Is debating our ideas sectarian?

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

The broad church of anarchism incorporates many different tendencies. There are anarchists who carve out “liberated space” living in eco-villages, anarchists who go to demos to join in the ‘Black Bloc’ for a ruck with the police, and of course those many anarchists who read old books and dream of utopia but have no personal involvement in the struggle.

But none of these individuals debate their politics with one another, and those who polemicise to even a limited extent (such as Murray Bookchin) are viewed with deep suspicion. They say that criticism is inherently an ‘authoritarian’ violation of the individual’s free will, and so each is allowed to go off and do their own thing, as long as they call themselves ‘anarchist’.

You think workers have power in society so you should go and build an anarcho-syndicalist union to fight the bosses; I prefer immediate action, so I’ll go and live on a camp with some mates and start an unhierarchical society outside of capitalism. While the sectarian Trots row with each other, the anarchists live out their free society by doing as they please.

But this is a perversion of the idea of ‘sectarianism’, a word whose real meaning is placing a specific group’s organisational interests above those of the working class as a whole. ‘Sectarianism’ is not the same thing as admitting that you disagree with other activists. It is not the same thing as challenging the ideas of those people who have carved out influence on the left.

Of course, the anarchists’ unwillingness to criticise one another or to engage in sharp debate is in part a response to very real problems with the way the Trotskyist left operates. Some recoil from the way polemicists resort to labels like ‘petty-bourgeois’, ‘unMarxist’, ‘centrist’, and indeed, the slander ‘anarchist’, to attack their opponents. Others are bothered by the fashion in which they exaggerate differences and caricature positions ad absurdum to help ‘win’ the argument. The use of personal innuendo, bureaucratic manoeuvres to silence rivals and even physical fights (such as the SWP’s attacks on AWL and CPGB comrades at their ‘Marxism’ event) also serve as clear evidence that the culture of the far left is indeed unhealthy and sectarian.

But the problems outlined above, to the extent that they exist, are symptomatic of a lack of free and honest debate, not too much of it. It is not the criticism itself, or admitting that there are differences, which engenders uncomradely behaviour. Far from it – for example, look at Marx’s work on the Civil War in France. He raises numerous criticisms of the tactics of the Paris Communards of 1871, but this does not detract in the slightest from his glowing reverence for their brave struggle and the comradely tone of the work.

The real problem is the bureaucratic culture of many organisations which seeks to silence or cow critics by whatever means are at hand. Indeed, the anarchist claim that any criticism other people’s views is sectarian bears a striking parallel to the position of leaders of bureaucratic-centralist organisations such as the Socialist Workers’ Party. The SWP’s idea of unity is that its leaders set out their politics without any debate or consultation with the membership, and then activists can agree to follow them or not. Those who raise criticisms are told to go off and join some other group – “if you don’t agree with the leaders, why are you in the SWP?” So take it or leave it – agree with John Rees and Lindsey German or choose to be a “sectarian” and debate politics with other people elsewhere.

Quite why the people who raise criticisms are ‘sectarians’ and are the ones who ‘disagree’ while those who follow the leadership line are assumed to be correct is never explained. If I disagree, why is it incumbent on me to pretend that I have nothing to say for myself?

Neither the SWP’s modus operandi nor the anarchist schema of ‘do your own thing’ represent ‘unity’. There is no sentiment of collective responsibility, equal exchange of ideas or recognition that activists should be engaged in a common struggle, whatever their differences. The real ‘sectarianism’ is the idea that any disagreement is bound to prove irreconcilable, so people who disagree should work separately in different organisations and not engage with one another. It undermines our fighting strength, stymies creative thought and reflects a lack of belief in the idea that solidarity could work.

Thinking that the labour movement is unsalvageable and living out your anarchist utopia in a commune is sectarian. Thinking, like the Black Bloc cadre, that people with jobs, pensioners and housewives are useless to a struggle where the primary task is confronting the police is sectarian. Those both place the interests of an activist élite above that of the working class, which is not seen as an important agent of social change. What is not sectarian is seeking to bring together the maximum possible forces while maintaining a culture where no leader has a monopoly over ideas, no viewpoint is silenced and continuous free and full debate allows the development of political theory and a sharpening of our tactics.

Kronstadt foam

A letter to the Weekly Worker

Edward Eisenstein's letter on the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion is based on the amalgam technique of lumping different opponents of the Communist Party together as if they were the same, and furthermore resorts to using "authoritative quotes" as if these were themselves evidence. For example the claim that "Subjectively the [Kronstadters] were doubtlessly highly moral revolutionists. But objectively it was a filthy counterrevolution" is highly tendentious, but goes without explanation.

However, not only were the Kronstadters' aims fundamentally different from those of the Whites - who were hardly partisans of slogans for "free soviet elections" and "workers' control" in industry - but it is not true that they excluded Communists from their soviet.

The city's equivalent of a soviet was convened at the Kronstadt Engineers' College on 2nd March 1921. Three hundred and three ship, dock, army unit, workshop, trade union and soviet institution delegates participated, with Communists representing over one-third of those attending. The meeting elected a Provisional Revolutionary Committee in which anarcho-populist Maximalists (not Makhnovists) held great influence, and fresh soviet elections were planned. In the 4th March edition of its paper Izvestiia the PRC published the Appeal of the independent Provisional Bureau of the Kronstadt section of the Russian Communist Party, formed by long-standing local Communist leaders Ilyin, Pervushin and Kabanov;

"Do not believe the absurd rumours that Communist leaders are supposedly being shot or that Communists are preparing for armed action in Kronstadt. They are spread by a clearly provocative element, which wishes to provoke bloodshed. These are lies and absurdities, and it is on such as these that the agents of the Entente, working to achieve the overthrow of soviet power, wish to play.
"We openly declare that our party, with weapon in hand, has and will defend all the achievements of the working class against the open and secret White Guards who wish the destruction of the Soviet power of workers and peasants.
"The Provisional Bureau of the R.C.P recognizes new elections to the Soviet as necessary, and calls on all members of the R.C.P to take part in these new elections."

The Kronstadt sailors, workers and soldiers demanding free soviet elections - a slogan raised at the March 1919 Putilov works strike as well as in February 1921's Petrograd strikes - was no call for bourgeois counter-revolution. Indeed the Kronstadters had rebuffed the Right Socialist Revolutionaries, who wanted to replace soviet power with a Constituent Assembly, as can easily be divined by reading their fifteen demands (the Petropavlovsk resolution).

It in any case seems perverse to foam at the mouth attacking the Kronstadt workers' council for alleged exclusions, given that the Communist Party leadership had brutally suppressed numerous strikes such as that of workers at the Aleksandrovskii workshops in February-March 1919 and the Petrograd general strike of March 1919, co-opted the Factory Committees into official unions and replaced workers' control with one-man management, and clamped down on dissidents within the Communist Party itself at the March 1921 Tenth Congress. Along with the atrophy of soviets and the lack of independent unions, this meant a severe disenfranchisement of the working class.

What those who tell us that Kronstadt was a counter-revolution do not get is (a) that it was possible to criticise the Communist leaders at certain given junctures from a revolutionary point of view, not a reactionary one and (b) that working-class self-rule is the revolution itself (i.e. the reason why it has become the ruling class), and this cannot be put on ice or abandoned in the interest of some higher military-strategic goal. Even if well-meaning, sincerely revolutionary and beset by difficult circumstances, the Communist Party undermined workers' power by crushing those who wanted to democratise the soviet apparatus and restore working-class authority over such organs. Yet according to Edward, anarchists are "unable to settle things in a comradely fashion"!

The claim that the rule of the Kronstadt workers' council meant ceding ground to imperialism, but that invading the city and killing thousand upon thousand of people was to defend its workers' authority, is beyond my comprehension. Why would the Kronstadters who declared soviet power in May 1917 and March 1921 not resist a White invasion? Much as I am not an anarchist I think it perfectly possible to isolate different anarchist organisations in different episodes and judge when they are supporting workers' power and when they are not.

I suggest that Edward reads Israel Getzler's book Kronstadt 1917-1921: the fate of a soviet democracy and Ida Mett's pamphlet The Kronstadt Uprising of 1921