By The Fool on the Hill
I am responding to a couple of items in the March Iconoclast -Issue 20. These items reflect a perception of the Left that I can’t agree with. Anarchists especially have identified with non-authoritarian, highly democratic structures.
First in the editor’s note (pg 1) is stated that one problem compounding the inability of the anarchists to “get behind a common platform” has been “the historical predisposition of the so-called ‘leftist’ governments towards totalitarianism.” This might be forgiven if the term ‘so-called’ were emphasized. Instead this image is then reinforced by Neon Trotsky by saying that “the majority of states that have proclaimed … leftist governance have been heavily state-controlled and state-centralized.” (pg 4-Rethinking the Left)
If ‘the Left’ is understood to include ‘Bolshevism’, then I would dissociate with that Left. In my opinion, Lenin was one of the greatest enemies of socialism. Even long before Lenin, Bakunin warned about the ‘Red Bureaucracy’ that would institute “the worst of all despotic governments.” The brutal and tyrannical Bolshevik system was as much ‘socialist’ as it was ‘democratic’. It claimed to be both. The latter claim was ridiculed in the West, while the former was eagerly accepted, as a weapon against socialism.
Murray Bookchin identifies social anarchism with the “left”, by which he refers to the “great tradition of human solidarity and a belief in the potentiality for humanness,” internationalism and confederalism, anti-militarism, and rational secularism. Social anarchism aims for “free association of people living together and cooperating in free communities.”
The question of conquest or destruction of state power is what Bakunin regarded as the primary issue dividing him from Marx. In one form or another, this has persisted ever since, dividing ‘libertarian’ from ‘authoritarian’ socialists.
Editor:
Bakunin’s dire warning of a “Red Bureaucracy” emerged from his criticism of MARX during the First International. The fact that his warnings were validated by the emergence of the Bolsheviks suggests that the Soviet government had its roots in classical Marxism (hence, the Left). there is nothing inherent in socialism that says it has to be democratic.
