WHEN INSURRECTIONS DIE
Brest-Litovsk, 1917 and 1939

If the Russian Revolusion becomes the signal for a proletarian
revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the
present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the
starting point for a communist development.”

Mang/Engels - Preface to the Russian edition of the manifesto, 1852.

This perspective was not realized. The European industrial proletariat missed
s rendez-vous with a revitalized Russian peasant commune.

Brest-Litovsk, Poland, December 1917: the Bolsheviks propose
peace without annexations to a Germany intent on taking over a large swath
of the old Tsarist empire, stretching from Finland to the Cavcusus. But in
February 1918, the German soldiers, “proletarians in uniform” though they
were, obey their officers and resume the offensive against a Russia stll uled
by soviets. No fratemization occurs, and the revolutionary war advocated by
the Bolshevik left proves impossible. In March, Trotsky has to sign a peace
treaty dictated by the Kaiser's generals. “We're trading space for time’
Lenin put t, and in fact, in November, the German defeat turns the treaty into
a scrap of paper. Nevertheless, practical proof of the international link-up
of the exploited had failed to materialize. A few months later, returning to
civilian lfe with the war's end, these same proletarians confront the alliance
of the official workers” movement and the Freikorps. Defeat follows defeat:
in Berlin, Bavaria and then in Hungary in 1919; the Red Army of the Rubr in
1920; the March Action in 1921

September 1939. Hitler and Stalin have just carved up Poland. At
the border bridge of Brest-Litovsk, several hundred members of the KPD,
refugees in the USSR subsequently arrested as “counter-revolutionaries” o
“fascists”, are taken from Stalinist prisons and handed over to the Gestapo.

1917-1937, twenty years that shook the world. The succession of
horrors represented by fascism, then by World War I and the subsequent
upheavals, are the effect of a gigantic social crisis opening with the mutini
of 1917 and closed by the Spanish Civil War*.

*This is a shorter, entirely reconceived version of the preface to the
collection Bilan/Contre-révolution en Espagne 1936-1939, Paris, 1979 (now
out of print). A text in progress will deal further with the question of the
development of fascism, and thus of anti-fascism, in our own epoch.

“Fascism and Big Capital”

If it is precisely the case, to use the formulation made famous by Daniel
Guérin, that fascism serves the interests of big capital, 99% of the people
articulating this perfectly accurate thesis hasten to add that, in spite of
everything, fascism could have been averted in 1922 or 1933 if the workers™
movement and/or the democrats had mounted enough pressure to bar it from
power. If only, in 1921, the Italian Socialist Party and the newly-founded
talian Communist Party had allied with republican forces to stop Mussolini;
if only, at the beginning of the thirtes, the KPD had not launched a fratricidal
struggle against the SPD, Europe would have been spared one of the most
ferocious dictatorships in history, a second world war, a Nazi empire of almost
continental dimensions, the concentration camps, and the extermination of the
Jews. Above and beyond its very true observations about classes, the state
‘and the ties between fascism and big industry, this vision fails to see that
fascism arose out of a two-fold falure: the failure of the revolutionaries after
‘World War I, crushed as they were by Social Democracy and parliamentary
democracy, and then, in the course of the 1920's, the failure of the democ
and Social Democrats in managing capital. Without a grasp of the preceding
period as well as of the earlier phase of class struggle and is limits,the coming
to power and, sill more, the nature of fascism remain incomprehensible. For
the rest, it is no accident that Guérin misjudges both the Popular Front, in
which he sees a “failed revolution”, and the real significance of fascism

‘What i the real thrust of fascism, if not the economic and political
unification of capital, a tendency which has become general since 19147
Fascism was a particular way of bringing about that unity in countries--
Italy and Germany-- where, even though the revolution had been snuffed
out, the state was unable to impose order, including order in the ranks of the.
bourgeoisie. Mussolini was no Thiers, with a solid base of power, ordering
regular armed forces to massacre the Communards. An essential aspect
of fascism i its birth in the streets, its use of disorder to impose order, its
mobilization of the old middle classes half-crazed by their own decline, and
its regeneration, from without, of a state unable o deal with the crisis of
capitalism . Fascism was an effort of the bourgeoisie to forcibly tame its
own contradictions, to tur working-class methods of mass mobilization to
its own advantage, and to deploy all the resources of the moder state, first
against an internal enemy, then against an external one.

‘This was indeed a crisis of the state, during the transition o the
total domination of capital over society. First, worker organizations had been
necessary to deal with the proletarian upsurge; then fascism was required o put
‘an end to the ensuing disorder. This disorder was, of course, not revolutionary,
but it was paralyzing, and stood in the way of solutions which, as a resul

2

could only be violent. The erisis was only erratically overcome at the time: the
fascist state was efficient only in appearance, because it forcibly integrated
the wage-labor work force, and artificially buried conflicts by projecting
them into militarist adventure. But the crisis was overcome, relatively, by
the mult-tentacled democratic state established in 1945, which potentially
appropriated all of fascism’s methods, and added some of its own, since it
neutralizes wage-worker organizations without destroying them. Parliaments
have lost control over the executive. With welfare or with workfare, by
moden techniques of survellance or by state assistance extended to millions
of individuals, in short by a system which makes everyone more and more
dependent, social unification goes beyond anything achieved by fascist terror.
but fascism as a specific movement has disappeared. It corresponded to the
forced-march discipline of the bourgeoisie, under the pressure of the state, in
the particular context of newly-created states hard-pressed to also consttute
themselves as nations.

‘The bourgeoisie even took the word “fascism” from working-class
organizations in Italy, which were often called fasci.. It is significant that
fascism first defined itself as a form of organization and not as a progran. Its
only program is to organize everyone, to forcibly make the component parts
of society converge. Dictatorship is not weapon of capital (as if capital
could replace it with other, less brutal weapons); dictatorship is one of its
tendencies, a tendency realized whenever it is deemed necessary. A “return”
to parliamentary democracy, as it occurred (for example) in Germany after
1945, indicates that dictatorship is useless for integrating the masses ino
the state (at least until the next time). The problem is therefore not the fact
that democracy ensures a more pliant domination than dictatorship; anyone
would prefer being exploited in the Swedish mode to being abducted
by the henchmen of Pinochet. But does one have the CHOICE? Even the
‘gentle democracy of Scandinavia would be transformed into dictatorship if
circumstances demanded it. The state can only have one function, which it
fulflls democratically or dictatorially. The fact that the former is less harsh
does not mean that it s possible to reorient the state to dispense with the lattr.
Capitalism’s forms depend no more on the preferences of wage workers than
they do on the intentions of the bourgeoisie. Weimar capitulated to Hitler
with open arms. Leon Blum’s Popular Front did not "

woid fascism”, because
in 1936 France required neither an authoritarian unifi
shrinking of its middle classes.

There s no political “choice” to which proleta
or which they could forcibly impose. Democracy is not dictatorship, but
democracy does prepare dictatorship, and prepares itself for dictatorship.

‘The essence of anti-fascism consists n resisting fascism by defending
democracy: it no longer struggles against capitalism but secks to pressure
capitalism into renouncing the totalitarian option. Since socialism is identified

3

with total democra

and capitalism with an accelerating tendency to fascism,

al, communism and wage

the antagonisms between proletariat and c
labor, proletariat and state, are rejected for a counterposition of democracy

and fascism presented as the quintessential revolutionary perspective. The
official left and far-left tell us that a real change would be the realization, at
last, of the ideals of 1759, endlessly betrayed by the bourgeoisie. The new
world? Why, it is already here, to some extent, in embryos to be preserved.
inlitle buds to be tended: already-existing democratic rights must be pushed
further and further within an infinitely perfectible saciety, with ever-greater
daily doses of democracy, until the achievement of complete democracy, o

Thus reduced to anti-fascist resistance, social critique is enlisted
in dithyrambs to everything it once denounced, and gives up nothing less
than that shop-worn affair, revolution, for gradualism, a variant on the
“peaceful transition to socialism” once advocated by the Communist Parties
and derided, before 1968, by anyone serious about changing the world. The,
retrogression is palpable.

We won't invite ridicule by accusing the left and the far left of
having discarded a communist perspective which they knew in reality only
when opposing it. I is ll too obvious that anti-fascism renounces revolution,
But ani-fascism fails exactly where its “realism” claims to be effective: in
preventing a possible dictatorial mutation of society.

Bourgeois democracy is a phase in capital’s seizure of
and its extension in the twentieth century completes capital’s domi
by intensifying the isolation of individuals. Proposed as & remedy for the
separation between men and community, between human activity and society,
‘and between classes, democracy will never be able to solve the problem of the.
most separated society in history. As a form forever incapable of modifying
its content, democracy is only a part of the problem to which it claims to be
the solution. Each time it claims to strengthen the “social bond”, democracy
contributes to its dissolution. Each time it papers over the contradictions of
the commodity, it does so by tightening the hold of the “safety net” which
the state has placed under social relations. Even in their own desperately
resigned terms, the antifascists, to be credible, have to explain to us how
local democracy is compatible with the colonization of the commodity which
empties out public space and fills up the shopping malls. They have to explain
how an omnipresent state to which people constantly turn for protection and
help, this veritable machine for producing social “good", will not commit
“evil” when explosive contradictions require it to restore order. Fascism is the
adulation of the statist monster, while anti-fascism is its more subile apology.
The fight for a demoratic state is inevitably a fight to consolidate the state
‘and far from crippling totalitarianism, such a fight increases totalitarianism’s
stranglehold on socicty.

4

Rome, 1919-1922

The countries where fascism triumphed are also the countries in which
the revolutionary assault after World War | matured into a series of armed
insurrections. In ltaly, an important part of the proletariat, using its own
methodsand goals, directly confronted fascism. There was nothing specifically
anti-fascist about it strugele: fighting capital compelled workers to fight both
the Blackshirts and the cops of parliamentary democracy

Fascism is unique in giving counter-revolution mass base and in
mimicking revolution. Fascism turns the call to “transform the imperialist war
into civil war” against the workers' movement, and it appears as a reaction
of demobilized veterans returning to civilian life, where they are nothing.
held together by nothing but collective violence, and bent on destroying
everything they imagine to be a cause of their dispossession: trouble-makers
subversives, enemies of the nation, etc.

Thus from the outset fascism became an auxiliary of the police in rural
areas, putting down the agricultural proletariat with bullets, but at the same time.
developing a frenzied anti-capitalist demagogy. In 1919, when it represented
nothing, fascism demanded the abolition of the monarchy, the Senate and all
titles of nobility, the vote for women, the confiscation of the property of the
clergy, and the expropriation of the big landowners and industrialsts. Fighting
against the worker in the name of the “producer”, Mussolini exalted the
memory of the Red Week of 1914 (which had seen a wave of riots, particularly
in Ancona and Naples), and hailed the positive role of unions in linking the.
worker to the nation. Fascism'’s goal was the authoriarian restoration of the
state, in order to create a new state structure capable (in contrast to democracy,
said Mussolin), of limiting big capital and of controlling the commoity logic
which was eroding values, social ties and work.

‘Traditionally, the bourgeoisie had tried to deny the reality of social
contradictions; fascism, on the contrary, proclaimed them with violence
denying their existence between classes and transposing them to the struggle
between nations, denouncing Italy's fate as a “proletarian nation’”

Fascistrepression was unleashed aftera proletarian failure engineered
mainly by democracy and its main fullback options: the parties and unions,
which alone can defeat the workers by employing direct and indirect methods
in tandem, It is false to present fascism’s arrival in power as the culmination
of street battles in which it defeated the workers. In Germany, the proletarians
had been crushed eleven or twelve years earlier. In ltaly they were defeated
by both ballots and bullets.

In 1919, federating pre-existing elements with other elements close
to him politically, Mussolini founded his fasci. To counter clubs and revolvers
while Italy was exploding along with the rest of Europe, democracy called.

5

for a vote, from which a moderate and socialist majority emerged.

“Victory, the election of 150 socialist deputies, was won at the cost
of the ebb of the insurrectionary movement and the political general strike
‘and the rollback of the gains that had already been won”, Bordiga commented
40 years later

At the time of the factory occupations of 1920, the state, holding
back from a head-on assault, allowed the proletariat to exhaust tself, with the
support of the CGL (a majority-socialist union), which wore down the strikes
when it did not break them openly.

As soon as the fasci appeared, sacking the Case di Popolo, the police
cither turned a blind eye or confiscated the workers’ guns. The courts showed
the fasci the greatest indulgence, and the army tolerated their exactions
when it did not actually assist them. This open but unofficial support became
quasi-official with the Bonomi circular of Oct. 20, 1921, providing 60,000
demobilized officers to take command of Mussolini’s assault groups. What
did the parties do? Those liberals allied with the right did not hesitate to form
a *national bloc”, including the fascists, for the elections of May 1921. In
June-July of the same year, confronting an adversary without the slightest
scruple, the PSI concluded a meaningless “pacification pact” whose only
concrete effect was to further disorient the workers.

Faced with an obviously political reaction, the C.G.L. declared
itself apolitical. Sensing that Mussolini had power within his grasp, the union
leaders dreamed of & tacit agreement of mutual tolerance with the fascists,
‘and called on the proletariat o stay out of the face-off between the CP and the.
National Fascist Party.

Until August 1922, fascism scarcely existed outside the agrarian
regimes, mainly in the north, where it eradicated all traces of autonomous
‘agrarian worker unionism. In 1919, fascists did burn down the headquarters
of the socialist daily newspaper, but they held back from any role as
strikebreakers in 1920, and even gave verbal support 10 worker demands. In
the urban areas, the fasci rarely were dominant. Their “March on Ravenna’”
(September 1921) was casily routed. In November 1921, in Rome. a general
strike prevented a fascist congress from taking place. In May 1922, the
fascists tried again, and were stopped again.

‘The scenario varie little. A localized fascist attack would be met by
‘a working class counter-attack, which would then relent (following calls for
moderation from the reformist workers’ movement) as soon as reactionary
pressure tapered off; the proletarians trusted the democrats to dismantle the
armed bands. The fascist threat would pull back, regroup and go elsewhere.
overtime making itelf credible to the same state from which the masses were
expecting a solution. The proletarians were quicker to recognize the enemy in
the black shirt of the street thug than in the “normal” form of a cop o soldier.
draped in a legality sanctioned by habi, law and universal suffrage.

Atthe beginning of July 1922, the C.G.LL., by a two-thirds majority
(against the Communist minority’s one-third). declared its support for “any
‘govemment guaranteeing the restoration of basic freedoms”. In the same
month, the fascists seriously stepped up their attempts to penetrate the
northen cities

On August 1, the Alliance of Labor, which included the railway
workers" union, the C.G L. and the anarchist U.S.1., called a general srike.
Despite broad success, the Alliance officially called off the strike on the 3rd.
In numerous cities, however, it continued in insurrectionary form, which was
finally contained only by a combined effort of the police and the militry.
supported by naval cannon, and, of course, reinforced by the fascists

‘Who defeated this proletarian energy? The general strike was broken
by the state and the fasci but it was also smothered by democracy, and its

ilure opened the way to a fascist solution to the crisis.

‘What followed was far less a coup d’etat than a transfer of power
with the support of a whole array of forces. The “March on Rome” of the
Duce (who actually took the train) was less a showdown than a bit of theatre:
the fascists went through the motions of assaulting the state, the state went
through the motions of defending itself, and Mussolini took power. His
ultimatum of October 24 (*“We Want To Become the State!”) was not a threat
of civil war, but a signal to the ruling class that the National Fascist Party
represented the only force capable of restoring state authority, and of
the political unity of the country. The army could still have contained the
fascist groups gathered in Rome, which were badly equipped and notoriously
inferior on the military level, and the state could have withstood the seditious
pressure. But the game was not being played on the military level. Under
the influence of Badoglio, in particular (the commander-in-chief in 1919-
1921) legitimate authority caved in. The king refused to proclaim a state of
emergency, and on the 30th he asked the Duce to form a new government
“The liberals - the same people anti-fascism counts on to stop fascism-—joined
the govermment. With the exception of the Socialists and the Communists, all
parties sought a rapprochement with the PNF and voted for Mussolini: the
parliament, with only 35 fascist deputies. supported Mussolini’s invesiiture
306-116. Gioliti himself, the great liberal icon of the time, an authoritarian
reformer who had often been president of the state council before the war and
who had again been head of state in 1920-1921, whom fashionable thought
stil fancies in retrospect as the sole politician capable of opposing Mussolini
supported him up to 1924. The dictator not only received his power from
democracy: democracy ratified him.

‘We might add that n the following months, several unions, including
(among others) those of the railway workers and the sailors, declared
themseles “national”, pro-patritic and therefore not hostile o the regime;
repression did not spare them.

7
Turin 1943

If Italian democracy surrendered to fascism almost without a fight, the latter
spawned democracy anew when it no longer corresponded to the balance of
social and political forces.

‘The central question after 1943, as in 1919, was how to control
the working class. In ltaly even more than in other countries, the end of
‘World War I shows the class dimension of intemational conflict, which can
never be explained by military logic alone. A general strike erupted at FIAT
in October 1942. In March 1943, a strike wave rocked Turin and Milan,
including atiempts at forming workers’ councils. In 1943-1945, worker groups
emerged, sometimes independent of the CP, sometimes calling themselves
“Bordigists”, often simultaneously antifascist, rossi, and armed. The regime
could no longer maintain social equilibrium, just as the German alliance was
becoming untenable against the rise of the Anglo-Americans, who were seen
in every quarter as the future masters of western Europe. Changing sides
meant allying with the winners-to-be, but also meant rerouting worker revolts
and partisan groups into a patriotic objective with a social content. On July
10, 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily. On the 24th, finding himself in a 19-
17 minority on the Grand Fascist Council, Mussolini resigned. Rarely has a
dictator had to step aside for a majority vote.

Marshal Badaglio, who had been a dignitary of the regime ever
since his support for the March on Rome, and who wanted to prevent, in his
own words, “the collapse of the regime from swinging 100 far to the left".
formed a government which was still facist but which no longer included
the Duce, and tumed to the democratic opposition. The democrats refused
to participate, making the departure of the king a condition. After a second
transitional government, Badoglio formed a third in April 1944, which
included the leader of the Communist Party, Togliatti. Under the pressure
of the Allies and of the CP, the democrats agreed to accept the king (the
Republic would be proclaimed by referendum in 1946). But Badaglio stirred
up too many bad memories. In June, Bonomi, who 23 years carlier had
ordered the officers to take over the fasci, formed the first ministry to actually
exclude the fascists, and the situation was reoriented around the tripartite
formula (PC+PS+Christian Democracy) which would dominate in both Italy
and France in the first years after the war.

‘This game of musical chairs , ofien played by the self-same political
class, was the theatre prop behind which democracy metamorphosed
into dictatorship, and vice-versa, while the phases of equilibrium and
disequilibrium in the conflicts of classes and nations unleashed a succession
and recombination of political forms aimed at maintaining the same state
underwriting the same content. No one was more qualified to say it than the

Spanish CP, when it declared, either out of cynicism or naiveté, during the
transition from Francoism to democratic monarchy in the mid- 1970's:

“Spanish society wants everything 1o be transformed so that the
~normal functioning of the state can be assured, without detours or
social convulsions. The continuity of the state requires the non-
continuity of the regime.”

Volksgemeinschaft vs. Gemeinwesen

Counter-revolution inevitably triumphs on the terrain of revolution. Through
its people’s commanity”, National Socialism would claim to have eliminated
the parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy against which the proletariat
revolted after 1917. But the conservative revolution also took over old anti-
capitalist tendencies (the return to nature, the flight from cities..) that the
workers' paries, even the extremist ones, had negated or misestimated by
their inability to integrate the a-classist and communitarian dimension of the
proletariat, by their inability to critique the economy, and their inability to
think of the future world as anything but an extension of heavy industry.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, these themes were at the center
of the socialist movement’s preoccupations, before they were abandoned by
“Marism” in the name of progress and Science, and they survived only in
anarchism and in sects.

Volksgemeinschaft vs. Gemeinwesen, people’s community or the
human commanity... 1933 was not the defeat, but only the consummation of
the defeat. Nazism arose and triumphed to defuse, resolve and to close a social
erisis so deep that we stll don’t fully appreciate its magnitude. Germany,
cradle of the largest Social Democracy in the world, also gave rise (o the,
strongest radical, anti-parliamentary, anti-union movement, one aspiring to.
a “worker's” world but also capable of attracting to itself many other anti-
bourgeois and anti-capitalist revolts. The presence of avant-garde artists in
the ranks of the “German radical left” s no accident. It was symptomatic of
the attack on capital a “civilization” in the way that Fourier eriticized it. The
loss of community, individualism and gregariousness, sexual poverty, the
family both undermined but also affirmed as a refuge, the estrangement from
nature, industrialized food, increasing artificiality, the prostheticization of
man, regimentation by time, social relations increasingly mediated by money
and technique: all these alienations passed through the fire of a diffuse and
multiformed eritique. Only a superficial backward glance sees this ferment
purely through the prism of its inevitable recuperation.

‘The counter-revolution triumphed in the 1920°s only by laying the

9

foundations,in Germany and in the U.S., of a consumer society and of Fordism,
and by pulling millions of Germans, including workers, into industril,
commodified modernity. Ten years of fragile rule, as the mad hyperinflation
of 1923 shows. This was followed in 1929 by an enormous earthquake, in
which not the proletariat but capitalist practice itself repudiated the ideology
of progress and an ever-increasing consumption of objects and signs.

Nazi extremism, and the violence it unleashed, were adequate to
the depth of the revolutionary movement it took over and negated, and to
these two rebellions, separated by 10 years, against capitalist modernity.
first by proletarians, then by capital. Like the radicals of 1919-1921, Nazism
proposed a community of wage-workers, but one which was authoritarian,
closed, national, and racial, and for 12 years it succeeded in transforming
proletarians into wage-workers and into soldiers

Berlin 1919-1933

Dictatorship always comes after the defeat of social movements, once they
have been chloroformed and massacred by democracy, the leftst parties and
the unions. In Haly, several months separated the final proletarian failures
firom the appointment of the fascist leader as head of state. In Germany,
2ap of a dozen years broke the continuity and made Jan. 30, 1933 appear as
an essentially political or ideological phenomenon, not as the effect of an
earlier social carthquake. The popular basis of National Socialism and the
murderous energy it unleashed remain mysteries if one ignores the question
of the submission, revolt, and control of labor, and of i position in society.

‘The German defeat of 1918 and the fall of the empire set in motion
a proletarian assault strong enough to shake the foundations of society, but
impotent to revolutionize it thus bringing Social Democracy and the unions
1o center stage as the key to political equilibrium, The Social Democratic and
union leaders emerged as men of order, and had no scruples about calling in
the Freikorps, fully fascist groupings with many future Nazis in their ranks, to
repress a radical worker minority in the name of the intersts of the reformist
majority. First defeated by the rules of bourgeois democracy, the communists
were also defeated by working-class democracy: the “works council
their trust in the traditional organizations, not in the revolutionar
denounced as anti-democrats.

Inthis juncture, democracy and Social Democracy were indispensable
to German capitalism for regimenting the workers, killing off the spirit of
revolt in the polling booth, for winning a series of reforms from the bosses
and dispersing the revolutionaries.

Afier 1929, on the other hand, capitalism needed to eliminate part of

the middle classes, and to discipline the proletarians, and even the bourgeoisic
‘The workers’ movement, defending as it did political pluralism and immediate
worker interests, had become an obstacle. As mediators between capital and
labor, working-class organizations derive their function from both, but also.
try to remain autonomus from both, and from the state. Social Democracy
has meaning only as a force contending with the employers and the state, not
asa force absorbed into them. Its vocation is the management of an enormous
political, municipal, social, mutualist and cultural network, along with
everything which today would be called “associative”. The KPD, morcover,
had quickly constituted its own network, smaller but vast nonetheless. But
as capital becomes more and more organized, it tends to pul together all
its different strands, bringing a statist element to the enterprise, a bourgeois.
element to the rade-union bureaueracy, and a social element to administration.
The weight of working-class reformism, which ultimately pervades the state
and its existence as a “counter-society” make it a factor of social conservation
‘and Malthusianism which capital in crisis has to climinate. By their defense
of wage labor as a component of capital, the SPD and the unions fulfilled
‘an indispensable anti-communist function in 1918-1921, but this very same
function later led them to put the inerest of the wage-labor work force ahead of
everything else, o the detriment of the reorganization of capital as a whole.

A stable bourgeais state would have tried to solve this problem by
anti-union legislation, by recapturing the “worker fortresses”, and by pitting
the middle classes, in the name of modemity, against the archaism of the
proles, as Thatcher's England did much later, But such an offensive assumes
that capital i relatively united under the control of a few dominant factions.
But the German bourgeoisie of 1930 was profoundly divided, the middle
classes had collapsed, and the nation-state was in shambles.

By negotiation or by force, modern democracy represents and
reconciles antagonistic interests, to the extent that it is possible. Endless
‘parliamentary crises and real or imagined plots (for which Germany was the
stage after the fall o the last socialist chancellor in 1930) in a democracy are
the invariable sign of long-term disarray in ruling circles. At the beginning
of the 1930's, the crisis whipsawed the bourgeoisie between imeconcilable.
social and geopolitical strategies - either the increased integration or the
elimination of the workers' movement; international trade and pacifism, o
autarchy laying the foundations of a military expansion. The solution did not
necessarily imply a Hitler, but it did presuppose a concentration of force and
violence in the hands of the central government. Once the centrist-reformist
‘compromise had exhausted itself, the only option left was statist, protectionist
and repressive,

A program of this kind required the violent dismantling of Social
Democracy, which in its domestication of the workers had come o exercise
excessive influence, while still being incapable of unifying all of Germany

behind it. This unification was the task of Nazism, which was able to appeal to
all classes, from the unemployed to the captains of industry, with a demagogy
that even surpassed that of the bourgeois politicians, and an anti-Semitism
intended to build cohesion through exclusion.

How could the working-class parties have made themselves into an
obstacle o such xenophobic and racist madness, after having so often been
the fellow travelers of nationalism? For the SPD, this had been clear since the.
beginning of the century, obvious in 1914, and signed in blood in the 1919
pact with the Freikorps, who were cast very much in the same warrior mould
as their contemporaries, the fasci. The KPD, for its part, had not hesitated
to ally with the nationalists against the French occupation of the Ruhr in
1923, and openly talked of a “national revolution” to the point of inspiring
Trotsky's 1931 pamphlet Against National-Communism.

In January 193, the die was cast. No one can deny that the Weimar
Republic willingly gave itself to Hitler. Both the right and the center had
come around to seeing him as a viable solution to get the country out of
impasse, or as a temporary lesser evil. “Big capital”, reticent about any
uncontrollable upheaval, had not, up to that time, been any more generous
with the NSDAP than with the other nationalist and right-wing formations.
Only in 1932 did Schacht, an intimate adviser of the bourgeoisie, convince
business circles to support Hitler (who had, moreover, just seen his electoral
support slightly decline) because he saw in Hitler a force capable of unifying
the state and society. The fact that the big bourgeoisie neither foresaw nor sill
less appreciated what then ensued, leading to war and then defeat, is another
question, and in any event they were not notable by their presence in the
clandestine resistance to the regime.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor, in complete
legality, by Hindenberg, who himself had been constitutionally elected
president a year carlier, with the support of the socialists, who saw in him a
rampart against. . Hitler. The Nazis were minority in the first government
formed by the leader of the NSDAP.

In the following weeks, the masks were taken Off: working-class
militants were hunted down, their offices were sacked, and a reign of terror
was launched. In the clections of March 1933, held against the backdrop.
of violence by both the Stormiroopers and the police, 288 NSDAP deputi
were sent 10 the Reichstag (while the KPD stillretained 80 and the SPD 120),
Naive people might express surprise at the docility with which the repressive
apparatus goes over to dictators, but the state machine obeys the authority
‘commanding it. Did the new leaders not enjoy full legitimacy? Did eminent
jorists not write their decrees in conformity with the higher laws of the land?
In the “democratic state”"-and Weimar was one--if there is conflict between
the two components of the binomial, it is not democracy which will win
out. In a “state founded on laws--and Weimar was also one-if there is a

12

opposite.
During these few months, what did the democrats do? Those on the

right accepted the new dispensation. The Zentrum, the Catholic party of the
center, which had even seen it support increase in the March 1033 clections
voted to give four years of full emergency powers to Hitler, powers which
became the legal basis of the future dictatorship. The Zentrum was forced to
dissolve itself n July,

The so for their part, attempted to avoid the fate of the KPD,
which had been outlawed on February 28 in the wake of the Reichstag fire.
On March 30, 1933, they left the Second Intenational to prove their national
German character. On May 17, their parliamentary group voted support for
Hitler's foreign policy. Nevertheless, on June 22, the SPD was dissolved as
“an enemy of the people and the state”

‘The unions followed in the footsteps of the ltalian CGL, and hoped
to salvage what they could by insisting that they were apolitical. In 1932, the
union leaders had proclaimed their independence from all parties and their
indifference to the form of the state. This did not stop them from secking
an accord with Schleicher, who was chancellor from November 1932 to
January 1933, and who therefore was looking for a base and some credible
pro-worker demagogy. Once the Nazis had formed a government, the union
leaders convinced themselves that if they recognized National Socialism, the
regime would leave them some small space. This strategy culminated in the
farce of union members marching under the swastika on May 1, 1933, which
had been renamed “Festival of German Labor”. It was wasted effort. In the
following days, the Nazis liquidated the union and arrested the militants.

Having been schooled to contain the masses and to negotiate in their
name, or, that failing, to repress them, the working-class bureaucracy was still
fighting the last war. Its furtive acts of propitiation got it exactly nowhere.
‘The labor bureaucrats were not being attacked for their lack of patriotism,
but rather as a useless expense for the capitalist class. What bothered the
bourgeoisic was not the bureaucrats’ lingering lip service to the old pre-1914
internationalism, but rather the existence of trade unions, however servile,
retaining a certain independence in an era in which capital no longer tolerated
‘any other community than its own, and in which even an institution of cla
collaboration became superfluous if the state did not completely control it

13
Barcelona, 1936

In Ty and in Germany, fascism took over the state by legal means,
Democracy capitulated to dictatorship, or, worse still, greeted dictatorship,
with open arms. But what about Spain? Far from being the exceptional case
of a resolute action that was nonetheless, and sadly, defeated, Spain was the
extreme case of armed confrontation between democracy and fascism in
which the nature of the strugle still remained the same clash of two forms
of capitalist development, two political forms of the capitalist state, two state
structures fighting for legitimacy in the same country.

Objection!

“So, in your opinion, Franco and a working-class militia are the
same thing? The big landowners and impoverished peasants collectivizing
land are in the same camp?”

First ofallthe confrontation happened only because the workers rose
up against fascism. All the power and all the contradictions of the movement
were manifest inits first weeks: an undeniable class war was transformed into.
pitalis civil war (though there was, of course, no worked-out agreement
and no assignment of roles in which the two bourgeois factions orchestrated
every action of the masses).

‘The history of a class-divided society is ultimately shaped by the
need to unify those classes. When, as happened in Spain, a popular explosion
combined with the disarray of the ruling groups, a social crisis becomes a
erisis of the state. Mussolini and Hitler triumphed in countries with weak
recently-unified nation-states and powerful regionalist currents. In Spain.
from the Renaissance until modern times, the state was the colonial armed
might of a commercial socety it ultimately ruined, choking off one of the pre-
conditions of industrial expansion, agrarian reform. In fact, industrialization
had to make its way through monopolies, the misappropriation of public
funds, and parasitism.

Space is lacking here for a summary of the nineteenth-century crazy
quilt of countless reforms and liberal impasses, dynastic factions, the Carlist
wars, the tragicomic succession of regimes and parties after World War 1,
and the cycle of insurrections and repression that followed the establishment
of the Republic in 1931. Beneath all these rumblings was the weakness of
the rising bourgeoisie, caught as it was between its rivalry with the landed
oligarchy and the absolute necessity of containing peasant and worker
revolts. In 1936, the land question had not been resolved; unlike France after
1789, the mid- 19th century sell-off of the Spanish clergy’s lands wound up
strengthening a latifundist bourgeoisie. Even in the years after 1931, the
Institute for Agrarian Reform only used one-third of the funds at ts disposal
1o buy up large holdings. The conflagration of 1936-1939 would never have
reached such political extremes, up to and including the explosion of the state

14

into two factions fighting a three-year civil war, without the tremors which
had been rising from the social depths for a century.

Inthe summer of 1936, after giving the military rebels every chance
to prepare themselves, the Popular Front elected in February was prepared
10 negotiate and perhaps even to surrender. The politicians would have made
their peace with the rbes, a they had done during the dictatorship of Primo.
de Rivera (1923-1931), which was supported by eminent socialists (Cabellero
had served it as a technical counselor, before becoming Minister of Labor in
1931, and then head of the Republican government from September 1936 to
May 1937). Furthermore, the general who had obeyed republican orders two
years carlier and crushed the Asturias insurrection--Franco--couldn't be all
that bad

But the proletariat rose up. blocked the puisch in half of the country.
and hung onto its weapons. In so doing, the workers were obviously fighting
fascism, but they were not acting as anti-fascists because their actions were
directed against both Franco and against a democralic state more unsettled by
the workers” nitative than by the military revolt. Three prime ministers came
and went in 24 hours before the fait accompl of the arming of the people was
accepted.

Once again, the unfolding of the insurrection showed that the
problem of violence is not primarily a technical one. Victory does not £0 to
the side with the advantage in weaponry (the miltary) o in numbers (the
people), but rather (o theside which dares o ke the iniiative. Where workers
rust the stat, the state remains passive or promiscs the moon, as happened
in Zaragoza. When their struggle is focused and sharp (as in Malaga). the
workers win; i it s lacking in vigor, it i drowned in blood (20,000 killed in
Sevile)

Thus the Spanish Civil War began with an authentic insurrection.
but such a characterization is incomplete. It holds truc only for the opening
moment of the struggle: an effectively proletarian uprising. After defeating the
forces of eaction ina large number of citis, the workers had the pover. But
what were they going to do with t? Should they give it back to the republican
state, or should they use it to g0 furthe in a communist direction?

Created immediately aftr the insurrection, the Central Committee
of Antifascst Militias included delegates from the CNT, the FAL the UGT,
the POUM, the PSUC (product of the recent fusion of the CP and the SP in
Catalonia), and four representatives of the Generaliat, the Catalan regional
‘govemment. As a veritable bridge between the workers’ movement and the
state, and, moreover, ted if not integrated into the Generalitats Department
of Defense by the presence inits midst ofthe latter s councilor of defense. the
‘commissar of public order,etc. the Central Committee of the Militias quickly
began to unravel,

OF course. in giving up their autonomy, most proletarians believed

15

that they were, in spite of everything, hanging onto real power, and giving
the politicians only the facade of authority, which they mistrusted, and which
they could control and orient in a favorable direction. Were they not armed?

“This was a fatal error. The question is not: who has the guns? but
rather: what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000 proletarians
armed to the teeth are nothing if they place their trust in anything beside their
own power to change the world. Otherwise, the next day. the next month or
the next year, the power whose authority they recognize will take away the
guns which they failed to use against it

“The insurgents did not take on the legal government, .. the existing
state, and all their subsequent actions took place under its auspices. It was
“a revolution that had begun but had never consolidated”, as Orwell wro.
“This is the main point which determined both the course of an increasingly
losing armed struggle against Franco as well as the exhaustion and violent
destruction by both camps of the collectivizations and socializations. After
the summer of 1936, real power in Spain was exercised by the state and not
by organizations, unions. collectivities, committees, etc. Even though Nin.
the head of the POUM, was an advisor o the Ministry of Justice, “the POUM
nowhere succeeded in having any influence over the police”, as one defender
of that party aditted . While the worker militias were indeed the flower of the
Republican army, and paid a heavy price in combat,they carried no weight in
the decisions of the military high command, which steadily integrated them
into regular units (a process completed by the beginning of 1937), preferring
1o wear them down rather than tolerating their autonomy. As for the powerful
CNT. it ceded ground to a CP which had been very weak before July 1936
(having elected 14 deputies o the Popular Front chamber in February 1936,
as opposed to 85 Socialiss). but which was able to insinuate itself into part
of the state apparatus and tum the state increasingly to its own advantage
against the radicals, and particularly against the militants of the CNT. The
question was: who was master of the situation? And the answer was: the state
can make brutal use of its power when it is necessary.

If the Republican bourgeoisie and the Stalinists lost precious time
dismantling the peasant communes, disarming the POUM militias, and
hunting down Trotskyist “saboteurs” and other “agents of Hitler” at the very
moment when anti-fascism was supposed to be throwing everything into the
strugle against Franco, they did not do so from a suicidal impulse. For the
state and for the CP. (which was becoming the backbone of the state through
the military and police) these operations were not a waste of time. The head
of the PSUC supposedly said: “Before taking Zaragoza, we have to take
Barcelona”. Their main objective was never crushing Franco, but retaining
control of the masses, because this is what states are for. Barcelona was taken
away from the proletarians. Zaragoza remained in the hands of the fa

Barcelona, May 1937

“The police attempted to occupy the Telephone Exchange, which was under
the control of the anarchist (and socialist) workers. In the Catalan metropolis,
heart and symbol of the revolution, legal authority stopped at nothing in
disarming whatever remained alive, spontancous and anti-bourgeois. The
local police, moreover, was in the hands of the PSUC. Confronted by an
openly hostile povwer, the proletaians finally understood that this power was
ot their own, that they had given it the gift of their insurrection ten months
carlcr, and thei insurtection had been turned against the. In reaction o the
powwer grab by the state, a general srike paralyzed Barcelona. It was too late.
The workers still had the capacity 10 ise up against the sate (this time in its
democratic form) but they could no longer push ther sirugle o the point of
an open break

As always, the “social” question predominated over the military
one. Legal authority cannot impose itself by street battles. Within a few
ours, instead of urban guerrilla warfare, a war of position, 4 faceoff of
apartment building against apartment building set in. It was 1 defensive
stalemate in which no one could win because no one was attacking. With ts
own offensive bogged down, the police would not risk its forces in attacks
o buildings held by the anarchists. Broadly speaking. the CP and the state
held the center of the city. while the CNT and the POUM held the working-
class districts. The status quo ultimately won out by political means. The
masses placed their trust in the two organizations under attack, while the
later, afraid of alienating the stte, got people (0 20 back o work (though
not without some difficulty) and thereby undermined the one force capable
of saving them politically and...“physically”. As soon s the siike was over,
Knowing that it henceforth controlled the siuation, the government brought
in 6,000 Assault Guards, the elite of the police. Because they accepted the
mediation of “representalive organizations” and councils of moderation from
the POUM and the CNT. the very same people who had defeated the fascist
military in July 1936 surrendered without a fight o the Republican police in
May 1937.

At that point, repression could begin. Only a few weeks were
necessary (0 outlaw the POUM, to arrest its leaders, 10 killthem legally or
otherwise. and to disappear Nin. A paralll police was established in secret
locales, organized by the NKVD and the secret apparatus of the Cominern.
and answering only 0 Moscow. From that point onward, anyone showing
the lightest opposition o the Republican state and its main ally,the USSR,
would be denounced and hunted down as a “fascist”, and all around the world
an army of well-meaning, gentle souls would repedt the slander, some from
ignorance, others from sell-interest , but every one of them convinced that

17

o denunciation was too excessive when fascism was on the march. The fury
unleashed against the POUM was no aberration. By opposing the Moscow
rials, the POUM condemned itself 1o be destroyed by a Stalinism locked
in a merciless world struggle against its rivals for control of the masses. At
the time, most parties, commentators and even the League for the Rights
of Man came out in endorsement of the guilt of the accused. Sixty years
later, mainstream ideology denounces these trials and sees them as a sign
of the Kremlin’s mad will to power. As if Stalinist crimes had nothing to do
with anti-fascism! Anti-fascist logic will always align itself with the most
moderate forces and will always fight against the most radical ones.

On the purely political level, May 1937 gave rise to what, a few
months before, would have been unthinkable: a Socialist even farther to,
the right than Caballero, Negrin, heading a government which came down
hard on the side of law and order, including repression against the workers,
realized that the war “for
was obviously over. What remained was a faceolf between
isms, with the difference that one was less inhuman than its rival
Orwell clung to the necessity of avoiding the “more naked and
developed fascism of Franco and Hitler”. From that point onward, the only
issue was fighting for a fascism less bad than the opposing one.

War Devours the Revolution

Power does not come from the barrel of a gun any more than it comes from
a ballot box. No revolution s peaceful, but the military dimension is not the
central one. The question is not whether the proles finally decide to break into
the armories, but whether they unleash what they are: commodified beings
who no longer can and no longer want 1o exist as commodities, and whose
revolt explodes the logic of capitalism. Barricades and machine guns flow
from this “weapon”. The more vital the social realm, the more the use of
‘guns and the number of casualties will diminish. A communist revolution will
never resemble a slaughter: not from any non-violent principle, but because
it will be a revolution only by subverting more than by actually destroying
the professional military. To imagine a proletarian front facing off against a
bourgeois front i to conceive the proletariat i bourgeois terms, on the model
of a political revolution or a war (seizing someone’s power, occupying their
temitory). In so doing, one reintroduces everything that the insurrectionary
moment had overwhelmed: hierarchy, respect for specialists, for knowledge
that Knows, and for techniques to solve problems, in short for everything that
diminishes the common man. In the service of the state, the working- class
“militia man” invariably evolves into a “soldier”. In Spain, from the fall of

1936 onward, the revolution dissolved into the war effort, and into a kind of
‘combat typical of states: a war of fronts.

Formed into “columns”, workers left Barcelona o defeat the facists
in other citis, starting with Zaragoza. Taking the revolution beyond areas
under republican control, however, meant completing the revolution in
the republican areas as well. But even Durruti did not seem to realize that
the state was everywhere still intact. As Durruti’s column (70% of whose
members were anarchists) advanced, it extended the collectivizations: the
militias helped the peasants and spread revolutionary ideas. But, Durruti
declared, “we have only one aim: to crush the fascists”. However much he
reiterated that “these militias will never defend the bourgeoisic”, they did not
attack the bourgeoisie cither. Two weeks before his death (Nov. 21, 1936),
he stated: “We have only one thought and one goal (..): to crush fascism
(..) For now. no one should be thinking of wage increases or a shorter work
week.. we must sacrifice and work as much as necessary (..) we must have
the solidity of granite. The moment has come to call on trade-union and
political organizations (o end their bickering once and for all. On the home
front, what we need is administration (...) After this war, we must not, by our
own incompetence. provoke another civil war among ourselves (..) Against
fascist tyranny. we should stand as one; only one organization, with only one
discipline, should exist”

Durruti and his comrades embodied an energy which had not waited
for 1936 to storm the existing world. But all the combative will in the world
is not enough when workers aim all their blows against one particular form
of the state, and not against the state as such. In mid-1936, accepting a war
of fronts meant leaving social and political weapons in the hands of the
‘bourgeoisie behind the lines, and moreover meant depriving military action
itself of the inital vigor it drew from another terrain, the only one where the
proletariat has the upper hand

Inthe summer of 1936, far from having decisive military superiority.
the nationalists held no major city. Their main strength lay in the Forcign
Legion and in the “Moors” recruited in Morocco, which had been under
Spanish protectatorate since 1912 but which had long since rebelled against
the colonial dreams of both Spain and France. The Spanish royal army had
been badly defeated there in 1921, largely due to the defection of Moroccan
troops. DespiteFranco-Spanish collaboration, the Rif war (in which a
‘general named Franco had distinguished himself) ended only when Abd el-
Krim surrendered in 1926. Ten years latr, the announcement of immediate
and unconditional independence for Spanish Morocco would, at minimum.
have stired up trouble among the shock troops of reaction. The Republic
obviously gave short shrift to this solution, under a combined pressure from
conservative milieus and from the democracies of England and France, which
had lttle enthusiasm for the possible breakup of their own empires. At the

19

very same time, moreover, the French Popular Front not only refused to grant
any reform worthy of the name to its colonial subjects, but dissolved the
Etoile Nord-Africaine, a proletarian movement in Algeria

Everyone knows that the policy of “non-intervention” in Spain was

a farce. One week after the putsch, London announced its opposition to any
arms shipment 10 the legal Spanish government, and its neutrality in the
event that France was drawn into a conflict. Democratic England thus put
the Republic and fascism on the same level. As a result, the France of Blum

‘and Thorez send a few planes, while Germany and ltaly sent whole armi
‘and their supplies. As for the International Brigades, controlled by the Soviet
Union and the Communist Parties, their military value came at a heavy price.
namely the elimination of any opposition to Stalinism in working-class ranks.
It was at the beginning of 1937, after the first Russian arms shipments, that
Catalonia removed Nin from his post as adviser to the Ministry of Justice.
Rarely has the narrow conception of history as a list of batles
cannons and strategies been more inept in explaining the course of a direetly
“social” war, shaped as it was by the internal dynamic of anti-fascism.
Revolutionary elan nitially broke the elan of the nationalists. Then the workers
accepted legality; the conflict was stalemated, and then institutionalized.
From late 1936 onward, the militia columns were bogged down in the siege
of Zaragoza. The state armed only the military units it trusted, ie. the ones
which would not confiscate property. By carly 1937, in the poorly-equipped
POUM militias fighting the Francoists with old guns, a revolver was a luxury.
In the cities, they rubbed shoulders with perfectly outfitted regular soldiers.
‘The fronts bogged down, like the Barcelona proletarians against the cops. The
last burst of energy was the republican victory at Madrid. Soon thereafie,
the government ordered private individuals to hand in their weapons. The
decree had little immediate effect, but it showed an unabashed will to disarm
the peaple. Disappointment and suspicions undermined morale. The war was
increasingly in the hands of the specialists. Finally, the Republic increasingly
lost ground s all social content and revolutionary appearances faded away in

educing the revolution to war simplifies and falsifies the social
question into the alternative of winning o losing, and in being “the stronges”.
The issue becomes one of having disciplined soldiers, superior logistics
competent officers and the support of allies whose awn political nature gets as
litle scrutiny as possible. Curiously, all tis means taking the conflict further
from daily life. It is peculiar quality of warfare that, even for its enthusiasts,
10 one wans to lose but everyone wans it o end. In contrast to revolution,
except in the case of defeat, war does not cross my doorstep. Transformed
into a military conflict, the struggle against Franco ceased (o be a personal
commitment, lost its immediate reality, and became a mobilization at once
economic (working for the front), ideological (wall posters in the street

20

meetings) and human: after January 1937, voluntary enlistments tapered
Off, and the civil war, in both camps, came 0 depend mainly on compulsory
militay service. As a resul,a miliia man of July 1936, leaving his column a
year later, disgusted with republican politics. could be arrested and shot as a
“deserter!

In different_historical conditions, the military evolution from
antifuscsminsurrection to militias and then to regular army is reminiscent
of the ant-Napolconic guerrilla warfare (the term passed into French during
the First Empire) described by Marx:

“If one compares the three periods of guerrilla warfare with the
political history of Spain. one notes they represented the three corresponding
degrees to which the counter-revolutionary government had reduced the spirit
of the people. In the beginning, the entire population rose up, then suerrilla
bands carried on a war of attriion backed up by eniire provinces: and fnally:
there were bands without cohesion, always on the verge of tuming into
bandits or dissolving into regular regiments.”

For 1936 as for 1508, the evolution of the miliary situation cannot
be explained exclusively or even mainly by the art of war, but flows from
the balance of polifical and social forces and its modification in an anti-
revolutionary direction. The compromise evoked by Durrut,the necessity of
any cost, could only hand victory first (o the republican stae (over
the proletariat) and then to the Francoist stte (over the Republic).

There was the beginning of a revolution in Spain, but it tumed into
its opposite as soon as the proletarians, convinced that they had cffective
power, placed ther rust n the stat to fight against Franco. On that basis, the
multiplicity of subversive initatives and measures taken in production and in
daily life were condemned to fail by the simple and terrible fact that they took
place in the shadow of a perfectly intact state structure, which had initially
been put on hold, and then reinvigorated by the necessites of the war against
Franco, 4 paradox which remained opague {0 most revolutionary roups at
the time. n order o be consolidated and extended, the social transformations
without which revolution remains an empty word had to pose themselves
as antagonistic to a state clearly designated as the adversary. But, after July
1936, dual power existed in appearance only. Not only did the instruments
of proletarian power which emerged from the insurrection. and those which
subsequently oversan the socializations. olerate the state. but they accorded
the state aprimacy inthe anti-Franco struggle, a i it were tactically necessary
o pass through the state in order to defeat Franco. In terms of “realism” the
recourse to traditional military methods accepted by the far left (ncluding the
POUM and the CNT) inthe name of effectiveness almost invariably proved
ineffective. Fifty years later, people ill deplore the fact. But the democratic
state s as litle suited for armed struggle against fascism as it is for stopping
its peaceful accession to power. States are normally loathe to deal with the

21

social war, and normally fear rather than encourage any fraternization. When,
in March 1937 in Guadalajara, the antifascists addressed themselves as
workers to the ltalian soldiers sent by Mussolini, a group of Italians defected.
But such an episode remained the exception.

From the battle for Madrid (March 1937) to the final fall of Catalonia
(February 1939, the cadaver of the aborted revolution decomposed on
the battlefeld. One can speak of war in Spain, not of revolution. This war
wound up having as its first function the resolution of a capitalist problem:
the constitution in Spain of a legitimate state which succeeded in developing
its national capital while keeping the popular masses in check. In February
1939, Benjamin Peret analyzed the consommation of the defeat as follows:

“The working class (..., having lost sight of its own goals, no longer
sees any urgent reason to be killed defending the bourgeois democratic clan
against the fascist clan, ie. in the last analysis, for the defense of Anglo-
French capital against Italo-German imperialism. The civil war increasingly
became an imperialist war.” (CL.. No. 2)

The two camps undeniably had quite different sociological
compositions and social meanings. If the bourgeoisie was present on both
sides, the immense majority of workers and poor peasants supported the
Republic, whereas the archaic and reactionary strata (landed property, small
holders, clergy) lined up behind Franco. This class polarization gave a
progressive aura to the republican state, but it does not disclose the historical
meaning of the conflict, any more than the percentage of working-class
members of the SPD, SFIO or PCF exhausts the question of the nature of
these parties. Such facts are real, but secondary to the social function in
question. The party with a working-class base which controls or opposes any
proletarian upsurge softens class contradictions. The republican army had a
large number of workers, but for what, with whom and under whose orders
were they fighting? To ask the question is to answer i, unless one considers
it possible to fight the bourgeoisie in an alliance with the bourgeoisic.

“Civil war is the supreme expression of the class struggle” (Their
Morals and Ours, 1938). Trotsky's assertion is right, as long as one adds that
from the so-called Wars of Religion to the Irish or Lebanese convulsions of
our own time, civil war is also, and most often, the form of an impossible.
or failed social struggle, where class contradictions which cannot assert
themselves as such erupt as ideological or ethnic blocs, still further delaying
any human emancipation.

22
Anarchists in the Government

Social Democracy did not “capitulate” in August 1914, like a fighter throwing
in the towel: it followed the normal trjectory of a powerful movement which
was internationalist in ehetoric and which, in realty. had become profoundly
national long before. The SPD may well have been the leading electoral force
in Germany in 1912, but it was powerful only for the purpose of reform.
within the framework of capitalism and according toits lnws, which included.
for example, accepting colonialism, and also war when the latier became the
sole solution to social and poliical contradictions.

In the same way, the integration of Spanish anarchism into the state
in 1936 is only surprising if one forgets its nature: the CNT was a nion, an
original union undoubtedly but a union nonetheless, and there is no such
thing as an anti-union union. Function transforms the organ. Whatever its
original ideals. every permanent organism for defending wage laborers as
such becomes a mediator, and then a conciliator. Exven when it isin the hands
of radicals, even when it is repressed, the instiution is doomed to escape
control of the base and to become a moderating instrument, Anarchist union
though it may have been, the CNT was a union before it was anarchist. A
world separated the rank-and-file from the leader seated at the bosses’ table.
but the CNT as an apparatus was litle different from the UGT. Both of
them worked to modernize and rationally manage the cconomy: in a word.
1o socialize capitalism. A single thread connects the socialst voe for war
eredits in August 1914 to the partcipation in the government of the anarchist
leaders, first in Catalonia (September 1936) and then in the Republic as
whole (November 1936). As early as 1914, Malatesta had called those of
his. comrades (including Kropotkin) who had accepted national defense
“government anarchists”

From one compromise o the next, the CNT wound up renouncing
the anti-statism which was its raison d'etre, even after the Republic and
its Russian ally had shown their real faces and unleashed their fury on the
radicals in May 1937, not to mention in everything that followe. in the jails
and seret cellars. Then, like the POUM, the CNT was all the more effective
in disarming proletarians, calling on them to give up their struggle against
both the official and Stalinist police bent on finishing them off. Some of
them even had the bitter surprisc of being in a prison administered by an old
anarchist comrade, stripped of any real power over what when on in his jail.
In 1938, a CNT delegation which had gone to the Soviet Union requesting
material aid did not even criicize the Moscow tias.

Everything for the anti-fascist struggle.

Everything for cannons and guns.

But even so, some people might object, the anarchists by their very

23

aying in State and Revolution that
one day cooks will administer society instead of polificians. But these same
“Marists” can still practice the most servile state idolatry, once they come.
10 see the state as the slightest agent of progress and of historical necessity.
Because they see the future as a t socialization without capitalists, as
a world still based on wage labor but egalitarian, democratized and planned.
every thing prepares them to accept a state (transitional, t0 be sure) and 0 go
Off to war for a capitalist sate they see as bad, but against another one they

For its part, anarchism overestimates state power by seeing authority
as the main enemy, and thus underestimates it with the belief that state power
can be destroyed by itself. Anarchism does not se the effective role of the
state as the guarantor but not the creator of the wage labor relation. The state
represents and unifies capital, it i neither capital’s motor nor its centerpiece.
Anarchism deduced, from the undeniable fact that the masses were armed, that
the state was losing s substance. But the substance of the state resides not in s
insttutional forms, but in ts unifying function. The state ensures the tie which,
human beings cannot or dare no create among themselves, and cretes a web.
of services which are both parasitic and real. When, in the summer of 1936,
it scemed weak in republican Spain, it subsisted as a framework capable of
picking up the pieces of capitalst society, and it continued to live in hibernation.
Then it awoke and gained new strength when the social relations opened up by
subversion were loosened or were torn apart; it revived the hibernating organs,
and, the occasion permitting, assumed control over those which subversion
had caused to emerge. What had been seen as a mere nuisance showed itself
capable not merely of revival, but of emptying out the parallel forms of power
in which the revolution thought it had best embodied itself

‘The CNT's ultimate justfication of it role comes down to the idea
that the legal government no longer really had power, because the workers"
movement had taken power de facto. *(..) the government has ceased to be a
force oppressing the working class. i the same way that the state is no longer
the organism dividing society into classes” (Solidaridad Obrera, September
1936)

Noless than “Marxism”, anarchism fetshizes the state and imagines
it as being incarnated in a place. Blanqui had already thrown his little flock
into attacks on city halls or on barracks, but he at least never claimed to base
his actions on the proletarian movement, only on a minority which would
awaken the people. A century later, the CNT declared the Spanish state to
be a phantom relative to the tangible reality of the “social organizations”
(ie. militias, unions). But the existence of the state, its raison d'etre, is to
paper over the shoricomings of “civil” society by a system of relations, of

24

links, of concentrations of force, an administrative, police, judicial, military
network which goes “on hold”. as a backup, in times of crisis, awaiting the
moment when police investigators can go sniffing into the files of the social
services. The revolution has no Bastille, police station or governor’s mansion
sitstask is o render harmless or destroy everything from which such
places draw their sustenance

The Failure of the Colledtivizations

‘The depth and breadth of the industrial and agrarian socializations after July
1936 was no historical fluke. Marx noted the Spanish tradition of popular
autonomy, and the gap between the people and the state which made itself
manifest in the anti-Napoleonic war, and then in the revolutions of the
nineteenth century, which renewed age-old communal resistance to the power
of the dynasty The absolute monarchy, he observed, did not shake up various
social strata 1o forge a modern state, but rather had left the living forces of the
country intact. Napoleon could see Spain as a “cadaver”, “but if the Spanish
state was indeed dead, Spanish society was full of life” and “what we call the
state in the modern sense of the word is materialized, in reality, only in the
army, in keeping with the exclusively “provincial” lfe of the people”

In the Spain of 1936, the bourgeois revolution had been made, and it
was vain to dream of scenarios such as 1917, not to mention 1848 or 1789. But
if the bourgeoisie dominated politically, and capital dominated economically,
they were nowhere near the creation of a unified internal market and a modern
state apparatus, the subjugation of society as a whole, and the domination of
local life and its particularisms. For Marx, in 1854, a “despotic” government
coexisted with a lack of unity that extended to the point of different currenci
and different systems of taxation: his observation still had some validity 80
years later. The state was neither able to stimulate industry nor carry out
‘agrarian reform: it could neither extract from agriculture the profits necessary
for capital accumulation, nor unify the regions, nor still less keep down the
proletarians of the cities and the countryside.

It was thus almost naturally that the shock of July 1936 gave rise, on
the margins of political power, 10 a social movement whose realizations with
communist potential were reabsorbed by the state they allowed to remain
intact. The first months of a revolution, already ebbing. but whose extent still
concealed i failure, looked liked nothing so much as a splintering process in
which each region, commune, enterprise, collective and municipality escaped
the central authority without attacking it, and set out 1o live differently.
Anarchism, and even the regionalism of the POUM, express this Spanish
originality within the workers’ movement, which is wrongly grasped if one.

25

sees only the negative side of this “late development” of capitalism. Even the
ebb of 1937 did not eradicate the elan of hundreds of thousands of workers
‘and peasants who took over land, factories, neighborhoods, villages, seizing
property and socializing production with an autonomy and a solidarity in
daily life which struck both observers and participants. Sad to say, if these.
countless acts and deeds, sometimes extending over several years, bear
witness (as do, in their own way, the Russian and German experiences) to .
communist movement remaking all of society, and to its formidable subversive
capacities when it emerges on a large scale, it i equally true that its fate was
sealed from the summer of 1936 onward. The Spanish Civil War proved both
the revolutionary vigor of communitarian bonds and forms which have been
penetrated by capital but which are not yet directly reproduced by capital,
and also their impotence, taken by themselves, in bringing off a revolution.
In the absence of an assault against the state, and of the establishment of
different relationships throughout the country, they condemned themselves
t0a fragmentary self-management preserving the content and even the forms
of capitalism, notably money and the division of activities by individual
enterprise. Any persistence of wage labor perpetuates the hierarchy of
functions and incomes.

‘Communist measures could have undermined the social bases of the
w0 states (republican and nationalist), if only by beginning to resolve the
‘agrarian question: in the thirties, more than half the population was under-
nourished. A subversive force erupted, bringing o the fore the most oppressed
strata, those farthest from “political life” (e.g. women), but it could not go all
the way and eradicate the system root and branch

Atthe time, the workers’ movement in the major industrial countri
corresponded to those regions of the world which had been socialized by a
total domination of capital over society, where communism was both closer
at hand as a result of this socialization, and at the same time farther away
because of the dissolution of all relations into commodity form. The new
world, in these countries, was most commonly conceived as a worker's
world, if not necessarily as an industrial one.

‘The Spanish proletariat, on the contrary, continued to be shaped by
4 capitalist penetration of society that was more quantitative than qualitative
From this reality it drew both ts strength and it weakness, as attested by the
tradition and demands for autonomy represented by anarchism.

“In the last hundred years, there has not been a single uprising in
Andalusia which has not resulted in the creation of communes, the sharing
out of land, the abolition of money and a declaration of independence ()
the anarchism of the workers is not very different. They too demand, first
ofall, the possibiliy of managing their industrial community or their union
themselves, and then the reduction of working hours and of te effort required
from everyone (....

26

Vast numbers of proposals were made, some of them were realized.
and others were initiated. Communism is also the re-appropriation of the
condiions of existence

One of the main weaknesses was the atitude towards money.
‘The “disappearance of money” is meaningful only if it entails more than
the replacement of one instrument for measuring value with another one
(such as labor coupons). But, like the majority of radical groups, whether
they call themselves Marxist or anarchist, Spanish proletarians did not see
money as the expression and abstraction of real relationships, but as a ool of
measurement, an accounting device, and they thereby reduced socialism to a
different management of the same categories and fundamental components
of capitalism.

The failure of the measures taken against commodity relations
was not due to the power of the UGT union (which was opposed to the
collectivizations) over the banks: as if the abolition of money was first of
all something to be undertaken by the centers of power! The closing of
private banks and of the central bank puts an end to mercantile relations
only if production and life are organized in a way no longer mediated by
the’commodity, and if they, on this basis, gradually come to dominate the
totality of social relationships. Money is not the “evil” to be removed from
an otherwise “good” production, but the manifestation (today becoming
increasingly immaterial) of the commodity character of all aspets of life.
It cannot be destroyed by eliminating signs, but only when exchange itself
disappears as a social relationship.

In fact, only agrarian collectives managed to do without money, and
they often did so with the help of local currencies, with coupons often being
used as “internal money”. Unable to extend non-commaodity production
beyond different autonomous zones with 1o scope for global action, the
soviets, collectives and liberated villages were transformed into precarious
communities and sooner or later were cither destroyed from within or
violently suppressed by cither the fascists or the republicans. In Aragon, the
column of the Stalinist Lister made this a specialty. Entering the village of
Calanda, his frst act was to write on a wall: “Collectivizations are theft”.

Collectivize or Communize?

Ever since the First International, anarchism has counterposed the collective
appropriation of the means of production to Social Democratic statification.
Both visions, nonetheless, begin from the same exigency of collective
management. But the problem is: management of what? Of course, what
Social Democracy carried out from above, and bureaucratically, the Spanish

27
proletarians practiced at the base, armed, with each individual responsible
10 everyone, thereby taking the land and the factories away from a minority
specialized in the organizing and exploitation of others. The opposite, in
short, o the co-management the Coal Board by socialist or Stalinist unions.
Nevertheless, the fact that a collectivity. rather than the state or a burcaueracy.
takes the production of its material lif into its own hands does not, by tself.
do away with the capitalist character of that life.

Wage labor means the passage of an activity, whatever it might
be, plowing a field or printing a newspaper, through the form of money.
‘This money, even as it makes the activity possible, is also expanded by it
Equalizing wages, deciding everything collectively, and replacing currency
by coupons has never being enough to eradicate the wage-labor relationship.
What money brings together cannot be free, and sooner or later money
becomes its master.

Substituting association for competition on a local basis was a
‘guaranteed recipe for disaster. Because if the collective did abolish private
property within itself, it also set tself up as a distinct entity and as a particular
element among others in the global economy, and therefore as a private,
collective, compelled to buy and 10 sell, to engage in commerce with the
outside world, thereby becoming in its turn an enterprise which, like it or
not, had 10 play its part in regional, national and world competition, or else
disappear.

‘One can only rejoice in the fact that one part of Spain imploded: what
mainstream opinion calls “anarchy” is the necessary condition for revolution,
as Marx wrote in his own time. But these movements made their subversive
impact on the basis of a centrifugal force which also fed into localism.
Rejuvenated communitarian ties also locked everyone into their village and
their barrio, as if the point were to rediscover a lost world and a degraded
humanity, to counterpose the working-class neighborhood to the metropolis,
the self-managed commune to the vast capitalist domain, the countryside of
the common folk to the commercialized city, in a word the poor to the rich
the small o the large and the local to the international, all the while forgetting
that a cooperative i often the synonym for the longest road to capitalism.

There is no revolution without the destruction of the state: that
the Spanish “lesson”. But be that as it may. a revolution is not a politic:
upheaval, but a social movement in which the destruction of the state and
the elaboration of new mades of debate and decision go hand in hand with
communization. We don't want “power”; we want the power to change all of
life. As an historical process extending over generations, can one imagine,
over such a time frame. continuing to pay wages for food and lodging? If the
revolution is supposed to be political first and social later, it would create an
apparatus whose sole function would b the struggle against the supporters of
the old world, .. a negative function of repression, a system of control resting

28

n o other content than ts “prograrm” and its will to realize communism the
day that conditions finally allow for i. This is how a revolution ideologizes

lf and legitimizes the birth of specialized stratum assigned to oversee the
maturation and the expectation of the ever radiant day after tomorrow. The
very St of politiesis not being able, and not wanting, o change anything:
it brings together what is separated without going any further. Power i there.
it manages, it administers, it oversees, it calms, it epresses: i is. Poliical
domination (in which a whole school of thought sees problem #1) flows
from the incapacty of human beings 10 take charge of themselves, and to
organize thei lives and ther activity. This domsination persists only through
the radical dispossession which characterizes the proletarian. When everyone
participates in the production of their existence, the capacity for pressure
and oppression now in the hands of the state will cease to be operative. It s
because wage-labor society deprives us of our means of living. producing
and communicating, not stopping shortof the invasion of once-private space
and of our emotional lives, that its state s all-powerful. The best guarantee
against the reappearance of a new structure of power over us s the decpest
possible appropriation of the conditions of existence, at every level. For
example, even if we don’t wanl everyone generating ther own clecricty in
their basements, the domination of the Leviathan also comes from the fact that
energy (u significant term, another English word for which is power) makes
us dependent on industrial complexes which, nuclear or not, necessarily
remain external to us and escape any control.

To conceive the destruction of the st as an armed struggle
against the police and the armed forces s to mistake the part for the whole.
‘Communism s firstof all activity. A mode of life in which men and women
produce their social existence paralyzes or reabsorbs the emergence of
separate powers.

Balance Sheet

‘The Spanish failure of 1936-37 is symmetrical to the Russian failure of 1917-
21. The Russian workers were sble to seize power, but not to use it for a.
‘communist transformation. Backwardness, economic ruin and international
isolation by themselves to do not explain the involution. The perspective
set out by Marx, and perhaps applicable in a different way after 1917, of
4 renaissance in a new form of the communal agrarian structures, was at
the time not even thinkable. Leaving aside Lenin’s eulogy for Taylorism,
and Trotsky's justification of military labor, for almost all the Bolsheviks
and the overwhelming majority of the Third International, including the
communist left, socialism meant a capitalist socialization PLUS soviets,

29

and the agriculture of the future was conceived as the large landholdings
managed democratically. (The difference-- and it is a major onel-- between
the German-Dutch left and the Comintern on this question was that the left
took soviets and democracy seriously, whereas the Russian communists--as
their practice proved--saw in them nothing but tactical formulas.

In any case. the Bolsheviks are the best illustration of what happens
toa power which is only a power, and which has to hold on without changing
real conditions very much. Very logically and, at irst,in perfectly good faith,
the state of the soviets perpetuated itself at any cost,frstin the perspective of
world revolution, then for itself, with the absolute priority being to preserve
the unity of a society coming apart at the seams. This explains, on one hand,
the concessions to small peasant property, followed by requisitions, both of
which resulted in a further unraveling of any communal life or production.
‘This explains, on the other hand, the repression against workers and against
any opposition within the party. A power which gets o the point of massacring
the Kronstadt mutineers (who were, for their part, only raising democratic
demands) in the name of a socialism it could not realize, and which goes on
to justify its actions with lies and calumny, is only demonstrating that it no
longer has any communist character. Lenin died his physical death in 1924,
but the revolutionary Lenin had died as head of state in 1921, if not earlier.
‘The Bolshevik leaders were left with no option but to become the managers
of capitalism.

Asthe hypertraphy ofa political perspective hell bent on elimi
the obstacles which it could not subvert, the October Revolution also
dissolved into a self-cannibalizing civil war. Its pathos was that of a power
which, unable to transform society, degenerated into a counter-revolutionary
force. In the Spanish tragedy, the proletarians, because they had left their own
terrain, wound up prisoners of a conflict in which the bourgeoisie and its state
were present behind the front lines on both sides. In 1936-37, the proletarians
of Spain were not fighting against Franco alone, but also against the fascist
countries, against the democracies and the farce of “non-intervention’”
against their own state, against the Soviet Union, against

1936.37 closed the historical moment opened by 1917.

In a future revolutionary period, the most sublle and most dangerous
defenders of capitalism will not be the people shouting pro-capitalst and pro-stat
slogans, but those who have understood the possible point o a total rupture.

Far from eulogizing advertising and obedience, they will propose
to change life... but to that end will call for building a true democratic power
first. IF they succeed in dominating the situation, the creation of this new
political form will use up people’s energies, fritier away radical aspirations
and, with the means becoming the end, will once again turn revolution into an
ideology. Against them, and of course against overtly capitalist reaction, the
proletarians’ only path to success wil be the multiplication and coordinated

30

extensionof concrete communist nitiatives, which will aturally be denounced
as anti-democratic or even as. “The struggle to establish places and
moments for deliberation and decision, making possible the autonomy of the
movement, s inseparable from practical measures aimed at changing lfe.

“(... in all past revolutions, the mode of activity has always
remained intact and the only issue has been a different distribution
of this activity and a redistribution of work among different
persons; whereas the communist revolusion is directed against

the mode of activity as it has existed up till now and abolishes
work and the domination of all lasses by abolishing classes
themselves, because it is carried out by the class which is no
longer, in society, considered as a class and which is already

the expression of the dissolution of all classes and all
nationalies, etc. within society itself (..)"

(Marx, The German Ideology, 1845-46)

31
“The question is not: who has the guns? but rather.
what do the people with the guns do? 10,000 or 100,000
proletarians armed to the teth are nothing if they place
their trust in anything beside their own power 1o change the
world. Otherwise, the next day, the next month or the next
year, the power whose authority they recognize will take
away the guns which they failed to use against i.”

When Insurrections Die
by Gilles Dauvé

This is a reconceived version of “Fascism and Anti-Fascism”.
which Dauvé wrote (under the pen name Jean Barrot) as a preface
10 a selection of artcles on the Spanish Revolution in the French
communist journal Bilan (published in 1979). In this text, Dauvé
draws on the experiences of the revolutionary movements in Russia,
Germany, and Spain to criticize anti-fascism and democracy, and to
draw general conclusions for communists today.

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