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From International Socialism (1st series), No.65, Mid-December 1973, pp.27-28.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Anarchy in Action
Colin Ward
Allen & Unwin, £3.50 hardback, £1.75 paperback
Bakunin on Anarchy
Edited by Sam Dolgoff, Preface by Paul Avrich
Allen & Unwin, £5.50.
I REMEMBER buying the anarchist newspaper, Freedom, as a kid and considering myself very revolutionary. I also remember being very disappointed every time I did so.
Colin Ward, an ex-Freedom editor, has written a book which makes nostalgic reading but has done nothing to make me revise my childhood disappointment. Then, as now, there was plenty of stuff on exploitation, but as Lenin commented over 70 years ago there have been platitudes about exploitation on record for more than two thousand years. The trouble with Colin Ward’s book is that only the most general utopian solutions are offered and no real idea is given about how we shall overcome exploitation.
The collection of readings by Bakunin is much more substantial theoretically – and in price. Only dedicated anarchists and academics will be buying this book and good luck to them.
It spans the period 1842-1875, possibly the most revolutionary of the nineteenth century. Throughout this period Bakunin flitted from one revolutionary adventure to the next, all the time carrying on a running battle with Karl Marx about how the International Workingmen’s Association should be run and what its politics should be.
Bakunin and his supporters were finally defeated (a good account of some of their antics can be found in Engels’ little pamphlet The Bakunists at Work) but many of their ideas stayed to haunt the international labour movement for many years. Apart from revolutionary catechisms, statements of principles and such like, reprinted here are many of the polemics Bakunin directed at Marx. One of the more perverse but not untypical pieces is called The International and Karl Marx in which he says:
‘Marx, in spite of all his misdeeds, has unconsciously rendered a great service to the International by demonstrating in the most dramatic and evident manner that if anything can kill the International, it is the introduction of politics into its programme.’ (p.293, my emphasis)
Anyone with the sparsest knowledge of the Paris Commune of 1871, which marked the end of the First International, will know that one of its greatest weaknesses was that there were no clear politics – they failed to nationalise the banks for example!
Bakunin’s personal courage and enthusiasm shine through the pages of this book and are not in doubt. But what did all this frantic activity and writing amount to? In practice very little or even disaster; in revolutionary theory – nothing. Finally Anarchism today, as in Bakunin’s time, stands accused of failing to take account of the particular political system which is in operation at any one time. By ignoring parliamentary politics altogether it subordinates itself to them – for without taking into account present political consciousness how can a revolutionary consciousness be achieved? Colin Ward like Bakunin is content to point out how awful capitalism is, but like Bakunin has nothing to offer the revolutionary socialist movement in Britain in terms of ideas on how we are going to build the party that will smash capitalism and end exploitation for all time.
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Last updated on 21.1.2008