The following contribution is the first in a series that, like the Cantiere, we will publish in preparation for the initiatives planned for the centenary of the Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists, better known as the "Arshinov Platform" after anarchist comrade Peter Andreyevich Arshinov, one of its drafters. The need for reflection on the Platform stems from the desire to give anarchist communism a unified and organized dimension, thus deepening its roots in society. This reflection already allowed the comrades who drafted the Platform to fully understand the political defeat anarchism had suffered during the crucial phases of the revolutionary struggle in Russia between 1917 and 1921, which saw it face to face with the White counterrevolution first and then with Bolshevism.
The first part of the Platform was published in no. 13-14 of June/July 1926 of the periodical Delo Truda (The Cause of Labour), published in Paris by a group of anarchists forced into exile by the drift of the Russian Revolution which resulted in the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Communist Party in power which, by repressing all political dissent and all social and class opposition through police repression and firing squads, would have laid the foundations for the dictatorship of the party and for the capitalist construction of the state, thus opening the way to the Stalinist counter-revolution.
The intention of the Platform was not to give rise to a doctrinal polemic on the principles of anarchism, a theoretical and political framework within which all Russian comrades recognized and would continue to recognize themselves, starting with comrade Nestor Makhno and comrade Ida Met, but to place the question of political organization at the center of the debate, in order to define a concrete response to the crisis of the international anarchist movement, which continued to be shaken by real anti-organizational tendencies that exposed it to political paralysis and marginalization from the social context. During the discussion, which continued on the Delo Truda until the spring of 1927, the Platform gradually refined its contents, which consisted of several fundamental fixed points: the recognition of class struggle as the driving force of history; the adoption of Anarchist Communism as the fundamental reference for anarchists' political action and for the construction of the future society; anti-capitalism, the denial of bourgeois democracy, the state, and any other authority; trade unionism as a fundamental instrument of struggle; the need for an Anarchist Communist Political Organization united in theory, strategy, and tactics, active in every country and equipped with a comprehensive program of political action for the social revolution.
But what value can reviving the Platform today have in a world where the extent of change appears so profound and dramatic that the increased conflict between powers could lay the groundwork for a third imperialist World War? This increases the confusion and difficulty in identifying, amidst an enormous availability of sources, the appropriate tools to understand the present. This feeling has gradually taken hold, transforming into a widespread awareness of the futility of analysis, thus impacting the very possibility of defining, in theory and practice, approaches and prospects for overcoming the capitalist system, now considered the only possible world. But if we look at history, we realize that the reality of the capitalist system of production presents an analogy with previous historical periods: the entire world continues to be characterized by the existence of exploited and exploiters with opposing interests. This is not a negligible analogy because, despite the profound changes that have taken place, the same contradiction inherent between capital and labor continues to exist, that is, the class struggle in the terms identified by Marx, Bakunin and the other theorists of socialism.
Furthermore, the Platform remains unknown outside the anarchist movement, which has repeatedly consciously excommunicated, derided, and suppressed it. For our part, we continue to believe it could be of interest to working men and women, and to the generations of students and those in precarious employment, especially the latter, who were overwhelmed by the widespread intoxication of the 1970s with income policies and concertation; with the moderation of union demands, especially those related to wages; with the widespread privatization of essential public services such as schools, healthcare, transportation, and social security; and with the "Treu package," which institutionalized precarious employment.
All these choices underlying the rise of neoliberalism were deliberately pursued and sometimes even imposed by the parliamentary left, the governing left, and the trade union leaders (think of the "EUR turning point" of 1978), in an unconditional exchange with the bourgeoisie. This exchange would have sacrificed the protection of the living conditions of the lower classes in order to facilitate, through lower labor costs, the relaunch of the competitiveness of Italian goods on international markets, to the exclusive benefit of profits and rents, in the interests of the bourgeoisie and weak Italian imperialism. Thus ended the reformist illusion that, in perfect subordination to capital, facilitated the great processes of capitalist restructuring, helping pave the way for the current political and governing right, and not only in Italy.
Why, then, is there no objective self-criticism from the political and trade union groups that supported those choices, but only a nostalgic celebration of the supposed merits attributed to individuals, or groups of individuals, politically oriented toward the parliamentary left, whose "personal strength is overestimated to the point of making them the very despots of history"? And in our current and dramatic context, why continue to omit a critical reconstruction of the aforementioned choices that allowed capital to reorganize, win, and assert itself on the conquests of labor?
We have no passion for clichés, and if we resort to a quote, it's not to provide easy answers to all the questions we urgently need to ask, but to emphasize that the problems we face today still hark back to the past, having their roots in the history of the balance of power between capital and labor. While this contextualization cannot predict the future, it does allow us to understand why today, in Italy and around the world, governments with clearly reactionary and fascist leanings are gaining ground, even with the complete disregard of significant youth: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every era the ruling ideas; that is, the class that is the dominant material power in society is at the same time its dominant spiritual power. The class that controls the means of material production also controls the means of intellectual production, so that, by and large, the ideas of those who lack the means of intellectual production are subject to it. The dominant ideas are nothing but the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, they are the dominant material relations taken as ideas: they are therefore the expression of the relations which make a class the dominant class and are therefore the ideas of its domination».[1]
Often, in response to international social and political events, deviant responses are offered, aimed at defending, in a sort of self-referentialism, the frequent regrets for individual defeated revolutions. These revolutions, by nationalizing all or part of the means of production in the exclusive interest of their respective national bourgeoisies, historically intent on freeing themselves from the imperialist domination of the great powers in order to assert themselves in their turn, ultimately revealed themselves painfully to be the exact opposite, interpreting not socialism but "the new class state that, prevailing over all others, takes on the task of planning overwork and over-exploitation, the restoration of overthrown privileges and the legitimization of new vested interests, and finally hunger, prison, and death for the socialist homeland."
But what does all this have to do with the Platform?
The answer to such a question can only begin with our not-so-brief political journey as it unfolded within anarchism, where we have represented and continue to represent a specific materialist and class-based tendency, albeit with all its limitations and delays. Therefore, speaking of the Platform today means critically addressing our journey in a very difficult historical moment, especially when we are left with only a handful of history, referring precisely to that history that illuminated the defeated revolutionary events, where anarchism nevertheless produced the finest seasons of its realistic utopia: como estaba felix nuestra Revolución.
Analyzing the origins, development, and ebb of class conflict, we recognize a profound insufficiency manifested not in the absence of a "leading party," but in the qualitative and quantitative inadequacy of a militant fabric capable of contributing to building the foundations of social conflict; of supporting its unifying role in orienting it toward broader contexts; of serving as a point of reference during the phases of defeat and disillusionment that disperse the forces and experiences of struggle; and of closing ranks to foster the growth of social and class consciousness, thus fueling new social opposition to capitalism, with a view to realizing the historical interests of the modern proletariat.
These are the tasks that lead to the construction of the Political Organization that we might also call a "party," if this term had not historically taken on a mystifying and therefore unusable meaning. In the bourgeois sphere, this term has, in fact, been consumed between progressivism and reaction; in the Marxist sphere, it has been dispersed among paralyzing orthodoxies, revisionisms, and reformist achievements that intertwine with the moderation of bourgeois ideologies, directions, and goals that historically span the entire horizon of reformism, up to the subordinate experiences of social democracy and the highly nuanced Leninist horizon, a perspective that is in any case unacceptable to us.
Starting from the Platform and its contents therefore means reiterating the need to concretely initiate a debate on the need for Political Organization not to direct but to support, orient, and strengthen class conflict, laying the foundations for overcoming the capitalist system.
The issue to be addressed is therefore complex, due in part to the fragmentation of available historical sources and the painful political and personal fractures that the entire Platform affair would have caused within the Italian and international anarchist movement, at least until the early 1980s. We therefore believe the time has come to objectively place the events and controversies within their historical context, to critically return to our younger years, which saw us as exponents of that libertarian communist movement that, since the Second World War, attempted to provide an alternative to the crisis of anarchism with a proposal to build a focused and federated political organization, rediscovering and critically reintroducing irresponsibly overlooked and omitted political contributions, including the Platform. The fact is that today we believe that all these transitions that we have been interpreting since the late 1960s, sometimes naively and presumptuously, do not refer to ancient enemies to be fought but to situations that need to be understood. Because if we believe we can identify and criticize the mistakes of others, we believe it is our duty, above all, to identify and criticize our own. Hence the need to describe, in future issues of Il Cantiere, the main features of our political journey, which has seen Arshinov's Platform as one of its landmarks.
Note
[1]Karl Marx, The German Ideology , 1846.
https://alternativalibertaria.fdca.it/wpAL/
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Link: (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #41 - The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists on its first centenary - AG (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]
Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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