A-Infos (en) South Africa, Zabalaza* #6 - REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHISM & POLITICAL PARTIES

 The SACP's youth wing, the Young Communist League
(YCL), backed by a groundswell of support from what SACP
secretary-general Blade Nzimande admitted was a "significant
minority" in at least six of the nine provincial branches of the
party, is arguing that the SACP should stand on its own right
in the local government elections scheduled for March 2006 at
the latest. The SACP leadership has come out against this
rank-and-file proposal, worried that if it is accepted at the party's
special congress this May (2005), it may pit the party against
the ANC and drive the government rightwards. The go-it-alone
  tendency has arisen because of frustration at the SACP's
declining influence within the Alliance and also with the sell-out
 actions of much of its leadership. But standing as a "workers'
party" for elections to bourgeois state-capitalist forums is a
   deeply compromising strategy which has seen revolutionary
Marxism decay into reformist social democracy across the
   world. All of which raises questions of what role self-described
communist organisations including our own, the ZACF,
  should play and on what field: among the working class, or
among the bourgeoisie? So here is an excellent article by our
comrades in the ACL of Mexico, which gives their answer to
 that question. We encourage the rank-and-file of the SACP and
the YCL to honestly examine this alternative method of
grassroots communist organising and ask of themselves:
 "Does this not ring true to us?"
      or a long time there has been an erro-
neous conception regarding anarchists'
views on parties. In this document, we, as
revolutionary anarchists, wish to clarify the
matter a little. We will begin by saying that
our ideology is rooted in the philosophical
and political ideas of the Russian revolu-
tionary Mikhail Bakunin. With that said, we
believe that, as a self-sacrificing fighter for
the cause of the workers and therefore an
enemy of bourgeois capitalist exploitation
and State repression, Bakunin understood
perfectly the historical need for a revolu-
tionary party, consisting only of the most
dedicated elements who sacrificed them-
selves to the revolutionary cause and were
an integral part of it.
     Not only did Bakunin understand the
need for an Organisation with these char-
acteristics, but actually formed one in the
year 1868 called the "Alliance of Socialist
Democracy". The Alliance was founded in
the same period as the "International
Working Men's Association" (the 1st
International) and the members of the
Alliance were unjustly and mistakenly
accused by the Marxists of "wanting to
weaken the International by forming a new
one from within". The reality, however, was
totally different, as far from wanting to
weaken it, Bakunin had realized quite right-
ly that the best complement to the Workers'
International would be an Organisation of
the best elements with a high level of revo-
lutionary consciousness which could lead
to a large number of workers Organised in
the International, in an authentically social-
ist and revolutionary direction. This is how
Mikhail Bakunin explained the relationship
between the Revolutionary Organisation of
the vanguard (the Alliance) and that
immense, formidable mass Proletarian
Front, the International Working Men's
Association:
"The Alliance is the necessary complement
to the International. But the International
and the Alliance, while having the same
ultimate aims, perform different functions.
The International endeavours to unify the
working masses, the millions of workers,
regardless of nationality and national
boundaries or religious and political beliefs,
into one compact body; the Alliance, on the
other hand, tries to give these masses a
really revolutionary direction. The pro-
grammes of one and the other, without
being in any way opposed, differ only in the
degree of their revolutionary development.
The International contains in germ, but only
in germ, the whole programme of the
Alliance. The programme of the Alliance
represents the fullest unfolding of the
International."
                            - Mikhail Bakunin

    Although we anarchists recognize the
need to build a revolutionary Organisation
with tactical and ideological unity, whose
task is to encourage the development of
the workers' consciousness of their revolu-
tionary historic role of getting rid of capital-
ism and the institutions of inequality, we
reject the use of the term "party" to refer to
such an Organisation. We reject the use of
this term for two reasons which derive from
the word in question. The first is confusion
with the bourgeois political parties; the sec-
ond is the Marxist-Leninist concept of the
party. It is these two ideas that we will be
examining below.

THE CONCEPT OF "PARTY"
    As a Revolutionary Organisation, our
aim is to make the proletariat aware of its
social strength and of the fact that this very
strength can bring down capitalist society.
Our work, therefore, involves the
Organisation of popular forces from below,
in other words independently of the ruling
class. We believe that it is inappropriate to
present ourselves to the workers as a
"workers' party", given that nowadays party
is understood in its bourgeois sense asso-
ciated with elections, parliament, political
power and a whole series of concepts
which go against the idea of popular eman-
cipation. We are convinced that those par-
ties and individuals who describe them-
selves as representing the exploited class-
es and the oppressed, and who create
hopes of emancipation in them through
elections and parliaments, are instead only
reinforcing the bourgeois political institu-
tions and thereby (logically and effectively)
also despotism, exploitation and tyranny...

THE LENINIST PARTY AND THE ANARCHIST
POLITICAL ORGANISATION

    We run the risk not only of being con-
fused with the bourgeois parties, but also
with the Leninist ones. And something
interesting emerges here: Leninism pro-
motes the creation of a party that repre-
sents the interests of the working class.
Some might draw the conclusion that anar-
chist ideas and the Leninist model have
much in common, but that is something
that we flatly reject, for two reasons. To
begin with, as can be seen from the earlier
part of this document, the concept of an
Organisation of the most advanced ele-
ments ("vanguard") was not something that
was first expressed by Lenin. Decades
before, Bakunin had understood that mass
defence and resistance fronts alone (such
as trade unions and international workers'
associations) were not sufficient to under-
take a revolutionary struggle as they were
lacking, amongst other things, that nucleus
of the most conscious revolutionaries who
could fight to ensure that the popular
movements did not fall victim to reformist or
openly bourgeois tendencies.

     The other main difference with the
Leninist concept is even more important,
as it concerns the aims of each tendency.
The Leninist tendency wants the vanguard
party to take control of the State once the
revolution has been won, as its members
are supposed to be the most conscious,
the most intelligent, the best able to repre-
sent perfectly the interests of the proletari-
at. The function of the anarchist Political
Organisation, instead, is not to conquer
State power. Unlike the Leninists, we want
the destruction of the State, as we know
that political and military power in the
hands of a minority in the name of the rev-
olution is exactly what can damage the rev-
olution most.
     The taking of political power, or rather
the fact that a minority turns itself into a
nucleus of professional politicians with the
right to take decisions and impose these on
the masses, signifies creating the seeds for
bureaucratisation and counter-revolution.
It lays the basis for a return to a society
divided into a privileged minority and a
huge oppressed and dominated majority.
     The goal of the anarchist Organisation
is not political power but the building of pro-
letarian popular power from the bottom up,
in other words all the power based on the
working people collectively through their
assemblies and horizontal decision-making
bodies.

ANARCHISM AND REVOLUTION-
ARY ORGANISATION
     But Revolutionary Anarchism did not
see its programme for homogeneous
Organisation expressed only during the
time of Bakunin. Apart from the Alliance of
Socialist Democracy, other similar groups
have at various times tried to emulate the
role of the Alliance, groups such as the
Dielo Trouda group, formed principally of
Russian and Ukrainian anarchists who
fought together with the Russian proletariat
in the Russian Revolution, which was sub-
sequently transformed by the Bolsheviks
into a State-Party dictatorship.
     At the end of the 1920s, The Dielo
Trouda group published a document which
was very important for the international
Libertarian Movement, opening a breach
between Organised anarchism and the
individualist interpretation of anarchism
which repudiated the formation of an
Organisation of the vanguard. The anti-
Organisationalists consisted of those who
did not want to make a commitment or be
responsible as militants, those who repudi-
ated that revolutionary discipline which, as
Nestor Makhno pointed out, is essential for
our tasks to be carried out successfully.
     These few lines will help us to clear up
the question in hand: "without discipline
inside the Organisation it is impossible to
undertake any serious revolutionary action
at all. Without discipline, the revolutionary
vanguard cannot exist, as it would then find
itself in total practical disunity and would be
unable to identify the tasks of the moment
or carry out its role as initiator which the
masses expect of it." (Nestor Makhno, "On
Revolutionary Discipline")
      The Organisational Platform is a docu-
ment published by the Dielo Trouda Group
with the aim of bringing about a General
Union of Anarchists, an Organisation of the
revolutionary anarchist vanguard. It is a
document that sets out the arguments
regarding the need for an Organisational
structure of this type. Another example of
anarchism constituted in a Revolutionary
Organisation is that of the Friends of
Durruti in Spain during the 1930s, at the
time of the Spanish Civil War. The Friends
of Durruti were an anarcho-syndicalist
group within the CNT who understood the
need to form a conscious revolutionary
leadership after the CNT began to commit
historical errors such as joining the
Republic's bourgeois government. The
Friends of Durruti, whose name commem-
orated the revolutionary anarchist
Buenaventura Durruti who died in combat
on 20th November 1936, realized that in
the circumstances of the time is was
urgently necessary to create a nucleus
which would be able to indicate the correct
positions for the Spanish proletariat so that
it could go back to the strictly collectivist
and anti-State positions which had been
defended from day one of the Spanish
Revolution by Durruti and Ascaso.
CONCLUSIONS
      We can summarize by saying that we
anarchists of the Bakuninist line are advo-
cates of a specific revolutionary
Organisation that participates in the popu-
lar movements, seeking to insert our
Libertarian Socialist programme in these
movements and ensure that they proceed
along anti-capitalist lines in order to abolish
private ownership of the means of produc-
tion and create horizontal and assemblyist
popular power on the ruins of all that is
called political power and the State. An
Organisation of this type is what the mili-
tants of the "Alianza de los Comunistas
Libertarios" want to build and we are work-
ing daily towards the social revolution and
the emancipation of the world.

   - Alliance of Libertarian Communists (ACL),
               Mexico, December 2004.
             Tr a n s l a t e d by FdCA, Italy.
       http://www.comunismolibertario.cjb.net
    alianzacomunistalibertaria@yahoo.com.mx
   The ACL is numbered among a new wave of
 "platformist" organisations similar to the ZACF
  that have sprung up over the past three years
 in countries as diverse as Argentina, Australia,
    Costa Rica, Brazil, Russia, Turkey and the
                               USA.



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