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strategies for change 137 issue directives from above. Committed anarcho-syndicalists reject these claims and argue that the syndicalists’ chief weapon, the strike, provides a perfect medium through which to realize their goals. The idea of early-twentieth-century anarcho-syndicalists was that local wildcat strikes would culminate in a general strike of all workers and that this would demonstrate both their immense power whilst simultaneously provoking a reaction from government and the employers that would provide the spark to civil war and popular rebellion. The self-consciously utopian picture described by Emile Pataud and Emile Pouget suggested that: The most obvious result of the repressive efforts of the capitalists was to make the breach between them and the working class deeper and wider. Things had come to such a pass, that periods of calm were now rare. When the crisis lessened in one Union, it became envenomed in another. Strikes followed strikes; lock-outs were replied to by boycotts; sabotage was employed with ruinous intensity. This happened to such an extent, that there were manufacturers and commercial people who came to regard their privileged position as a not very enviable one, and even doubted its being tenable. 28 In reality, the general strike has not proved to be such a decisive weapon. Strikes have succeeded in frightening the authorities, in demonstrating the significant power and resolve of the workers and in achieving particular aims. But the general strike has failed to sustain momentum for revolution. The limited success of anarchosyndicalist action suggests that if the general strike is to be employed as an instrument of revolution, it must be both strong enough to withstand violent repression and sufficiently well-organized to begin self-management. The danger of the general strike is that it collapses either into reformism or into armed struggle. This is what one recent scenario suggests: … we are ready to use every form of dissuasion in the course of the struggle – particularly the destruction of machines, stocks and hostages to get the state forces in retreat and disarmed. At a less acute stage in the struggle, there would be point in cutting off water, gas, electricity and fuel for active bourgeois districts, to dump refuse on them, to sabotage lifts in blocks of flats etc.
138 anarchism: a beginner’s guide … As soon as possible, factory machinery is converted for a rapid armaments programme, … For immediate use, we could use piping transformed into rocket-spear tubes. Air rifles, catapults for grenades and molotov cocktails, flame-throwers, mortars, ultra-sonic generators, lasers … We can also study different sorts of armouring for converting lorries and bulldozers, bullet-proof jackets, gas masks, antidotes to incapacitants, the use of L.S.D. in the water supply of enemies etc … . 29 In this scenario the general strike becomes indistinguishable from guerrilla warfare. guerrilla warfare Anarchists usually credit Nestor Makhno with developing guerrilla warfare as a revolutionary strategy. Makhno operated between 1918–21 in the South Ukraine, fighting in turn, German and Austrian armies of occupation, General Denikin’s White Russian forces and, finally, the Bolshevik Red Army. His battle was waged in defence of the spontaneous rural rebellion sparked off by the Russian Revolution. Anarchists had long argued that the peasantry were an inherently revolutionary force. Indeed, Bakunin had defended the idea of the rural jacquerie, accusing Marx of wanting to swallow up the ‘peasant rabble’ in an urban workers’ state. Landauer argued a similar case. Socialists, he argued, ‘cannot avoid the struggle against landownership. The struggle for socialism is a struggle for the land; the social question is an agrarian question’. 30 Makhno followed this tradition. He believed that the peasantry’s ‘innate’ impulse was to anarchism. In 1917 ‘the toiling masses’ had transferred ‘the land confiscated from the great landlords and the clergy to those who worked it or … intended to do so without exploitation of another man’s labour’. They would gravitate naturally towards the organization of producer and consumer co-operatives based on free association in communes. His role was to protect the peasants’ revolutionary gains and to extend the process of revolution by spreading propaganda. Makhno’s version of guerrilla action was as much about communication as it was about fighting. And though Voline believed that the movement lacked sufficient intellectual force, Makhno organized a Commission for Propaganda and Education in the Insurgent Army.
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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
Page 186 and 187: index 177 Farrow, Lynne 119 fascism
Page 188 and 189: index 179 and state 30, 45-6, 50, 5
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