Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

418/ ANARCHISM
regulate its own affairs by mutual agreement with all the other economic, regional or
national associations.
VII. For the identical reason, revolutionary syndicalism fights against militarism
in all of its forms and considers anti-militarist propaganda one of its most important
tasks in the struggle against the existing system. In fu rtherance of that goal, above
all, are the refusal to participate in state military service, and the organized refusal of
the workers to produce military equipment.
VIII. Revolutionary syndicalism stands on the footing of direct action and supports
all struggles of the people that are not in contradiction to its goal of abolishing
economic monopolies and state despotism. It endorses strikes, boycotts, sabotage,
and so on, as its weapons. Direct action reaches its highest expression in the social
general strike, which syndicalists at the same time envisage as the prelude to the social
revolution.
IX. While syndicalists are opposed to all organized violence in the hands of any
revolutionary government, they do not fa il to realize that the decisive struggles between
the capitalism of today and the free communism oftomorrow will not be without
conflict. Consequently, they recognize violence as a means of defence against the
violent methods of the ruling classes during the struggle fo r the possession of the
fa ctories and the fields by the revolutionary people. Just as the expropriation of the
fa ctories and the fields in practice can only be carried out and channelled along the
path of social reorganization by the workers' revolutionary economic organizations,
so must also the defence of the revolution be the task of the masses themselves and
their economic organizations, and not of a particular military body, or any other organization,
outside of the economic associations.
X. Only in the revolutionary economic organizations of the working class is
fo und the means of its liberation, and the creative energy fo r the reconstruction of
society on the path oflibertarian communism. (Further reading: Wayne Thorpe, "The
Workers Themselves": Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913-1923,
Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989).
1 15. The Platform and its Critics (1926-27)
The Organizational Platfo rm of the Libertarian Communists was a document published
il1 1926 by a group of exiled Russian anarchists, including Nestor Makhno (Selection 85), Peter
Arshinov (Selection 86), and Ida Mett, author of The Kronstadt Uprising (Montreal:
Black Rose, 1971; originally published 1938). The stated purpose of the Platform was to draw
the lessons from the fa ilure of anarchism in the Russian Revolution, and to provide an organi-