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strategies for change 129
political action was stimulated by the rise of Leninism and the success
of the Bolshevik revolutionary strategies. Otto Rühle’s critique
of Bolshevism described this concept (which Lenin elaborated in his
1902 pamphlet What is To Be Done?) in the following terms:
The party was considered the war academy of professional revolutionists.
Its outstanding pedagogical requirements were unconditional
leader authority, rigid centralism, iron discipline, conformity,
militancy, and sacrifice of personality for party interests. What
Lenin actually developed was an elite of intellectuals, a centre which,
when thrown into the revolution would capture leadership and
assume power.
On this account vanguardism represents a dramatic return to
Marx’s policy of political action – one that blatantly contradicts the
principle of worker emancipation. Indeed, Rühle argued that vanguardism
was posited on a belief that the workers were incapable of
emancipating themselves. The Russian revolution, he noted, provided
an excellent opportunity for the workers to take direct control
of the revolutionary process through the organization of the soviets.
Yet the actions of the workers were frustrated largely because Lenin
failed to
… understand the real importance of the soviet movement for the
socialist orientation of society. He never learned to know the
prerequisites for the freeing of the workers. Authority, leadership,
force, exerted on one side, and organization, cadres, subordination
on the other side … Discipline and dictatorship are the words which
are most frequent in his writings … he could not comprehend, not
appreciate … what was most obvious and most … necessary for the
revolutionary struggle for socialism, namely that the workers once
and for all take their fate in their own hands. 7
The positive strategies that anarchists have developed for workeremancipation
do not reject the possibility of education or the
co-ordination of revolutionary actions. Early on Bakunin argued
that the success of the revolution and, indeed, any collective action,
turned on ‘a certain kind of discipline’. He also believed that agents
organized in secret, fraternal associations (‘brotherhoods’) could
play a valuable role in encouraging and helping the masses in revolutionary
situations: ‘[o]ne hundred revolutionaries, strongly and
earnestly allied, would suffice for the international organisation in