From a friend and brief participant in this woeful mailing list, before he
was summarily removed by F. (for "Free Speech"?) Leon Wilson:

----------
From: Alex LoCascio <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: FW: [CHOMSKY] With or Without You
Date: Wed, Jul 21, 1999, 2:00 PM


Be a dear and forward my reply.

Milutin writes:

>I'm all for a decentralized state, absolutly no concentration of power.
All
>individuals within this state hold the same power.

Dictatorship of the proletariat is still dictatorship.  And I'm not
talking about the Leninist strawman you anarchists are always beating up
on (and despite what anarchists say, Lenin was an exemplary leader of
Russian Social Democracy, as well as a master theoretician and tactician.
 Ditto Trotsky.  Let's see if you can handle this without bringing up
Kronstadt, which was largely the fault of Zinoviev).  I'm talking about
Marx's original conception of the proletarian dictatorship, taking the
Paris Commune as his model.

Anyone truly committed to class struggle knows that the exercise of
dictatorship by the proletariat is the only way to consolidate a
revolution.  The reluctance of anarchists to come to grips with this fact
is probably why they never end up being a part of truly revolutionary
mass movements.

Anarchism by its very nature is a petit-bourgeois, reactionary
phenomenon, and its adherents either tend to be middle-class radical
intellectuals or declassed peasants.  Anarchism is the cry of the small
tradesmen and petit-bourgeois in the face of modern global capital.  The
only country where anarchism ever caught on as a mass movement was Spain,
and that's because Spain at the time was a largely backward country with
a not so very big proletariat.  Anarchism hit a chord with rural peasants
who romanticized the lifestyle associated with the peasant village.  As
Alexander Cockburn pointed out in his collection The Golden Age is in Us,
there's enormous romantic mythmaking going on these days concerning the
Spanish anarchists.  The truth of the situation was a whole lot messier.


>And so, if this
>social organization is a de facto government, it is a government that
cannot
>affect those outside the government and all those instead the government
>play an equal role.  Also, the members can leave and join other
>"governments" whenever they feel like it.

Let me play the devil's advocate and assume the role of the Sternerite
anarchist.  Suppose I don't want to be subservient to your government any
more than I want to be subservient to capital?  Suppose none of the
governments in your ideal society suit me?  Suppose I object to the
expropriation of my property by so-called "anarchists"?  Am I not, then
too, victimized by a coercive regime, even if that regime
propagandistically refers to itself as one "without a concentration of
power."  Of course there's a concentration of power!  Just because power
is distributedly widely doesn't mean it ceases to be power.

You say that your ideal society is one of "direct democracy."  Was is not
Proudhon who said that "democracy is nothing but a constitutional
tyrant?"  Was it not Stirner who said "We do not aspire to communal life
but a life apart" and "the people's good fortune is my misfortune?"
Contemporary anarchists are quick to forget the more unsavory
individualism of past anarchist thinkers.

>That is Anarchy.  Direct democracy with social planning.

Great.  Basically a Massachusetts town hall meeting writ large.  *yawn*

For the record, my own politics is one of Non-Bolshevik Marxism,
Left-Schachtmanism, Luxemburgism, or Draperism (pick whatever term suits
you).   I reject the vanguardist model of Lenin not out of
petit-bourgeois moralism, but because the tactics and programs of Lenin
and Trotsky were tailored towards creating a revolution within the
context of Russia in the early 20th century. Sure, mistakes were made,
such as the dismantling of the soviets, but these were tactical blunders,
and not the pernicious conspiracy that ignorant anarchists make it out to
be. If anarchists are going to condemn every foolishness or brutality
committed in the name of revolution, they had better start with their own
heroes, such as Nestor Makhno, who was a brutal kulak tyrant and
anti-semite.  If that's anarchism, give me the vanguard party anyday.

 "Revisionists worship petitions, votes and letters to congress; in
reply, the anarchists make fetishes out of bombs, guns, direct action,
and the general strike."  - Proletarian Unity League.  2,3, Many Parties
of a New Type: Against the Ultra-Left Line


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