Bolshevik thought takes it for granted that truth is its peculiar possession. To Lenin, to Bukharin, to Trotsky, to Preobrajensky, to many another thinker I could mention, the materialist dialectic of Marx and Engels was at one and the same time the law of human thought and the law of the natural development of societies. The party, quite simply, is the custodian of truth; any idea at variance with party doctrine is either pernicious error or backsliding. Here, then, is the source of the party’s intolerance. Because of its unshakable conviction of its exalted mission, it develops astonishing reserves of moral energy—and a theological turn of mind which easily becomes inquisitorial. Lenin’s ‘proletarian Jacobinism’, with its disinterestedness, its discipline in both thought and action, was grafted upon the psychology of cadres whose character had been formed under the old regime—that is to say, in the course of the struggle against despotism. It seems to be unquestionable that Lenin chose as his co-workers men whose temperament was authoritarian. The final triumph of the revolution eased the inferiority-complex of the masses—the always bullied and always downtrodden masses. At the same time, however, it awakened in them a desire for retaliation; and this desire tended to make the new institutions despotic also. I have seen with my own eyes how a man who only yesterday was a worker or sailor gets drunk on the exercise of power—how he delights in reminding others that from now on he’s giving the orders.
Victor Serge
Anarchist, Bolshevik, Trotskyist, Social-democrat: the ideological markers of Victor Serge’s political militancy can serve as a point of criticism, but also as testimony to the vagaries and uncertainties of all revolutionary engagement.
The criticisms of Serge’s political engagements are well known (see, for example, Luiggi Fabri‘s Revolution and Dictatorship, and Daniel Guerin‘s Anarchism), and we will not repeat them here. What we share below, as part of our series of testimonials of the russian revolution of 1917, are his reflections on the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921 against Bolshevik rule (from his Memoirs of a Revolutionary), the suppression of which effectively marked the end of the revolution.
“We were advancing towards a classless society, a society of free men; but the party never missed an opportunity to remind people that “the reign of the workers will never end”. Over whom were the workers to reign then? And that word ‘reign’—what does it mean anyhow? Totalitarianism—and within ourselves!”
Ruymán Rodríguez: Neighbourhood anarchism. A surmounting thesis
If you struggle you can lose
If you don’t struggle you are lost
On a wall in Cordoba
Ruymán Rodríguez‘s “neighbourhood anarchism” is the child of his militant experience in the Federación de Anarquistas Gran Canaria (FAGC). It is an effort to think through the implications of this militancy for the understanding of anarchism, pushing the latter beyond more traditional, and exhausted, ideological and theoretical oppositions, and this without any intellectual or moral arrogance.
The ambition is simple, but far reaching: to invent and clarify a broader and more militant notion of what it is to be an anarchist.
If the concept of a “neighbourhood” is itself vague, Rodríguez’s “neighbourhood” has both historical and social depth (it refers to relatively small human spaces of shared ways of life, bound by common experiences and forms of activity), while remaining sufficiently malleable to capture ways of life that are not exclusively expressive of urban life, or of any particular activity (for example, factory labour). It points then to spaces of commonality, of what has been and what might be. What a neighbourhood can be is that space from which autonomous ways of being gain form.
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