5W III: The "General Union" builds an Organizational Platform

Part 3 of a 7-part article on the history of anarchist communism.

Capitalism began expanding dramatically in the mid-1890s, with the opening up of the African colonies to imperialist exploitation, and a second wave of anarcho-syndicalist organising, larger than the first, exploded on to the world scene.

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FIVE WAVES: A BRIEF GLOBAL HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHIST COMMUNIST MASS ORGANISATIONAL THEORY & PRACTICE

SECOND WAVE:

THE "GENERAL UNION" BUILDS AN ORGANISATIONAL PLATFORM

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Capitalism began expanding dramatically in the mid-1890s, with the opening up of the African colonies to imperialist exploitation, and a second wave of anarcho-syndicalist organising, larger than the first, exploded on to the world scene. An oft-forgotten key organisation in this resurgence was the National Labour Secretariat (NAS) of the Netherlands which dominated the Dutch labour movement for a decade and peaked at about 18,700 members in 1895 - but it was in that year that in France the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) was founded on a model that was replicated around the Latin world.

This dramatic growth was spurred on after anarchist militants captured the CGT, which then had 203,000 dues-paying members and which declared in its influential Charter of Amiens (1906) that the "trade union, today a fighting organisation, will in the future be an organisation for production and distribution and the basis of social reorganisation."

This growth was accelerated by two other "jolts" that recalled the direct-democratic practices of the French and Spanish communes and anticipated the soviets of the Russian Revolution: the 1903 Macedonian Revolt and the 1905-1906 Russian Revolt. Macedonia saw anarchist guerrillas among those who established communes in Strandzha and Krusevo, while anarchists were among those who established the first soviets in Russia: St Petersburg and Moscow. The Russian Revolt also saw the establishment in occupied Poland of the longest-lived anarchist international organisation, the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) prisoner's aid network which today has sections in 64 countries.

These jolts helped light the fuse on the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the USA in 1905, establishing an industrial revolutionary syndicalist organising model that swept the English-speaking world in particular, including branches in Australia, Canada, Britain, New Zealand / Aotearoa and South Africa, but also Argentina, Chile and other Latin American countries. It still exists today as a fighting "red" union, with branches in countries as diverse as Iceland and Russia.

The IWW Preamble made the organisation's class politics very clear: "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organise as a class, take possession of the means of production and abolish the wage system."

"It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organised, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organising industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old."

The 1905 Revolt also saw a gathering in London of exiled Russian anarchists including the anarcho-communist theorists Piotr Kropotkin and Maria Isidine (Maria Goldsmit) and the terrorist-turned-syndicalist Novomirsky (Kirilovsky) met and discussed an organised response. Novomirsky said that in order to fight reaction, all "anti-authoritarian socialists should unite into a Workers' Anarchist Party. The next step would be the formation of a vast union of all revolutionary elements under the black flag of the International Workers' Anarchist Party."

Such a party required theoretical unity to enable "unity of action". It would be "the only revolutionary party, unlike the conservative parties which seek to preserve the established political and economic order, and the progressive parties [like the Social Democratic Labour Party: both its Menshevik and Bolshevik tendencies] which seek to reform the state in one way or another, so as to reform the corresponding economic relations, for anarchists aim to destroy the state, in order to do away with the established economic order and reconstruct it on new principles."

Novomirsky said such a "party" was "the free union of individuals struggling for a common goal" and as such required "a clear programme and tactics" that was distinct from other currents. It needed to "participate in the revolutionary syndicalist movement [as] the central objective of our work, so that we can make that movement anarchist", and to boycott all state structures, substituting them with "workers' communes with soviets of workers' deputies, acting as industrial committees, at their head".

At the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907, the insurrectionary terrorists who identified as anarchist were roundly defeated, with the resolution that "anarchy and organisation, far from being incompatible as has sometimes been claimed, are mutually complimentary and illuminate each other, the very precept of anarchy residing in the free organisation of the producers [the anarcho-syndicalist influenced trade unions]".

The congress further hailed the "collective action" and "concerted movement", stated that "[t]he organisation of militant forces would assure propaganda of fresh wings and could not but hasten the penetration of the ideas of federalism and revolution into the working class". It stated, however, that labour organisation did not preclude political organisation and urged that "the comrades of every land should place on their agenda the creation of anarchist groups and the federation of existing groups".

As a result of this powerful shift towards political action within the context of mass organisation arose the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation (FORA), founded in 1903, which provided the template for similar federations across Latin America - notably Brazil, Chile, Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay - while on the Iberian peninsula, the movement had matured with the formation of the massive National Confederation of Labour (CNT) of Spain, founded in 1910 and the relatively larger National Workers' Union (UON) of Portugal, founded in 1914.

The internationalist aspect of this new wave of syndicalism found expression in the 1913 syndicalist conference in London that drew delegates from 12 European and Latin American countries and laid the groundwork for the formation of the International Workers' Association (IWA) in Berlin in 1922. In the same period, specific anarchist political federations mushroomed, instigated in part by the pro-organisationalist Anarchist International (AI), founded in Amsterdam in 1907 by delegates from Europe, Latin America, Japan, Russia, and the USA, and lasting until about 1915.

These anarchist federations, some of which affiliated to the AI, worked in parallel to and sometimes inside the syndicalist unions. One of the best examples of these is the Anarchist Communist Alliance (ACA), founded in France in 1911 and having as its descendants in the 2000s the Francophone Anarchist Federation (FAF), the Co-ordination of Anarchist Groups (CGA), the Libertarian Communist Organisation (OCL) and Libertarian Alternative (AL).

Back in 1910, the first great anarchist revolution broke out in Mexico, providing the template, replicated in other upheavals to come, of how anarchist political organisations, militia and unions could work in concert: the anarcho-syndicalist House of the Workers of the World (COM) - the direct descendant of the first-wave CP - working largely in concert with the Magonistas of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and the anarcho-communists of the Struggle (Lucha) group, and defended by the Red Battalions.

Mexico also showed how things could go awfully wrong: despite the fact that the interventionist USA had its imperialist intentions diverted by its 1917 entry into the First World War, the anarchists failed their first watershed test of class solidarity by breaking ranks with the Zapatista peasantry, who the Red Battalions attacked. The anarcho-communists then broke with the COM and backed the Zapatistas, but the revolution never truly peaked, sputtered and finally died after 10 exhausting years, gutted by reformism.

The second wave was not broken on the rocks of the First World War, into which the now-compromised CGT was drawn. The imperialist powers had initiated the bloodbath because capital was in steep decline and beset on all sides by a militant working class which had a lot of momentum left. Despite the scale of the slaughter, the conflict unleashed two other revolutions - Russia and Ukraine - both of which drank deeply from the well of working class self-organisation before the counter-revolution unlatched the guillotine-blade.

Russia showed the danger of anarchists withdrawing from the battle into purist ivory towers, while at the same time proving Bakunin's predictions about the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be chillingly correct and in stark contrast to the anarchist-flavoured sovietism of the working class. The Ukraine showed the efficiency of anarchist guerrilla warfare, based on popular support, directly-democratic urban and rural communes and internal democracy, a twin lesson that would stand anarchists in good stead in the dark decades to come.

By the time the global revolt finally ended in 1923, the world was a totally changed place. The second wave transformed anarchism into a truly global phenomenon, with sizeable organisations fighting the class war from Costa Rica to China, from Portugal to Paraguay, from Sweden to South Africa, and with global syndicalism drawn together in the IWA, founded in Berlin in 1922 and representing between 1,5-million and 2-million revolutionary workers globally.

The movement's most remarkable achievements were the commune model that proved the backbone of the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions, the creation of a deeply-entrenched tradition of rank-and-file labour militancy that eschewed bourgeois patronage, the establishment of near-universal labour protections like the eight-hour working day and worker's compensation, a substantial contribution to the virtual annihilation of absolute monarchism, and the mounting of the most serious challenge to clerical control of education across the world.

But the defeats of the Mexican, Russian and Ukrainian revolutions lead a lot of anarchists to become defeatist, withdrawing from the fields of social and industrial struggle that they had dominated for decades, leaving the door open to Bolshevism. Those critical of this retreat found themselves having to defend the core principles of the social revolution.

When Nestor Makhno and the surviving Ukranian anarchist guerrillas fled into exile in 1921 following their defeat at the hands of the Red Army whose backs they had protected for so many years, they faced some hard questions. The most important was: if anarchism places so much value on freedom from coercion, is it a powerful enough strategy to defeat a united, militarised enemy? The survivors were not only embittered by their experiences at the hands of the "revolutionary" reds. They were also greatly disappointed in the poor support given to them by Russian anarchist comrades.

Sure, there was the Nabat, the Alarm Confederation of Anarchist Organisations (ACAO), that worked alongside the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (RIAU), the anarcho-syndicalist unions in the cities and the various Black Guard detatchments of guerrillas like Maroussia Nikiforova, but precious little aid had come from anarchists further afield. And the majority of the Nabat had split with the RIAU in 1919 over the latter's third tactical truce with the Bolsheviks.

This dispute over strategy was to play itself out in exile in France between ex-Nabat "synthesists" like Voline and ex-Makhnovists like Makhno. In 1926, Makhno, the metalworker Piotr Arshinov (who had helped found Nabat), the Jewish woman guerrilla Ida Mett and other exiles of the Workers' Cause (Dielo Truda) group in Paris published a pamphlet titled Organizatsionnaia Platforma Vseobshchego Soiuza Anarkhistov: Proekt (Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists: Draft).

We prefer the title the Organisational Platform of the Anarchist Communists, but it is more commonly known as the Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, or simply the Platform. The text caused big waves through the international anarchist movement because of its call for tight internal discipline, for mutually-agreed unity of ideas and tactics within anarchist groups, and for the formation of a "general union of anarchists".

By union, the writers of the Platform meant a united political organisation rather than a trade union. As anarchist communists, they considered anarcho-syndicalism with its focus on industrial organising, to be "only one of the forms of revolutionary class struggle". Anarchist unions needed to be united with anarchist political groups, anarchist militia, and anarchist municipal soviets. The Platform emphasised the class struggle nature of anarchism, reminding militants that it was a workerist movement, but one that was not exclusively focussed on industry or the trade unions.

It called for ideological and tactical unity plus collective responsibility and a programme of revolutionary action. More controversially, it called for an "executive committee" to be formed within the general union of anarchists. But by executive committee, the writers of the Platform meant a task group of activists whose job it was to carry out tasks mandated by the union.

The Platform's vision of the future social revolutionary soviet society was arguably derived from an earlier Makhnovist document, the Draft Declaration of the (Makhnovist) Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine, adopted in 1919 at a congress of the Military-Revolutionary Soviet. The Declaration called - like the Kronstadt Soviet would in 1921 - for a "third revolution" against Bolshevik coercive power over the working class, poor and peasantry, and stated that the free soviet system - that is, "libertarian organisation as taken up by significant masses", freely self-organised to oppose "the notion of political power" - was the basis of this revolution.

However, since the Soviet and the RIAU were pluralistic organisations, consisting of anarchist, Social Revolutionaries, non-party revolutionaries and even dissident Bolsheviks, the Declaration did not assign the anarchists a specific social function by name. Instead, it stated that not only all "political activity" based on privilege, coercion and enslavement, but all political organisation - presumably including all genuine socialist revolutionary factions like the anarchist communists - would "tend to wither away of themselves" under revolutionary conditions.

But it emphasised that the RIAU, while pluralistic, volunteer, and working class-controlled, did form the "fighting core of this Ukrainian people's revolutionary movement, a core whose task consists everywhere of organising insurgent forces and helping insurgent toilers in their struggle against all abuse of power and capital". So the militant minority's task was clearly pro-organisational in support of the popular revolutionary forces. But the document stopped short of calling for a specific organisation of a distinct revolutionary tendency to carry out that task - as the later Platform did.

Unlike authoritarian socialist organisations where the committee would make all policy decisions, in a platformist organisation, the entire membership is the decision-making body. Any delegates or committees merely carry out tasks mandated by that membership. The Platform's critics included veteran anarchist militants like Voline (Vsevolod Eikenbaum) of Russia, himself a former Makhnovist, Sébastian Faure of France, Errico Malatesta of Italy and Alexander Berkman of the USA.

They accused the exiles of trying to "Bolshevise anarchism" - in the sense of the substitution of a professional revolutionary elite for the revolutionary masses - and the later "conversion" of Arshinov to Bolshevism to enable the exhausted militant to return home gave the critics lots of ammunition, despite the fact that he was executed in 1937 during Stalin's purges for "attempting to restore anarchism in Russia". But Makhno and his co-authors argued that it was exactly because of the disorganisation of Russian anarchists that many of them went on to join the only group with a clear revolutionary plan - the Bolsheviks.

Anarchists, they said, needed to be just as clear and as organised, but along libertarian not authoritarian lines, and guiding, not dictating revolutionary workers' aspirations. Most of the anarchist opposition to the Platform has sprung from misconceptions.

But its original title as a "draft" shows it was intended as an internal discussion document within the international anarchist movement, not as a final blueprint for the only possible style of anarchist organisation. It was neither authoritarian (as we have seen in discussing the executive committee), nor was it vanguardist, that is an attempt to get a tiny group of activists to lead the working class.

It was also not intended to say that all anarchists should be absorbed into one massive platformist organisation. It quite clearly said that platformist groups would maintain links with other revolutionary organisations. Platformism is also not a different strand of anarchism: the platformist method of organising was applied to all forms of anarchist communist organisation, whether economic, political, military or social.

Most importantly, the Platform was not an innovation, but a clear re-statement of the fundamentals of mass anarchist communist organising dating back to Bakunin's time: the necessity for commonly agreed lines of attack on which anarchist organisations had become the primary promoters of exclusively working class interests worldwide.

The intense debate over the Platform split the Russian and Ukrainian anarchist movements in exile, notably in France where the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad (GRAZ) fractured in 1927 into platformist and synthesist tendencies, and in North America where the Russian/Ukrainian diaspora split into organisationalist and svobodnik, groupings. The specific platformist tendency in France founded the International Anarchist Communist Federation (IACF) in 1927 with sections in France and Italy and delegates from China, Poland and Spain. The IACF can be considered to be the ideological descendant of Bakunin's IB and, to a lesser extent, of the organisationalist Anarchist International.

The debate also influenced the remaining anarchists in Russia itself, including former militants of the Nabat who had either been driven underground or jailed. According to a Nabat veteran writing in Dielo Truda in 1928 - unnamed for security reasons - who was then in exile in Siberia, the Nabat itself, initially a de facto "synthesist" organisation, had been refining its organisational structure, in the "whirlwind of revolution", in what approximated a "platformist" direction.

The Nabat veteran wrote that the organisation was in a sense a "party" in that it was not, as claimed by Voline, a loose, affinity-based organisation, but a federation of groups that rallied "the most determined, the most dynamic militants with an eye to launching a healthy, well-structured movement with the prospect of a standardised programme". Nabat members submitted to majority decisions reached at its congresses, and that transcended its different tendencies to promote a unitary "policy line" - "a single, coherent platform".

"In short, it was a well-structured, well-disciplined movement with a leading echelon appointed and monitored by the rank and file. And let there be no illusions as to the role of that echelon [later referred to as the 'Secretariat', in echo of the Platform's 'executive committee']: it was not merely technically executive, as it is commonly regarded. It was also the movement's ideological pilot core, looking after publishing operations, and propaganda activity, utilising the central funds and above all controlling and deploying the movement's resources and militants".

In Bulgaria, the platformist tendency proved strongest with the Bulgarian Anarchist Communist Federation (BACF) adopting the document as its constitution. This may account in part for the diversity and resilience of the Bulgarian anarchist movement, which organised workers, peasants, students, professionals and intellectuals, and not only survived, under arms, the 1934 fascist putsch, but the Second World War (only to be crushed by Stalinist-Fascist reaction in 1948). It was unfortunate that the Platform was not translated into Spanish early enough to influence the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), founded in 1927.

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