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strategies for change 127 must be taken directly against the exploiters through the expropriation of property. Whereas those who supported Marx believed that the workers could, through their representatives, wrest control of the state to achieve liberation, those who followed the nascent anarchist position believed that direct action by the workers held the key to emancipation. By the time that working class or socialist parties began to appear at the end of the nineteenth century, political action was identified specifically with parliamentarism. Parliamentarism described the electoral strategy favoured by Engels and modelled by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). It was soon taken up by groups across Europe and became the official policy of the Second International. For anarchists like Malatesta the policy was fundamentally flawed and would ‘only lead the masses back to slavery’. 2 Many non-anarchist socialists rejected the implication of Malatesta’s view, namely, that participation in parliamentary politics implied a rejection of revolution from below. But for anarchists like Malatesta there was a dichotomy between popular revolution and parliamentary politics. Landauer shared this view: ‘[t]he chief aims of Social Democracy consist in catering for votes … Genuine Socialist propaganda, agitation against private property and all exploitation and oppression is out of the question …’. 3 The anarchist rejection of parliamentarism, which came to a head in the Second International, turned on a number of points. In the 1890s Charlotte Wilson outlined the three principle anarchist complaints. 1. The organization of political parties was authoritarian. By seeking to take power in government, socialist parties were attempting to take command. (Chinese anarchists – following Bakunin – raised a more specific complaint. Not only did parliamentarism suggest a desire to command, it also suggested that command would be assumed by or on behalf of a tiny section of the workers – the urban, industrial proletariat – and that it would be exercised against the interests of the rural masses). 4 2. Party politics was elitist: the ‘lofty ideal of the socialized state appeals to the moral sense of the thoughtful few’, but not apparently to the masses who ‘supply both the dynamic force and the raw material essential to … social reconstruction’. 3. Socialist parties would inevitably get bogged down in the mire of political competition.
128 anarchism: a beginner’s guide … the man who wins is he with the loudest voice, the readiest flow of words, the quickest wit and most self-assertive personality. Immediately it becomes the business of the minor personalities to drag him down, as the old struggle for place and power repeats itself with the socialistic societies themselves. 5 With the success of the parliamentary strategy and the entry of socialists into state legislatures, anarchists reinforced these complaints. One was that the comforts of office were corrupting and that parliamentary politics encouraged reformism. Emma Goldman developed this critique in the light of the success of American women’s suffrage campaign. Against the claim that women could improve the quality of public life by their participation, she argued that women would be swallowed up by the system. It was a mistake, she argued, to think that the corruptness of politics was a question of ‘morals, or the laxity of morals’. Politics was ‘the reflex of the business and industrial world, the mottos of which are: “To take is more blessed than to give”; “buy cheap and sell dear”; “one soiled hand washes the other”’. Women could no more emancipate themselves through participation in party politics than working men; their entry into parliamentary legislatures would end in their own corruption, not the reform of the system. Moreover the scope of parliamentary politics was simply too narrow to enable women to tackle the real causes of their oppression: the hypocritical conventions that constrained them and inhibited their emotional development. For as long as women clung to the mistaken belief that parliamentary action was making a difference they would be deflected from the real task of emancipation. Consequently, Goldman concluded: ‘woman is confronted with the necessity of emancipating herself from emancipation’. 6 Traditionally, the anarchist critique of parliamentarism has extended from the refusal to participate in electoral politics to the boycotting of elections. Today some modern anarchists are willing to relax the strict prohibition on the boycotting of elections, pointing out that abstention can advantage repressive movements. Whilst the main thrust of anarchism is directed against electoral activity, anarchists like John Clark argue there is some scope in modern democracies for anarchists to vote tactically, particularly in referenda and local elections. Unlike parliamentarism, vanguardism provides no space for compromise. The anarchist concern with vanguardism as a form of
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contents Acknowledgements vii intro
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acknowledgements A number of people
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chapter two anarchist rejections of
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Page 95 and 96: chapter three anarchy We have alway
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Page 184 and 185: index Page numbers in italic denote
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index 177 Farrow, Lynne 119 fascism
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index 179 and state 30, 45-6, 50, 5
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