‘Why a Vanguard?’ + ‘Fictional Movement or Real Movement?’ by Alfredo M. Bonanno
Fictional Movement or Real Movement? [+ Cover label]
2009-2011/ Elephant Editions
http://www.elephanteditions.net/
Translated by Jean Weir
325 is pleased to present for the first time in English, these two new free online PDF editions from well-known anarchist-insurrectionalist comrade, Alfredo M. Bonanno, translated and produced by Elephant Editions. These pamphlets consist of two sections from ‘Movimento e progetto rivoluzione’; sections which analyse and explore the role of the anarchist revolutionary project within mass social struggle, and also the changing nature of that struggle, with differing political and subversive structures contrasted and examined in regard to their direction and impetus, and not only. We welcome you to print out and distribute these texts to interested readers, which cut to the heart of the topics of, amongst others; movement politics, minority struggle, and widespread social change, with their prescient nature and enduring critical value.
Download here: Why a Vanguard?
Original title: Avanguardia, perche?
Published in: Movimento e progetto rivoluzionaria, Edizioni di “Anarchismo”, January 1977
From the introduction:
“The ideas that follow are aimed at going into the problem of the relations between the movement of the exploited and the revolutionary anarchist movement.
The conclusion is very simple and constitutes the starting point of a reflection that we are proposing to all comrades: it is not within the enclosure of the specific anarchist movement that one works for the revolution, but outside in the reality of struggles, which at this moment do not see us present. In this sense the anarchist movement still has a long way to go. In the face of the urgency of the situation it has become imperative for all sincere revolutionary anarchist comrades to reflect on the ways and conditions of organising oneself to contribute to the widening, in the libertarian sense, of the present situation of crises and discomfort.
The time for hesitation and waiting is over. May whoever is available for the revolutionary struggle seek his or her comrades and not indulge in waiting for a sign or clarification on the part of the specific movement.”
Sections:
Why a vanguard?
The organisational question
The illusion of quantity
Authoritarian group and libertarian one
The relationship between groups: the vertical structure and the horizontal one
Authoritarian boss and libertarian leader
An attempt to examine the character structure of the libertarian militant
The conflict between total and partial
Revolutionary alienation
Revolutionary tension
The solution of the problem of the vanguard
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Download here: Fictional Movement or Real Movement? [+ Cover label]
Original title: Movimento fittizio e movimento reale,
Published in the volume Movimento e progetto rivoluzionario, Edizioni di “Anarchismo”, June 1977.
From the introduction:
“Following on from the text ‘Why a Vanguard?’, the present work continues to go into the problem of the relations between the movement of the exploited and the revolutionary anarchist movement.
The anarchist revolutionary project is the bridge that is thrown in the direction of specific reality, uniting the experiences of selforganisation that are often singularly isolated. It is also the overcoming of the distinction between anarchist minority and movement of the exploited; from the moment the project is in course, all barriers start to fall and one finds oneself struggling for a common goal.”
Sections:
The movement of the exploited
The anarchist movement
Fictitious movement and real movement
The real anarchist movement
Organisation
The dangers of the primacy of doing
The false dilemma between theory and practice
The first contact with the reality of the struggle
More on the misconception of the quantitative growth of the minority
Contact with reality and the consequences
The fragmentary nature of the reality of the struggles
The revolutionary anarchist project
FICTITIOUS MOVEMENT AND REAL MOVEMENT
Original title:
Movimento fittizio e movimento reale,
published in the volume Movimento e progetto rivoluzionario,
Edizioni di “Anarchismo”, June 1977.
translated by Jean Weir
Elephant Editions / London / 2011
FICTITIOUS MOVEMENT AND REAL MOVEMENT
The evolving of social struggles leads to profound changes in the structure of the movement of the exploited. Capital’s attitude to the class struggle changes according to time and place, leading to diverse reactions and organizational forms.
We are going to look at some of the more obvious of these forms, see where they belong in the social clash and point to their real or apparent revolutionary essence in the anarchist sense.
The movement of the exploited
It is not easy to identify the social composition of this movement for the same reasons that make any analysis that claims to fix the essence of a class of exploited here and now unreliable. The great mass of disinherited (those who have been deprived of the means of production) is divided into many non-communicating areas. The technique of ‘divide and rule’ applied by capital at world level has transformed the classic workers’ movement into a confused conglommeration of stimuli towards careerism and abuse of power, developing that capitalist individualism which, born elsewhere, has nothing to do with the miserable situation of the workers.
The decision to give producers access to consumer goods allowed capital both to overcome its crisis for about thirty years and to transform the movement of exploited profoundly. The unions and democratic parties were then called upon to complete the task. Traditionally suspicious of the union, the worker is less so of the party, which he considers something detached from the reality of work and concerned with ‘political affairs’ that have little to do with him.
Basically, the worker would rather be exploited by a member of the bourgeoisie than by someone of his own class (or social status). For this he became suspicious of the union in stituations where it was becoming a bureaucracy (or he was at first, when the union was produced by the working class), but was far less so of the political party, traditionally in the hands of lawyers, professors and other such despicable people.
However, although this distinction between party and union still exists, both of these institutions are now manouvred by capital for its projects of integration.
Nevertheless, this integration can never be complete, and this applies to traditional capitalism, advanced capitalism, and State capitalism alike. It cannot become total because, in order to ensure the persistance of exploitation, a net class differentiation is required both at national and international level. This differentiation leads to the possibility of integration (consumerism and welfare state), on the backs of minorities that are still living in absolute poverty. Precise areas of the globe are deliberately left in this condition because they must produce raw materials at low costs and import finished products at high prices. When some of these areas change route, i.e. change their model of production, adjusting it to that of countries in economically advanced areas (such as happened in Chile), the correction of this tendency comes about through recourse to any means whatsoever, including genocide.
The same phenomenon occurs on a reduced scale within individual countries. The poorer strata subsist and are becoming more and more ghettoised in order to guarantee the inclusion of the part of the exploited that has been given access to expensive consumer goods.
There is no need to cry scandal, one shouldn’t confuse traitor and betrayed and throw everything together in the dark night of a society that is making classes disappear. In substance, the movement of the exploited has been betrayed; its real interests—definitive liberation from the bosses and the building of true socialism—have been betrayed. To complete this vast operation are the unions and so-called democratic parties, while the capitalists direct the queues. It goes without saying that the FIAT worker who is drawn by some occult force from the supermarket to the cinema, from the cinema to the football stadium, the stadium to filling in a football pools coupon, and fills his house with useless expensive objects, is not a traitor. He has been lent an ethical and social model that does not belong to him, a model that is guaranteed by the real traitors of the class of workers, the political parties and the unions. Think of the difficulty capitalism would have in getting its servants to troop into the police if it did not make them amazing promises (salary, professional qualification, social status, uniforms with shiny buttons, see the world, etc.). All the bodies that carry out some kind of activity related to the defence of capital enjoy some kind of concrete privilege. The judiciary, that State-commissioned band of criminals, that mafia in ermine called upon to destroy human lives with impunity, that gang of murderers in togas, enjoy a great reputation, permanence and free reign. False defamation and real privilege (very high salaries). The same can be said for army professionals, that other gang of murderers paid for with money that belongs to everybody. They are always ready to torture the proletarians that fall into their hands, suppress those who intend to make their own will prevail, contrive more or less murky conspiracies and ultimately take over power. Army professionals enjoy more than a few privileges. Warrant officers plunder the orderly office unpunished, laying in supplies for their own homes and those of the other officers. They have service personnel at their disposition and plenty of free time. They enjoy discounts and various privileges and, last but not least, can wear a uniform with lots of shiny buttons and medals to commemorate their fuckups in the service of the bosses.
Coming back to the movement of the exploited, it is easy to see how this is broken in half, thanks to the same system—they have given themselves little privileges and built an ethic that is far from the real interests of the working class.
But another part of the movement exists, one that cannot gain access to the aforementioned area. If it were possible, the ‘closed’ social State that Fichte once spoke about, unsuccessful attempts of which have been tried in New Zealand and Sweden, or the authoritarian socialist State which the USSR and China are gigantic examples of, would be realised.
But, if we look closely we see that even in the case of the closed social State a part of the exploited always escapes global control. They develop a fundamental disharmony with the ‘globally harmonious’ system. This disharmony is finding the class clash difficult at the present time and often ends up in individual refusal to accept the wellbeing that is being served down from above. Here a radical response to the State perspective of dreamed integration could constitute sparks of great interest. Not a contrast due to poverty therefore, but due to a different approach concerning individual autonomy and that of the class of ‘the controlled’.
So it is the other part of the movement that we are interested in here, the part that has been excluded from the possibility of finding a job, is ghettoised inside prisons and asylums or isolated in areas that have been deliberately built for them inside the great urban enclaves. It is the part that is pushed into individual survival in order to be more effectively struck and physically eliminated. This part that is also more directly in contact with exploitation at the workplace, i.e. produces commodities directly and struggles with every means against the work pace and fatal accidents. These are the ones that get cut to pieces by machinery and rarely have all ten fingers on their hands.
The really incisive class clash is tied to the perspective of this exploited minority. Elsewhere, at higher levels, where the relationship proletarianisation-salarisation has disintegrated or is in the process of disintegrating, the clash is attenuating to the point of reaching mere discussions on how to share out the spoils of the ghettoised.
So, to conclude, we can see a clear disparity within the movement of the exploited. On the one hand there are those who have been seduced by capital’s game and who, although they still have the outward aspects of wage-earners, have lost their proletarian characteristics. On the other hand there are those who have become estranged from this process, either because they have undergone intensive exploitation at the level of production, or because they have been cut out of work temporarily (unemployed) or once and for all (prisoners, alienated). Class unity can only be rebuilt by unmasking the traitors (parties and unions) and upturning the clash that has been determined by the authoritarian organisation of work, in other words, through a revolutionary process. What we need to do at the present time, therefore, is to identify both the fictitious movement and the real movement of the exploited and turn our revolutionary attention to the latter.
The anarchist movement
The anarchist movement is based on pluralism. Real pluralism, not the banality that this has been reduced to by the democratic parties that only refer to the term so as to mask their political agreements for power-sharing. For anarchists pluralism means the presence of different methods that are continually being confronted frankly and clearly. It also means the existence of different, constantly verifiable tendencies, all of which are based on antiauthoritarianism, i.e. freedom and equality, the substitution of the State with free agreement, self-management, federation, direct action, the integration of manual and intellectual work and solidarity.
We still haven’t said much, however. The anarchist movement, as an historic movement existing in a precise moment in time and in precise social situations, never tallies with the fundamental principles of anarchism in absolute. And the differences cannot all be due to pluralism in the way that the word is used by political parties. At certain moments in history the anarchist movement has shown and still shows considerable divergences from the fundamental principles of anarchism. These approximations are often a consequence of the social clash that allows the use of certain means and excludes others. But they are often a result of precise choices operated by regroupings of tendencies influenced, in turn, by a small cohort of leaders. While in the first case approximation in the anarchist strategy of the struggle is due to the objective conditions of the class clash, in the second one it is possible speak of a totally negative influence.
Given the complexity of the problem, let us try to be more clear, even at the risk of repeating ourselves.
The social clash does not consent an anarchist strategy in absolute, just as it does not consent the realisation of an anarchist revolution in absolute. The problem is to carry anarchist aspirations to within the mass in order to allow the coming about of a revolutionary process that has as wide an anarchist presence as possible. The problem immediately rebounds: what means should we choose in view of the ends we want to obtain. Given that we are talking of anarchist aims, otherwise we would be outside the problem altogether, it is a question of how to choose from the various means that we have at our disposition. We maintain that the choice of one set of means rather than another is never an objective fact. The analysis that preceeds the choice, no matter how much it contains points of fact, cannot fail to include important subjective elements. In our opinion, the choice of means alone (adhering perfectly to the anarchist perspective) is no guarantee that anarchist aims will be attained. Power has the capacity to put obstacles in motion that get in the way between the movement and its aims. One could even end up with an irreproachable choice of anarchist means becoming counterproductive to attaining anarchist ends. Power has known how to modify contrasts and structures pertaining to the clash in such a way that those who put such choices into effect can find themselves on the wrong side, black and red stripes and all.
What we are saying is not as crazy as it seems, just as any attempt to look at the anarchist movement in relation to the movement of the exploited should not seem strange. Unfortunately the problem is complex and needs to be gone into further.
This discourse would obviously be absurd if the anarchist movement were to correspond to the ideal of comrades divided into affinity groups and, regrouped in federations or not, all working to bring about the conditions for a revolution with as great a libertarian presence as possible. In fact, none of this is actually happening. The anarchist movement harbours tiny power centres that develop, work, judge, condemn, absolve, programme, decide, make mistakes or get it right, just like any power centre the world over. I was about to add that the anarchist movement even has its heretics, but that obviously goes without saying.
The tendency of the small power centre is to put everything together, as far as possible, under one flag or acronym. In this case power is measured according to the number of militants or, better still, the number of groups (which makes more of an impression as one doesn’t know whether a group consists of two or two hundred people). Bakunin himself averted that the absence of retribution was in no way a guarantee against the formation of power centres. Man is a strange animal. If money attracts, power for power’s sake attracts just as much, even when it is so rarified as to seem impossible. This also occurs in the anarchist movement. Many comrades pay more attention to congresses and conferences than to the struggle. They elaborate philosophical articles for reviews that want to publish them rather than engaging themselves in first person. Rather than attack power they think of how they can disturb it as little as possible in order to cultivate the tiny space they find themselves acting in or believe they are acting in.
The truth is that in Italy the movement is to a great extent a ‘fictitious’ movement. Apart from a few rare cases, it is outside the struggles, at least as far as the task of intervention within the mass that many groups and federations consider this to be goes. Outside the struggles, but still with some residual capacity to elaborate decent analyses, have debates with some decorum, construct interesting theoretical interventions. A few groups are moving forward a little and take great delight in making known their experiences inside some factory committee or residents’group.
What we have said should not imply that everything is fine elsewhere, that the autonomous groups are quite beyond criticism. Confusion and rough measure reign everywhere. It is sufficient to think of the French and English phenomenon of the ORA and the Italian one of the Archinovists to get an idea. Reacting to the inefficiency and humanitarianism of some of the tendencies in the movement, these people have gone to the other extreme of claiming to have found the solution in a specific organisation, the class memory. We have already developed our critique of this tendency of contemporary anarchism that sees therapeutic values in Archinov’s Platform that would be capable of curing the great invalid, just like the Russian comrades who survived the disaster of the revolution.
What we want to point out here is that it is often possible to distinguish a few stronger personalities behind each of the tendencies, who build real (tiny) power centres, managing them in perfect harmony with the universal rules of power.
There is a tendency to overestimate the importance of the specific anarchist movement as a component of the libertarian revolution, and this is particularly evident in the Italian movement. While it is agreed that it is unthinkable that a revolution will be influenced by anarchists alone, it is believed that in the future revolution the wider the specific anarchist presence, the more likely it is that this will be useful to the masses. The concept is nothing special in itself, but what seems mistaken to us is how both the anarchist movement and the mass are considered, and the very meaning given to the term ‘mass’. Once again it is this mania for quantitative growth, numerical strength, that becomes all the more pressing and disturbing the fewer we are and the further we are from the conditions that make growth itself possible.
To sum up, we have a movement that sees itself historically in a precise way. It has inherited ideas, analyses and very specific experiences, but it does not have any direct relationship with the struggles in course as it lacks the presence within the mass that is considered the ‘sole’ condition of its being able to call oneself an anarchist movement. Not all of the comrades that consider themselves part of the anarchist movement share the above ideas however. Not all of them abandon themselves to waiting for a quantitative growth in the movement as the essential element for any action to be carried out ‘within’ the mass. Some see the problem the other way around. This different analysis usually emerges from the so-called autonomous groups, although this is in no way consistent or universally accepted.
Fictitious movement and real movement
We see the fictitious anarchist movement as the whole of the comrades that hold positions of power within the movement. They do not make any effort to contribute to the growth of revolutionary anarchist consciousness within the mass, but limit themselves to meetings, conferences and congresses, trying to address the younger and less prepared comrades towards what they consider to be the indiscutable tenets of anarchism. These comrades—even those in good faith—are betraying the anarchist ideals of life and action. Then there are the other comrades, those who, due to weakness or aquiescence, end up complying with resolutions that are always drawn up by the same people. Even if they are involved in ongoing struggles, they distort the very meaning of struggle as soon as they succumb to the need to delegate it to others, taking no steps to inform themselves in order to be able to validly oppose themselves to the ‘tyranny’of the more competent or influencial comrades.
The rest of the movement includes two precise tendencies. The Archinovists, now in decline, who theorise the need for a specific minority with well-defined tasks, but confuse this with the real movement. If it were possible to realise this in libertarian and not leninist terms, it would simply be another form of fictitious movement as it would not emerge directly from the concrete struggles of the exploited but would superimpose itself on them, a vanguard destined to defend the sacred principles of anarchism (or anarcho-leninism). The autonomists, who are torn between the original goal of quantitative growth and a new vision of the movement in the real sense. When these groups think that they hold the truth and, as such, are destined to reap the patrimony of sacred anarchist virtues of the past, their future is mapped out in advance. Very soon they too will find their leader (if they have not already done so) and will march within the ranks of the fictitious movement. Were they to look beyond organisation to the concrete reality of the struggles then, perhaps, they might be the comrades best indicated to give us a new analysis of the essence and possibility of a real anarchist movement.
The forces of capital that we have seen at work lacerating the movement of the exploited, producing the emargination of a minority and the access of the rest into consumerism, also act indirectly upon the anarchist movement, determining what we have just defined as the repartition between fictitious movement and real movement. Just as there is a fictitious movement of the exploited, there is also a fictitious anarchist movement; just as there is a real movement of exploited, there is also a real anarchist movement. The democratic illusion takes the place of the pitfall of inclusion into consumersim; cohabitation with power, its immediate corollary, does the rest. Anarchists only scare in operettas. Power has learned how to use the scarecrow of anarchy to instill fear in the well-fed bourgeois (when useful), but basically it knows very well that it is able to keep a good part of the movement under control at all times. Of course, it can still be useful to power to kill the odd anarchist, but that happens when the clash becomes more acute and they need to offer a victim to the god of public opinion (Pinelli), or when things reach the point of clashes in the streets (Serantini). But normally the anarchist movement does not disturb power very much and is left to doze in peace. The democratic illusion opens up imaginary spaces for action in the eyes of many comrades and leads them astray. It is the same kind of error as parliamentary entrism. But, although we are very good at criticising parliamentarianism (which doesn’t cost us anything apart from not going to vote), we do not always see that any concession to power at all should be seen for what it is: a compromise.
We are not condemning partial struggles or struggles for claiming better conditions here. What we are saying does not mean that we think we should abstain from participating in the forms that the exploited in general invent beyond party and union models, just because these forms have limited objectives. It simply means that everything should not be confused with anarchism as such but be seen in the right dimension, in the perspective of approaching the mass and a growth in the autonomous libertarian movement in the wider sense of the term. Unfortunately, it is our own class position, our awareness, that pushes us to find a process of substitution at any cost. To false consciousness corresponds false revolutionary activity, and the cleverer we are at putting words and concepts together the easier it is to influence those around us, addressing them in the direction of fictitious and distorted activity.
The contemporary transformations of capital are rendering such a vegetation possible within the anarchist movement. Freedom of expression (up to a certain point) guarantees the right to call oneself anarchist without running too many risks. The problems start when somebody starts to cause trouble. Then there is the risk of waking the sleeping dogs that destroy indiscriminately, including the fictitious part of the movement that the compromise with power had made possible.
We should also point out that the tiny power groups that can be seen within the anarchist movement run roughly parallel to the large power groups of the movement of the exploited (unions and parties), having the function of connecting the requirements of capital with the pressures of the class clash. The rest of the movement, at least the part that revolves around these tiny vacuous power centres, corresponds to that part of the movement of exploited that has been absorbed into consumerism through the formation of ‘intermediate classes’ where wage-earning no longer leads to consciousness of being exploited. Then there is the movement of the excluded, the ghettoised part, the excluded minority that does not find citizenship in the new capitalist perspectives and is persecuted by both the State police and the police of the parties and unions. There is nothing in the anarchist movement that corresponds to this part.
This lack of correspondence might seem strange or contradictory. Having developed a critique of the anarchist movement in these pages, and in particular having attacked the components that have recourse to quantitative growth through more or less complex mechanisms, it would seem logical that quite a positive evaluation would emerge concerning the autonomous groups. But no. And it is here that we reach the most complex point of the whole analysis.
The real anarchist movement
The considerable part of the international anarchist movement that, as we have mentioned, is constituted of autonomous groups, does not have any more right than the others to declare that it belongs to—or constitutes—the real anarchist movement. Here too the phenomena of elitism, stubborn elephantism, backwardness in analysis and strategy are to be found.
On the contrary, it seems to us that the best place to look for the real anarchist movement is beyond all the schema and churches. It is to be found in the mass that are realising the self-organisation of the struggle concretely with all their confusion and afterthoughts, mistakes and hesitancy, but also with considerable effort, in an anarchist strategy of moving towards social revolution. But this research inside the mass cannot be made in a sullenly spontaneous way, i.e. the number of autonomous actions (or those considered such) contain the highest coefficient of anarchism. This is not an accurate procedure. In the exploited mass which, as we have seen, are not the mass in general but a precise bunch of them, they are identifiable with fair approximation through analytical processes that must constantly be verified. The organisation of attack on associated power (bosses, unions, parties) is a spontaneous fact that emerges from the process of exploitation directly. This undergoes modifications according to the changing conditions of a real movement that is not quantifiable. The anarchist presence is indispensable here and could be useful to a maximum degree. Here is where the latter fuses indissolubly with the mass and the conditions for the growth of a real movement start to appear. This is not quantifiable in terms of groups or federations, but turns out to be measurable indirectly on the basis of the number of certain kinds of action realised, the circulation of certain ideas, and the correlation that these ideas find in certain milieux of the exploited.
The starting point for the ‘decisive test’ of the anarchist movement is precisely here, far from the stagnant atmosphere of traditional groups, lapidary decisions at congresses and conferences and more or less doctrinal or populist publications. They are the starting point for ‘verification’, not ‘constitution’. In fact, by reasoning in this way the whole movement reassesses itself in what it still has that is alive and valid and has managed to keep integral throughout the years in spite of the onslaught of muddle-headed little leaders of various extractions. And in this perspective such a patrimony could give better and better fruit.
We do not agree with the comrades that make the same critique of the fictitious anarchist movement and come to the conclusion that the whole anarchist movement is an absolute nullity. We consider that, upturning the perspective and forgetting the logic of arithmetic or of seeing quantitative growth as a sign of strength, and ignoring the management of the small power centres, the movement could contribute a lot to the struggle of the exploited by identifying with it.
Two immediate results would emerge from this upturning of perspective: a) analyses would not necessarily be made by specialised persons or groups; b) specific autonomous organisation that does not come into contrast with the libertarian principles of self-determination might take form.
The analytical part of anarchism is influenced by certain ‘doctrines’. These doctrines do not bear equal weight today in the face of the development of the struggle, but there can be no doubt that some of them persist in influencing the movement in its fictitious aspect. Personally, we believe that the real movement of the exploited should not be seen as something separate from the theoretical development of anarchism, but that its realisations should be followed and enlivened in order to sustain the revolutionary component that can become a point of reference for everybody. Here the anarchist negation of eternal principles must express itself in order to allow a continual theoretical foundation for struggles coming from particular conditions of exploitation in the real movement of the exploited. Here the old anarchist texts cannot be dully accepted as gospel, but need to be reread in the light of the present day as models of action and not mummified stereotypes. Only then will it be possible to have an anarchist movement that does not turn out to be backward when faced with theoretical stimuli from situations presented by the real movement of exploited.
Finally, let us examine the other point: the structure of an autonomous organisation that is very different from that envisaged by the Archinovist comrades. When the struggle radicalises, the movement of the exploited resists further exploitation and ghettoization. The latter resist physical elimination in the prisons and mental asylums, refusing to play the role assigned to them by power, and develop autonomous organisational forms that can reach precise levels of articulation, not excluding armed organisation. What we said earlier concerning theoretical development is also valid in this case. The real anarchist movement cannot stay outside this spontaneous organisational fecundity. It must become a part of it, trying as far as possible to guarantee the libertarian essence of the movement of the base in contrast against all kinds of power.
But this specific organisation must not adopt forms that resemble those of the mass organisations that characterise the movement of the exploited. Class memory belongs to the exploited themselves and cannot be managed by enlightened specialists capable of keeping it alive even in moments of slack. The essential point to bear in mind is that the famous moments of reflux are such for the fictitious movement of the exploited, not for the real movement who suffer the relentless pressure of exploitation and genocide all the time. The attack on that part of the movement can also come about as a result of radical modifications in the economic structure, or it can happen with an accentuation of repression. In that case one is assisting in a radicalisation of the struggle, a phenomenon that must attract anarchists’ attention to the maximum degree.
The real anarchist movement must therefore be found within the mass after having examined the latter’s composition attentively and individuated a real movement within the movement of exploited as a whole. But that does not mean to deny the validity of the traditional anarchist movement with all its sins and limitations, its pathetic power centres and obtuseness. These hindrances automatically disappear by upturning the point of reference. The real movement of the exploited thus comes to be seen as an integral part of the theoretical development of anarchism, whereas anarchist doctrines, relived in the critical light that eliminates the danger of sacralisation, contribute to enriching the continual realisation of the movement in question. By the same token, a specific organisation can emerge from the real movement of the exploited and integrate with the real anarchist movement without becoming an ‘institution’ or the memory of the proletariat, but remain a spontaneous germination of the exploited strengthened in light of the experience of anarchist struggles of the past.
Fictitious movement and the dominion of the apparent
We are partisans of organisation. There is no life possible beyond organisation. Chaos and brutal spontaneity cannot produce the elements that are indispensible for liberation, which consists of a long and difficult process where a strategic project can turn out to be out of date and must be superceded.
But organisation cannot be a thing in itself, isolated from the struggle, an obstacle to be overcome before gaining access to the area of the class clash. On the contrary, it must model and condition itself on the actual situation of struggle, emerge as a homogenising fact, not set itself up ‘a priori’ to explain the contradictions of the social impact. When it is separate from reality, organisation descends into the realm of the apparent, becomes a cathedral in the desert. It takes on a living semblance, precise details and contours. Battles quite similar to real clashes take place within it, strategies and tactics that have nothing to envy of real ones rival each other. Only all this takes place in the world of the fictitious.
This situation usually has a precise class connotation. Manual workers, labourers and peasants are not inclined to give life to organisational forms that do not come from the class clash itself. Their lives (up to a point), take place within the nevralgic points of this clash and the intellectual hypothesis, even if not unknown to them, is at least not very familiar. On the contrary, intellectuals coming from within the context of dominion are afflicted with more or less severe crises of consciousness and want to reach theoretical clarity before passing to the resolutive action of the abstract moment. They find themselves up to the neck in endless contradictions, constantly building and undoing organisational models which, according to them, should serve to give life to action.
Of course, this repartition between intellectuals and manual workers is also arbitrary and approximative, which is why we should approach the subject with caution. However, we suggest that comrades reflect upon it. At the present time the anarchist movement is composed massively of students and intellectuals and is mainly a fictitious movement: is it impossible to get a relation between the two?
We are going to report a few statements made by various representatives of the fictitious anarchist movement that clearly show how these comrades are completely immersed in the ‘domain of the apparent’. The need to do something to come out of the imaginary and go towards reality is evident.
‘Let’s be honest, the organisation is kept afloat by the resolve of a few comrades! We should be able to say such things between ourselves, shouldn’t we? We must remind ourselves that when we each go our own way after a conference it is up to us, not Tom, Dick and Harry, but each one of us. There is a lot of activity and work that each one of us must do, must carry out endlessly, yet we will always and only be a movement that spreads and defends beautiful ideas.’
And elsewhere: ‘Our Movement is mainly composed of students. And that is all very well, but the worker element is lacking and should be there.’ We are obviously not the only ones to be concerned about a situation of deficiency and crisis that is threatening to lose the sense of the relationship between anarchist theory and practice. But the comrades pointing out the danger are the same ones that are completely immersed in fictitious reality. We ask ourselves why it is that, once they see the danger, these comrades continue to flee their responsibilities and do nothing to remove the obstacle and start moving in the right direction?
The reason for this is to be found in the existence of little power centres that many comrades rotate around, while the few who manage these centres in the same logic as any organisation of power can do nothing other than continue to do so. It seems to us that, even if they are in good faith, comrades who do nothing to break up these power centres and turn the active potential of the movement towards the struggle even at the cost of denting the ideological heritage, bear some responsibility. The care with which certain mummies, which by their own definition should be against any kind of conservatism, are embalmed is really extraordinary.
Basically, it is the illusion produced by appearances that pushes these comrades to get involved in something that does not make sense if seen as an end in itself. Hence the great fatigue in sustaining organisations whose only aim is to perpetuate themselves in view of the day when it will be possible to put this or that libertarian strategy into effect. We don’t want to accuse anyone in particular, we just want to point out a danger, that’s all.
But there are those who have taken a significant step forward in the critique. Those who, declaring that they agree with us (largely speaking) as far as the basic analysis is concerned, have suggested that when it comes to it, we are no exception as far as this critique is concerned. And who has ever said anything to the contrary? We are developing a critique that is at the same time, and in the first place, self-criticism. But as soon as we see the danger the critique, precisely because it is self-criticism, loses its value because at least there is the will on our part to put the problem on the carpet and examine it with courage, without false modesty, whereas it seems useful to address the analyses towards those who insist on keeping their heads under the sand.
Of course we do not succeed in coming out of the reign of the fictitious decisively either. Many analyses are too vague and try to face too many problems all at once, there is no actual connection between ourselves and the real revolutionary movement. But we can say one thing net and clear: we do not try to build fantastic castles in the air, phantom organisations with bombastic acronyms. We do not dedicate ourselves to amassing converts. Our work is aimed towards the real movement, tries to contribute, as best it can, to the evolution of struggles in situations that we think are most significant: prisons, mental asylums, armed struggle organisations, autonomous workers’ struggles. Any step in the direction of a clear libertarian organisation of these struggles is a step that is also taken with our contribution. We do not see how we can enter the heart of the class clash directly at the present time, perhaps due to particular short-sightedness linked to our own class situation, our analytical defects or for other reasons that we don’t know. However, albeit with great timidity we are sure that we are moving in the direction of the place of the struggle and away from the dominion of the apparent.
What movement?
A clear sign of the incapacity to come out of the fictitious movement is shown in the confusion that reigns among comrades when one tries to define what one means by anarchist movement.
Tendencies are emerging from within one of the biggest federated organisations that is supporting an opening towards the whole ‘movement’ in order ‘to bring about a restoration of the movement on proper bases: the recomposition of tendencies that compare and contrast each other and work together as far as possible, without any claims to predominate or any desire to prevaricate’. In this way they want to struggle against tendencies that—more or less openly—see a pre-eminence of the organised movement over the rest of the movement. But on the whole this organisation remains nebulous and has no clear ideas.
The problem becomes tragic when it is a case of a specific instrument, such as a paper produced by one organisation. In this case it is stated that the paper ‘must above all be the expression of the whole Movement.’ An absolutely impossible and mythical affirmation, clear indicating the great confusion on the subject. The same comrade then states: ‘It must be the paper of the anarchist movement, a paper that belongs to the (specific federated organisation) and remains so (of this organisation) but opens up to the problems of the Movement.’ How a paper of the specific federated organisation that must remain such can become the expression of the whole movement is not explained. And that, in our opinion, is a clear sign yet again of not knowing what the movement as a whole is.
Then there are the pathetic calls to action. ‘I am not a fan of acronyms and would like all acronyms to disappear to move to one name alone, that of the Italian anarchist movement. But unfortunately fractionalism exists and is a sore, a cancer that we carry within us. Do we want to go on like this? I don’t think so. Let’s say the names, let’s try to see if the defects that we have encountered can be corrected and we are here to correct them.’ This is an indication of the role that appearance plays in the absence of concrete social struggles. The ghost’s decomposition and recomposition pushes comrades to see a hallucinatory phenomenon as something real and to struggle, often with disgusting means, to address it towards this or that objective, not realising that its essential appearance transforms any objective, even a theoretically more solid one, into appearance.
Of considerable importance concerning this problem, it seems, is the way in which the management of money coming from the sale of a property asset belonging to the whole anarchist movement has been carried out. To decide the fate of this asset a commission was made up of three comrades belonging to the organisation we will call A and three comrades of the organisation we will call B. The sale was decided and a number of million (lire) were realised and put ‘at the disposition of the whole Movement’. Thus a comrade belonging to the so-called commission continues: ‘There is the problem of using this sum in such a way that it benefits the Movement as a whole, or to establish a repartition among the organised components of the Movement… The money has been put in a bank and is at the disposition of the Movement and therefore of organisation B and organisation A. As far as organisation C is concerned this is still to be decided.’ Another comrade, one of the nominees of the asset we are talking about, says, ‘It has been decided to print … (a certain work). In the name of the Italian Anarchist Movement of course, because the funds (coming from the sale of the asset) are funds of the Italian Anarchist Movement and do not belong to organisation A, B, or C, or to any other particular group that claims it.’ Well, as we can see, ideas are not very clear, they are even in contrast. This blessed Movement (with so many capital letters), good ghost that it is, is made to enter and leave the stage whenever it suits them, without too much concern as to what it will actually say or do, so great is its acquiescence seen to be.
But let us take another very instructive argument. The defence of comrades in prison. We will take part in a debate on the question, limiting ourselves to the point where there is a discussion as to whether to allow autonomous groups to participate in a forthcoming conference or to limit it to the organised parts. ‘… Will this Conference only be open to the three federations or also to the autonomous groups?’
– It must be a Conference of the militants of the three federations.
– We have not discussed that much. There was talk of a conference of the Movement without specification or preclusion. It seems to me that the autonomous groups are also interested in the problem.
– Even if it is true that the autonomous groups have worked and are interested in the problem, this question must not include them as it only concerns the three federations (…) and must be resolved by them alone.
– I’d like to point out that many comrades of the autonomous groups are interested in knowing who has the task of defending the arrested comrades, who should manage the funds and how. Some of them have turned to us to find out what is happening. I think it is right to let them know the situation and to allow them to participate. To exclude them from the conference would not simply create even more chaos, but might also look like a political manouvre.
– But I wouldn’t like to give the comrades that walked out through the door the possibility of coming back in through the window in this way.
– These groups are outside the Movement. We could invite the groups that are forming or have already formed, but which we can guarantee, not those that have already compromised themselves by taking certain positions’…
It should be remembered that they are talking about how to defend comrades in prison here.
No comment. Basically there is no such thing as an exact idea of what is meant by anarchist movement. Most of the time reference is made to it in order to cook up an alibi so as to be able to do certain things, not because this is really meant as a force.
But when all is said and done, what do we mean by anarchist movement? We believe that the anarchist movement should be seen in the widest sense of the term as all the forces that are struggling for the realisation of a libertarian social revolution. But we also believe that the crystalisation of certain parts of the movement that are wallowing in academic themes, closed up in cliques that play the wiseguy with sentences of absolution or condemnation, have ended up transforming the greater part of this movement into an awkward and useless ideological bureaucratic monster. Yet, beyond the structure that is killing everything, there are comrades, individuals, that mean to struggle for their ideal, who clearly see how this constantly comes up against the structure that ends up oppressing them when they should be enhancing it and making it feasable. These are the comrades that we are talking to here. Work together, not to establish who is closer to the real movement if the demarcation line also involves those pointing towards it, if the critique is also criticism of the critique, but to move in the right direction, that of the exploited masses struggling for their liberation.
Along these lines there are also some comrades that, although they are still tied to the perspective of a federated organisation, are getting tired of it. ‘We keep bringing out beautiful analyses without putting ourselves in the optic of the concrete, in fact it is pointless to carry on ruminating old positions such as abstentionism, now a common patrimony of the Movement, without linking this to what there is that is new happening in society… In our opinion, it is no longer the moment for long discussions but for starting to work to find a strategy; in fact, until we find a strategy the Movement will go on making ideological statements that lead to paralysis on the one hand, and to throwing oneself into all the struggles that are going on without carrying out the necessary analyses on the other.’
As one can imagine, the other side of the coin is just as backward. In discussing a pamphlet illustrating the federated anarchist organisation, a comrade stresses, ‘It is to be a propaganda pamphlet, so all the arguments that have taken place, etc., should not be put in it. It must be done for propaganda, so be something very simple.. a few deadlines and events to explain to those that don’t know where (organisation A) comes from, when it was founded, what happened at the beginning…’
Anyone who, like this comrade, raises the problem of bringing out a pamphlet to make one’s organisation known, but ‘without the internal disputes’, is so steeped in the ‘fictitious movement’ in our opinion that there is little to be said. On the contrary, the comrade mentioned earlier, while remaining—like most of us—in a fictitious situation, tends towards reality, faces the context that hosts him critically and tries to push it and bring it out into the open, with all the consequences that ensue but also with all the useful results that it is logical to expect.
Towards reality
If nobody can say in absolute that they are part of the real anarchist movement, that is due to the impossibility of pointing to legitimate situations of struggle or methodologies that are valid for everyone at all times. Even the thesis of armed insurrection that we are so often accused of, nevralgic point of any discussion on anarchist methodology, cannot be considered a winning horse at any cost. There can be no doubt that the clash with capital—as we have said many times—will not be pacific. Violence will be the midwife of the new society, it is necessary to be genuinely active against the organised terrorism of the State, trying in every possible way to denounce and contrast it; but all that cannot be considered a simple sacralization of the machine gun. Changing our tune, we have merely said that when such organisations emerge from popular struggles as a result of a process of radicalisation that has isolated them, making the struggles they produced regress, only then, and only on condition that the umbilical cord uniting them with the mass has not been cut, can these organisations be considered to belong to the real movement.
We have said more than once, in contrast with many comrades who considered our opinions to be unfounded, that an armed strategy is not only possible but necessary in Italy today at the present level of capitalist contradictions, so long as it comes from the mass and never ceases to maintain a reciprocal relation with it. If we must be blamed for this then we are ready to discuss all the criticism against us, so long as it is clear and detailed and not concealed in a cowardly way behind mumbling and half sentences as has happened until now. But, let me make it quite clear, we have never said that it is enough to pick up a machine gun to find oneself in the real movement all of a sudden. The problem is far more serious and complex.
At this phase in the struggle the only possible methodology is that of verification. In taking residence within the movement one must proceed to verify one’s theoretical content in order to present a strategy that is not up in the clouds. In taking residence within the mass one must proceed to identify the class clash, discerning the ‘territory’ where this is still acute, i.e. where capitalism has not yet succeeded in completely solving its contradictions.
Once this double verification has taken place one must move towards the movement of the exploited, without claiming to impose any ideological direction or claiming that ‘the exploited come to us’ as so often happens in the discourses of anarchist comrades. Of course, the anarchist movement is precise enough—even though internal verification should take place at all costs—so is still something that opposes itself to the workers’ movement, if nothing other than as an organisational reality that considers itself carrier of a certain revolutionary consciousness. But that is no guarantee as to why one must try to bring about a process that transfers this revolutionary consciousness, a process that allows the charge of the particular consciousness to the total one (that of the mass, or the movement of the exploited). As a revolutionary minority, anarchists must not impose their ideas on the exploited, even though—objectively speaking—they are the bearers of a precise revolutionary consciousness. To act in this way would be to involuntarily perpetrate leninist violence without the aim of the conquest of power, something that is totally contradictory.
On the contrary, by participating in the process of mass self-organisation, working within it, not as theoreticians, politicians or military specialists, but as mass, it is possible to avoid the obstacle of the separate minority that wants to ‘move’ towards totality, but does not know how to decide upon what methodology to use. It is necessary to start from the actual level of the struggle, from the concrete, material level of the class clash, building small autonomous base organisms that are capable of placing themselves at the point of concurrence between the total vision of liberation and the partial strategic vision that revolutionary collaboration renders indispensible. It is therefore not a question of propaganda, of ‘making oneself known’ to the mass, it is not a question of reaching the media, it is not a question of speaking on television to millions of viewers. It is a question of realising the revolutionary awareness of the minority in single episodes of mass struggle, making concrete the consciousness that remained abstract when closed up in minoritarian cliques, doing so in such a way that the need for communism felt by the mass is realised little by little, daily, in the material organisation of life.
That is why we do not want to teach anyone anything. The point we are making belongs to the ambit of the theoretical pointer that we are proposing as an indispensible starting point in the road towards the real movement. We do not consider ourselves to be holders of the truth or revolutionary consciousness, and we do not want to close ourselves up in sterile arguments that are only good for rendering the present divisions of the revolutionary movement insurmountable. We are not carrying out this struggle in our own name in order to get stronger, quantitatively, or to build another organisational model that is destined to abort prematurely. We are struggling to denounce a grave situation of crisis within the revolutionary movement as a whole and the anarchist movement in particular. Those who don’t see these crises, refuse to look at them, are either in bad faith or are so used to exchanging fictition for reality that they no longer even notice it.
Organisation
But we also support the need for organisation. If we put ourselves in the direction of the real movement and look at the concrete possibilities of the anarchist movement critically (not triumphalistically), we realise that these are far more beyond its traditional components—permeated with that episcopal hue that characterises cliques in the phase of reflux—and that is why we are taking up the problem of how to face organisational relations with the mass of exploited rather than with the anarchist movement in the traditional case in point. Today, the areas suffering the contradictory dominion of capital, the ones excluded from the area that has resolved a few fundamental contradictions, are understanding the great alliance of traitors, parties, unions and hangers on, very quickly. They also understand the need for selforganisation, autonomy and the elimination of separate organisms.
Our task is to avoid isolation and extensive theoretical disputes that will never move mountains. We must appear with a series of actions within the mass—along the lines of self-organisation—that are capable of defining our position clearly and unequivocally, making real what up till now—in the mass—is only a spontaneous refusal of the parties, unions and collateral clowns.
If we were to carry out these actions successfully this could open up a road that even the best of us believed unthinkable until now and bring an exasperating situation to a head. We must undermine the socialdemocratic principles that have infiltrated us through bourgeois hypocrysy or the threat of reprisals from within.
If the prisons enter the struggle, we must struggle with the prisoners, because we too are in prison. We must put an end to making hypocritical distinctions between prisoners that are innocent because they are political and prisoners that are guilty because they are social prisoners. As we are all prisoners, we are all innocent and all guilty. Our struggle, which seemingly takes place outside the prison walls, actually comes about within the great prison which is the present society. Democratic freedoms are puppets that populate the world of the fictitious.
If we dismantle the defensive possibilities of the boss structure, contradictions emerge that the State must face and overcome in first person. Our task is to propose ever new, ever more acute contradictions in order to make the divisions that the State creates between each social group in struggle explode and make the unthinkable thinkable and the impossible possible. This is the self-negation of the vanguard.
In this way a specific mass organisation can arise within the mass, produced by a selforganisational phenomenon. This can extend during the course of the clash and the development of the contradictions to the point of becoming an armed organisation, but without losing its spontaneous self-regulating function. That guarantees, among other things, the persistence of a horizontal structure, the only safeguard for the continuation of the struggle under the present levels of militarisation of States. Isolation leads to revolutionary defeat, not just on a military level but even more so at the political one. That is impossible when the active organism is not the product of dualism (mass organisms versus specific organisation), but it is the mass itself that extends its activity, structuring itself autonomously to face the social clash, also at a military level.
Everything remains to be done in that direction. Every day the mass are developing and incrementing their need for communism, elaborating their theory, recognising their enemies. We stay closed up in our groups, meditating upon analyses and proposing strategies for action as products of an organism that considers itself the interlocutor, even a privileged one, of the mass. We must upturn the reasoning, stop counting ourselves and start counting the exploited and ghettoised. Then we would realise that we are far more than we thought to have clear ideas, to be better organised, have a precise military defence structure, to be on the right road for attacking power, for building the real revolutionary movement for the elimination of exploitation, for laying the foundations of the future society than cannot fail to be anarchist.
The dangers of the primacy of doing
In their attempt to break the barrier of fictitiousness that they are all too aware of, many comrades end up favouring an activist conception of the movement, one that privileges ‘doing’ above everything else. Identifying a particular ‘field’of intervention that usually coincides with the area they live in, they begin personal ‘work’. Preferred areas tend to be factories, housing estates and schools, the countryside being very dispersive and the other places based on total institutions (prisons, asylums, barracks, etc.) very difficult to penetrate.
However, this—very interesting—perspective has one great limitation if it is not inserted into a wider revolutionary project which, although it emerges from the microscopic fact of the unicellular life of the ‘area’, does not necessarily do so spontaneously. Moreover, it should be said that in fleeing from a situation of apparent lack of involvement, comrades can end up exaltating ‘work for the sake of it’, in a ‘pre-eminence of doing’.
Inserting oneself into a minimal field of intervention, they take all the decisions from the base, all the initiatives that have something in common with the anarchist methodology of revolutionary ‘work’. But they cannot stop there. In fact, these initiatives are always ‘responses’ to power’s project of exploitation, i.e. they are subordinate to a precise strategy that comes from the power centres, while very little can be done to prevent this strategy and reach its source directly. To face this part of the problem it is necessary, while insisting on intervention in the ‘territory’, to develop a wider analysis allowing for the individuation of the real objectives of the struggle, the central nucleus of the system of exploitation, at the same time. We can say that any intervention in the peripheral ‘territory’ must be carried out as though it is attacking reality as a whole, because the small situation contains all the problems of the large. On the contrary, in giving greater scope to the primacy of doing many comrades end up getting involved in a myriad of sectorial struggles that all add up to maximum involvement (seen as number of hours and personal availability). At first this might satisfy the just aspirations of the individual militant—who must recognise himself in what he does in first person—but soon ends up entering the monotony of habit and repetitivity.
Not just that. As our intervention is, by definition, against an immediately quantitative perspective, militants have no control over the amount of involvement in the ‘territory’of their intervention. It thus often turns out that one lives periods of flux and reflux as moments of enthusiasm or apathy. On the other hand the revolutionary project is more far-reaching, it presents more complex nuances and interlacing, and if it lives fluxes and refluxes it does so on an international, not a peripheral, level. When one severs the links with the general framework of the revolutionary project (which is both analysis and action), one inevitably see one’s own ‘work’ enclosed within a specific dimension and ends up suffering the consequences.
The false dilemma between theory and practice
The current distinction between theory and practice is based on a misunderstanding. The term theory is seen as something autonomous, worse still, as separate from practice. Speaking of theory one thinks of books, academia, universities, intellectuals, things written and said in a very difficult way. Viceversa, speaking of practice one thinks of actions, organisations, realisations, transformations of the concrete structure of things. Now this polarisation is false.
Another current thesis among revolutionaries is that ‘ideas derive from events and not the contrary’. Absolutely correct, only it leaves standing a polarity between ideas and facts that does not exist. If Pisacane, to whom this phrase is attributed, were alive today, he would not be able to do other than agree with this.
Just as there is theory and theory, there is also practice and practice. In abstract terms, theory is that of the bourgeois philosopher that speaks to us of his ontological dreams, and practice is that of the boss that exploits the worker. Only this theory and practice, which correspond and cooperate at the level of the system as a whole, do not constitute the theory and practice that we consider to be the indispensible elements of the revolutionary project.
In the latter sense we have the movement of the exploited which, in its progressive disposition towards self organisation of the struggles develops a theory, is its own theory. But this theory is also the practice of the movement. From this point of view there is no difference between theory and practice. It is just that the whole movement is not capable of selfmanaging its own struggles at the present time. On the contrary, a large sector find themselves at the mercy of the reformist lie and substantially favour the game of boss exploitation. In this sense there is a sliding, an imbalance, in the theory of the movement of the exploited. It is here that the intervention of the anarchist minority that is developing its own practice, soliciting the ‘rectification’ of the positions of the movement and developing the project of generalised selfmanagement of struggles, fits in. In this tendency towards the elimination of the above-mentioned imbalance, the anarchist minority realises both practice and theory. It is its own theory and its own practice.
To be more specific, analysis has two functions: a) it leads to knowledge of the nature and composition of the struggles of the exploited; b) it serves as a point of reference for the latter to see the contradiction between the perspective of self-managing one’s own struggle and the reality of the instruments of compromise (unions, parties).
Obviously, by underestimating the importance of analysis or sticking to events inside one ‘area’ seen as a microcosm that is complete in itself, one ends up evaluating the latter at the cost of the former. The movement of the exploited cannot see its position in the face of a series of interventions, events, experiences without the intimate link of the anarchist revolutionary project as a whole.
The first contact with the reality of the struggle
It is necessary to start off by relating to the reality of the struggle as a whole as the exploited have only one point of contact: that which power makes with them in order to exploit them more effectively. Here there could be an impasse or critical intolerence. The essential reason for this situation is society’s division into classes and the permanent war that derives from this.
The only way to get round this difficulty is to see it for what it is, i.e. a serious obstacle, and not close one’s eyes to it or illude oneself that, because we are the bearers of a ‘thesis’ of self-organisation and ultimate liberation, the exploited will immediately throw their arms around us.
Another necessary step is to outline the social components of the relation. We think that these components are three and not two as is usually maintained. We have the active minority, the reality of the struggles, and power, which makes that contact possible within a precise institutional framework.
Let us examine these elements. The active minority can only be isolated from a wider context by means of abstraction. In substance, it has its own class composition and acts consequently in some way. Only, at the same time, it is an anarchist minority (because that is what we are talking about), i.e. it has become aware of a method of intervention, an ethical evaluation of life, an aim to be reached and a clear discrimination in the choice of the methods to be used. They do not draw all this from an abstract theoretical code, a philosophical tradition or the illumination of some ‘thinking hero’. They find it in a tradition of struggle and specific analyses of course, but mainly in a praxis of struggle that they verify as they go along. We can therefore say that the further this minority is from the ‘theory’ of the movement of the exploited, the further it is from understanding its own struggles. In this case, a perfect observance of abstract principles drawn from anarchist philosophy does not help.
Second element: the reality of the struggle. We cannot ‘know it’, i.e. set about describing it, just as we cannot measure or classify it. We can propose approximate models, but as long as we are operating as a detached entity these remain very far from it. But if on the one hand the reality of the struggle cannot ‘accept’ the minority as its own without unleashing a series of contradictions within itself, it is able to indicate its own state of dissociation with some clarity. In fact, the reality of the struggle is not uniform, and it is precisely this fact that allows for the existence of the active minority as an entity that is getting ready to belong to this reality but does not yet do so. We are thus facing two fluxes and tendencies: a) the tendency of struggles to move towards their own selfmanagement (in contrast with the persistence of the unions and parties); b) the tendency of the active anarchist minority to become part of the reality of the struggles (in contrast with the persistent illusion of the minority that it takes the truth to the masses and considers itself the custodian of this truth).
The third element is power and its institutional framework. This is the class enemy and is the point of theoretical consolidation of the struggle. Only, in advanced socialdemocratic situations the institutional framework is irregular, complex and often succeeds in breaking up the unity of the struggle by proposing models of collaboration with power. These models, in themselves ‘theory’, are the theory of power even if they are proposed by trades union or party structures, just as the theory of the movement of the exploited lies in the selforganisation of its struggles.
The first contact with the reality of a struggle is also always a three-way relationship, as it is senseless to assume that a ‘certain kind of undertaking’ will be tolerated by power. When this moves in the direction of the theory and practice of the real movement, it is immediately singled out and opposed by power.
More on the misconception of the quantitative growth of the minority
A fictitious residuum can appear in this opening towards the reality of the struggle. The old quantitative ideology can pass through an objectification of the minority. The struggle then address itself towards a growth in the specific movement. Given that the work of spreading ideas is possible in any situation, at least theoretically, it is not very difficult to find a target to turn one’s attention to. Of course, there are always specific sectors such as immigration, unemployment, ghettos, criminality, as well as the various sectors of production; but the importance of isolating a point of encounter decreases. Anything will do in view of a growth in the minority. For example, there is discontent in a particular area due to a lack of something (water, lighting, services, transport, etc.). It is not important if alongside this discontent there are hints of selforganisation or not. What counts is being there with one’s own organisation; an occasion is awaited to start the game all over again. The results demonstrate one’s capabilities and how much more they might be if one were to find oneself greater in number. If nothing is obtained, one waits for another occasion. The problem of why, once the water, electricity or other has been obtained the movement calms down, or why it quietens down all the same even if nothing has been obtained, is not questioned. The prioritising of doing and the quantitative illusion prevent many comrades from thinking about such things and elaborating a different strategy of intervention.
It seems to us that the contact should not be made on the basis of one’s own perspectives and interests (those of the minority), using the occasional demands of the movement of the exploited as detonator of a process of development and growth, but, on the contrary, the starting point must be the transformation of reality itself, i.e. the transformation of the relationship that exists between selforganisation and the delegation of struggles. The ‘field’ one involves oneself in cannot therefore be that of stimuli from reality, as we know that these stimuli are torn between selfmanagement and delegating. That is, not all the stimuli that come from the reality of the struggle can be taken in absolute. It is necessary to insert oneself within them in order to transform the situation that led to them, and so transform the relationship between selforganisation and delegating the struggle.
If an area shows stimuli of discontent due to certain defects in power that lead to lack of services (increase in exploitation), that does not necessarily mean that those involved are prepared to organise the struggle to solve this problem themselves, reduce the exploitation that is striking them and move on to developing the struggle with other more general and specifically revolutionary aims. Often all they are interested in is waiting to see which road is more effective for getting what they need. For this simple reason, unions and parties can at any time force power to solve the contradictions and, in so doing, extinguish the struggle. So our task cannot simply be that of turning up, but is also that of placing the struggle in a wider framework, within a more complex revolutionary project that can move the relationship between self-organisation-delegating in the direction of selforganisation. And that is impossible if one becomes immersed in the event itself, where action is an end in itself or even worse, by using it to increase the numbers of the minority.
The need to fully understand this relation has become pressing in recent times. We could say that dissent has become institutionalised. Contestation, unorthodox demands, a certain animosity of the base, everything that until recently caused a certain panic in the unions and parties, can be drawn back into the institutions today. By democratising these institutions, power, (which is itself an institution), has lain the foundations for absorbing dissent. It has blunted the more dangerous edges by throwing divergences into the quicksands of assemblies. In fact, if by institution we mean repeatable forms of activity, social behaviour and structures that acquire a capacity for social control, we can deduce that no political instrument controls better than democratic centralism, the one that uses debate, assembly, dialogue, to impose what the centre wants in a clean form without any residue. Power has programmed a modification of society. To do that it will support the cost, make concessions, determine the genocide (ghettoisation, criminalisation) of one part of society; but it will succeed in convincing the other part that it is choosing its own destiny. In other words, power has also realised that the struggle takes place at the demarcation line between selforganisation and delegation of the struggle, and wants the delegate (which it can always control) to predominate, even when this is camouflaged as selforganisation.
Power would even allow us to grow quantitatively, as long as this takes place within the institutional framework. In the same way, it allows us to ‘work’ politically so long as we remain one of the forces of democratic opposition. On the other hand, if we intend to enter the social fabric as an external force in order to push the base to make the contradictions more acute, we must grow in number. And that is precisely what power fears least. So, the objective of the intervention cannot be qualified in advance but needs to work itself out during the course of the intervention itself on the basis of the modifications that it causes within the struggles themselves. It cannot, that is, qualify itself on the basis of immediate results to be reached, as the unions and parties can do the same. Nor can it qualify itself on the basis of an ideology that ends up becoming a maximalist and often contradictory stand in the face of a reality that is structuring itself on a contradiction: that between selforganisation and delegate of the struggle.
It is during the course of the intervention itself that its aims are developed, the separation between the minority and the movement of the workers is overcome and an awareness of new problems and stimuli is gained.
Contact with reality and the consequences
The real objective of the intervention is something that can only emerge during the course of the intervention itself. This is not clear at first, but grows and gradually becomes identifiable as the intervention develops and relations between the minority and the reality of the struggle pushes, with greater emphasis, between self-organisation and delegation of the struggles.
First one tends to overestimate the specific conditions of the reality we are facing. If it is the question of prison, we tend to exaggerate prison as a physical place of ghettoisation. We concentrate on conditions of detention, possible improvements, torture, the mechanism of trials and sentences. Then, the unravelling of the intervention puts us in a different relationship with the reality of the struggle, we change and, in doing so, change our relationship with reality. It is precisely at this point that the ‘work’ that we are doing becomes productive.
If we were to limit ourselves to shouting to improve prisoners’ conditions, against torture or trials in special tribunals, we would still undoubtedly be useful to the comrades who are suffering repression at that moment—and this is work that needs to be done because it carries out its basic task of preparation and defence at the same time. But, if we stop there we will be condemning our intervention to remain such, i.e. the intervention of a minority that approaches reality and evaluates it, struggles for it, even does something to change it for the better. But this ‘changing for the better’ is also useful to power in that, sooner or later, it must somehow decide to adopt more refined and social democratic systems of repression, systems that are just as effective, if not more. And we should also follow it in these modifications, keep on its heels and force it to unmask itself, but always as work of defence and preparation. Another task exists alongside this work, and this is what signs the demarcation between waiting, the vision, the interpretation of the struggles, and action within struggles themselves; it is this other that breaks the barriers and allows one to enhance the experiences of the minority.
The action of the minority within actual struggles is therefore to develop the tendency to strengthen self-organisation, breaking the conspiracy of the delegate and the leader, also when camouflaged by the leninist type of revolutionary project.
To bring this about it is necessary to see the situation that one is acting in in all its details, including the intervention of the minority itself. In fact, the more this presence is a source of contrast, the more it raises doubts and contradictions, the more fruitful the modification of the situation in all its parts and the deeper the insertion within the struggles will be.
It is only at this point that what we mean by ‘it is necessary to insert ourselves within struggles’ becomes clear. What emerges is the absence of a stable, clearly defined schema. Everything is problematic, the intervention in the first place. This appears more as a tension than as being comfortably ‘inside’ something. That explains why we cannot accept the idea that the initial situation, where we accentuated the importance of certain conditions, can transform itself into an optimal situation. The consequences of such interventions should be borne in mind because they always create problems and transformation, they always put the objective conditions of the situation one started off from in question.
The fragmentary nature of the reality of the struggles
The surest sign of the fragmentary nature of the struggle is the existence of power and exploitation. If the struggle were to succeed in fusing uniform action, i.e. were to succeed in making the tendency to selforganisation predominate, power would be swept away. The latter, being perfectly aware of this danger, organises accordingly, its most effective allies being the parties and the unions.
This fragmentariness cannot be catalogued in horizontal lines, that is, it cannot be seen as a distinction at different levels, according to the reformist, technocratic, authoritarian revolutionary, or other presence. It descends vertically, in depth. A place of struggle, let’s say a factory, a living area, a ghetto, a school, an asylum, etc., can never be qualified in absolute as reformist, technocratic, revolutionary, etc.. It is always characterised by a complexity of problems and stimuli, a complexity of tendencies and prejudices, distancing and involvement, compromise and awakening of consciousness. All that must be approached with conoscitive instruments, that is, one must ‘document’ oneself on this reality, dismantling the mechanisms as far as possible. All these technical aspects, however, cannot fail to be seen as something separate from the constitution of the minority, its conditions as an element of insertion within a reality which up until then was foreign to it. And this constitution often presents problems and tendencies that are not unlike those of the reality we are going towards. It is an illusion to say that the minority is by definition immovable because it has gained consciousness, whereas reality is fragmentary because it must still do so. In truth things are very different, the process for both elements of this relation is still a tendency and constant modification.
To clearly see the relations that reality has with the basic coordinates of the system, with exploitation and social control, produces an immediate questioning of the relations that the minority also has with these coordinates, i.e. with exploitation and social control.
The distinction proposed earlier between fictitious movement and real movement of the exploited (concerning the anarchist movement), should not be seen in the sense that the bad are all on one side and the good on the other. The forces that push the movement of the exploited towards the selforganisation of struggles constitute a tendency that is acting within the same fragmentary reality, proposing a need to go beyond it.
In this way, even in the most advanced and selforganised struggles it is only possible to see a tendency and never ‘reality in every detail’; the most intimate point of contact is precisely this fragmentary aspect. The minority is also fragmentary and problematic, does not hold the truth, does not intend to impose an illuminated dogma, guide, or leader.
The revolutionary anarchist project
Having spoken of the tendency of struggles to self-organisation, of tensions that come about at the point of contact between the minority and actual struggles and of the series of contradictions that emerge as a result of that contact, we gain a more detailed idea of the revolutionary project.
Above all this cannot be the product of the minority. It is not elaborated by the latter inside their theoretical edifice, then exported to the movement in one block or in pieces. Neither is the revolutionary project a ‘complete’ realisation in all its parts. It comes from all the problematics that emerge from the tensions that have become more acute following the relation anarchist minority / movement of the exploited. It is therefore itself tension and development, the negation of everything defined and immutable.
It starts from the specific context of actual struggles, underlines their selforganisational component and develops consequences and relations with the adversary forces, with power, within the general context of the movement.
It uses the specific elements of struggles that make them significant. When seen in the light of the strategy of selforganisation, these elements place themselves within a wider perspective, connecting to other elements that are just as important, though normally less visible.
The anarchist revolutionary project is the bridge that is thrown in the direction of specific reality, uniting experiences of selforganisation that are often singularly isolated. It is also, however, the indication of overcoming the distinction between anarchist minority and movement of the exploited where, from the moment that the project is in course, all barriers start to fall and one finds oneself struggling for a common goal.
http://www.elephanteditions.net/
Why a Vanguard?
published in Movimento e progetto rivoluzionaria
Edizioni Anarchismo – Nuovi contributi per una rivoluzione anarchica – 1 – 1977
The conclusion is very simple and constitutes the starting point of a reflection that we are proposing to all comrades: it is not within the enclosure of the specific anarchist movement that one works for the revolution, but outside in the reality of struggles, which at this moment do not see us present. In this sense the anarchist movement still has a long way to go. In the face of the urgency of the situation it has become imperative for all sincere revolutionary anarchist comrades to reflect on the ways and conditions of organising oneself to contribute to the widening, in the libertarian sense, of the present situation of crises and discomfort.
The time for hesitation and waiting is over. May whoever is available for the revolutionary struggle seek his or her comrades and not indulge in waiting for a sign or clarification on the part of the specific movement.
AMB
The problem of the vanguard has been gone into by all conscious revolutionaries past and present. They fear its dangers and try to see what causes it and how to eliminate it or attenuate its effects.
The problem is far more serious for anarchists. They do not accept the political expedients that other revolutionaries end up justifying in their haste to take power.
All the same, anarchists also end up producing vanguards but they are careful not to call them such, a word they detest. But we have no fig leaf with which to cover up reality, and if this includes structures that are the same or similar to those of the authoritarians, it is pointless to try to conceal the fact simply by using different words.
Is a vanguard necessary then?
There is no simple answer to this. Anarchists have tended to bury their heads in the sand until now, hoping to solve the problem through the use of metaphors.
We feel we must take a step forward and risk upsetting those that are obstinately holding on to their positions like the same old octopus on the same old rock.
Many have cut the problem short by simply stating that there is a need for a vanguard. Pushing the underlying ideology—always present in anarchism—in an authoritarian direction, they pull their sleeves up and set to work. With the aid of some extremely distilled and refined theories, they start to build mysterious constructions that are maxims of control and selection.
Such a position does not differ much from those who, categorically denying that there is any such thing as a vanguard in anarchism, refuse to see reality as it is.
This tendency—usually wrapped up in humanistic rhetoric bordering on nebulous idealism—is the sworn enemy of the former which it accuses of being the most sinister Leninism camouflaged as anarchism. On the other hand, the more sharp-witted part of the movement, aware of the difficulties involved in trying to justify some of the leadership, replace the term “vanguard” with “active minority” and similar euphemisms.
However, the problem is not just a question of words. We are not interested in substituting one term with another and explaining why, but are trying to get to the root of the problems that such a concept leads to.
And the question does not change if we call the “thing” a vanguard or an active minority.
What is this thing then? What is a revolutionary vanguard?
The answer looks simple: it is an organic whole composed of the individuals that make it up. This organisation tends to cut itself off from and impose itself upon the revolutionary movement that produced it.
Let us look at this in stages.
There are many ways to justify the need for a specific organisation to take on certain problems that mass organisations cannot solve. Obviously, those who make up this organisation must have three attributes: a) knowledge; b) commitment; c) time. Power establishes itself on the basis of authoritativeness rather than authority in the narrow sense of the word. We are talking of revolutionary organisations in general, but let us not lose sight of those we are particularly interested in examining, anarchist organisations. It is precisely in the latter that elements of authoritativeness predominate over authority, leaving the underlying problem intact: that of the growth and consolidation of an organisation (therefore of a group of people) that exerts control over the rest of the movement.
The revolution is eminently an organisational event, so it is no wonder that a process of organisational superstructuring comes about when base organisations multiply. This could quite well be limited (at least in the early stages) by pointing to the questions that such an organisation should concern itself with and controlling it through a recall of its delegates. We shall see why such expedients (limitation of tasks and recall of delegates) constitute very fragile bulwarks, and how these are often simply used to solve consciences, i.e. as alibis, rather than as instruments with which to limit power as such.
When the counterrevolution lets loose, this group tends to close in on itself. Repression and clandestinity have the effect of making it turn into a militarised group which (suddenly or gradually) loses its relationship with the old base organisations, the first to succumb to the repression. At other times the predominant organisational group splits into a number of separate or coordinated groups that—still limited in number—carry on the struggle, often drawing in those from the base organisation who prefer to go into clandestinity. We are looking at an extreme situation here that reduces the value of the work done at other times when the counterrevolution leaves the revolutionary movement relatively in peace. But the problems arising from this radicalisation are none other than those that already existed, now in a more rarified, obvious, form.
The conditions leading to the formation of the vanguard are therefore linked to the development of revolutionary activity itself. An organisation formed of men and women—the best available—emerges, and along with it the danger of its beginning to reason independently in keeping with the logic of all organisations, their main priority becoming their own survival.
Such a conclusion would seem to implicate the inevitability of a vanguard, yet, on the contrary, I believe that it is possible to go beyond a minority logic. However, in order for this to become clear a number of points need to be considered.
Nothing is possible without organisation. Human life would stop and everything would fall into chaos. Organisation is indispensable to man to such an extent that any improvement in the latter, even if carried out by tyrants, is to be considered something positive. The very idea of progress would never have come about had organisation not been essential to man. In this sense, if history is the development of anything it is the development of something organised.
The power structure is a fairly refined organisation aimed at attaining ends for the benefit of a minority. The majority are engaged in bringing about these ends. But we cannot deny that the interests of the minority also hold certain positive aspects for the majority. The latter would rebel or die otherwise and the former’s aims would not be reached.
The power structure is full of expedients for obtaining the maximum whilst giving the minimum. It elaborates these expedients and puts them into effect, modifying them from time to time in relation to the struggle carried out by the majority, i.e. the exploited.
The latter, as a result of various—all dramatic—experiences of struggle, have developed organisations of their own to make the clash more effective. These have gradually entered the logic of exploitation and become an integral part of it, coinciding with power’s discovery of the untenability of absolutism and the idiocy of fascist irrationalism.
This is how democratic power was born, an organisation that continues to exploit the majority to the benefit of the minority but does so using the majority’s own organisations of defence.
Moreover, what has made this possible is the fact that the defence organisations of the majority have nearly always come into effect after becoming legalised.
But organisational activity should not necessarily be seen as something that is built from the outside by specialists who make decisions according to their own aims. This interpretation contains two basic errors: what we could call the biological error, and the functionalist one. According to this way of thinking an organisation must structure itself more or less like an organism (have a head and limbs, therefore a hierarchy) and fulfil the essential requirements of efficiency and functionality. If the exploited majority cannot defend themselves because they are dispersed in single units (like the cells of organic tissue), we must put these cells together and build a body with a precious structure (i.e. trades unions and unions in general) suited to the aims in view, to oppose the bosses in the process of exploitation and to defend the majority.
The justification for this is the concept that, because the bosses’ structure is monolithic, the defence structure should also be so.
The biological and functionalist analogy also dominated in the field of political defence, as party structures increased in importance alongside the decline of absolutist States.
The justification, the monolithicity of the State.
This is all quite pathetic. The great irony of history lies in the fact that it was power itself to decide the terms of the huge defence organisations. These terms were produced on an organic and functional basis, often as the involuntary consequence of certain modifications within the power structure itself. Clearly an organism of defence is a product of a particular historical period, and nearly always consolidates in a precise relationship with the power structure that conditions it and renders it possible.
An incredible number of comrades maintain that they are revolutionary yet insist on the validity of using the defence structures of the exploited. They see the latter as instruments of struggle, unaware of the intimate relationship of dependency that exists between them and the structures of power.
But history has contributed to clarifying this question. Each time the exploited have moved from defence to attack and a revolutionary mechanism has sprung into effect, other kinds of organisational structure have arisen.
The problem of the great defence organisations of the exploited is not the fact that they exist—something that is natural and ineliminable—but precisely the defensive dimension that they have adopted. That is why they “copy” the organisations of the adversary and use the same logic.
On the other hand, organisations of attack do not reproduce the biological functionalism of the defensive ones. These organisational forms have no intention of becoming a great monolithic structure, so allow the process of breaking up to continue. They do not want to reproduce the model of the adversary by using the same logic. It is true that organisations of defence can also be mobilised to attack but this turns out to be a military-style clash that might look revolutionary but which can have no other outcome than the persistence of the old power or the birth of a new one, possibly more tyrannical than the first.
Organisations of attack, on the other hand, are born on the basis of a social logic that takes people’s needs, the level of exploitation and the extent of radicalisation that the clash has reached into account.
These organisations do not suffer from functionalist illusions. They cannot be improved upon, they do not hope to “grow”. Neither do they put themselves in the logic of a “dialogue” with power. They are for the destruction of all power from the moment they appear, so in their very logic they are already “complete” in themselves. They can of course perfect themselves from the point of view of tactics, the preparation of their individual components or aspects of the military clash. But as far as the organisational aspect is concerned there is nothing to be improved upon and vice versa. They are beyond the logic of power. They are “outlaws”.
Not seeking quantitative growth they have no need for a “head” or “limbs”. They orientate themselves towards the reality of exploitation, emerging in their organisational completeness at the moment in which they attack power. They do not have one function among others, but have the “definitive function” of destroying power.
It is not important to describe here what forms these organisations of attack have taken in the history of the exploited (councils, soviets, committees, etc.), or might take in the near future. Nor are we interested in discussing an important and immediately obvious characteristic of these organisations, autonomy.
On the contrary, we feel that it is necessary to reflect upon two things: a) that these organisations never lose sight of the individual (that is also an organisation); b) in the destructive moment they become a model for the construction of the future society.
Now we have acquired a new problem. The single individual is an organisation, or rather is the fundamental organisation. Here the confusion concerning an apparent contradiction between individualism and anarchist communism disappears. While the former sometimes adopts attitudes that are strangely absurd (the defence of small property, the will to power, a disdain for communist life, etc.), most of this is no more than isolated attitudes that have had little contact with the reality of the struggles of the exploited. A typical case is that of the humanists who recognise themselves in anarchism but, hindered by their idealistic interpretation of the vicissitudes of man, end up losing the essential foundation of the exploiter/exploited relationship. They bring the attributes of the old God down to earth and turn them into a new myth, quite similar to the old one that only served the designs of power.
This kind of individualism is clearly a distortion of the more rational doctrines of egoism. It denies the concept of organisation and tends to see man as continually realising himself within an animalistic dimension of the struggle for life. It sees the communist dimension as the negation of human development, the sacrifice of the individual to the good society. It fights for the liberation of the individual outside a communitarian perspective, avoiding the fundamental premise that the slavery of one single individual in the world is also my own.
On the contrary, when individualism is seen correctly it starts from the concept that, although simple and basic from the point of view of social dynamics, the individual is already a complex organisation. This organisation can establish precise relationships with other organisation-individuals and is capable of changing or regulating them. It can even realise itself in the absolute sacrifice, the conscious negation of itself—death—when this seems necessary in order to overturn the exploiter-exploited relationship that renders the organisation-individual incomplete and unhappy.
Supreme egoism, i.e. autonomy, is the organisational perfectionment of the individual, a precise relationship that does not infringe upon other organisation-individuals.
A proper exposition of this problem is extremely important for anarchism. It leads to a clearer vision of the struggle against exploitation, even when this comes about in situations that are confusing or in not quite orthodox organisational forms. When it comes to defence it should be said that anarchist structures often condemn any form of struggle that is produced independently of themselves, considering them to be individualist in the negative sense of the word and branding them “objectively provocatory”.
For individualism, the essential point is that the individual is an autonomous organisation that usually reacts against what has been established by power, often by working out its own precepts, clarifying itself and taking the initiative. At that moment a precise moral event sets in motion: the individual, no longer an unconscious instrument in the hands of power, acquires an autonomous perspective that is of an essentially organisational character.
The other aspect of the organisational moment we have defined “attack” is its preparation as the destructive instrument to act upon the reality of exploitation, and as a model to build from once this relationship is abolished.
Objective conditions push the great mass of exploited to look for these organisational models, which are impeded by the power of the adversary. If the heavy power structure starts to show signs of weakness at some point, needs and problems must be faced differently. Usually, in building forms of attack, the mass also build forms to solve the problems of survival. The latter are very significant because they are based on communist relations.
The main element of the organisational structuring of defence is quantitative growth. This has been conditioned by the logic of power.
The greater the numbers, the more an organisation is considered to be significant, strong, well known, important. In this sense, if the power structure is the stronger organisation, if it is at its peak and covers every manifestation of associated life, any organisation that intends to contrast it and represent the rights of the great majority of exploited must aim to be as strong as possible.
At first glance such statements seem quite unexceptional. And so they are if one puts oneself in the logic of power. If we want to defend ourselves from an evil force we need to oppose it with a good force i.e., one that is, if not equally strong, at least strong enough to scare it. But in this way one is putting oneself in the logic of power, unaware that any significant growth in numbers simply shifts the class relationship without actually putting the latter in question. It does not abolish classes.
By channelling revolutionary and reformist organisations towards the quantitative illusion, power has obtained one great result. It has equalised the latter at the organisational level, reducing differences to whoever shouts loudest. And we well know how he that shouts loudest is often the one most easily disposed to stopping shouting all of a sudden, or to start shouting for the opposite side.
Revolutionary organisations cannot grow quantitatively. If they do, that being in the logic of power, the difference between revolutionaries and reformists becomes no more than a question of semantics, something that power does not fear.
Of course, quantity does not catch the reformists unaware. Betrayal is implicit in their discourse and so is their insertion into relations that are managed by power. Now dominated by the structures of exploitation, they act out the role assigned to them in the modern liberal-social setup.
On the other hand, even revolutionaries in good faith fall prey to the quantitative illusion. That is the point that interests us most, which we want to go into here.
A revolutionary comrade must be considered to be in good faith until proved otherwise. Questions of clarification and criticism must never be at a personal level but must focus on the comrade’s choices and the consequences that they have on the whole organisation. In this sense the comrade’s good faith must be put to the test through a decisive action that gets to the root of things and does not stop at appearances, in other words through a penetrating action that is not limited to the field of abstract revolutionary ideology.
The quantitative illusion is very important for authoritarian comrades, but always within certain limits. They realise that they are starting off on the wrong foot and that it is not possible to go beyond something that would merely like to become part of real situations of struggle. Unfortunately, they often prefer to wait for that to come about (i.e. be facilitated) by the precipitation of events. They proceed to build strong organisations that are revolutionary in appearance alone, being in fact organisations of defence, therefore losers before they start. Numerical growth in the latter leads comrades to foster this illusion. It makes them feel strong and secure. So they grow steadfastly in that direction, which is precisely what power wants: the acceptance of an innocuous expression of revolution as something that is quantitative and nothing else, so it is easily pulled back into the logic of the power system.
The illusion of quantity is absolutely critical for anarchist organisations, which cannot become useless, sterile and counterproductive, their growth simply quantitative. Nor would it be plausible for them to simply wait for events to precipitate. Anarchists would not be able to act in something that is structured as a defence organisation, as they would not be willing to transform it into a pyramidal structure. At a radical point in the struggle when events precipitate, they would be forced to put their organisation to the test, dismember it and take it back to the elementary form that it should have had at the start. Much of the history of anarchism can be seen from this optic: the failure of the Russian revolution, the authoritarian involution of the Spanish one.
Many anarchists are now playing the part of Penelope, weaving what they know they will have to unstitch, precisely at the moment when the aims they are struggling for come about. Apart from a few marginal efforts, the present organisational forms of the anarchist movement are no different from any other organisation that is far from the reality of the struggle. These organisations must accept the quantitative logic if they do not want to seem anachronistic (or elitist), even though they know that such a logic inevitably leads to their denying the basic principles of anarchism, or to the complete undoing of what they have just built.
If one holds on to the illusion of quantity, the role of the vanguard must unavoidably be accepted. Authoritarians have nothing against this. Anarchists, on the other hand, have a great deal against it. Unfortunately, this being ‘against’ the vanguard often turns into a sterile debate, the argument often turning to the difference between authoritarian structures and libertarian ones. This point deserves to be gone into further.
At this point we want to go into the concept of the group. Up until now we have been speaking about organisation, comparing various organisations that are objectively different but which all borrow the logic of defence, therefore of power. These organisations are different in many aspects but share one fundamental one, their capacity to be used by power. Organisations for economic defence, political defence, reformist organisations and revolutionary organisations are all the same—words are meaningless—if they operate in forms that are outside the struggle.
However, within that uniformity there is a difference between a structure by groups and a structure by sections or other synonyms that usually characterise unions and parties. If we look closely we can find a semblance of reality, still external to the reality of the struggle but which claims to make a difference. The structure made up of groups considers itself to be libertarian and accuses the other of being authoritarian.
Basically, it is easy to make this accusation as it is welcomed by those responsible for the authoritarian parties and organisations themselves. In fact, central committees, hierarchies and other similar devices are not concealed but are justified by a series of discourses on the need for the leader, representation, a transitional period and other fantasies that are not worth mentioning here because they are as old as the hills.
On the other hand, a structure by groups is seen as the basis of every libertarian organisation. This is correct, but we need to know what kind of groups we are talking about. Nothing prevents authoritarian organisations from being based on groups, or the existence of actual authoritarian groups. In fact the libertarian structure should not be considered a typical group structure but rather one that is characterised from within and distinguishes itself from the other kinds.
The authoritarian group has a leader and a hierarchical microstructure. The leader makes the most important decisions without consulting the group members, and makes them one at a time in such a way that the others never know what the next decision will be. This situation of uncertainty is what makes it possible for the leader’s authority to become permanent, and from time to time the latter is called upon to set out tasks for all the others. Nothing prevents vanguardist organisations from structuring themselves this way. Moreover, this is often quite a normal state of affairs in situations of clandestinity.
The libertarian group does not have a leader and does not have an internal hierarchical structure. The distribution of tasks is decided upon collectively. The line of behaviour is decided by all of the components of the group and members can choose to carry out one task rather than another, always with common agreement. The state of uncertainty that exists in the face of a new event does not paralyse or traumatize anyone and does not require the intervention of a “specialist”, in that each individual is already aware of the situation and is prepared to face it along with all the others.
If we are assuming that only authoritarian groups can constitute a vanguard, we must look at the conditions that would prevent a libertarian group from producing one.
Just because the libertarian group does not have a leader does not mean that it is not capable of producing a vanguard. In itself this simple fact is not alarming, it becomes serious when the group is operating in a situation outside the struggle. Let us see why.
Above all, let us see how leaders do emerge within such groups. We have said that decisions are worked out as openly as possible. Everybody participates. But not everybody has the same level of preparation. It therefore transpires that discussions move in the direction of one or more particular points that correspond to the ideas of those who are better prepared. In other words, the components of the group start to divide, not on the basis of their own ideas, which can often be quite vague or superficial, but on the basis of some interpretative lines supplied by the better prepared elements. Then there is a passage from polarisation to concentration, usually because the theses of the leaders (by now identifiable) reach some agreement, i.e. divergences are blunted in order to reach unanimity. In extreme cases, where a concentration of opinion is not possible, a fracture and consequent separation results.
The problem of the formation of a majority and minority, or the libertarian equivalent of the same, is not relevant here. What concerns us is that the polarisation of opinions comes about on the basis of interpretative lines that are supplied by some elements (a minority within the group) constituted by the leaders. It should be added that these elements are usually the ones that frequent the group most assiduously, participate in all the work, engage themselves totally. That often coincides with a certain level of freedom from other kinds of work that are necessary in order to live. Without referring to the extreme case of revolutionary professionalism, we could say that the leaders of libertarian groups are usually comrades with a certain amount of time at their disposal, which they dedicate to the life of the group. The group unavoidably takes on their physiognomy, their cultural and social characteristics that involuntarily but consistently select themselves.
The other great problem is that, alongside the existence of leaders, it is often possible to identify the existence of “problematics” that are introduced to the group by the same, then submitted to the process of democratic scrutiny for discussion, etc. In this way the choice of methods of struggle, the theoretical foundations and various political positions are dealt with outside the group then, with a typically paternalistic process, everything is then discussed with all the comrades. The group thus becomes an objective, abstract entity for the individuals that make it up, as its relations only enter the reality of some of them. A formal difference in the style of command within the group turns out to be even more conditioned than the authoritarian one. In other words we are faced with an essentially authoritarian structure that is far more efficient than the authoritarian group itself. The latter always has the problem of how to overcome individual uncertainty in the case of having to act in the leader’s absence. The libertarian group, on the other hand, reaches an envious homogeneity of decision by acting as we have just seen, although there is little to be envied at the subjective level.
The worst question they have to face is how to pilot problems instead of confronting the group with them directly. Now, such a situation is impossible if the group is acting directly within the struggle when, as we shall see further on, a whole series of other problematics arise. So, given that the group is acting in an external organisation, tied as we have said to the illusory perspective of quantity, it becomes indispensable for someone within the group to carry out the fundamental tasks. On the contrary, in the case where the group is acting within struggles, the function of the leader is quite simply that of orientation on the grounds of his wider preparation and availability of time, not that of choosing the problems to be discussed.
This distinction is of the greatest importance. It marks the watershed between the fictitious movement and the real movement.
A group, in that it is an elemental structure of a wider organisational reality, would be insignificant if it were to remain isolated from other groups. It would contain all the defects of an external organisation without managing to have any effect on a wider range of opinion.
If the group consolidates on the basis of affinity emerging from the ideas and opinions of some of the leaders, as well as its geographical situation, which also exerts an influence, that does not mean that it cannot develop a wider organisational base. It can establish relations with other groups—those not too far from its own positions —based on some of the theses put forward by the leaders.
These relations can come about vertically in the case of authoritarian groups, or horizontally in the case of libertarian ones. It is the horizontal structure that we are interested in looking at here, as this is characteristic of anarchist groups.
Various groups federate or keep in contact in one way or another, supporting each other in the minimum common intention that can be drawn from a few basic principles and theoretical points worked out in advance. Even a loose agreement concerning these ideas and principles is sufficient to guarantee the persistence of the horizontal structure. No one group predominates over any other, no group claims to carry out the function of leader, and no group makes a decision concerning the others without getting in touch with the rest of the federation or informal union, who then state what they want. They can also use common instruments such as papers or commissions. These are edited or compiled by various groups, or by one single group, following a discussion among delegates, using various procedures (ratification of the group, recall of delegates, etc.) in order to try to guarantee the structure as far as possible, keeping it horizontal.
Things are not quite like that in reality. Inevitable processes favour the formation of a group of leaders that take over the federation or union of groups, pushing them towards the basic interpretation of the underlying thesis which, according to them, is the only one that is valid for all the comrades. This is not reached directly. As we have seen, each group produces its leaders, usually one or two, maximum three. Very often their preparation and availability are greater than that of the others. In this way a true leader emerges. We know how the retrieval of opinion works, the process of decision-making within groups. The phenomenon of polarisation is overcome, often in order to try to give the group uniformity and cohesion but when taken to a wider level (geographically), these phenomena do not fail to reappear.
It can be instructive to read accounts of debates or reports written by delegates from individual groups to see what we are talking about. The polarisation of ideas is quite evident. Usually only the leaders are present at wider meetings, each one of whom is more “inside” the problems of their own particular group. More often than not it is they who have worked out the ideas that the group has ended up attributing to itself. Hence a great divergence on whatever problem is being faced, with a strong possibility of never reaching any precise conclusions.
Usually a broad program is established, be it old or new, with propositions that are general enough for everyone to agree with. Care is taken to limit the program to general principles, otherwise the internal contradictions represented by the various interpretations would be irreconcilable.
Even if the structure remains horizontal, if the revocable delegate tries to avoid any form of professionalism, if the debate within the structure is always alive—in fact, the further it finds itself from the various points of struggle the more virulent it gets—that does not mean that spontaneous formations acting along the lines of a vanguard do not appear.
So now we have a series of groups that organise in a structure that is outside the struggle. By this fact alone they see themselves as the conscious vanguard of something that is considered to be unconsciousness, therefore in need of being approached and receiving clarification. Propaganda and proselytism are important for this enlightened kind of vanguard. Within the latter, through an inevitable process of selection, an even more restricted vanguard is formed, a group of leaders that act starting from certain decisions concerning basic ideas and the interpretation of individual problems that do not always come from a wider base but are often elaborated in specific places, i.e. at meetings of the restricted vanguard.
One thus becomes aware of the extreme apex of an organised whole, that takes on the task of piloting an instrument for acting on the mass in one way or another.
As far as the organised structure as a whole is concerned, its reduction to a vanguard comes about because it is detached from the real struggle and because it is seen as an instrument by the leaders who want to use it as such.
At first glance it would seem that such things regard authoritarian structures rather than libertarian ones, because, as we said they go against the latter’s aims and intentions. Each and every militant that enters a libertarian group is making a choice, not just on the basis of an abstract program but also because he or she wants to live differently, with a way of working together that is free from that absurd situation of authoritarian groups where only the leader or leaders know what is to be done and everyone else waits to take orders. When it actually comes to it, reality takes charge of changing opinions one way or another.
Authoritarian groups are finding it more and more difficult to hold on to the classic centralised structure. Leaders are conceding a certain freedom of action to their subalterns, even if processes of reification, i.e. the transformation of the organisational apparatus into a “thing” are always in act, considerably influencing the behaviour of the individual militants.
In libertarian groups, as we have seen, the idyllic situation of maximum freedom of expression is impeded by the lack of preparation and scarce availability of most of the members. For this reason a certain decision-making power ends up in the hands of a few leaders.
This situation is the same as the former in appearance alone. In reality we are looking at two very different forms of degeneration that lead to different consequences. In the first case, i.e. in the authoritarian structure, the process of reification is such that individual militants become so integrated with the organisation that it becomes inconceivable for them to imagine that the latter could make a mistake. Hence their failure to question orders from above. The structure must be right, precisely because of some of its internal, quite irrational, characteristics. Its reflection as an organised structure cannot be wrong, in that they live the same life as the organisation. They personify it in a way, giving it a human semblance. The personality cult and all its consequences are a logical conclusion of this direction.
In the second case, i.e. in the horizontal, libertarian structure, methods of discussion, a minimum of decency and various other elements contribute to preventing a reification of the organisation. Even many elements of the base who have nothing to say on certain arguments do not accept the typically authoritarian principle that the organistion is always right. In this case the leaders’ authority should more correctly be called authoritativeness, although the use of a different word does not alter the consequences of the phenomenon.
It should be added that there quite often exists what is know as an esprit de corps. Militants of a libertarian organisation should be free from such absurdities. Yet reality shows us how one often becomes a prisoner of them. The militant at the base of the organised structure sees the latter in a certain way, that usually coincides with the way the leader that influences it sees it. By simply accepting this situation, he cannot see his organisation at the same level as others do. He sees something better in it, something more fitting to the principles he vaguely feels are close to his “truth”, which are codified succinctly for the non-initiated. The leader is even closer to identifying with the organisation. He feels there is something definitive in it, feels it is “his” to a much greater degree than the simple militant does. Whereas for the latter the intermediary of the leader was necessary, for him the relationship is direct. He feels the pulsations directly. All this leads to his being extremely indulgent towards his own organisation and extremely critical of others.
An irrational evaluation of the organisation one belongs to can lead to strange situations. A great deal of effort is made to expand, perfect and fortify a structure, without analysing whether it corresponds to the needs of the struggle that it is supposed to be involved in. All kinds of excuses are invented to camouflage the priority given to internal work compared to that beyond the organisation. It is said that it is not the right moment to do this or that, while it is always the time for the work of internal growth, in that it is always the moment for waiting and preparing to defend oneself from the attacks of the exploiters. The outside is no longer seen as a field of struggle, a specific situation that can be analysed, or as the necessary condition for preventing abnormal growth or sterile conformity to past models, but only for finding new militants. Proselytism is the most important part of the organisation’s activities. In a few extreme cases the struggle, any struggle whatsoever, is not carried out on the basis of the positive consequences that it might determine in the exploited masses, but on the basis of the propaganda that it might create for the organisation. Hence a position of stalemate in the relation of the struggle between exploiter and exploited is reached. If the relation concerns the problem of abortion, for example, the latter is not faced in terms of how the problem concerns the mass of exploited, but only in view of an outcome in quantitative terms, and what the negative consequences of going in the opposite direction would be for the organisation.
The first sets himself up as a constant point of reference. He gets his authority from the position he occupies within the authoritarian structure, a position that has—usually—been gained through total dedication to the organisation itself, as well as his considerable competence and preparation. He comes to be considered the interpreter of the will of the organisation, therefore, indirectly, given that the latter is considered holder of the truth, he is considered interpreter and holder of the truth. The irrational relationship at the root of a militant’s belonging to an authoritarian structure, consolidates itself in his relationship with the direct head. The indirect leader, the one who places himself at the top of the pyramid, then comes to be invested with those charismatic forms that have a very strong irrational content. Because there is no way to control the validity of his work, apart from through the action of the intermediate leaders, the supreme head becomes more a symbol than anything else, a symbol dispenser of charisma, i.e. the truth.
Here it is necessary to point out the great difference that there is between this situation and the counterrevolutionary authoritarian structure. This is a delicate question. Objectively speaking an authoritarian structure is always counterrevolutionary, because it always tries to put obstacles in the way of ultimate liberation. But it should be distinguished from the structures deliberately created by the bosses to reach their aims. In this sense, let’s say, a fascist organisational structure gives rise to certain hierarchical relations that are flights from freedom, each single component grasps the charisma of the head because he is scared of the freedom that he could find elsewhere, because he has that special petit bourgeois vision of life that makes him take refuge and comfort in the fixed structures of authoritarianism. For the fascist, the acceptation of the authoritarian structure is not a concession, it is a point of stability: his interior conflict, typically existential, is resolved in the total and definitive delegation, in the flight. The other possibility, that he vaguely sees, the possibility of living free, scares him because the schema of tradition, family, honour, homeland, and other such rubbish, suffocate him, making him see freedom as chaos without rules, in which old the old ghosts, that he has always run away from, equality in the first place, would end up multiplying.
The authoritarian comrade is a comrade who intends to consciously make the choice of freedom. He is not afraid, in fact all of his action is aimed at breaking with the past, with tradition. Acceptance of the authoritarian structure is the lesser of two evils for the militant who naively convinces himself that nothing lasting can be obtained without sacrifice. For this reason he is ready for the extreme sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own freedom. Herein lies the tragedy. A person struggling for freedom ends up sacrificing the latter in the illusion that he is continuing to struggle for it. Even the acceptance of charisma is always a mediated fact that involves a process of “snobbery”, self-importance, little moral blackmails with oneself. He usually starts off seeing the leader as a “comrade”, accepting him as one who is more prepared and more aware. He would never admit to a direct charismatic process. Then, as he is gradually absorbed into the authoritarian structure he realises that any possibility of control from the base is minimal. Next there is his accusation of superficial snobbery. He finally ends up taking orders and sacrificing himself to the structure itself which, as an indissoluble whole, he identifies with freedom and truth.
Now let us look at the situation of the libertarian leader. He should not become a point of reference. If he is, that has happened against his will, as a direct consequence of his having more free time and due to his greater involvement and preparation. As far as he is concerned, one could speak of authoritativeness rather than authority. He cannot be accused of interpreting the will of the organisation as the latter is composed of the wills of all the members. Finally, as the organisation itself is not considered the depository of truth, the leader towards whom some militants turn in no way interprets or spreads the truth.
In actual fact, considerable modifications do occur within this schema. The leader does end up becoming a point of reference, otherwise the diversity of opinions within the structure would be enormous and make it almost impossible to reach any decision. This organisation also ends up being seen by militants in a deformed, irrational way as “their organisation” due to the simple fact that they chose it as the organisation which, although not carrier of the truth, is almost certainly the one that gets closer to that than any other. Consequently, even if the leader is not the interpreter or holder of truth he can in a sense be considered something similar, a comrade to have faith in, so much so as to accept his conclusions even if one does not fully grasp them. All this comes about in the hope that we too will manage to see clearly in the future in order to put the comrade, who for the time being serves as a point of reference, into a proper critical dimension. This awaiting better moments when we will all have time, when our preparation is more accurate and detailed, also conceals renunciation and accommodation. It conceals the acceptance of a situation that it is very difficult to alter, which we are not really interested in going into as such.
Then there is the question of the relationship between leaders. Another delicate problem. If the clash between authoritarian leaders is taken for granted as a result of the ranks that are built within the vertical structure, one should not be able to say the same thing about libertarian leaders. They also have clashes of opinion, find themselves opposing those who diverge from their own point of view, have to overcome organisational obstacles caused by the different tendencies, but the means that they have recourse to should be different.
On the contrary, one often sees that the means employed are not so different at all. The libertarian leader cannot let predominance over the tendency he represents escape him, without risking the very negation of the tendency and a distortion of the relationship with the part of the base that he represents. There might be a hint of a relationship of exchange, or reciprocal influence, between base and leader within the wider organised structure. That does not alter the fact that the precise interest of the leader, even a libertarian one, emerges to seal this relationship, protecting it from the influence of other tendencies that might threaten the clarity of his own position.
Hence the clash with other leaders. An idea of the intensity of the clash is given by the rush for commissions and tasks to be carried out within the organisation. Nothing changes because these commissions are unpaid and produce a considerable burden of work and fatigue: they are recompensed by influence and solidity. One could say that the more widely a leader’s activity is developed within the organisation, the clearer and less attackable his point of reference becomes.
One should not generalise however. In the libertarian organisational structure, the formation of militants makes it possible for there to be a constant exchange of ideas in circulation that ends up emarginating tendencies that become crystallized. Then the comrade or comrades who identify with that crystallized tendency, even when they keep in touch with certain instruments such as papers, reviews, commissions and other things, still end up creating a vacuum around themselves.
The libertarian organisation, even the one farthest from the struggle, cannot fail to face the problem of aims and methods. And the discussion of methods ends up creating relationships within the organisation that render possible a debate which, although sterile at times, often leads to unexpected results in other organisations.
It should be added that comrades in the libertarian organisation are there by their own free choice. Generally speaking, belonging to a libertarian organisation, even those with quite unclear perspectives, involves risk, sacrifice, awareness of these risks and sacrifices and a fairly clear evaluation of the reasons that determined such a choice. At any level whatsoever, anarchist militants are indisputably militants who can make decisions and question any doubts about positions or tendencies that are not quite tenable (at least in their opinion). This fact, which often gives rise to arguments, endless discussions, splits and conflict between tendencies and has been considered the weak point of anarchism, is actually one of its points of strength and vitality. Obtuse uniformity would kill any lively tendency in favour of the grey will of the winning side.
An attempt to examine the character structure of the libertarian militant
Anarchist methodology vaguely gives us a model of a certain kind of militant. More often than not this indication is not gained from the reality of intervention in struggle, but from an idealisation of the latter.
Moreover, it is possible to see the evolution of this model throughout the history of the libertarian movement and the profound transformations that have taken place from 1968 onwards.
The definition has precise characteristics: a coherent choice of means for reaching the aims of justice, equality and freedom; intervention in the quick of social struggles; refusal to prioritize the economic factor in the evolving of the exploited/exploiter conflict; the elevation of a liberatory culture to oppose the bourgeois culture of repression; optimism; faith in man and his innate gifts; an a priori refusal of doctrines; use of the empirical method “try and try again”; specific solicitations on the social conflict in act with means of every kind (insurrectional-violent or pacifist-educational).
This framework is not complete but it gives the rough contours of a perspective that cannot be brought about in practice. Offspring of social contradictions and the social struggle, anarchist militants are not only products of their time, they would be insignificant automata if they were to base their action on abstract principles without relating them to the requirements of their intervention in reality.
It should not be forgotten that one of the most important points of anarchism is precisely its ethical preoccupation, and this would disappear if one were to try to obliterate the contradictory vitality of the individual in favour of an idealism detached from history and its events. If the strong point of anarchism is its methodology, great freedom of action is possible within that framework. In fact, if one were to dictate the main rules of anarchism in Ten Commandments, throwing out anyone that failed to manifest the intention to follow them scrupulously down to the last detail, and there was an accentuation of internal norms and elaborate codes intended to confuse ideas or create conflict, one would end up with a minority of revolutionaries with very limited choices. This character model is marked by a net subordination of one’s own happiness, interests and need for a private life to the aims of the organisation and the revolution. By making the model of reference rigid, people become rigid, personality falls into second place. The abstract ideals of justice, equality and freedom come to be considered important enough to justify self-oblivion, the nullification of any stimulus towards the different (which ends up being considered bourgeois, so is condemned).
Once they have conformed to the basic rigid model these comrades would no doubt be disposed to make any sacrifice imaginable for the ideal, even their own lives, but they would be throwing the cold veil of separation between themselves, the ideal (now “their ideal”) and other comrades, i.e., they would come to deny the unitarian and collective process that the elaboration of the revolutionary model implies. Their aim would be to apply in the sphere of reality the model that they had crystallized in the sphere of analysis, without taking account of any possible individual or group differences. Phenomena such as the birth of a so-called “objective consciousness” would surface, leading to suspicion, intolerance, exclusivity.
We are looking at this extreme situation here simply to point out the dangers of a crystallisation of a model of anarchist intervention. In reality, such a model must, in our opinion, result from constant elaboration, verification and modification by all comrades, always within the basic methodological perspective, which is that of the correct choice of means for reaching the aims of justice, equality and freedom.
Specific historical transformation has produced different kinds of militants. There can be no doubt that the character of the French comrades engaged in the struggle against the reaction up until 1890 differed greatly from those of the anarcho-syndicalist comrades who later tried to address the struggle towards claiming better conditions, convinced that that was still within a revolutionary perspective. Just as there can be no doubt that profound differences existed between the Spanish comrades of the FAI and the Italian comrades of similar organisations. The same goes for the German comrades that went to work in America and those who stayed at home, for the English comrades in London and the Scottish ones, etc. The ‘model’ proposed by Ravachol is not the same as that proposed by Henry, nor is it the same as that which Bonnot was to propose. While basically remaining within the realm of illegality, profoundly different characteristics emerge, leading to differences in analyses and tendencies.
It is also possible to see differences at the level of language. The language of anarchist writings from 1880 to 1895 in France is different from that between 1895 and 1914. Galleani’s style differs from Malatesta’s but is very similar to that of Cipriani and Ciancabilla.
The variety and flourishing of models since 1968 is even greater.
The development of cultural analysis, the widening of revolutionary reading, the French phenomenon of May, a faster circulation of ideas, the breakdown in traditional university structures, the crisis of the most sacred values of the bourgeois world (science, projectuality, salubrity, integrity), have all produced rapid changes. Anyone that fails to adapt to the new era ends up being out of date and inefficient. The persistence of old schema, even by very valid comrades, is the sign of a difficulty in making the model pliable, but one goes ahead in any case and new lines of intervention are developed. Amidst contrasts and colossal blunders, amidst intuition and attempts at internal repression, a profound cultural modification of the world anarchist movement comes about. Hence the emergence of a new kind of militant that is still in formation, one that flees rhetoric like the plague and only focuses on a few points, but does so clearly.
The new anarchist militant places himself or herself in the libertarian tradition but at the same time they try with all their might to sift through the cultural contribution of the revolutionary left, as well as cultural models of the bourgeoisie. This has opened up many contradictions from which deep theoretical splits have arisen, but these are very positive, breaking the circle of a cultural closure that had ended up with outdated analytical models. Basically, if one were to draw up a short inventory of the theoretical baggage of the anarchism of the ’fifties, especially in Italy, one would have to admit that some of the old models (revolutionary syndicalism, Malatestian critique, Gorian humanism, late-Bakuninist collectivism, Kropotkinian determinism) have become acritical rhetoric. Also models that are more directly influenced by action such as the ethical and strategic evaluation of armed struggle, have been influenced by this cultural atrophy. The actions of Sabate and Facerias were isolated acritically, often praised, often condemned, without the message they contain being able to emerge in the form of a concrete proposal to comrades beyond a mythisisation of armed action for the sake of it.
If we were to look at some of the examples that were fossilized by this cultural atrophying, we would have to point to the Sorel of the myth of the general strike (behind revolutionary syndicalism), the Malatesta of the final years (influenced by Gori’s humanism), the Kropotkin of Ethics and Modern Science and Anarchy (as well as a little of Mutual Aid). That would imply a direct intervention in the reality that is trying to revive syndical models, now decidedly oriented in a reformist and authoritarian direction, a logic of waiting and naturalist and determinist ethical discourses.
Revolutionary culture’s sudden break (also the authoritarian strain) with certain schema of the past (for example the sudden refusal of Crocian historicism and the immediate—acritical—acceptance of Marxism), produced considerable reflexes, also within the anarchist movement that was debating themes and facing problems that had previously been hidden under the ashes of badly digested rhetoric.
It is the ethical question that interests us here. Not that of text books but of the relationship with life, the question facing all militants that find themselves traumatically living the experience of being an anarchist in a society of exploiters and parvenus, exploited and acquiescent. And when anarchists refuse the bourgeois model at the same time as they refuse the authoritarian-collectivist model of the Marxists and Stalinists, they end up facing the problem of a socialised personality in a personalised society, a development of total self-management of the person in a society that does not crush man but exalts him and offers the possibility of living a coherent life.
So the project of a militant that does not hide difficulties from himself, does not have recourse to a huge apparatus of phrases and commonplaces, in fact is almost afraid to use slogans and uniform speech, forcing himself to work for the satisfaction of the global needs of society as well as that of individuals and groups. It is the problem of participation, of opening out and relating to others, refusing the party apparatus, refusing the bourgeois ideology of civic consciousness.
The debate has moved away from the clash between individual and organisation, the rights of the individual and those of the specific organisation (of the revolutionary syndicalist or simply revolutionary kind). It now concerns the autonomy of the militant’s personality in a dimension of collective responsibility, within the process of the growth of social revolutionary consciousness that cannot be left to itself.
As the dominant ideology conformed to economic progress (between the ’fifties and ’sixties) an anticonformism that attempted to rethink some of the traditional models of political struggle appeared. Then, with the modifications in the very structure of power, the economic reflux and the entrance of the reformist forces of the Left into the dominant class, anticonformism becomes more responsible: quality of life opposes itself to the quantitative reduction in the class conflict. The stimulus of the individual, the ethical stimulus, is added to the material one with its partial analysis of a counterpower that had come to be conditioned by a certain culture of power (political science and its negation): politics starts living a new process of opening out.
This profound renewal is also part of a global crisis in the values of late capitalist society. It cannot be said with precision whether the fall of consumerist structures are a cause or effect of this crisis that has lead a great number of people to suspend their judgement and open up a kind of “parenthesis”, a life that refuses what is offered by capital. In this world, which at the same time is out of this world, this “parenthesis” is no longer restricted to an elite but is a mass phenomenon that is too great to be ignored.
Today the anarchist is also conditioned by all this. It is all very well to say that anarchists are not “perfect”, they are not “strange” beings from another planet, possessors of truth capable of finding the right answers and methods for intervening in any situation. Just as they are not the monsters of violence and terror that a certain press in the service of the bosses portrays them as. Nevertheless, they are not “revealers” of truth. And it is precisely for this reason that we can attempt, for the first time as far as we know, to outline the character of the anarchist militant of the past few years, at least within the limits of experiences in European countries where the movement has some significance today: Italy, France, Spain (Spanish emigration), Germany, England. If we were to consider anarchism a well-defined, crystallized doctrine, we would have to conclude that anarchists are born such and that anyone that “feels” for anarchy is either enrolled in some anarchist federation and shouts “Long live Bakunin”, or reads no books at all and swears on the negativity of culture.
On the contrary, if we see anarchism as the theoretical and practical experience that emerges with a precise methodology in social struggles at certain times, we see anarchist militants as men and women of their time who are influenced by prevailing ideas—and the specific methods of anarchism—, and are involved in struggles against the class in power. The more the era is rich in contradictions, the more the crisis in the power structure becomes evident and the more the instruments that once belonged exclusively to the revolutionary forces come to be used by power for the repression. The more confusing reality becomes, the more anarchist methods become a relevant perspective. This is not absolute or taken for granted, we need to verify things so that the struggle against power can be organised correctly rather than resurge from the revolutionary cinders of the past.
So, anarchists are also people that live the contradictions of their time. Their character cannot escape the consequences. Their personality will end up hosting a crucial conflict between the ascetic aspect of the revolutionary: abnegation, agreement, and the ethical aspect of the individual that opens up to autonomy and the organisation of society in the egalitarian sense, seeing the limits and the need for progressive approximation. It is much easier to intervene in reality and change it, however limited the action might be, than to intervene in reality, change it and in so doing, change oneself.
If more space is given to the first aspect of the conflict, we will have one kind of intervention in reality, that leading to the formation of a vanguard. In the second hypothesis we would see a growth in the anarchist movement directly, in the reality of the struggle, with the possible constitution of specific organisations that are expressions of this reality in struggles where it would be difficult for them to become vanguards.
This seems to us to be the most important problem that needs to be faced. It is a complex problem, as the passage from the dimension of the individual to the collective one is not just marked by the organisational forms but also by the aims that the organisation gives itself, those of the people that make it up, etc. If the tendency we have defined “ascetic” can lead to the formation of a vanguard due to a rationalisation of the conflict, the tendency which, with equal caution, we have defined “ethical” can make the same mistake due to an abstraction of the conflict as a result of the quantitative illusion.
We should say right away that in making a distinction between the “ascetic” tendency and the “ethical” one we are not implying that the moral aspect is absent from the former. This is a fundamental aspect of anarchist methodology (as we have said): the choice of means we use irremediably affects the ends we reach.
This said, it should be added that the problem of violence cannot be solved by discriminating between the two tendencies. A comparison such as “ascetic” = violence, “ethic” = nonviolence does not make sense. Always on the basis of the anarchist principle that refuses that “the end justifies the means”, violence can legitimately be used for liberation without being seen as ambiguous moral relativism.
It goes without saying that in the clash with power, in the revolution, one is often forced to make choices between the greater or lesser evil. Debit and credit exists, even in ethics. But the contingent factors that explain some mistakes must never be raised to a moral justification of anarchist action.
Reality, with all its nuances, complications and contradictions, is reflected in the contradictory personality of man, and consequently also in the anarchist. So we can see that anarchist methodology is nourished and modified by analyses that use various instruments, from the intuition of individuals who decide to carry out a single action, to an organisation that acts upon the reality around it.
But the anarchist, employing his or her methodology with exactitude and recognising the contradictory aspects, causes modifications in reality that are both cause and the effect of the resulting contradictions.
All the same, it is not easy to see where reality ends and appearances begin in the conflict. It is not easy to separate men from their ideologies, and this can lead to an attempt to isolate certain levels of intervention by separating them from the ideological processes that cover them. We often hear serenades to “doing” which, in the best hypothesis, are naive romanticism. “Doing” cannot be autonomous, i.e. it cannot justify itself alone.
To turn means into an end in themselves would correspond to the ascetic excess of the revolutionary, and if this is also quite a rational phenomenon (in the framework of the destructive process), as it cuts the conflict between total and partial in too net a fashion. It denies the latter, affirming the former, but camouflages both poles of the clash thus making the distinction problematical. This is the extreme case of an armed minority that have been radicalised by certain processes in the clash that are imputable to their strategy (on the one hand), but also and perhaps primarily to the decisions of power. Real motivations, specific tendencies between individuals and social groups are disregarded in favour of an acritical exaltation of the clash, the value of the armed “deed”, attack and univocity of will. The militant is deformed by objective consequences and as this is happening he thinks that he is in charge of the situation. He becomes a professional, enclosing the outside world into the asphyxiating framework of the frontal clash, and from this perspective claims to judge the rest of reality. Once again ideological alienation (always present), reflects fundamental alienation. Then, in concrete, the requirements of the clash itself necessitates these operative reductions. It reenters the logic of the division of labour, one that it cannot escape as it is not possible to flee such a dimension in the absence of a decisively revolutionary and globalising act of rupture. That does not alter the fact that radicalisation exists and is logically founded, we were about to say “necessary”, just as it does not alter the fact that this should be supported when there are cops and all their variety of accomplices on the other side of the barricade. But that cannot deny us the right to reflect and criticise. And the restrictive dimension, the dimension which in restriction wants totality, that is, that can (theoretically) aspire to totality precisely because it has reduced the world and all its deeds to a pocket dimension, should be criticised. The vanguard that comes out of this is as ambitious as ever. The greater the risks run to procure means, the easier it is for them to become an end in themselves. In this way the vanguard moves in the direction of becoming independent of its own aims, even to the point of replacing them.
One obstacle to revolution is the fact that in coming up against reality the vanguard, rather than consider itself a means, ends up preferring its own aims. These in no way conform to the general aims of the revolution, i.e. the definitive liberation of man.
We must distinguish between the model of the vanguard that we are looking at here and the classical one suggested by Marxism. For Marxists, the vanguard acts as mediator between the immediate and the historical interests of the working class. The paradox is that this vanguard must interpret the interests of the class whose conditions of development it must create. For the ascetic kind of revolutionary vanguard the problem of “mediation” does not exist, only that of “action”. Only once the clash has evolved due to the reaction of power is it possible to speak of a real coagulation of vanguardist forms, with all the ensuing consequences (transformation into a military wing, professional deformation, etc.).
Yet, in our opinion, this is not the most delicate point of the conflict between totality and part. Far more radical is the underlying problem, the conflict within the militant as an individual.
The clash between totality and part is consistently present for the militant engaged in the struggle and, in the long run, this marks his character profoundly. It deforms his vision of life to the point of, at times—in the face of great delusions—making him refuse to accept reality. We see the extent of the problem in the anguished cry of Cafiero or in the painful writings of Coeurderoy.
The revolution is a globalising concept of human involvement. It is totality. It does not allow joint ownership, cohabitation or compromise. The anarchist struggle is the supreme recognition of the principle of realisable totality whilst safeguarding the value of the individual, an addition of great complexity in that it refuses to see revolutionary means as ends in themselves. In this case totality becomes crystal clear, dazzling. Everything goes towards it, one’s self, one’s family, one’s affections, one’s habits, one’s hopes.
But all that (which no matter how grand it might sound to the individual is still very small) soon burns out in the immense furnace of revolutionary totality. And so one wants to act quickly to speed up a process that takes its own time and goes at its own pace. We begin to feel it weighing on us as though we had to carry it upon our shoulders.
Then we are forced to stand before the inexorable tribunal of the part. To measure growth, estimate distances, consider relations, indicate perspectives. We start to pay more attention to the pace of events. We start to save ourselves, preparing for the long road ahead. We would like it to go on for ever, our revolution, but we realise that we cannot imprison totality within the limits of our desires, and we end up giving in to care and strategy. We note that we are not alone, that facing us and our project of liberation are the masses (who are not necessarily ready to free themselves) and power. In full evidence and revolutionary mystery, there before us stands a contradictory but constant relationship between totality and part, dream and reality, ideal and strategic project.
Some, enclosing totality inside a more restricted dimension, asceticise their intervention. They wrap themselves up in a microcosm that they recognise as such, which they intend to take to infinity, perfecting it, claiming that it is capable of reproducing all the conditions of revolutionary totality on a reduced scale. Through this reduction they are trying to propose a “model”, give an example, a point of reference so that many other “little” totalities will be formed, all together capable of forming such a vast totality as to get close to the final one. In one way or another this decision leads to the vanguard closing in on itself. Through the activity of criminalisation, power will do the rest.
Others, fully accepting the concept of partiality, dispose themselves favourably to long periods of time, i.e. quantitative measurement. For these comrades, basic doing turns into basic thinking. The relationship with the mass becomes educational and moves into the particular, the specific. The link with the totality that was made on the basis of a more or less globalising analysis becomes purely theoretical. In this way the quantitative degeneration of the ethical tendency is born, just as in the preceding case there was a qualitative degeneration of the ascetic tendency. Although different (the first open, the second closed), these positions are both open to criticism.
“Revolutionary alienation” is the awareness of the contrast between totality and part. It is disgust for the latter united with the possibility of the former, leading to a form of extraneation that is experienced as extreme discomfort in the face of the transformation of the system.
In a way we are faced with a phenomenon similar to so-called “unhappy consciousness” resulting from an inadequate reaction to one’s class situation. Only, while unhappy consciousness is above all a sense of discomfort before a class dislocation that one ends up feeling estranged to, revolutionary alienation is the final breaking point in the process. It is the awareness of not being able to realise totality, of losing something in an effort towards totality, which we feel is the only possible road to revolution.
We turn to a profound critique of the “human” significance of the revolutionary being because one feels oneself to be a “thing”. This process of reification comes about in the clash between the persistence of partiality and the continual return of the need for totality.
This is not the “crisis” of the bourgeois who crumbles because of the saturation of a life-style that has deliberately been built for him with fabricated needs and stimuli studied in the laboratories of power. It is not the crisis of consumerist well-being, boredom and remote-controlled action, a constant repetition of programmed change.
It is not the suspension of involvement or judgement, a taking refuge in an aristocratic dimension of reflection, or the power of the intellect regulating the universe of one’s thoughts and illuding oneself that one is regulating the world. It is not a cutting off from the things of reality in order to go in search of the perfect utopian society, through numbers, verses or the preferred Icaria.
It is not a “piloted” upheaval in a reality that is held suspended with the help of some vehicle or other (drugs or whatever), that can correspond to, or actually be, the effect of the mass product, following fashion or a scale of values that the system itself can no longer uphold.
It is not alienation in the Marxist sense of the term, the loss of something that belongs to us, in the first place the social product, because it is through the product of our work alone that we recognise ourselves as human beings. It is not, that is, the alienation of the worker that reacts in a certain way before the forced perspective that the system of production is offering him.
The alienation we are talking about here is a lack of something, (a process of generic alienation) but is also a lack of oneself, the self that identifies with revolutionary totality. It is precisely this perspective (totality) that provides an outlet from the general form of alienation without, moreover, managing to completely avoid the danger of alienation reemerging through the frustration of the need for revolutionary totality.
When the alienated worker recognises his alienation, he becomes conscious of it and overcomes it. In this way he enters the revolutionary perspective. This can fall upon him like a ton of bricks if he is not able to fulfil what the absence of primitive alienation forces upon him: complete liberation and the realisation of revolutionary totality. In this way, the very perspective of liberation risks turning into a further form of alienation, that of lack of totality.
This situation is far more serious for anarchist revolutionaries. Having neither the charisma of the leader or the organisation, they have nothing to hold on to. Assessment of their own work is of little help; with one simple reflection they can put it into second place in the perspective of revolutionary totality. If they try to see something wrong with their situation, thus convincing themselves that a small enclosed portion of reality is the microcosm that produces totality, they transform themselves into a vanguardist mechanism and reify alienation to the point of not being able see it any more, just as happened in the phase of primitive alienation before the awakening of consciousness. They thus reify their own alienation, accepting the solution of partiality (analyses and long periods of intervention).
The fact is that revolutionary alienation is not simply a relationship that is lacking in something (totality), it is also consciousness of this lack. In other words, it is not just the recognition that something is missing, it is also a recognition of not being able to do without what the latter.
Do all anarchists engaged in the revolutionary struggle reach this conclusion? There is no simple answer to that.
One thing that is certain is that if anarchism is the refusal of authority, it is also a critical reflection on the basic conditions of life and all the ensuing contradictions. In a sense, one of the characteristics of anarchists is that they go into these contradictions as it would be strange for authoritarian revolutionaries to gain consciousness of this alienation through the tight mesh of the party structure that they find themselves operating in. But if this alienation is a consequence of a critical examination of reality, it should not be considered something negative but rather a necessary step, a difficult stage that needs to be overcome. To sum up, it is not the antechamber of revolutionary engagement, but is the result of it, the consequence of it. It is not even the ultimate solution, the final wall from which to recede and commit suicide, but the passage to a further phase of the deepening of one’s knowledge and gaining maturity.
Before going any further it is necessary to look at the conditions of this particular kind of alienation.
The process starts from the absolute value given to the individual. Any proposal to sacrifice the latter to revolutionary strategy, or even to revolutionary totality, is rejected. The engagement can be total, can go as far as complete dedication and death, but can never reach the annulling of the individual. Anarchists who die for the revolution do not reject the value of the individual, on the contrary they take the latter to the maximum degree, as the sacrifice that leads to a society where sacrifice will be impossible, a freed society. In all their opening towards the struggle, in all the collective action that they feel and make their own, they never lose the individual dimension.
Alienation comes to them when they realise that only by accepting a worse form of alienation (the primitive kind or that of centralised power) will they be able to escape the danger of seeing the project of the liberation of the individual disappear. In actual fact, the individual at least manages to partially realise himself under the conditions of primitive alienation, albeit in a deformed (alienated) way. But anarchists want the complete realisation of the individual and want this in the social perspective of total liberation. They find themselves in a serious crisis that comes from the contrast between individual and totality. Entering a partial dimension would heal many aspects of this crisis but would reproduce another alienated form, the vanguard.
Alienation only becomes a crucial factor when one is aware that one is alienated. And this is an effect of the individual’s will, of moving in a situation of stalemate with no way forward leading to a consideration of the other possibility, the conscious refusal of totality as the immediate aim. The greater this awareness, the more the individual will open up to other possibilities.
But simple awareness, recognising that one is in a state of “crisis” could push the individual to sacrifice everything in order to come through the latter in the shortest possible time. Intolerance of a situation of uncertainty can push someone that is accustomed to radicalising their action to extreme solutions. If totality leads to “crisis”, if it is this aim that spoils the revolutionary project by upsetting the destructive order that one imagined was deterministically progressive, we must cut off this pole of contrast. In order to do so it becomes necessary to undervalue it, accuse it of being utopian, a fantasy, unfounded, deforming, petit bourgeois. The ultimate accusation is precisely this last one. Anything that annoys us becomes a product of bourgeois ideology and its shop-keeping accountancy. A product of commodities and their reification.
However, by acting in this way one realises that one is losing a lot. For a time one is convinced that one has solved the problem, then it reappears. The perspective of revolutionary totality is what contained the quality of the revolution, its liberatory essence. Quality is the only thing that can give us the feeling of the totality of liberation at any moment when we are acting progressively. Only quality can make us live the final moment that we will never see, but which we must nevertheless feel present, like a reflex that allows us to know where we are. And this quality is often fantastic, utopian. It is very difficult for it to relate with quantification. By struggling for revolutionary totality we grasp the quality of the revolution and relive it in our actions, in the small things that begin to acquire a progressive sense of liberation. But all that also brings us alienation, discomfort, suffering.
When we suffer, we remember the things of the past with a sense of loss. This could be seen as nostalgia for primitive alienation. The world of reification can be a nice little port in the storm and, with this going backwards the suffering goes full circle. In horror we realise that alienation consists of not wanting to be something one could be but is in itself meaningless, and not being able to be something one would like to be, that means everything.
Make no mistake, we are not looking for a detailed revision of individualism, personalism or voluntaristic rationalism here. Certainly what we know of the vicissitudes of the person (the transformation of the mask) is not worth mentioning and is the fruit of bourgeois irrationalism (existentialism, phenomenology, etc.). Much more would be necessary, and it is not possible to go into that here. It is important to understand that we are concerned with the relationship individual/collectivity. Painful contradictions emerge in anarchist militants not because they are individuals, but because they are individuals who recognise their own value and that of the mass as two values that are in opposition to each other but which cannot be substituted the one for the other.
If revolutionary tension comes from the fact that the revolution is a totalizing project, a project that revokes the quality of life and claims to transform the latter completely, particular contradictions arise from the need for the individual anarchist to establish a correct relationship with the mass in order to avoid carrying out one single aspect of their decision alone.
The revolutionary encompasses the totality of the life of the individual. Hence the possibility of the realisation of the totality of the revolution (therefore also the totality of life) that is reflected in quality. But revolutionary decision is not something abstract. It is not a “possibility” or a “necessity” according to the perspective of whoever brings it about. It is real, it leads to profound changes in the individual and in this sense is “necessary”. But in order to be such it must go beyond “possibility”, i.e. must be realised. If the latter is not realised, even through constant engagement, it will never become a necessity. Herein lies the drama: it is the struggle that leads to going from approximation to this necessary aspect of revolutionary decision, leading to all the alienating consequences.
But possibility and necessity do not go hand in hand. Possibility draws in personal involvement and can even reach necessity, but only as a move towards something, as the singling out of an objective. Necessity as such, as the conscious place of the profound modification of the quality of life, comes from the mass, from what the mass produce. In a word, necessity comes from the masses’ self-organisation.
One can wrap oneself up in the plots of revolutionary possibility to infinity. One can dream of insurrectional clashes or fantasize about long-term educational projects to the point of exhaustion, even to the point of insufferance and annoyance. Not for this does one reach the dimension where possibility becomes necessity, i.e. the recognition of the need for this resolution, the acceptance of the only valid road, that of going towards the self-organisation of the mass.
When we catch a glimpse of this perspective, the myriad of possibilities, the very possibility of a probable solution of an approaching totality, become unbearable for us. Time is required to realise this possibility, and that is what we lack. We want to run. We want the totality we caught a glimpse of to materialise. We want the waiting to become reality. This situation has no outlet in the current aspect of suffering. It is an intimate laceration, a contradiction that—when you think about it—is the reflex of the class factor, with even greater awareness, more suffering. And, because the process of awareness is one-way, the suffering of class laceration cannot be eliminated.
Let us examine the other form of alienation for a moment, the better-known one. This is an objective fact, i.e. the result of being deprived of something (the social product of one’s work). With the awakening of consciousness (increased awareness) one also gains an awareness of alienation. The mechanism for correcting the situation of suffering, so-called class consciousness, would not make sense or would be a mere objective fact, if it did not include the possibilities that this creates. Religious residuals act at this level, pushing this class consciousness towards the search for mediated solutions such as looking for a guide. That obviously cannot be seen as a correction of the situation of suffering, but merely its “repression”.
Other difficulties arise at different level of awareness. The refusal of the guide in some way corresponds to the refusal of the father. The self-organisation of the struggle necessitates the a priori refusal to discharge the responsibility of struggles on to someone or something. It is always the level of awareness that is growing.
The development of this awareness in the individual leads to what we have called revolutionary alienation under the conditions examined above. The developing of the self-organisation of struggles determines a transient feeling of discomfort, suffering, despondency in the mass that can be compared to that of revolutionary alienation at a different level.
But, whereas from the point of view of the individual there is only one sequence of possibilities and an unnerving need for revolutionary totality, from the point of view of the self-organising mass there is a progressive identification with a need that is becoming clear. In this case suffering and discomfort is the discovery of something that exists, no matter how small, not something that will become, because anything that is projected into the future (starting from the necessity of the present) is merely quantitative growth.
So the suffering of the individual comes from lack of quality (revolutionary totality), a lack that offers an infinite series of possibilities that project themselves on to the need for the self-organisation of the mass. On the other hand, the mass are experiencing a stirring-up, discomfort, real suffering, because they are beginning to discover the fact of self-organisation.
This dual situation of discomfort characterises the “human” field of the revolutionary clash and supplies us with the key for solving the problem of the vanguard. Before facing this final question it is necessary to clarify the structural relationship that exists between individual, minority and mass and examine the tension that emerges from it.
Individual activity cannot be seen as something autonomous starting from which reality becomes thinkable through its organisation of the struggle. There is no such thing as a homogeneity of intent. In observing the attitudes and activities of the single individual one cannot reconstruct reality simply with an adjunctive action. The contradictoriness of the latter is far more complex than that of the individual and, moreover, is sustained by different structures. While the individual, through awareness of oneself, can reach revolutionary possibility and the need for revolutionary totality (hence alienation and its overcoming in revolutionary tension); the second, through self-organisation, reaches revolutionary necessity directly, so the growth of a first nucleus, no matter how small, is already the revolutionary totality at disposition.
We are faced with tendencies going in two different directions that might never meet, at least in the sense of eliminating differences and creating liberated reality beyond the reality of the struggles. In fact the other encounter, that of the guide and the party with the minority in the lead as memory and revolutionary reservoir of the mass, is not a real encounter but the denial of the very concept of encounter from the revolutionary point of view.
In fact, revolutionary totality, the new society, is not deterministically certain. Perhaps obscurantists will always manage to prevail and force the revolutionary project back, destroying progress and reestablishing barbarity. This note of precarity and instability is also to be found in revolutionary tension, rendering necessary a continual effort of assessment, verification, precision.
The presence and development of self-organised forms of struggle are not sufficient to guarantee the final resolution of theory in praxis, their unification in the liberated society. It is only a question of a tendency, including in this concept the profound sense of suffering derived from the gestation of new forms of struggle. All this produces a state of tension, of restlessness, in the movement of the exploited. New forces arise, new needs emerge, ideals and idols of the past are destroyed.
The tension of the movement of the exploited arises from the awareness of the discrepancy between one’s being theory, and one’s realisation in practice. This contradiction affects the movement deeply, often unleashing one part of it against the other, thus playing the game of the forces of power. But this tension is vital, it is the essential strength of coordination towards the future. It is from within it that the destructive and creative capacities of the revolution explode.
The anarchist minority also carry a profound laceration. The rigidity of the closed model seen as the reproduction of revolutionary totality risks depriving it of the quality of the revolution, that is of the new quality of life. Only by accepting this renunciation and falling victim to the quantitative illusion will it succeed in silencing the intimate tension that plagues it. But in so doing it also destroys the meaning of its own revolutionary anarchist project, cutting off any real contact with the masses. Not only that, its militants, as individuals conscious of revolutionary possibility in that they are (knowingly) cut out of the revolutionary totality, are personally living another tension that is felt all the more because it touches the life of each one. This other tension cannot be satisfied with quantitative games, globalising analyses or memories of the proletariat. It needs to identify itself in another, still wider, tension, that of the mass itself. Either the minority accepts living the tension of the single individuals that compose it while at the same time living the tension of the mass, or it is condemned to remain a vanguard and, as such, to become responsible for all the consequences that ensue.
Consciousness of revolutionary tension is the first sign of going beyond alienation.
For the movement of the exploited this consciousness expresses itself in a more organic search for the self-organisation of struggles. What was once lost in the individual behaviour of atomised defence against repression and exploitation, an individual reaction in order to reevaluate the life extinguished by the integrative process of capitalism, now becomes a quantifying project. The movement of the exploited begins to give itself an autonomous structure, it starts seeking new internal relations and links. In this research and realisation tension becomes construction. Theory increasingly takes form and begins to resemble practice more and more.
For the anarchist minority, the awareness of revolutionary tension is a sign of maturity. It gradually rids itself of the quantitative illusion, of feeling itself to be carrier of “truth”, an “external” force, a “memory”. This is only possible on condition that the internal tension be lightened, that the single militants see the revolutionary relationship possibility-totality, have been struggling against alienation and been able to go beyond it in a personal tension. The latter now reappears at the level of a minority, to find its place within the wider tension of the movement of the exploited, the only dimension in which it is possible to find a constructive road towards quantitative growth.
The solution of the problem of the vanguard
To conclude, we can define the vanguard as an involution, a giving in in the face of the revolutionary anarchist project. Now we can see that the definition “an organic whole composed of individuals” that we made at the beginning is no longer sufficient. The actual composition of the vanguard becomes less important in the face of its significance within the complex framework of revolutionary relations. The vanguard is therefore an escape from the sensations of suffering and panic that are caused by revolutionary alienation; it is the refusal of tension towards the movement of the exploited, a tension that the latter develops in its contradictory relationship between self-organisation and delegation of the struggle. The vanguard takes the place of the quantitative task of the movement of the exploited, wanting to reproduce at a reduced level (either with edifying aims or with the aim of domination), the reality of the struggles as a whole. It is a desire to quantify the unquantifiable. It is a violent deformation of revolutionary possibility into fictitious necessity (totality). The vanguard is the acceptance of a globalising analysis that claims to “take account of everything” in an exclusively theoretical field, fictitiously doing what the movement of the exploited bring about in reality by becoming theory and praxis at the same time.
On the contrary, full knowledge of revolutionary alienation allows access to individual revolutionary tension, which would lose itself in a postponement to the infinity of the total project of the revolution, were it not to find its correct development within the tension of the minority. If this gives up in the face of obstacles, it transforms itself into a vanguard and acts accordingly. The tension of the minority extinguishes itself in the quantitative illusion and in the analytical project that claims to be global. The tension of the individual recedes into the suffering of alienation, finding comfort in a thousand little facets of the quantitative project cut off from the mass. In fact, the more pressing the suffering caused by revolutionary alienation; the greater the detachment, loss of totality and the quality of revolution, the more paltry the engagement in quantitative daily praxis will be in solving a guilty conscience. If the tension of the minority is inserted within the wider tension of the movement of the exploited a point of contact is made between self-organisation and delegation of struggles. It develops a solicitation for self-organisation, adding one’s own revolutionary tension to that of the movement of the exploited, developing the anarchist revolutionary project fully in harmony with this movement’s theory.
The more detail and clarification this theory acquires; the more it becomes conscious of itself, advances in the self-organisation of the struggle, gives itself an autonomous structure, connects internal relations and establishes links, the more it will renounce the false perspective of the delegate (parties and unions). The traditional function of the anarchist minority will diminish, and, losing its value, its revolutionary tension will increase. In fact, the aim of the anarchist movement is to contribute to the construction of a society in which there will no longer be exploitation. And exploitation no longer existing, there will no longer be a need for the political struggle, movements and consequently not even the anarchist movement.
The final negation of the anarchist minority as such will not be the decision of a group or something that happens outside the minority. It will be the realisation of revolutionary tension in revolutionary totality, the liberated society. In this final phase, the movement of the exploited will realise its own theory (that will no longer differ from its practice), and through this realisation the vicissitudes of the anarchist minority will come to an end.
http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-vanguard.html