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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
the whole of Europe. Two, three hundred revolutionaries will suffice
for the organisation of the greatest country’. 8 He even argued that
these agents might exercise a ‘collective dictatorship’ in the process
of revolution. Yet just as he distinguished natural authority from
state authority, he drew a line between his understanding of
discipline/dictatorship and the statist ideas he associated with Marx.
Anarchist discipline, he argued, was ‘not automatic but voluntary
and intelligently understood’. And when it came to dictatorship,
Bakunin noted:
This dictatorship is free from all self-interest, vanity, and ambition
for it is anonymous, invisible, and does not give advantage or
honour, or official recognition of power to a member of the group
or to the groups themselves. It does not threaten the people because
it is free from official character. It is not placed above the people like
state power because its whole aim … consists of the fullest realisation
of the liberty of the people. 9
Malatesta endorsed Bakunin’s position. The masses, he argued,
were perfectly capable of rebelling against their oppressors, but they
lacked technical skill and they needed ‘[m]en, groups and parties …
who are joined by free agreement, under oath of secrecy and
provided with the necessary means to create the network of speedy
communications’ to help them secure victory. These men were not a
vanguard since their ‘special mission’ was to act as ‘vigilant custodians
of freedom, against all aspirants to power and against the possible
tyranny of the majority’. 10
Modern activists talk in terms of affinity groups rather than
brotherhoods. The Spanish Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) – an
organization of anarchist militants who worked within the CNT –
has provided the model for this form of organization. Affinity
groups bring activists together on the basis of friendship in small,
fluid autonomous groups to ferment revolution in the wider population.
Membership might be very small, and meetings informal.
However the group is more than a debating society or drinking circle.
As Guérin explained, affinity groups act as ‘an ideologically conscious
minority’ to enlighten the masses and combat the reformist
tendencies of other worker or protest organizations. Something akin
to this model was adopted by the Angry Brigade, a group of anarchists
engaged during the 1960s in a high-profile campaign against
the British state. But this idea of organization appeals to a wide