Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629633909 ISBN 13: 9781629633909

Verlag: PM Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The history of anarchist-Marxist relations is usually told as a history of factionalism and division. These essays, based on original research and written especially for this collection, reveal some of the enduring sores in the revolutionary socialist movement in order to explore the important, too often neglected left-libertarian currents that have thrived in revolutionary socialist movements. By turns, the collection interrogates the theoretical boundaries between Marxism and anarchism and the process of their formation, the overlaps and creative tensions that shaped left-libertarian theory and practice, and the stumbling blocks to movement cooperation. Bringing together specialists working from a range of political perspectives, the book charts a history of radical twentieth-century socialism, and opens new vistas for research in the twenty-first. Contributors examine the political and social thought of a number of leading socialists—Marx, Morris, Sorel, Gramsci, Guérin, C.L.R. James, Hardt and Negri—and key movements including the Situationist International, Socialisme ou Barbarie and Council Communism. Analysis of activism in the UK, Australasia, and the U.S. serves as the prism to discuss syndicalism, carnival anarchism, and the anarchistic currents in the U.S. civil rights movement.

Contributors include Paul Blackledge, Lewis H. Mates, Renzo Llorente, Carl Levy, Christian Høgsbjerg, Andrew Cornell, Benoît Challand, Jean-Christophe Angaut, Toby Boraman, and David Bates.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Alex Prichard is senior lecturer in International Relations at the University of Exeter. He gained his PhD from Loughborough University in 2008 for work on the international political theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Dr Prichard is coeditor of the Contemporary Anarchist Studies monograph series published by Manchester University Press and was coeditor of a 2016 special issue of Capital & Class on ideological convergence on the left.

Ruth Kinna works at Loughborough University in the UK. She is the author of Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition (2016) and writes on historical and contemporary anarchist politics. She is editor of the peer-review journal Anarchist Studies.

Saku Pinta gained his PhD from Loughborough University in 2011. His research brought to light the history of the IWW and libertarian socialism more broadly. He is the writer and coproducer of To My Son in Spain, (2009) a documentary that tells the story of Finnish-Canadians from Thunder Bay who joined the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigades to fight in Spain.

Dave Berry was a lecturer in French politics and history at Loughborough University for over 30 years and was a cofounder of Loughborough’s Anarchism Research Group and of the Anarchist Studies Network. His doctoral thesis led to A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945. Besides a number of chapters and articles on various aspects of the life and politics of Daniel Guérin, other publications include New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational, coedited with Constance Bantman; Libertarian Socialism: Politics in Black and Red, coedited with Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, and Saku Pinta; “Anarchism in 1968,” in Carl Levy and Matt Adams (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism; and “An Anarchist History of ‘Our Common Mother,’” an introduction to a new edition of Peter Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution, 1789–1793. He also edited and introduced a selection of Guérin’s articles, translated for the first time: For a Libertarian Communism. His biography of Guérin, A Life in the Service of Revolution: Daniel Guérin, 1904–1988 is nearing completion.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Libertarian Socialism

Politics in Black and Red

By Alex Prichard

PM Press

Copyright © 2017 Alex Prichard, Ruth Kinna, Saku Pinta, and David Berry
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62963-390-9

Contents

Acknowledgements, 
Notes on Contributors, 
Preface, 
1 Introduction Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard, 
2 Freedom and Democracy: Marxism, Anarchism and the Problem of Human Nature Paul Blackledge, 
3 Anarchism, Individualism and Communism: William Morris's Critique of Anarcho-communism Ruth Kinna, 
4 The Syndicalist Challenge in the Durham Coalfield before 1914 Lewis H. Mates, 
5 Georges Sorel's Anarcho-Marxism Renzo Llorente, 
6 Antonio Gramsci, Anarchism, Syndicalism and Sovversivismo Carl Levy, 
7 Council Communist Perspectives on the Spanish Civil War and Revolution, 1936–1939 Saku Pinta, 
8 A 'Bohemian Freelancer'? C.L.R. James, His Early Relationship to Anarchism and the Intellectual Origins of Autonomism Christian Høgsbjerg, 
9 'White Skin, Black Masks': Marxist and Anti-racist Roots of Contemporary US Anarchism Andrew Cornell, 
10 The Search for a Libertarian Communism: Daniel Guérin and the 'Synthesis' of Marxism and Anarchism David Berry, 
11 Socialisme ou Barbarie or the Partial Encounters between Critical Marxism and Libertarianism Benoît Challand, 
12 Beyond Black and Red: The Situationists and the Legacy of the Workers' Movement Jean-Christophe Angaut, 
13 Carnival and Class: Anarchism and Councilism in Australasia during the 1970s Toby Boraman, 
14 Situating Hardt and Negri David Bates, 
15 Conclusion: Towards a Libertarian Socialism for the Twenty-First Century? Saku Pinta and David Berry, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Ruth Kinna and Alex Prichard

Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!

Otto Von Bismarck

This book is about two currents of ideas, anarchism and Marxism. It examines their complex interrelationship and mutual borrowings in history, theory and practice and it probes the limits and possibilities of co-operation by looking at the institutional and social contexts in which both heretical and orthodox expressions of these movements have operated. In presenting this collection, we have not attempted to fix the ideological content of either of these two currents but to show instead how this content has itself been shaped by a process of engagement, theoretical debate and political activity. To begin with definitions is to restart the long and wearisome tradition of demarcating difference and establishing doctrinal purity. This tradition has dominated in the past and its historical significance can hardly be underestimated, and we discuss it by way of introduction in order to contextualise the aims of the collection. But its practical effect has been to establish exclusive boundaries and to encourage a view that a politics of black and red is impossible, impractical or dangerous. The essays in this book suggest that such a politics might well be problematic, but that it nevertheless provides a welcome counter to sectarianism.

To turn, then, to the context: the history of European revolutionary socialism is usually told as a story of factionalism and dispute, and the politics of black and red – black being the colour of anarchism, and red of communism – is usually understood as dysfunctional and oppositional. The antagonism at the core of the relationship is often traced back to 1871 when the collapse of the First International appeared to mark the neat division of socialism into Bakuninist and Marxist currents. Suggestions that the significant marker was earlier, in the 1840s, when Proudhon refused collaboration with Marx, tend to reinforce the importance of this later split: 1871 cemented the formation of an ideological divide that Marx and Proudhon's mutual suspicion presaged. Criticisms of Max Stirner, voiced since the 1890s – sometime after Marx and Engels sketched their critique of 'Saint Max' in The German Ideology – similarly bolstered the view that the political disputes that divided Marxists and anarchists were grounded in very different, perhaps irreconcilable, philosophical traditions, always latent in the socialist movement.

A second influential story of the relationship is the account promoted by Lenin and it consists of the view that the differences between Marxists and anarchists have been overstated: both groups of socialists are committed to the realisation of a common end, they disagree only about the means of transformation. In the 1970s this case was advanced by the historian Eric Hobsbawm. The rejection of anarchism, he argued, had a number of dimensions, but its leading idea was that '[t]here is no difference between the ultimate objects of Marxists and anarchists, i.e. a libertarian communism in which exploitation, classes and the state will have ceased to exist'. Hobsbawm attempted to explain the apparent tension between this theoretical accord and the actual history of the revolutionary socialist movement by showing how revolutionary Marxists – Marx, Engels and Lenin – combined a rejection of anarchist thought with benevolence towards anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. The agreement on ends reflected the shared practical experience of revolution, but it was also consistent with a firm denial of anarchist means to that end, and the theory that supported those means. His explanation implied a clear separation of ideas from practice in the development of ideology. Although Hobsbawm acknowledged the imprecision of 'doctrinal, ideological and programmatic distinctions' in rank-and-file movements, contrary to contemporary treatments of ideological formation, he failed to see how the ideas of 'ideologists and political leaders', of both Marxist and anarchist varieties, were also shaped by political engagements and events – not just theory. The result was to reinforce the principle of theoretical division whilst providing a positive account of Leninism that, for anarchists, was unpersuasive.

Hobsbawm's elaboration of the apparent dovetailing of Marxist and anarchist positions points to a line of division that many anarchists have wanted to highlight – a third account of difference. This turns on the relationship between the means and ends of revolutionary struggle and the anarchist rejection of the idea that the transition from capitalism to socialism requires a period of transition in which state power is captured and used as an instrument of change, before 'withering away'. For anarchists, the adoption of such means necessarily compromises the ends of the revolution and it points to a model of socialist organisation that most have rejected. Although he passed over the theoretical grounds of the anarchist complaints, Hobsbawm pinpointed precisely the nature of the concern: Marxists not only accepted the 'withering away' thesis they also adopted a 'firm belief in the superiority of centralization to decentralization or federalism and (especially in the Leninist version), to a belief in the indispensability of leadership, organization and discipline and the inadequacy of any movement based on mere "spontaneity"'. From an apparent agreement about the ends of the revolution, Hobsbawm identified a combined package of ideas that was antithetical to anarchist thought and which, in parts and in whole, many self-identifying Marxists also rejected.

A fourth story of the relationship...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PM Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1629633909
• ISBN 13: 9781629633909
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Herausgeber: Prichard Alex, Kinna Ruth, Pinta Saku, Berry David
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland