“On March 17th the Communist Government completed its ‘victory’ over the Kronstadt proletariat and on the 18th of March it commemorated the martyrs of the Paris Commune. It was apparent to all who were mute witnesses to the outrage committed by the Bolsheviki that the crime against Kronstadt was far more enormous than the slaughter of the Communards in 1871, for it was done in the name of the Social Revolution, in the name of the Socialist Republic.”

– Emma Goldman[1]

There are a few sure things about reading history books. Firstly, and most obviously, you generally know how it ends (badly, in the case of the Paris Commune). What is important is what you learn from the events discussed. Secondly, when it is a Marxist account you are guaranteed that it will (at best) ignore or (at worse) distort the anarchist involvement and analysis of events. In this, Leninist Donny Gluckstein’s account of the Paris Commune[2] does not disappoint: he both ignores key aspects of the anarchist critique and distorts what parts he does cover.

The Paris Commune is a significant influence for all revolutionary socialists, anarchists as well as Marxists. It should be well known in libertarian circles so there should be no need to discuss its history in any great length. Not only were there “among the Communards Anarchists and Syndicalists of a number of different brands”[3] but Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin saw the Commune as a striking confirmation (in both positive and negative senses) of anarchist ideas. Karl Marx produced his classic Civil War in France immediately after its fall and added what he considered its key lesson – “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”[4] – to the next preface of the Communist Manifesto. Lenin placed it at the heart of his State and Revolution and proclaimed that while “anarchists had tried to claim” it as “a corroboration of their doctrine” in fact they “completely misunderstood its lessons and Marx’s analysis of these lessons.”[5] More recently, Leninist Paul Blackledge has utilised this work to suggest the “problem for Bakunin was that Marx was palpably correct” as “the Commune was a novel form of government and indeed a novel form of state” and so Kropotkin produced “an immanent critique of Bakunin’s analysis of the Commune.”[6]

We will use Gluckstein’s book as means of exploring the lessons from the Commune, to show how anarchist ideas are distorted and how the standard Marxist interpretation he summarises is flawed. It will reaffirm the anarchist influences on the Commune, the place of the Commune in anarchism and the anarchist critique of it. It will also show how implausible Leninist attempts to appropriate it for their tradition are, for, while Gluckstein praises the Commune for introducing “workers’ control of production” and “democracy from below,” (53) he fails to mention the awkward fact that the Bolsheviks abolished both.

Proudhon, Marx and exploitation

While Marx in The Civil War in France failed to mention any intellectual influences on the Commune, so presenting it as something which appeared to spring from nowhere, Gluckstein rightly notes that “for all its daring and forward-looking ideas” it was “not written on a blank sheet.” (85) He follows most historians of the Commune into splitting the Commune’s political influences into three: Jacobin, Blanquist and Proudhonist. The first were radical republicans, inspired by the Jacobins of the Great French Revolution and primarily sought political change, with the social question being addressed later. The Blanquists followed their eponymous hero, Louis Auguste Blanqui, in favouring a party of professional revolutionaries who would seize power in a coup and implement socialism from the top-down. The “Proudhonists” were inspired by the federal socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to call themselves an anarchist, and were a mixed bag, whom Gluckstein rightly splits into right and left wings.

That the Commune was heavily influenced by Proudhon’s ideas should go without saying and the best that can be said of Gluckstein’s account is that he at least acknowledges this by stating that while Marx “played a significant role” in the First International that did “not mean, however, that the French section was full of Marxists. Here the Proudhonists were the most influential current.” (82) However, his discussion of Proudhon’s ideas is a travesty.[7] To be charitable, it simply repeats the standard Marxist analysis of the Frenchman’s ideas so his account is not breaking new ground in distortion. Given how regularly this nonsense is repeated, it is worthwhile contrasting Gluckstein’s account to what the “father of anarchism” actually argued.

The usual Leninist equation of a market economy with capitalism is repeated, with Gluckstein stating Proudhon’s “criticisms of the failings of capitalist society where sharp” but he “did not reject the market system as such.” (72) Confusing capitalism with the market allows Proudhon to be presented as an advocate of wage labour and it is asserted that he market exchange under capitalism was based on freedom and equality:

“It followed that, since the selling of labour was itself a form of commercial operation, when employees went to work for the bosses they were not being exploited because ‘any man’s labour can buy the value it represents.’” (72)

Significantly, Gluckstein quotes Marx quoting Proudhon. Indeed, he rarely quotes Proudhon directly, suggesting a lack of familiarity with the source material for if he were at all familiar with it then he would have known that the anarchist explained how property – wage labour – “violates equality by the rights of exclusion and increase, and freedom by despotism,” resulting in the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist who employed him.[8] Ironically, the passage Marx rips out of context and which Gluckstein regurgitates was Proudhon taunting bourgeois economists on why the surplus produced by labour was not enjoyed by the workers who created it:

“Why do not the economists, if they believe, as they appear to, that the labour of each should leave a surplus, use all their influence in spreading this truth, so simple and so luminous: Each man’s labour can buy only the value which it contains, and this value is proportional to the services of all other workers?”[9]

Proudhon explains why this does not occur under capitalism, how selling their labour and its product ensures workers are exploited by their employers, how it is wage-labour that produces this outcome. So if the “exchange of commodities through a market system” was for Proudhon “fundamentally fair,” it did not follow that “the selling of labour was a form of commercial operation, where employees… were not being exploited.” (72) Showing his utter ignorance of the matter, Gluckstein asserts that “Karl Marx, who studied Proudhon’s work carefully, had a very different analysis which located exploitation at the very heart of the capitalist production process.” (72) In reality, Proudhon had argued that this was the case from 1840 onwards. He was well aware that workers produced a value greater than what they received in wages:

“Whoever labours becomes a proprietor… I do not mean simply (as do our hypocritical economists) proprietor of his allowance, his salary, his wages, – I mean proprietor of the value which he creates, and by which the master alone profits… the worker retains, even after he has received his wages, a natural right of property in the thing which he has produced.”[10]

Compare this to the “Marxist” account Gluckstein provides in which the worker “will normally create during a working day more value than his daily wages with which the capitalist has purchased his or her labour power”. (72) In this, Marx was echoing Proudhon rather than presenting a different analysis:

“I have shown that every labour must leave a surplus; so that, supposing the consumption of the worker to remain constant, his labour should create, on top of his subsistence, an ever greater capital. Under the regime of property, the surplus of labour, essentially collective, passes entirely… to the proprietor”[11]

This, obviously, is a theory of surplus value being produced in production, as recognised by more informed Marxists like John Enrenberg who notes that Proudhon’s ideas were “anticipating what Marx and Engels were later to call the appropriation of surplus value”.[12] This was part of the reason why “property is theft,” the other being that the appropriation of the means of live by the few placed the rest in the position of having to sell their labour (and so its product) to those who did (“We who belong to the proletarian class: property excommunicates us!”[13]). Thus, the theft of the land and workplaces needed by all to produce and live, allowed the theft by the owner of the product and surplus created by labour.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gluckstein fails to mention an essential part of Proudhon’s analysis, namely his concept of “collective force”. This was “[o]ne of the reasons Proudhon gave for rejecting” property, that “collective endeavours produced an additional value” which was “unjustly appropriated by the proprietaire.”[14] Edward Hyams, whom Gluckstein quotes in support of his incorrect account, summarised it well enough even if he did not use the term:

“The proprietor (capitalist)… cheats [his workers] abominably: for he has paid nothing for their collective effort, only for the individual effort of each.”[15]

This is on the page before the one Gluckstein quotes from Hyman’s book: so much for the notion that Proudhon thought “the crime [of theft] did not occur in the labour process.” (72) Marx, incidentally, repeated Proudhon’s analysis of the role of “collective force” in Capital in essentially the same fashion but without acknowledgement.[16]

Gluckstein explains the “Marxist” theory of exploitation in terms of “the difference between the value created by labour power once it is put to work, and the value of labour power itself”. (73) Yet Proudhon had raised this in 1846 when he noted labour “is a thing vague and indeterminate in its nature, but qualitatively defined by its object – that is, it becomes a reality through its product.”[17] Marx, ironically, “made some disparaging remarks about this passage” yet this “anticipated an idea that Marx was to develop as one of the key elements in the concept of labour power, viz. that as a commodity, labour produces nothing and it exists independently of and prior to the exercise of its potential to produce value as active labour.”[18] Likewise Marx is quoted from 1871 on the “despotism of capital over labour” (97) yet Gluckstein fails to mention Proudhon’s “property is despotism” from 1840.[19] This is unfortunate because it was this despotism which allowed exploitation to occur as workers “have sold their arms and parted with their liberty” when they become an employee. [20] Proudhon, then, was well aware of the oppressive nature of wage labour:

“Thus, property, which should make us free, makes us prisoners. What am I saying? It degrades us, by making us servants and tyrants to one another.

“Do you know what it is to be a wage-worker? To work under a master, watchful of his prejudices even more than of his orders… Not to have any thought of your own… to know no stimulus except your daily bread, and the fear of losing your job!

“The wage-worker is a man to whom the proprietor who hires his services gives this speech: What you have to do does not concern you at all: you do not control it”[21]

Moreover, he linked rising inequality to the exploitation produced by the hierarchical relationship created in the capitalist workplace.

“I have shown the entrepreneur, at the birth of industry, negotiating on equal terms with his comrades, who have since become his workers. It is plain, in fact, that this original equality was bound to disappear through the advantageous position of the master and the dependence of the wage-workers.”[22]

Proudhon clearly saw exploitation occurring in the workplace and so his “position that property is theft locates a fundamental antagonism between producers and owners at the heart of modern society. If the direct producers are the sole source of social value which the owners of capital are expropriating, then exploitation must be the root cause of... inequality.”[23] Indeed, he linked his analysis of how exploitation occurred within production – by the appropriation of the “collective force” by the capitalist – with his calls for both association (“By virtue of the principle of collective force, workers are the equals and associates of their leaders”[24]) and socialisation (“All human labour being the result of collective force, all property becomes, by the same reason, collective and undivided”[25])

Gluckstein does, in passing, acknowledge Proudhon’s actual position by noting that big capitalists “could be excluded from commodity production through mutualism, or workers’ co-operatives.” (75) If Proudhon really thought that exploitation did not occur within the workplace then why did he advocate co-operatives? Why did he consistently argue for the abolition of wage labour? Simply because, contra Gluckstein, Proudhon knew that “industrial democracy”, in which “all positions are elective, and the by-laws subject to the approval of the members,” would ensure that “the collective force, which is a product of the community, ceases to be a source of profit to a small number of managers” and becomes “the property of all the workers.” Thus “workers’ associations... are full of hope both as a protest against wage-labour, and as an affirmation of reciprocity” and their importance lies “in the negation of the capitalist regime.” His aim was “Capitalist and landlord exploitation stopped everywhere, wage-labour abolished, equal and just exchange guaranteed.”[26]

So even a basic awareness of his ideas would be sufficient to recognise that Gluckstein’s claim that, for Proudhon, exploitation “did not occur in the labour process” and so it “must come from outside of the commercial or capitalist relations, through force and fraud” (72) is nonsense. The notion that Proudhon was not against wage labour simply cannot stand even a superficial look at his works.[27]

Proudhon and Associational Socialism

Like Marx,[28] Proudhon was well aware that the “market system” was not identical to capitalism, that “capitalist society” was marked by wage labour and that such an economic system was not the end of social evolution.[29] Like Marx, he repeatedly called for the abolition of wage labour (hence his consistent support for co-operatives).

Gluckstein obscures this by his flawed account of the Associational Socialism then predominant within the French labour movement. He is keen to assign the idea of socialism based on co-operatives to Louis Blanc whom he claims “originally promoted” the idea and his ideas were “attractive to people in small workshops that operated with minimum machinery” for in these cases it was superficially plausible that the co-operatives “could win in competition with the capitalist system.” This is dismissed as “classic reformism” and doomed to failure due to “industrial development [having] rendered it impossible to out-compete the capitalist.” Marx is quoted approvingly indicating that a “workers’ government” was needed to foster a national production based on a common plan. (197-8)

This is wrong for three reasons.

The first is that Blanc did not think that co-operatives, by themselves, could out-compete capitalism. He was of the opinion it was “necessary to use the whole power of the state” to achieve the organisation of labour for what “the proletarians lack to free themselves are the tools of labour” and “these the government must furnish them.” The state “should place itself resolutely at the head of industry” and “would constitute itself, by and by, as master of industry and in the place of monopoly we have obtained… association.”[30] That Gluckstein seems unaware of Blanc’s actual position is strange as it is well-established in the secondary literature. Moreover, if he had consulted the writings of Proudhon, he would have discovered the repeated criticising of Blanc’s system because it was state run and financed. This centralised form of association was denounced as a new form of wage-labour in which simply mean replacing capitalists with bureaucrats. As history shows, Proudhon was right.[31]

The second is that other socialists recognised the need for associations to replace wage-labour. Proudhon had also popularised the idea of workers associations (co-operatives) as the basis of socialism from 1840 onwards when he had stated managers “must be chosen from the workers by the workers themselves”[32]. While 1851’s General idea of the Revolution is particularly strong on this, it can be found in almost all of his works.[33] For Proudhon, the workplace must be run by “industrial associations, small worker republics” and so “industrial democracy must follow industrial feudalism.”[34] As Dorothy W. Douglas correctly noted, “the co-operative movement... syndicalism... guild socialism... all bear traces of the kind of self-governing industrial life to which Proudhon looked forward.”[35]

The third, and most importantly, is that Blanc – like Proudhon – did not originate the idea of workers associations. While Gluckstein misdates the publication of Blanc’s influential work (The Organisation of Labour) to 1847 rather than 1840,[36] the fact is that “Associationism” was born during the wave of strikes and protests unleashed by the 1830 revolution. That year saw Parisian printers, for example, producing a newspaper (L’Artisan: Journal de la classe ouvrière) which suggested that the only way to stop being exploited by a master was for workers to form co-operatives. During the strikes of 1833, this was echoed by other skilled workers and so co-operatives were seen by many workers as a method of emancipation from wage labour long before Blanc put pen to paper.[37]

In other words, Blanc and Proudhon simply took up the ideas expressed by workers and interpreted them in different ways. This is important because simply acknowledging that other socialist thinkers raised the idea of workers co-operatives as an alternative to wage-labour still gives credence to Lenin’s notion that the working class could not come up with socialist ideas by themselves.[38] The opposite is the case with, for example Proudhon picking up the term Mutualisme from the workers in Lyon in the early 1840s and their ideas of co-operative credit, exchange and production influenced him as surely as his influenced the Lyon workers. Thus, there was “close similarity between the associational ideal of Proudhon... and the program of the Lyon Mutualists” and “it is likely that Proudhon was able to articulate his positive program more coherently because of the example of the silk workers of Lyon. The socialist ideal that he championed was already being realised, to a certain extent, by such workers.”[39]

Then there is the usual Marxist nonsense that “Proudhon wanted to return society to an earlier golden age.” (73) In reality, he did not and he championed association precisely to accommodate the development of industry and large-scale production.[40] Yet, he was also well aware that in the France of his time artisans and peasants predominated and so any serious socialist theory and movement had to recognise this fact. Gluckstein knows this, as he admits that, in 1871, “[o]lder forms of production predominated” as well as “the prevalence of artisans and handicraft production” in Paris and elsewhere in France. (69) Yet this does stop Gluckstein – like Engels before him – labelling Proudhon anachronistic in spite of him advocating ideas applicable to the economic structure he lived in rather than, as with Marx, ones that only became predominant decades after his death. Rather than being and backward looking, Proudhon tailored his ideas to the economy he faced. As Daniel Guérin summarised long ago:

“Proudhon really moved with the times and realized that it is impossible to turn back the clock. He was realistic enough to understand that ‘small industry is as stupid as petty culture’ and recorded this view in his Carnets. With regard to large-scale modern industry requiring a large labour force, he was resolutely collectivist: ‘In future, large-scale industry and wide culture must be the fruit of association.’ ‘We have no choice in the matter,’ he concluded, and waxed indignant that anyone had dared to suggest that he was opposed to technical progress.

“In his collectivism he was, however, as categorically opposed to statism. Property must be abolished. The community (as it is understood by authoritarian communism) is oppression and servitude. Thus Proudhon sought a combination of property and community: this was association. The means of production and exchange must be controlled neither by capitalist companies nor by the State… they must be managed by associations of workers”[41]

Indeed, it could have been Proudhon talking when a club meeting in Paris proclaimed the commune “will place its contracts with workers’ associations which will replace the big bosses, the great companies (railway companies in particular…)” and “organise the democratic and social Republic.” (104) After all, as Proudhon recalled in 1851:

“I said one day, in February or March 1849, at a meeting of patriots, that I rejected equally the construction and management of railroads by companies of capitalists and by the State. In my opinion, railroads are in the field of workers’ companies, which are different from the present commercial companies, as they must be independent of the State.”[42]

While grudgingly admitting that “Proudhon’s criticisms of the failing of capitalist society were sharp and won him many converts,” Gluckstein also asserts, with casual abandon, that Proudhon’s ideas are “easily recognisable as the precursor of neo-liberal economics today. But Proudhon’s ideas were located in a different context and so took a far more radical form when adopted by the male artisan class.” (72) Since when did neo-liberalism refrain from using the state to impose its reforms and skew the market in favour of the capitalist class? When has the capitalist state ever left working class people alone when they act for themselves? Equally, when has an advocate of neo-liberal economics ever argued that laissez-faire capitalism meant “the victory of the strong over the weak, of those who have over those who have not”? Or denounced capitalist firms because they result in “the worker [being] subordinated, exploited: his permanent condition is one of obedience” and so people are related as “subordinates and superiors” with “two... castes of masters and wage-workers, which is repugnant to a free and democratic society” and urged co-operatives to replace them? Or suggested that “workers’ association will remain a utopia as long as government does not understand that it must not perform public services itself or convert them into corporations but entrust them by term lease at a fixed rate to companies of united and responsible workers.”[43] Like Marx Proudhon was well aware of the role economics played in defending, justifying, rationalising capitalism: “Political economy – that is, proprietary despotism – can never be in the wrong: it must be the proletariat.”[44] Unsurprisingly, Proudhon had nothing but contempt for the neo-liberals of his time and they for him.[45]

Given that Gluckstein seems to draw almost exclusively from secondary sources to create his account of Proudhon’s ideas, it comes as no surprise that he utilises a quote by Proudhon via the unreliable J. Salwyn Schapiro[46] to suggest Proudhon was opposed to “common ownership” when, in reality, his source wilfully mistranslates the word communauté (community). (75) What Proudhon meant by “community” is well-known as is his reasons for opposing it (although Gluckstein fails to mention both) and it was not common ownership but rather the State control which nationalisation created that he opposed.[47] This can be seen when he argued that mutualism is “association, which is the annihilation of property” for while “the use” of wealth “may be divided” as “property [it] remains undivided” and so “the land [is] common property” and capital is “common or collective.”[48] As he put it during the 1848 Revolution:

“under universal association, ownership of the land and of the instruments of labour is social ownership… We want … democratically organised workers’ associations… that vast federation of companies and societies woven into the common cloth of the democratic and social Republic.”[49]

So Proudhon was also for associations of associations. Fifteen years later, in 1863, he called this system an “agricultural-industrial federation” in The Federative Principle and this “summarised” all of his economic ideas “developed over the last twenty-five years.”[50] Even Gluckstein cannot ignore this, noting that for Proudhon “the many tiny[51] economic units would federate together... group into local communes... and then upwards into regional and finally national federations” (75) Still, he does manage to do better than Engels who proclaimed Proudhon “regarded association with positive hatred” and so “combin[ing] all these associations into one great union” was “the direct opposite of the Proudhon doctrine.”[52]

In summary, Proudhon favoured workers’ co-operatives (or association) as he was well aware that bosses kept part of the value produced by workers. That Gluckstein does not know this basic fact shows the superficial nature of his critique. Dependent on a selective reading of secondary sources, he ironically confirms the comments of one such author he quotes: “since [Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy] no good Marxists have had to think about Proudhon. They have what is mother’s milk to them, an ex cathedra judgement.”[53]

Proudhon and the State

Gluckstein’s use of secondary sources ensures that he misrepresents Proudhon on numerous subjects beyond his economic theories. In terms of his political ideas, an unwillingness to discuss why Proudhon held these views adds to the problems this approach inherently creates.

As an example of the former, Gluckstein utilises (74) Schapiro’s hostile and inaccurate article to provide his readers with a quote from Proudhon: “All this democracy disgusts me… What would I not give to sail into this mob with clenched fists!” Yet consulting the letter this is from, it quickly becomes clear that Schapiro is wilfully quoting Proudhon out-of-context to bolster his preposterous suggestion that he was a “harbinger” of fascism. In reality, Proudhon was bemoaning how others on the left were attacking him as “a false democrat, a false friend of progress, a false republican” due to his critical position on Polish independence. Unlike most of the rest of the left, Proudhon opposed the creation of a Polish state as it would not be a democracy but rather run by the nobility and so would “catholic, aristocratic, [and] divided into castes”.[54] Context shows that Proudhon is making an ironic comment about those on the left who violate their own stated democratic principles by supporting the creation of such a feudal regime. Likewise “this mob” does not refer to “the people” as Schapiro and Gluckstein sought to suggest but rather to a group of Proudhon’s critics: Schapiro made no attempt to indicate the change in subject nor, for that matter, even the change of page![55]

He relies on Schapiro’s hostile and inaccurate article for other false assertions, not least that Proudhon “favoured war”[56] (216) when in fact the work in question (1861’s La guerre et la paix) sought to explain how war could be ended once and for all, finishing with the cry “HUMANITY DOES NOT WANT ANY MORE WAR.”[57] He likewise utilises Schapiro for his summary of Proudhon’s position on Louis-Napoleon’s coup, noting that it was “bizarre” and expressed in “a pamphlet with the extraordinary title The Social Revolution Demonstrated by the Coup d’état" (74-5) when what is “bizarre” and “extraordinary” is judging a book (not “a pamphlet”) by its title. Suffice to say, Gluckstein’s summary leaves a lot to be desired (like Schapiro’s[58]). For Proudhon, the coup “demonstrated” the Social Revolution only in-so-far as it showed that the situation before December 1851 could not be maintained and that some kind of change was possible, whether positive or negative. This, in turn, meant that Louis-Bonaparte had two options – embrace the social and democratic revolution (and so end his personal power) or embrace reaction (and so maintain his personal power).[59] Or, in the words of its final chapter, “Anarchy or Caesarism.”[60] That Louis-Bonaparte chose the latter was perhaps unsurprising and while Proudhon’s work is hardly his best, it arguments are not even summarised by Gluckstein who clearly has only read its title.

As well as showing the dangers of insufficient research – or doing as little research as needed to confirm your assumptions or prejudices – this also highlights a key flaw of Gluckstein’s account of both Proudhon’s ideas and the anarchist critique of the Commune. Simply put, he does not explain why Proudhon opposed the state and argued against political action. Given that the reason he held these positions feeds directly into the anarchist critique of the Commune, it is doubly unfortunate that it is not discussed.

Gluckstein does quote Proudhon arguing that “the social question can only be resolved by you, by you alone, without the assistance of power.”[61] (74) So why did Proudhon stress self-organisation and change from below? This was because he recognised that the state (“power”) was run by capital. As he put it, to “conduct this offensive and defensive war against the proletariat a public force was indispensable” and this “finds itself inevitably enchained to capital and directed against the proletariat.”[62] Forgetting that Proudhon successfully stood for election, Gluckstein uses out-of-context quotes to bolster the claim that “the idea of any working class political involvement enraged him.” (74) Yet his experiences in Parliament are of note when seeking to understand and explain his position – particularly when Proudhon explicitly uses them to confirm his earlier analysis of the class nature of the state, as he did in his 1849 work Confessions of a Revolutionary.[63]

Thus, his critique of the State was built on a clear understanding of its class nature and basis, that the Republic “is nothing but the offensive and defensive alliance of those who possess, against those who do not possess”, a “coalition of the barons of property, commerce and industry against the disinherited lower class.” A centralised, unitarian, indivisible republic creates a division between rulers and ruled and so “the citizen has nothing left but the power of choosing his rulers by a plurality vote.” Thus France was “a quasi-democratic Republic” in which citizens “are permitted, every third or fourth year, to elect, first, the Legislative Power, second, the Executive Power. The duration of this participation in the Government for the popular collectivity is brief... The President and the Representatives, once elected, are the masters; all the rest obey. They are subjects, to be governed and to be taxed, without surcease.”[64] It “no sooner exists than it creates an interest of its own, apart from and often contrary to the interests of the people; because, acting then in that interest, it makes civil servants its own creatures, from which results nepotism, corruption, and little by little to the formation of an official tribe, enemies of labour as well as of liberty.”[65]

The centralisation (unité, unity) of the “indivisible republic” was not a neutral form of social organisation but rather “the cornerstone of bourgeois despotism and exploitation.”[66] It was needed to secure bourgeois rule:

“And who benefits from this regime of unity? The people? No, the upper classes… Unity… is quite simply a form of bourgeois exploitation under the protection of bayonets. Yes, political unity, in the great States, is bourgeois: the positions which it creates, the intrigues which it causes, the influences which it cherishes, all that is bourgeois and goes to the bourgeois.”[67]

Given that even a democracy was enchained to capital and could not be captured, Proudhon turned to the working class economic self-organisation so that “a new society be founded in the heart of the old society” and by this “combat and reduce power, to put it in its proper place in society, [for] it is of no use to change the holders of power or introduce some variation into its workings: an agricultural and industrial combination must be found by means of which power, today the ruler of society, shall become its slave.” [68]

This is something that Gluckstein, in theory, is aware of. He notes that “the communards had no doubt of the limitations of suffrage operating where capitalist economics was dominant.” (46) Which is exactly why the various shades of “Proudhonists” were either against standing or hesitant about in elections. As history shows, social democracy failed to live up to the hopes of Marx and became as reformist as Bakunin had warned.[69] Gluckstein himself notes that these parties “end up running the capitalist system” (204) and so have “foundered on the state machine, the British Labour Party being one example. These movements thought they could use the existing power structures to bring about the changes they wanted.” (63) Yet he fails to link this end with the means used, with the awkward fact those parties had following Marx’s call to take part in “political action” and organise as a political party rather than as a militant union movement desired by the “Collectivists” in the International.

Likewise, Proudhon was not convinced that any centralised state socialist structure would be anything other than state capitalism: “We do not want expropriation by the State of the mines, canals and railways; it is still monarchy, still wage-labour.”[70] Again, this was the case with Labour’s nationalisation and, of course, under Lenin, Trotsky and then Stalin. As he had predicted, if government is substituted for private ownership, then “nothing is changed but the stockholders and the management; beyond that, there is not the least difference in the position of the workers.”[71] Replacing the private boss with a public bureaucrat did not create socialism.

This was why Proudhon advocated political, economic and social federalism so that “no longer do we have the abstraction of people’s sovereignty as in the ’93 Constitution and the others that followed it, and in Rousseau’s Social Contract. Instead it becomes an effective sovereignty of the labouring masses which rule and govern... the labouring masses are actually, positively and effectively sovereign: how could they not be when the economic organism – labour, capital, property and assets – belongs to them entirely”.[72] As well as economic association and federalism, Proudhon also urged community federalism and Gluckstein does admit that a “federation of communes” – “Free France, that is communal France in federal form,” as one Communard put it (52) – would “replace the state, as Proudhon had envisaged.” (101) Yet at the same time he asserts that “Proudhon’s approach was to focus on economics alone” and “the state had to be disregarded.” (74) Proudhon, though, was not indifferent to the State and sought ways to undermine it until such time as it would disappear – he simply recognised that political action instead of popular pressure and economic transformation from below would never result in real change. Given the subsequent history of capitalism, he seems to have had a point.

Thus it is simply untrue to claim that Proudhon “held back from dealing with the core of the system – the exploitation at the heart of the capitalist-worker relationship, and the state which exists to protect that exploitative process.” (76) He was well aware that the state was a capitalist tool and that wage labour lead to exploitation.

“Left Proudhonists” or Collectivists?

Rather than being at odds with Associational Socialism, Proudhon was one of its most influential advocates. His ideas found expression in working class circles during and after his lifetime and when Proudhon expressed support for workers associations as the basis of libertarian socialism he was not expressing new ideas but rather expressing a common perspective developed within working class circles and this was later reflected in the Continental European sections of the First International and within the Commune.

It comes as no surprise, then, that during the Commune, numerous workers urged the Council to promote co-operatives as the means of solving the “social question.” The Communal Council itself decreed that workshops whose owners had fled should be given to “the co-operative association of workers who were employed there.” (30) Like Proudhon, it raised the possibility that all large workplaces would be turned over to workers’ associations. However, the Commune (like Proudhon) was fundamentally gradualist in its approach. This failure to take a revolutionary approach was highlighted by Bakunin and subsequent libertarians as a key flaw in the Commune.

Gluckstein does seem to contradict himself by providing some praise for Proudhon, noting that the “strengths of Proudhon’s approach – his anti-authoritarianism and stress on self-organisation by the working class – were adapted” by his followers. (75) This is a significant improvement on, say, Engels who considered “anti-authoritarianism” as being total nonsense and inapplicable to modern society.[73] He also notes that “Proudhonism had deep roots in the working class movement and laid stress on action from below.” (83) This is an improvement on Lenin who argued that “the organisational principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy... strives to proceed from the top downward.”[74]

After Proudhon’s death, militants influenced by him revised and developed many of his ideas. Based on their experiences, many became (like Eugène Varlin) organisers of trade unions and strikes as well as rejecting his patriarchal notions. Gluckstein labels these “Left Proudhonists” (134-5) but a far better term would be “collectivists” – what Bakunin initially called his politics before taking up the term anarchist. Like the French militants, Bakunin favoured collective ownership, economic struggles and strikes, the expropriation of capital by unions and a decentralised, federal social organisation based on communes and workplace associations. Yet this is hardly a radical departure as may appear at first for these militants sought to extend Proudhon’s “agricultural and industrial combination” from just co-operative credit and workplaces to trade unionism. That Proudhon had rejected this position does not mean denying the obvious links between the “left mutualists” (collectivists) and his ideas.

By not presenting accurate account of Proudhon’s ideas, Gluckstein also presents a false picture of the theoretical influences within the International and inflates that of Marx in the process. As G.D.H. Cole notes, the French Internationalists, including Varlin, were “strongly hostile to centralisation. They were federalists, intent on building up working-class organisations on a local basis and then federating the local federations. The free France they looked forward was to be a country made up of locally autonomous communes, freely federated for common purposes which required action over larger areas... In this sense they were Anarchists.” Varlin “had at bottom a great deal more in common with Proudhon than with Marx” and had a “Syndicalist outlook.”[75]

To quote Varlin himself, unions have “the enormous advantage of making people accustomed to group life and thus preparing them for a more extended social organisation. They accustom people not only to get along with one another and to understand one another, but also to organise themselves, to discuss, and to reason from a collective perspective.” As well as mitigating capitalist exploitation and oppression in the here and now, the unions also “form the natural elements of the social edifice of the future; it is they who can be easily transformed into producers associations; it is they who can make the social ingredients and the organisation of production work.”[76]

While such views can be found in Bakunin’s writings, nothing like this can be seen in Marx’s so Gluckstein suggesting the correspondence between Marx and Varlin “is surely significant” in refuting the “[m]any recent historians [who] feel the need to deny any Marxist influence in Paris” (210) is clutching at straws. The notion that Varlin was a Marxist cannot be squared with him warning that “placing everything in the hands of a highly centralised, authoritarian state... would set up a hierarchic structure from top to bottom of the labour process”. Rejecting state ownership he had, like Proudhon, suggested that “the only alternative is for workers themselves to have the free disposition and possession of the tools of production... through co-operative association”.[77]

As can be seen, Varlin’s position was close to Bakunin’s – perhaps the fact that Marx also corresponded with the Russian Anarchist shows a “Marxist influence” in his ideas? This is an example of the many times Gluckstein seeks to bolster Marx’s influence in a revolution and an International section were little existed. Yet, the similarities with Bakunin’s ideas are obvious, although go unmentioned by Gluckstein as Marxists regularly ignore the obvious links between Bakunin’s ideas and what later became known as syndicalism.[78] Unsurprisingly, when Bakunin met Varlin at the International’s Basel Congress and, “once the program of the Alliance was explained to” Varlin, he said he “shared the same ideas and agreed to co-ordinate with their revolutionary plans.”[79] “Varlin and the French Bakuninists,” George Woodcock notes, “had also [like the syndicalists] recognised before the Paris Commune the role of the trade unions in social struggle, and the general strike.”[80]

Equally, Gluckstein considers Varlin’s work in overthrowing the Empire as being in contradiction with Proudhon’s apolitical stance. Yet he forgets that Proudhon built barricades and utilised the skills of his trade to print the first Republican proclamation in the 1848 revolution and, of course, successfully stood for election a few months later (although the experience did, as noted, confirm his anti-parliamentarianism). Likewise, Anarchists are well aware that republics can offer more opportunity for activity than dictatorships, that the “most imperfect republic is a thousand times better than the most enlightened monarchy… The democratic system gradually educates the masses to public life”[81] and so the “International does not reject politics of a general kind; it will be compelled to intervene in politics so long as it is forced to struggle against the bourgeoisie. It rejects only bourgeois politics.”[82]Anarchists took part in the protests which overthrew the Tsar in February 1917[83] as well as in Spain, 1931 (for example). The key is that they participated in such events to push them further, to turn them into social revolutions rather than purely political ones.[84] This was the position of Kropotkin during the 1905 Russian Revolution: “Together with the whole Russian people we fight against autocracy. At the same time, we have to work in order to broaden our struggle and fight simultaneously against capital and against the government.”[85] This was Varlin’s position as well when he noted that “for us political revolution and social revolution are interdependent” and “in view of all the obstacles we now meet we feel that it will be impossible for us to organise the social revolution so long as we live under a government as authoritarian as the present one.”[86]

For Engels in 1891, “the Commune was the grave of the Proudhon school of socialism.”[87] Yet the evidence suggests otherwise – the “Proudhon school” had transformed long before March 1871 and continued to do so afterwards in the form of Collectivism. Varlin, in other words, was part of the general development on the libertarian movement from reformist mutualism towards revolutionary collectivism, from Proudhon to Bakunin (so to speak). For Bakunin, his ideas were “Proudhonism widely developed and pushed to these, its final consequences.”[88] However, this is not to say that without Bakunin this would not have happened for Varlin “seems to have moved independently towards his collectivist position.”[89] In other words, Bakunin became influential because he was part of a general development within Internationalist circles, ideas which he helped deepen but was also influenced by.

So, given Varlin’s links with Bakunin and the similarities in their politics, Gluckstein is right to state that “Varlin showed what could be achieved” (84) but not in the sense he meant it. It was precisely the rise of the “collectivism” which Bakunin and Varlin subscribed to which finally forced Marx to move the General Council to America.[90]

“the form at last discovered…”?

For Marx, the Commune was “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour.” He praised such features as the Communal Council being made up of delegates who were “at any time revocable and bound by the mandat impératif (formal instructions) of his constituents,” that it was a “working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time” and that “the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia.”[91] Marx is paraphrased by Gluckstein: “What made the Parisian democratic structure so different?” Simply that its representatives “were ‘at all times revocable’ so delegates could not stray from the mandate of their electors.” (199) The creation of a militia is also praised as it meant that state “force was fundamentally different” and so “turned the very principles of the state upside down”. (51)

Yet while the Communards had applied these forms it is false to suggest, as Marx does, that they had come entirely out of the blue. In fact, the Paris Commune applied ideas which anarchists had been discussing for some time. Proudhon, for example, raised the idea of representatives with binding mandates being elected to executive and legislative assemblies during the 1848 revolution:

“It is up to the National Assembly, through organisation of its committees, to exercise executive power, just the way it exercises legislative power… Besides universal suffrage and as a consequence of universal suffrage, we want implementation of the binding mandate. Politicians balk at it! Which means that in their eyes, the people, in electing representatives, do not appoint mandatories but rather abjure their sovereignty! That is assuredly not socialism: it is not even democracy.”[92]

The vision of a free society being a federation of communes was discussed by Proudhon in his 1863 book The Federative Principle. Bakunin repeated the same vision of a federal system of communes based on mandated and revocable delegates in 1868:

“the Alliance of all labour associations... will constitute the Commune... there will be a standing federation of the barricades and a Revolutionary Communal Council... [made up of] delegates... invested with binding mandates and accountable and revocable at all times... all provinces, communes and associations... [will] delegate deputies to an agreed place of assembly (all... invested with binding mandated and accountable and subject to recall), in order to found the federation of insurgent associations, communes and provinces”[93]

What of abolishing the army and replacing it with a militia? For Gluckstein, the idea of a militia “owed nothing to... Proudhon’s anarchist rejection of the state... The federation wanted to replace the permanent army with a workers’ militia... That completely subverted the idea of the state as something imposing its will upon society from above.” (114) This is not true, as Proudhon did suggest in 1848 that it was “necessary to disarm the powers that be” by ending military conscription and “organis[ing] a citizens’ army”. It “is the right of the citizens to appoint the hierarchy of their military chiefs, the simple soldiers and national guards appointing the lower ranks of officers, the officers appointing their superiors.” In this way “the army retains its civic feelings” while the People “organise its military in such a way as to simultaneously guarantee its defence and its liberties, while waiting for the nations to agree to terminate the armed peace.”[94]

As a reformist Proudhon did not address the issue of defence of a revolution but the revolutionary Bakunin built upon his call for a democratic militia:

“Immediately after established governments have been overthrown, communes will have to reorganise themselves along revolutionary lines... In order to defend the revolution, their volunteers will at the same time form a communal militia. But no commune can defend itself in isolation. So it will be necessary to radiate revolution outward, to raise all of its neighbouring communes in revolt... and to federate with them for common defence.”[95]

So the awkward fact is that anarchists had been advocating the organisational forms Gluckstein praises the Commune for implementing since Proudhon in the 1840s and developed by Bakunin in the 1860s. Nothing similar can be found in Marx until after the Commune. As K.J. Kenafick notes:

“the programme [the Commune] set out is... the system of Federalism, which Bakunin had been advocating for years, and which had first been enunciated by Proudhon. The Proudhonists... exercised considerable influence in the Commune. This ‘political form’ was therefore not ‘at last’ discovered; it had been discovered years ago; and now it was proven to be correct by the very fact that in the crisis the Paris workers adopted it almost automatically, under the pressure of circumstance, rather than as the result of theory, as being the form most suitable to express working class aspirations.”[96]

So, clearly, the major influence in terms of “political vision” of the Commune was anarchism. The “rough sketch of national organisation which the Commune had no time to develop”[97] which Marx praises but does not quote was written by a follower of Proudhon and it expounded a clearly federalist and “bottom-up” organisational structure.[98] Based on this libertarian revolt, it is unsurprising that Marx’s defence of it took on a libertarian twist.

That the ideas generated by workers in struggle reflected Bakunin’s predictions is not to suggest that the Internationalists influenced by him somehow injected these ideas into the struggle. Rather, both groups of people, subject to much the same experiences as well as theoretical discussions and influences, drew similar conclusions from them. So, indeed, “[b]y the end of 1870 the vision of a Commune as a complete alternative to the existing power was emerging from club discussions” (104) and these discussions were influenced by Internationalists just as they were influenced by them. Which disproves the Leninist assumption that the masses could not develop socialist consciousness on their own.

The Anarchist Critique

In his discussion of the champions of the Commune, Gluckstein does at least acknowledge that anarchists have analysed it and claimed it as expressing our ideas. He gives slightly less than two pages to the subject (what he terms the feminist critique is covered in more depth). It is, at best, perfunctory and superficial and, at worse, simply false and self-contradictory while, at the same time, he also unwittily shows that it is correct.

The presentation of what Gluckstein terms the “anarchist interpretation” of the Commune starts badly, with the author asserting that “Anarchists believe that the Commune cannot be described as a workers’ government, because it abolished the very concept of government” (184) and quotes both Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s most famous essays on the Paris Commune as evidence. Yet, regardless of Gluckstein’s assertions, Anarchists believe no such thing – as these very essays prove.

Central to the anarchist critique is precisely that one of the key problems with the Commune was that it retained a government within Paris while proclaiming the free federation of communes outside it. This was Bakunin’s position, who while proclaiming that “revolutionary socialism has just attempted its first striking and practical demonstration in the Paris Commune” and “show[ed] to all enslaved peoples (and are there any masses that are not slaves?) the only road to emancipation” also noted that the Communards had “set up a revolutionary government” and so organised “themselves in a Jacobin manner, forgetting or sacrificing the first conditions of revolutionary socialism.”[99] Kropotkin repeated and extended this analysis as admitted by Gluckstein himself: “One of Kropotkin’s complaints against the Commune was precisely that the masses co-operated with the centralised power they had created at the Hotel de Ville.” (184-5) He even quotes Kropotkin arguing that “[t]here is no more reason for a government inside the commune than for a government outside.” (185) In spite of this, he does not ask the obvious question: if this is the case, how could Anarchists think that the commune “abolished” government?

As Gluckstein cannot bring himself to present the anarchist critique, it is useful to summarise it here by taking Kropotkin’s analysis as the starting point. It has two main aspects, which Kropotkin summarised in a few words: “the Commune was not Communistic enough… the Commune was not Anarchist enough.”[100]

First, the Commune “treated the economic question as a secondary one, which would be attended to later on, after the triumph of the Commune” when “the triumph of a popular Commune was materially impossible without a parallel triumph of the people in the economic field.” Second, that while “proclaiming the free Commune, the people of Paris proclaimed an essential anarchist principle” but “they stopped mid-course” and gave “themselves a Communal Council copied from the old municipal councils.” The Commune did not “break with the tradition of the State, of representative government, and it did not attempt to achieve within the Commune that organisation from the simple to the complex it inaugurated by proclaiming the independence and free federation of the Communes.” This resulted in the revolutionaries being isolated from the masses in the town hall, “immobilised... by red tape” and losing “the sensitivity that comes from continued contact with the masses... Paralysed by their distancing from the revolutionary centre – the people – they themselves paralysed the popular initiative.”[101]

Totally missing the point of the anarchist critique, Gluckstein opines that “[i]f the Commune had only been a moment from below, the anarchist interpretation might have been correct” but the insurrection “founded a new focus of power.” (185) Quite – and anarchists argued that this power was simply not up to the task at hand. This can be seen when Gluckstein admits that the council was “overwhelmed” by suggestions from other bodies, the “sheer volume” of which “created difficulties”, it “found it hard to cope with the stream of people who crammed into the offices” (47-8) while reports, letters and motions “piled up” at the Town Hall and in the offices of the secretariat and were not discussed. (51) This bureaucratic inertia can be seen from the 16 April 1871 decree on turning closed workshops into co-operatives:

“Workers trade councils are convened to establish a commission of inquiry [...] To compile statistics on abandoned workshops, as well as an inventory [...] To present a report on the practical requisites for the prompt restarting of these workshops [...] by the co-operative association of the workers who were employed there [...]This commission of inquiry must send its report to the Communal Commission on Labour and Exchange, which will be required to present to the Commune [...] the draft of a decree […]”[102]

Perhaps because the author of this decree which Gluckstein (30) praises was Leo Frankel (the only member of the Council who can be considered even remotely a Marxist), Gluckstein mentions it almost in passing, uncritically summarising it in less than a paragraph, before noting “[i]n practice there was little time to do very much.” (30) Given the process being implemented, this is hardly surprising. Little wonder Kropotkin concluded from this decree and others like it the following:

“the insurgent people will not wait for any old government in its marvellous wisdom to decree economic reforms. They will abolish individual property by themselves… They will not stop short at expropriating the owners of social capital by a decree that will remain a dead letter; they will take possession and establish their rights of usufruct immediately. They will organise the workshops so that they continue production.”[103]

That Gluckstein has so little to say on this issue is strange, as he obviously considers this decree a key example of the “new kind of society [that] can be fleetingly glimpsed in [the Commune’s] action.” (27) Given the central role this clearly played in the lessons anarchists drew from the Commune, the lack of discussion surely points to a political perspective rooted in governmental action rather than workers’ self-activity as the means of creating socialism.

In terms of mass participation, Gluckstein notes that “[r]elations between the Commune” and “the Clubs and the mass meetings” are “harder to measure” (50) which is a damning admission for someone claiming that the Commune implemented a new regime based on direct democracy and that the evidence that it was a “radically different from all previous states” was to be found here. (46) Even his conclusions against the “anarchist interpretation” are question begging:

“It was this combination of direct activity, plus an organised governmental structure (for all its inadequacies), that earned the Paris Commune its historic significance as the moment when an anti-capitalist movement was transformed into a power in its own right.” (185)

Yes, “for all its inadequacies”! Rather than address whether “an organised governmental structure” undermines the “direct activity” of the masses and is up to solving the many tasks facing a social revolution as Kropotkin and other anarchists did, Gluckstein simply ignores the issue. He notes, in passing, the difficulties facing the Council trying to handle the numerous problems facing the revolution but does not draw any conclusions from them. Anarchists, however, would note that they confirm Bakunin’s 1870 prediction that any revolutionary government “could not fail to severely constrict the scope of revolutionary action because it is impossible, even for the most energetic and enterprising authoritarian revolutionary, to understand and deal effectively with all the manifold problems generated by the Revolution. For every dictatorship, be it exercised by an individual or collectively by relatively few individuals, is necessarily very circumscribed, very short-sighted, and its limited perception cannot, therefore, penetrate the depth and encompass the whole complex range of popular life.”[104]

The people of Paris were also aware of this problem, namely the inability of the Commune to be effective. As the Council “appeared increasingly incompetent or insufficiently revolutionary, clubs and committees became the vehicles for the assertion of direct sovereignty by means of association... Had the Commune managed to last longer it is certain that Leftist factions of the clubs and committees and the National Guard would have posed serious, organised opposition to the Communal Council.”[105] Before and during the Commune, there were attempts to federate various clubs and assemblies (such as the Delegation of the Twenty Arrondissements). These would have, eventually, produced a federal structure within the commune itself as the limitations of the Council became clear. As Kropotkin argued:

“Back in 1871, Paris saw a vague anticipation of a better manner of acting. The revolutionaries among the people seemed to understand that that the ‘Council of the Commune’ had to be regarded as a mere backdrop, as a nod to past traditions; that the people should not only not disarm but should retain, together with the Council, its own organisation, its federated groups, and that the requisite measures to ensure the success of the revolution ought to come from these groups rather than from the City Hall. Unfortunately, a certain modesty among the popular revolutionaries, underpinned also by authoritarian prejudices whose roots still ran deep at that time, prevented these federated groups from completely ignoring the Council, as if it were non-existent and acting so as to usher in a new age of social construction.”[106]

Significantly, during the Commune, the Delegation “began or joined a series of initiatives designed to more effectively unite popular organisations. It started a Federation of Clubs… Had the Commune survived it is almost certain that these projects would have once again made the Delegation the centre of the revolutionary club and committee movement, as it had been during the siege and armistice.” In other words, it “returned to the idea of directing a central club in which delegates from all clubs and committees could meet... it would be open to the public and would unite delegates from popular clubs.”[107]

Gluckstein suggests that the Commune was a “new form of government based on mass active democracy,” and the “first workers’ state.” (7) The question is, if the so-called workers’ state is “an entirely new form of state, in its utterly novelty” (114) then why call it a state? Insofar as it was based on “mass active democracy” it was not a state as it was based on what states have evolved to stop – mass participation in social life (“The State is necessarily hierarchical, authoritarian—or it ceases to be the State”[108]). He is right to state that power “from above, acting on those below, was challenged and the very foundations of the conventional state were undermined” (205) however he shows the typical Marxist confusion when he calls the new social institutions formed “a new type of state which fused people and power.” (205) Which is understandable, given the false Marxist metaphysical notion that the state is simply “a system of domination by one class over another” (205) rather than a set of institutions marked by specific social relationships required to maintain minority class rule over society.[109] As Kropotkin argued:

“Developed in the course of history to establish and maintain the monopoly of land ownership in favour of one class – which, for that reason, became the ruling class par excellence – what means can the State provide to abolish this monopoly that the working class could not find in its own strength and groups? Then perfected during the course of the nineteenth century to ensure the monopoly of industrial property, trade, and banking to new enriched classes, to which the State was supplying ‘arms’ cheaply by stripping the land from the village communes and crushing the cultivators by tax – what advantages could the State provide for abolishing these same privileges? Could its governmental machine, developed for the creation and upholding of these privileges, now be used to abolish them? Would not the new function require new organs? And these new organs would they not have to be created by the workers themselves, in their unions, their federations, completely outside the State?”[110]

So, in the words of Gluckstein, “the reality was not simple.” (184) Sadly, this applies to his distortions of the “anarchist interpretation” rather than to the analysis he cannot bring himself to present never mind discuss. Simply put, to assert “the anarchist belief that in 1871 the Commune had already abolished the state” (206) cannot be sustained by looking at what anarchists actually wrote about the Commune and how one of its failings was precisely that it had not abolished the state within Paris itself – as Gluckstein himself indicates in passing.

Perhaps this obvious unwillingness to address the actual anarchist position helps, in part, to explain Gluckstein’s repeating of an all too common Marxist contradiction about anarchism. Thus we find him asserting that Proudhon’s “disciple, Michael Bakunin, made the abolition of the state his central tenet” (74) while also it being a case of the state being “ignored” “anarchist style”. (50) Needless to say, you cannot “ignore” the state if your goal is its “abolition.” In addition, it should be stressed that Bakunin’s “central tenet” was not simply the abolition of the state but, rather, as Wayne Thorpe correctly summarises, “the simultaneous destruction of the state and of the capitalist system, accompanied by the organisation from below of a federalist system of administration based upon labour’s economic associations.”[111]

So, contra the Marxist tradition, it is not the case that the “originality of the Commune lay in its determination to found a new type of state.” (63) Rather, its decentralised and federal form showed how to replace the state with a new form of social organisation, one which is based upon, rather than designed to exclude, mass participation. One of the limitations of the Commune, as Bakunin and Kropotkin stressed, was that it combined aspects of this new social organism with aspects of the state and, as a consequence, hindered the social revolution.

Centralisation and Federalism

For most Marxists, any form of co-operation or co-ordination is “centralisation” or “centralism” and, correspondingly, decentralisation implies isolation and atomisation of forces. The anarchist system of federalism simply does not fit into this stark dichotomy. This as can be seen when Lenin proclaimed the clearly federalist aim of the Commune an example “of voluntary centralism, of the voluntary fusion of the proletarian communes”. He seemed unaware that “to abolish the central authority” does not mean “to destroy national unity” for federalism postulates the need to co-ordinate joint activity.[112] In short, Marxists like all “[a]dversaries of federalism benevolently take it for granted that centralisation boasts all of the advantages that they deny federation.”[113]

Gluckstein does not disappoint and he confuses decentralisation with isolation, centralisation with co-ordination. He points to discussion within the Commune on “whether to emphasise centralised direction or local initiative, freedom or authority” (159) and states that “[e]ven leading anarchists, who opposed centralisation on principle,” (165) recognised the need for co-ordinated resistance to the central government and its forces. He contrasts the Communards’ distrust of central leadership with “Versailles’s unified command” (165) and notes that the debate about the Committee of Public Safety was, at its heart, “whether, given conditions of civil war, power could be decentralised immediately.” (52) He, of course, sides with the Blanquists as civil war showed “workers could not dispense with a concentrated authority of their own. Lenin, recalling Marx, called this authority a workers’ state.” (206)

Yet no anarchist has ever argued against the idea of co-ordination of struggle and have consistently advocated federalism as a means of doing so. Hence the commune “must break the State and replace it by the Federation.”[114] As Proudhon argued, a federal body “only has a quite restricted part of the public administration, the one concerning federal services” and “subordinate and entrusted to an Assembly formed of delegates” who “exert over the federal assembly’s acts supervision all the more jealous and severe.” Thus communes and workplaces “confederate to jointly guarantee their territorial integrity or for the protection of their liberties” and from “an economic standpoint, one can federate for a mutual protection of commerce and industry... for the construction and maintenance of communication routes, roads, canals, railways, for the organisation of credit and insurance, etc.”[115]

In short, anarchist argue for federation precisely to co-ordinate joint activities and to provide services that are better organised or can only be organised by many groups working together. We reject centralisation because it is does not do such co-ordination as well and, moreover, empowers and benefits the few at the expense of the many as “[t]here are no limits on the State besides those which it voluntarily imposes on itself.”[116]

There were attempts to centralise power in the Commune, most notably the Communal Council itself which saw the “concentrating [of] power in fewer and fewer hands over the course of the Commune, centralising authority rather than broadening it”[117] followed by the Blanquist/Jacobin inspired Committee of Public Safety. This, as Gluckstein notes, was a “proposal for [a] five-strong leadership [which] reflected widespread frustration with the existing arrangements”. (158) In the debate to form the latter, “the majority stressed the need for centralised decision-making at the expense of grass roots democracy” but he has to admit that it “performed no better than the Communal Council.” (160) If centralisation is considered as automatically ensuring the means of success in a revolution, this failure should give pause for thought but it does not and so the Commune shows that “discipline under a centralised command was absolutely vital to mould a fighting force out of the workers of Paris. This was not an optional extra.” (141)

The Marxist prejudice that centralisation is always more efficient and effective will not let mere evidence get in its way. Gluckstein notes how conflict over who should organise resistance saw Communard forces “receiving orders from no less than seven different sources,” (144) while “none of the War Delegates was ever able to bring the Commune’s artillery under one command, or even discover the exact number available.” (144) This “competition for control” between the National Guard Central Committee and the Commune Council resulted in “deadlock”. (145) As noted above, he presents enough evidence to show this was no isolated case, that the problems with bureaucracy existed within a single city. (47-51)

Unsurprisingly, then, when the affairs of a whole nation were centralised in 1917 bureaucracy and inefficiency correspondingly increased. As Emma Goldman experienced, “the newly fledged officialdom was as hard to cope with as the old bureaucracy,” manned by “bureaucratic officials [who] seemed to take particular delight in countermanding each other’s orders” and “how paralysing was the effect of the bureaucratic red tape which delayed and often frustrated the most earnest and energetic efforts… Materials were very scarce and it was most difficult to procure them owing to the unbelievably centralised Bolshevik methods. Thus to get a pound of nails one had to file applications in about ten or fifteen bureaus; to secure some bed linen or ordinary dishes one wasted days.”[118]

The same issues Gluckstein laments in the Commune also arose within the centralised Bolshevik regime he favours but magnified. Indeed, “in practice, hypercentralisation turned into infighting and scrambles for control among competing bureaucracies” and so “the not untypical example of a small condensed milk plant with fewer than 15 workers that became the object of a drawn-out competition among six organisations including the Supreme Council of National Economy, the Council of People’s Commissars of the Northern Region, the Vologda Council of People’s Commissars, and the Petrograd Food Commissariat.”[119] Bolshevik centralisation was inefficient for other reasons, as “it seems apparent that many workers themselves... had now come to believe... that confusion and anarchy [sic] at the top were the major causes of their difficulties, and with some justification. The fact was that Bolshevik administration was chaotic... Scores of competitive and conflicting Bolshevik and Soviet authorities issued contradictory orders, often brought to factories by armed Chekists. The Supreme Economic Council… issu[ed] dozens of orders and pass[ed] countless directives with virtually no real knowledge of affairs.”[120] The new centralised regime was “not only bureaucratically cumbersome, but [it] involved mountainous accounting problems” and with its “various offices... and commissariat structure literally swamped with ‘urgent’ delegations and submerged in paperwork.”[121] Unsurprisingly, the number of bureaucrats exploded – along with their power and privileges.

This does not mean that co-ordination is impossible, simply that it needs to be organised by those affected by their own organisations – by federal means, in other words. This would mean, as Bakunin had argued, a federation of barricades and militias rather than waiting for the central bodies to try to organise defence, for example. Similarly, for other aspects of social life – whether social, economic or political.

As well as the Commune showing that centralisation of power need not be as successful as Leninists assume, it also shows that representative bodies can easily give themselves more power at the expense of popular organisations. This can be seen from the Committee of Public Safety in the Commune, with a minority of council members (essentially those active in the International) arguing that “the Paris Commune has surrendered its authority to a dictatorship” and it was “hiding behind a dictatorship that the electorate have not authorised us to accept or to recognise.”[122] So this example shows that it is difficult for the masses to control those they give power to even in the confines of one city. Gluckstein notes that the Commune could be “viewed as the organ of solidarity giving collective control through a workers’ state” (184) Yet “collective control” is precisely what the state was designed to exclude:

“To attack the central power, to strip it of its prerogatives, to decentralise, to dissolve authority, would have been to abandon to the people the control of its affairs, to run the risk of a truly popular revolution. That is why the bourgeoisie sought to reinforce the central government even more.”[123]

Ironically, after quoting a Communard on the need for federalism, Gluckstein notes that this “would allow the population to be directly involved in accessible power structures.” (52) Indeed, that is why minority classes reject it as he himself admits when he notes that the victory of the French bourgeoisie in the Great French Revolution meant the “mass popular involvement and democratic structures of the earlier period were no longer essential”. (58) Unsurprisingly, our Marxist repeats the myth that the Girondins “disapproved of centralised state power” (57) when, in reality, they wished “to establish a strong government and to reduce the people to submission” and so “[i]nstead of federalising, everything done by the Girondins showed them to be as centralising and authoritarian as the [Jacobins], perhaps more so.”[124] This was understood by many Communards and one is quoted by Gluckstein – without noting that this was echoing Proudhon – on how the Commune’s aim was to “break the alien system of centralisation and thus destroy the only weapon that the privileged classes possess.” (52) Sadly, he does not ponder why.

The question is: can the centralised social organisation which is the state be used by the many rather than the few? For Marxists, the answer is yes. For anarchists, the answer is no, for centralisation is not a neutral form of organisation and if the oppressed utilise it then they will simply empower a new few to rule over them. The question, as Kropotkin put it, is “how it is possible that the socialists of the second half of the nineteenth century adopted the ideal of the Jacobin State when this ideal had been designed from the viewpoint of the bourgeois, in direct opposition to the egalitarian and communist tendencies of the people which had arisen during the Revolution?”[125]

Gluckstein shows this confusion when he states that “[d]irect democracy was the basis of the communal movement, and it had created an embryonic workers’ state, without which the defeat of capitalism and creation of a new society could not have been attempted”. (148-9) Yet his own account shows how the creation of the “embryonic workers’ state” undermined the direct democracy which is required to ensure that capitalism is not replaced by state capitalism and that a genuinely new society is created rather than replacing the bosses. Equally, his sympathies are with the Blanquists and their seeking for more centralisation in spite of the fact he himself records its failures.

This shows how the Paris Commune brought the contradictions of Marxist attacks on anarchism to the surface. Thus we read Engels attacking anarchists for holding certain position yet praising the 1871 revolution when it implemented exactly the same ideas.

For example, in his inaccurate diatribe The Bakuninists at Work, Engels was keen to distort the federalist ideas of anarchism, dismissing “the so-called principle of anarchy, free federation of independent groups” for Bakunin “[a]s early as September 1870 (in his Lettres à un français)... had declared that the only way to drive the Prussians out of France by a revolutionary struggle was to do away with all forms of centralised leadership and leave each town, each village, each parish to wage war on its own.” For Engels anarchist federalism “consisted precisely in the fact that each town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not co-operation with other towns but separation from them, this precluding any possibility of a combined attack.” This meant “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.” According to Engels, the anarchists “proclaimed [this] a principle of supreme revolutionary wisdom.”[126]

Compare this to Engels praise for the Paris Commune which, he gushed, refuted the Blanquist notion of a revolution sprung by a vanguard which would create “the strictest, dictatorial centralisation of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government.” Instead the Commune “appealed to [the provinces] to form a free federation of all French Communes... a national organisation which for the first time was really created by the nation itself. It was precisely the oppressing power of the former centralised government... which was to fall everywhere, just as it had fallen in Paris.”[127]

Clearly a “free federation” of Communes is bad when anarchists advocate it but excellent when workers in revolt do so. Why this was the case Engels failed to explain nor did he attempt to square this praise for “free federation” with his comments that only those who “have no idea of what revolution is or are revolutionaries only in word” talk of “authority and centralisation as of two things deserving condemnation whatever the circumstances.”[128]

There is an element of truth in all this, as Bakunin did reject “centralised leadership” as not up to the task but it is a falsehood to state that he denied the need for co-ordination of struggles and federal organisations from the bottom up. As he put it, the revolution must “foster the self-organisation of the masses into autonomous bodies, federated from the bottom upwards.” Rather than deny the need for co-ordination, Bakunin stressed it: “the peasants, like the industrial city workers, should unite by federating the fighting battalions, district by district, assuring a common coordinated defence against internal and external enemies.”[129] In this he repeated his earlier arguments concerning social revolution – arguments that Engels was well aware of and so he deliberately misrepresented Bakunin’s ideas by means of an attack on federalism when, in Spain, federalism was not implemented.

Likewise, Engels quickly forgot Marx’s praise for the Commune implementing binding mandates by attacking anarchist use and support for them the following year. For the latter, it was a case of this being part of Bakunin’s nefarious plans to control the international “for a secret society... there is nothing more convenient than the imperative mandate” as all its members vote in one way, while the others will “contradict one another” (he did not explain how members of the “secret society” could all vote in one way unless… mandated to do so by the groups which elected them). Without these binding mandates, “the common sense of the independent delegates will swiftly unite them in a common party against the party of the secret society.” Obviously, the notion that delegates from a group should reflect the wishes of that group was lost on Engels as was the utility of this system for “if all electors gave their delegates imperative mandates concerning all points in the agenda, meetings and debates of the delegates would be superfluous.”[130] Given this, it seems ironic to read Gluckstein lament on how politicians in the capitalist state “cannot be mandated or sacked, and so once elected are free to act as they wish until the next ballot.” (22) Which is why anarchists had supported the binding mandate since 1848, to ensure – to quote on Communard – that anyone elected remains a servant rather than the master of the electors: “We are here as representatives of the people and must how to obey its wishes.” (46)

Ultimately, this is the key ideological flaw in Marxism. While claiming to base itself on mass participation, direct democracy and so forth (“socialism from below”) it advocates a form of social organisation, centralisation, which is designed to exclude it.[131] They end up advocating party rule (“socialism from above”) and ensure the defeat of the revolution from within if not from without.

From below or above?

Which shows the limitations of Marxism and its confusions about the state. For Gluckstein, the Commune “inextricably linked change from below and the state” (50) and “Parisian direct democracy made the masses part of the state, and the state part of the masses.” (204) He suggests that Marx synthesised Proudhonism and Blanquism (83), that his contribution was to “synthesise their insights.” (206)

Yet during the 1905 Russian Revolution, Lenin mocked the Mensheviks for only wanting “pressure from below” which was “pressure by the citizens on the revolutionary government.” Instead, he argued for “pressure... from above as well as from below,” where “pressure from above” was “pressure by the revolutionary government on the citizens.” Lenin invoked the authority of Engels, noting that against the anarchists that, as a “true Jacobin of Social-Democracy,” he had “appreciated the importance of action from above” and saw the need for “the utilisation of the revolutionary governmental power.” Lenin summarised his position (which he considered as being in line with orthodox Marxism): “Limitation, in principle, of revolutionary action to pressure from below and renunciation of pressure also from above is anarchism.”[132]

Given that Lenin had rejected the idea of “only from below” as an anarchist principle (which it is), we need to bear in mind that Leninist calls for “democracy from below” are always placed in the context of a Leninist government for Lenin always stressed that the Bolsheviks would “take over full state power,” that they “can and must take state power into their own hands.”[133] Leninist “democracy from below” always means representative government, not popular power or self-management, of a “revolutionary” government exercising power “from above” onto the very class it claimed to represent. As Lenin summarised to his political police, the Cheka, in 1920:

“Without revolutionary coercion directed against the avowed enemies of the workers and peasants, it is impossible to break down the resistance of these exploiters. On the other hand, revolutionary coercion is bound to be employed towards the wavering and unstable elements among the masses themselves.”[134]

Or as Trotsky put it nearly 20 years later:

“The very same masses are at different times inspired by different moods and objectives. It is just for this reason that a centralised organisation of the vanguard is indispensable. Only a party, wielding the authority it has won, is capable of overcoming the vacillation of the masses themselves... if the dictatorship of the proletariat means anything at all, then it means that the vanguard of the proletariat is armed with the resources of the state in order to repel dangers, including those emanating from the backward layers of the proletariat itself.”[135]

If Gluckstein thinks that the Commune shows that the so-called workers’ state “was not there to oppress or exploit them” (25) then Bolshevism – in both theory and practice – proves that this is not the case. The vanguard party arms itself with the might of the state to put “pressure” on or coerce anyone it considered “wavering and unstable” or, to use Trotsky’s word, “backward” which is, by definition, anyone who disagrees with the vanguard party.

Compare the position of Lenin and Trotsky with that voiced in the Commune that the National Guard “gives to the city a national militia that defends the citizens against power, instead of an army which defends the state from the citizens”. (51) Bakunin, however, would not have been surprised for, based on the anarchist analysis of the State as “minority government, from the top downward, of a vast quantity of men,” he correctly predicted that even the so-called workers' State “cannot be sure of its own self-preservation without an armed force to defend it against its own internal enemies, against the discontent of its people.”[136]

Which is precisely why anarchists reject socialism “from above” in favour of one created “from below.” In the state, it is always the leaders at the top who have power, not the masses. No revolutionary anarchist denies the need for self-discipline and the need to co-ordinate revolutionary struggle and defence: it is considered a truism that there was a need to federate revolutionary forces to defeat reaction. What we also recognised is that giving power to a few leaders is a fatal mistake, that they will implement what they consider as “socialism” and override the creative actions from below so necessary to the success of a revolution and the building of socialism. For example:

“On three occasions in the first months of Soviet power, the [factory] committees leaders sought to bring their model [of socialism based on workers’ self-management of the economy] into being. At each point the party leadership overruled them. The Bolshevik alternative was to vest both managerial and control powers in organs of the state which were subordinate to the central authorities, and formed by them.”[137]

This was in-line with pre-October Bolshevik notions on building “socialism” for, lest we forget, “the postal service [is] an example of the socialist economic system” and “Imperialism is gradually transforming all trusts into organisations of a similar type… Once we have overthrown the capitalists… we shall have a splendidly-equipped mechanism.” Thus the “immediate aim” was to “organise the whole economy on the lines of the postal service” and “on the basis of what capitalism has already created.” Thus everyone is “transformed into hired employees of the state.”[138] This simply ensured that the revolution developed in a state capitalist fashion – both in the sense Lenin desired and in the sense which anarchists warned would be the inevitable result of state socialism.

The Bolshevik regime shows that “from below” and “from above” cannot be combined. The latter will always undermine the former simply because that was what it was designed to do.

“nothing could be more foreign…”

The main problem with Gluckstein’s work is that he tries to present Leninism (what he considers as “Marxism”) as the sole champion of the Commune. In reality, this is not the case and he shows this when he approvingly quotes, and paraphrases, Trotsky’s 1921 essay Lessons of the Paris Commune – although he does repeat its conclusions more tactfully than its author did. Needless to say, he is as selective in his use of that work as he is with the anarchist ones.

For Trotsky, the Commune was not problematic for “we will find in it one single lesson: a strong party leadership is needed.” That is it. As for the Communards themselves “[w]hat they lacked was clarity in method and a centralized leading organization. That is why they were vanquished.”[139] Thus the Commune was a classic example of what not to do rather than a source of hope for a better society.

What about the Commune’s aim for mass participation and direct democracy? Nonsense, for the Commune “shows us the incapacity of the masses to choose their path, their indecision in the leadership of the movement, their fatal penchant to come to a halt after the first successes, thus permitting the enemy to regain its breath, to reestablish its position.” The party, not the class, is seen as the key as “it is the accumulated and organized experience of the proletariat” and “foresees theoretically the paths of development, all its stages.” With the “aid of the party” the proletariat “frees itself from the need of always recommencing its history: its hesitations, its lack of decision, its mistakes.” Or, more bluntly, the proletariat frees itself from the need to govern itself and society: that can be left to “[o]ur party” which “seized the power” in Russia.[140] The increased democracy Gluckstein praises is seen purely as a means of securing party power and, once state power is seized, the working class can get back to its traditional role of following orders.

In reality, of course, only the party leadership held effective power as Trotsky also acknowledged. He notes that one member of the Central Committee demanded in October in 1917 “the proclamation of the dictatorship of the Central Committee of the party” and indicated that this was simply “anticipating the logical development of the struggle”. He was against this only because the time was not right and so it “would have provoked great disorder at that moment”.[141]

Gluckstein approvingly quotes Communards arguing for “communal France in federal form” and that the “triumph of the communal idea is... the social revolution” (52) For Trotsky, such aspirations were simply wrong. The notion that “each town has its sacred right of self-government” was “idealistic chatter – of the same gender as mundane anarchism.” In fact, “more than any other” the French proletariat had been “duped” by the bourgeoisie for “autonomist formulae” are “nothing but impediments on the feet of the proletariat, hampering its forward movement.” Opposition to centralism was “a heritage of petty bourgeois localism and autonomism” and “is without a doubt the weak side of a certain section of the French proletariat.” Autonomy “is the supreme guarantee of real activity and individual independence for certain revolutionists” but in reality it was “a great mistake which cost the French proletariat dearly.” So the “tendency towards particularism, whatever the form it may assume, is a heritage of the dead past. The sooner French communism – socialist communism and syndicalist communism – emancipates itself from it, the better it will be for the proletarian revolution.” “Passivity and indecision,” asserted Trotsky, “were supported in this case by the sacred principle of federation and autonomy... In sum, it was nothing but an attempt to replace the proletarian revolution, which was developing, by a petty bourgeois reform: communal autonomy.”[142]

So much for the Commune having “planted the seeds of a new social world”. (53)

For Marx in 1871, the Communards were “storming heaven,”[143] for Trotsky they were nothing more than wrong-headed petit-bourgeois autonomist-anarchist federalists. Yet, to be fair to Trotsky, he could at least quote Marx to justify his dismissal of the Communards and their vision of a federal France. Lest we forget, for Gluckstein does not remind us, Marx had argued forcefully in 1850 during the German Revolution that “the workers must not only strive for one and indivisible German republic, but also… for the most decisive centralisation of power in the hands of the state authority. They should not let themselves be led astray by empty democratic talk about the freedom of the municipalities, self-government, etc. … revolutionary activity…. can only be developed with full efficiency from a central point…. As in France in 1793, it is the task of the genuinely revolutionary party in Germany to carry through the strictest centralisation.”[144] Significantly, Engels in 1872 privately reiterated this vision by suggesting that it “was the want of centralisation and authority that cost the Paris Commune its life.”[145] Needless to say, it were these writings and others like it from which the Bolsheviks drew inspiration and, in this, Trotsky in 1921 at least had the merit of honesty.

And what of the popular organisations Gluckstein praises so highly? For Trotsky, their role was simple, to provide a link by which the party can implement its decisions. Thus it “was indispensable to have an organization incarnating the political experience of the proletariat” and by means of “the Councils of Deputies... the party could have been in continual contact with the masses, known their state of mind; its leading centre could each day put forward a slogan which, through the medium of the party’s militants, would have penetrated into the masses, uniting their thought and their will.”[146] The focus is at the top, and the decisions flow downwards – as it does in every class system – yet Gluckstein praises the “anti-hierarchical attitude of the insurgents” of 1871. (47)

Trotsky was also disparaging of the mass democracy in the National Guard, arguing that “[b]efore wide masses of soldiers acquire the experience of well choosing and selecting commanders, the revolution will be beaten by the enemy.” This meant that the “methods of shapeless democracy (simple electability) must be supplemented and to a certain extent replaced by measures of selection from above. The revolution must create an organ composed of experienced, reliable organizers, in which one[147] can have absolute confidence, give it full powers to choose, designate and educate the command.”[148] Yet Trotsky is being disingenuous here, for he was well aware that the Bolsheviks did not “supplement” internal democracy in the armed forces but had in fact completed replaced it with appointment from above for it had been he who abolished it – before the civil war started – in March 1918: “the principle of election is politically purposeless and technically inexpedient, and it has been, in practice, abolished by decree”.[149]

Gluckstein echoes this, suggesting that “[i]n time the Commune’s open, direct democracy would have selected more effective leaders from their midst, but it did not survive long enough for this to occur.” (141) Yet he also can be replaced by appointment from above without, apparently, affecting the nature of the “coercive force.” Gluckstein appears to agree – the military democracy he praises and seeks to associate his ideology with was not applied in the Bolsheviks’ new state and so clearly viewed as not essential: with the right people in power, then apparently democracy can be postponed to the distant future. Yet the Red Army itself showed the necessity of “internal democracy” – for in practice it “belonged” to the party rulers, not to the “mass of the people” and was regularly “used against it” to maintain Bolshevik rule by repressing strikes and other protests.[150] This goes unmentioned of course, but space is found to reference Trotsky on the need for a “Communist discipline” not based on “the rod” (141) when, in reality, the Red Army was based on that, with its appointed officers having numerous techniques to enforce obedience up to and including firing squads.

If democracy can be deferred for the armed forces, would this argument not be equally applicable in the mass organisations created by the revolution? Trotsky attacks the Central Committee of the National Guard organising elections “to transmit its powers to the representatives of the Commune” as it “was a great mistake in that period to play with elections”[151] suggest so, along with his repeated defence of party dictatorship. For example:

“The Workers’ Opposition has come out with dangerous slogans, making a fetish of democratic principles! They place the workers’ right to elect representatives above the Party, as if the party were not entitled to assert its dictatorship even if that dictatorship temporarily clashed with the passing moods of the workers’ democracy. It is necessary to create amongst us the awareness of the revolutionary birthright of the party, which is obliged to maintain its dictatorship, regardless of temporary wavering even in the working classes. This awareness is for us the indispensable element. The dictatorship does not base itself at every given moment on the formal principle of a workers' democracy.”[152]

For Leninism, elections were a means to achieve the end of party power and not valued in themselves. “Electability, the democratic method,” Trotsky stressed, “is but one of the instruments in the hands of the proletariat and its party” and must not be considered as “a fetish, a remedy for all evils. The methods of electability must be combined with those of appointments.” The key, therefore, was “that at its head, above the wards, the districts, the groups, there is an apparatus which is centralized and bound together by an iron discipline.”[153]

It is by elections, mandates and recall that the masses express their “wavering” and so, ultimately, for Trotsky in 1921 mass participation was viewed as optional for it “reflects… the weak side of the masses… it manifests the spirit of indecision, of waiting, the tendency to be inactive after the first successes.”[154] Can it be any wonder, then, that the Bolsheviks had concluded that the dictatorship of the proletariat could only be achieved by party dictatorship, i.e. the dictatorship over the proletariat that Bakunin had warned of? As Trotsky acknowledged in 1920:

“We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorship of the Soviets the dictatorship of our party. Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party… In this ‘substitution’ of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental interests of the working class.”[155]

Hence the glaring contradiction between the reality of the so-called workers’ state and 