What Is Communist Anarchism?
by Alexander Berkman
Paul Avrich Intro.
(NY: Dover Publications, 1972)
Amerikan anarchist of Russian Jewish descent, Alexander Berkman wrote his preface to this book in 1928. He was a good friend of anarchist Emma Goldman and an ideological descendant of Kropotkin who recognized the radicalism of the Russian Revolution, but accused the Bolsheviks of selling it out. With no hope, as admitted by his good friend Emma Goldman, Berkman killed himself in 1936. A few weeks later, Goldman says events in Spain occurred that would have cheered him up.
Berkman's suicide is only typical of the alternating nihilism and paralyzing and conservative despair in anarchist circles which fail to develop into thoroughgoing Marxist scientists. Although Hitler had come to power in Germany, Berkman was not able to see the careful build up and advance in the Soviet peoples. He had no way of measuring or understanding the progress that was going on globally and it was the fault of his own idealist methods.
Ever since the anarchists accused the Bolsheviks of selling out the revolution, without using a criterion of progress, idealists of all sorts have felt justified. In essence, this type of "anarchist" feels free to criticize the most progressive reality from the mere standpoint of an idea, a religious dogma that denies it is a religious dogma. It does not concern these idealists that their criticisms of the most progressive realities may benefit the forces of more reactionary realities.
Soon after, the Trotskyists made the same accusations of sell-out of the Russian Revolution, but said the solution was a bureaucracy with Trotsky at the head. There are an infinite number of possible variations of this idea, because there is no limit to the number of ideas that can be constructed to criticize reality. However, reality has a limited number of countries or societies. There is no one society where anarchists or Trotskyists could show that their ideas worked better than Lenin's and Stalin's. Hence, even in 2002 we have Trotskyists and anarchists continuing to criticize progressive realities created by Lenin, Stalin and their followers with reference to mere Trotarchist ideas.
Without showing where anarchism had actually done better than Leninism, Berkman said, "Leninist principles can lead only to dictatorship and reaction."(p. xxii) It is the lack of reality on the part of anarchists that allows them to say Lenin's pulling Russia out of World War I and the subsequent record progress made in providing for humyn needs as measured by mortality tables from 1913 to 1953 was "reaction." MIM always asks such idealists, "reaction compared with what?" "Show us where something was better!" The anarchists and Trotskyists cannot, because they are not comparing realities or social movements. They are comparing realities with their favorite ideas, their dogmas that might as well be religions. A fair comparison would be the progress brought by anarchist or Trotskyist movements compared with that of "Stalinist" movements.
Berkman said, "What is the thing we call government? Is it anything else but organized violence? . . . We are interested in the fact that it is so--that all government, all law and authority finally rest on force and violence, on punishment or the fear of punishment." (p. 178)
Unfortunately, Berkman was unable to draw the conclusion from his own observation that out of the communist anarchists only pacifist-anarchists can be distinguished in a principled way from Marxist-anarchists. Later he speaks against "the ends justify the means," yet at the same time he opposes pacifism. Thus Berkman was neither consistent ideologically nor scientifically. Berkman goes so far as to rename Nicolo Machiavelli's "the end justifies the means" the "Lenin principle;"(p. 152) yet, Berkman provides no way of overcoming a Machiavellian style of reasoning without pacifism. Rather than deny being in Machiavelli's camp, we Marxists point out to the numerous Berkmans that they are also following Machiavelli, not Tolstoy. Berkman says, "Means and aims are in reality the same: you cannot separate them,"(p. 168) but he does not mean it or he would have been a pacifist-anarchist, which he was not.
According to Berkman, "there can be no justice as long as one man is ruled by another; as long as one has the authority and power to compel another against his will."(p. 49) This is a goal we recognize clearly, but Berkman has no other indication of how to achieve that goal except this: "The power of even the strongest government evaporates like smoke the moment the people refuse to acknowledge its authority, to bow to it, and withhold their support."(p. 132) No where in the book is there any science to explain what causes smaller or greater proportions of people to acknowledge state authority. For Berkman, the work of the revolution is almost all purely verbal--converting people's ideas, not the conditions that give rise to those ideas.
According to us Marxists, classes, nations and patriarchy have to go before state authority will disappear. Failure to recognize this truth will result in the building of coercive systems --with states– in the name of anarchism. Unless we take the common Menshevik or anarchist position that we must "wait" till the distant future for a perfect revolution, we must admit that recruiting efforts can only succeed with a portion of the people. Berkman was far from being a Menshevik or anarchist who said only set backs would come if revolutionaries did not wait for the perfect future, so he should have been interested in why some people can be recruited while others cannot.
The question that Berkman is interested in--converting people to his beliefs--is no different than the question that born-again preachers are interested in. Yet, like born-again preachers who do not understand why their preachings fall on deaf ears and don't prevent sin, Berkman has no idea why anyone other than the capitalist class is not taking up anarchism.
Today for example, there is an international economic system of parasitism. Preaching to parasites to oppose the state that creates and defends parasitism is like asking boxers to outlaw boxing. In fact, eliminating the parasitic advantages of millions of imperialist country people will require a centralized authority able to deliver reparations to the Third World. Without someone measuring parasitism globally and coordinating its eradication, parasites will continue to demand the existence of states to protect their privileges. With non-Tolstoyan and non-Marxist anarchists, we have the perfect protector of the parasite--people willing to build a state while saying they are not.
Ideologically, Berkman did not seize the most consistent answer of just taking up pacifist-anarchism. Scientifically he had no way of telling us why what he proposed was not "the ends justify the means" while what we Marxists proposed did violate his injunction against "the ends justify the means." In other words, Berkman left himself open to attack from the Tolstoyan side ideologically and from the Marxist side scientifically and the way he handled the problem was by one big, unaccountable dodge.
People reading Berkman's book will also observe him simultaneously say that the bourgeoisie could not offer any resistance to the Russian Revolution on the one hand,(p. 150) while admitting that imperialists were invading at other points in the book.(p. 254). It gets to the point where it is obvious that Berkman politically defends the bourgeoisie by underestimating it: "The Russian bourgeoisie was not dangerous to the Revolution. As already explained, it was an insignificant minority, unorganized and powerless."(p. 158) Contrary to this "theory" is the reality that capitalism came back in Hungary shortly after the revolution in 1918. The German Revolution was also a near miss in 1919 and 1923. Even in Russia itself, and after a political reawakening of the masses, it was not the party that ended up ruling: there is open capitalism in Russia and Albania today, so to say the bourgeoisie had no power is obviously false.
In fact, Berkman's implicit theory of anarchism is really bourgeois. "Economic growth, as well as trade and commerce, requires security of person and property, a certain amount of freedom and non-interference in order to function."(p. 165)
In his definition of state previously mentioned, Berkman admits even "fear of punishment" is a state, but he still says anarchism was an option in the early stages of the Russian Revolution. How the fuck can you go through a civil war and not have "fear of punishment" even years later? It's not possible and only people flying the anarchist flag to impose a state would say it is possible. The conditions for eradicating fear have to be built over long years mainly by being forgotten through the birth of new generations raised under early stages of communism and progress toward a state-free mind has to be measured unless for some reason the Tolstoyan approach suddenly works--when Jesus descends from Heaven or the most advanced stage of communism has arrived in the distant future.
Berkman wrote a religious tract--stating a goal but providing no way to measure progress toward that goal. It is the book's simplicity that earns it its highest praise from its promoters. Yet at the same time, Berkman's religious fervor was not as consistent as Tolstoy's, so the book is not as simple and elegant as it could be.
In the end, Berkman makes this clear by writing a whole chapter titled "the idea is the thing." Substitute the word "Jesus" for "idea" in Berkman and most similar anarchists, and we have an ideology that says when people believe in Jesus they will be saved. Unfortunately for Berkman, whether the idealism is Christian preaching or anarchist preaching, there is no preaching that has proved to have an effect per se independent of circumstances.
In other words, Berkman is exactly the kind of persyn who is an unaccountable anarchist--someone who will build a state while flying the anarchist flag. We Marxists build states, and openly do so. We also provide measures of various kinds to show how progress is being made toward a world of no coercion. We collect figures on infant mortality, education, unemployment etc. to prove that overall coercion is falling in the Leninist-led society. That is what separates a scientific from a mixed up religious or religious-opportunist view.
According to Berkman, the only interesting question is how many people have been converted to the anarchist idea. He does not ask what the underlying reasons are that people convert to anarchism. He presumes that only the appearance of his pamphlet is necessary for the anarchist society to appear.