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Texts :: history |
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The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control |
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by Maurice Brinton |
02 Sep 2005
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"... Bolshevism will eventually be seen to have been a monstrous aberration, the last garb donned by a bourgeois ideology as it was being subverted at the roots. Bolshevism's emphasis on the incapacity of the masses to achieve a socialist consciousness through their own experience of life under capitalism, its prescription of a hierarchically structured 'vanguard party' and of 'centralisation to fight the centralised state power of the bourgeoisie', its proclamation of the 'historical birthright' of those who have accepted a particular vision of society (and of its future) and the decreed right to dictate this vision to others - if necessary at the point of a gun - all these will be recognised for what they are: the last attempt of bourgeois society to reassert its ordained division into leaders and led, and to maintain authoritarian social relations in all aspects of human life." |
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Texts :: history |
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Collectives in the Spanish Revolution |
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by Gaston Leval |
02 Sep 2005
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"The ideals pursued by the Spanish anarchists are the same as those followed and propagated by the greatest minds from Plato and perhaps some of the Stoics, right up to our own times. The Spanish revolution achieved what the early Christians were asking, what in the XIVth Century the Jacquerie in France and the English peasants led by John Ball struggled for, and those in Germany whom Thomas Munzer was to lead two centuries later, as well as the English Levellers led by Everard and Winstanley, the Moraves brothers, disciples of Jean Huss. That which Thomas More foresaw in his Utopia, and Francis Bacon, and Campanella in La Citta del Sole and the priest Jean Meslier in his famous Testament (too often ignored) and Morelli in his Naufrage des lles Flottantes, and Mably who like Morelli inspired the noblest minds in the American Revolution, and the enrages of the French Revolution of whom Jacques Roux, the "red priest" was one. And the army of thinkers and reformers of the XIXth Century and of the first thirty years of the present. It is, in world history, the first attempt to apply the dream of all that was best in mankind. It succeeded in achieving, in many cases completely, the finest ideal conceived by the human mind and this will be its permanent glory. " |
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Texts :: history |
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Italy 1920 |
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by Tom Wetzel |
02 Sep 2005
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"During the month of September, 1920, a widespread occupation of Italian factories by their workforces took place, which originated in the auto factories, steel mills and machine tool plants of the metal sector but spread out into many other industries -- cotton mills and hosiery firms, lignite mines, tire factories, breweries and distilleries, and steamships and warehouses in the port towns . . . But this was not a sit-down strike; the workers continued production with their own in-plant organization. And railway workers, in open defiance of the management of the state-owned railways, shunted freight cars between the factories to enable production to continue. At its height about 600,000 workers were involved . . . This movement blew up out of a conventional trade union struggle over wages. But the wage demands were only the official occasion for the fight; the real aspirations and desires that motivated the workers involved in this struggle go much deeper . . . " |
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Texts :: history |
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The Kronstadt Uprising 1921 |
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by Ida Mett |
02 Sep 2005
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"We can now say, however, that the Kronstadt uprising marked the definitive end of the Russian Revolution itself. Indeed, the character and importance of the uprising were destined to become issues of acrimonious dispute within the international Left for years to come. Today, although an entirely new generation of revolutionaries has emerged - a generation almost totally uninformed of the events "the problem of Kronstadt" has lost none of its relevance and poignancy. For the Kronstadt uprising posed very far-reaching issues: the relationship between the so-called "masses" and the parties which profess to speak in their name, and the nature of the social system in the modern Soviet Union. The Kronstadt uprising, in effect, remains as a lasting challenge to the Bolshevik concept of a party's historical function and the notion of the Soviet Union as a "workers" or "socialist" state." |
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Texts :: history |
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An Overview of the Spanish Libertarian Movement |
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by Murray Bookchin |
02 Sep 2005
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"Although the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July, 1936, was followed by a far-reaching social revolution in the anti-Franco camp - more profound in some respects than the Bolshevik Revolution in its early stages - millions of discerning people outside of Spain were kept in ignorance, not only of its depth and range, but even of its existence, by virtue of a policy of duplicity and dissimulation of which there is no parallel in history." |
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Texts :: history |
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Reform and Revolution: Moderates and Revolutionaries in the French CGT |
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by Larry Gambone |
02 Sep 2005
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"Almost seventy five years have passed since the supposed "right-turn" of the CGT and therefore we are far enough removed in time to examine this claim in a more objective light. A first step in this examination requires a brief review of the history of anarcho- syndicalism before the break between "revolutionaries" and "moderates"." |
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Texts :: history |
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A Short History of Syndicalism |
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by Workers Solidarity Alliance (WSA) |
02 Sep 2005
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"The International Workers Association was founded in Berlin in 1922, but its origins trace back to the 1860's and the International Working Men's Association, better known as the First International. Most people associate the First International only with Karl Marx and the emerging Social Democratic movement, but the Anarchists and Marxists had actually about the same influence among the workers and in the International." |
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Texts :: history |
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Syndicalists in the Russian Revolution |
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by Gregory P. Maximoff |
02 Sep 2005
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"The industrial principle underlying the process of merging unions into large units became a useful weapon in the Bolshevik struggle against Anarcho-Syndicalism. In the first place the Bolsheviks began to consolidate those unions which they deemed unreliable, from the viewpoint of their own basic drive for domination. The move was to merge such unions in the general mass and scatter the leading Anarcho-Syndicalist workers in unions considered "reliable" from their point of view . . . Due to this measure and to intensified centralisation, coupled with unscrupulous juggling of votes and, in some places, the severe measures applied by the authorities, the administrative bodies fell into the hands of Communists." |
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Texts :: history |
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The Tragedy of Spain |
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by Rudolf Rocker |
02 Sep 2005
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"July 19th was the anniversary of the day on which a gang of militarist adventurers rose against the republican regime in Spain and, with the assistance of outside powers and foreign troops, plunged the country into a bloody war. This murderous war has thus far devoured nearly a million human lives, among them thousands of women and children, and has transformed wide stretches of the country into desert wastes. The profound tragedy of this bloody drama lies in the fact that it is not just an ordinary civil war, but a struggle, as well, between two different foreign power-groups that is being waged today on Spanish soil. Two hostile imperialist camps are struggling for the natural resources of a foreign country and the strategic advantage of its coasts. The prosecution of this war is, moreover, having an unmistakable influence on the struggle of the Spanish people for freedom, and this influence is today constantly manifesting itself more clearly in the intestine warfare between the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary forces of the country." |
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Texts :: history |
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Workers' Power and the Spanish Revolution |
by Tom Wetzel
Previously published: Ideas & Action |
02 Sep 2005
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"A social order that emerges from a rapid period of social change will necessarily be shaped by the movement and tactics that generates that social change. A movement that proceeds by building up a top-down political party can only create a society in which decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a few. If the movement for social change concentrates on changes implemented through government action, the result can only be to increase government power. To create a libertarian society, the process of social change must be dominated by a movement that is run in a libertarian way, that is, through direct decision-making by the rank-and-file. The development of a mass workers movement that is directly run by the rank-and-file is, thus, crucial to the creation of a libertarian socialist society." |
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