Eclipsed from the headlines by the ongoing carnage, there is an active
civil resistance in Iraq that opposes the occupation, the torture regime
it protects, and the jihadi and Ba'athist 'resistance' alike.
Submitted by The New Centrist (not verified) on Thu, 02/21/2008 - 10:52.
Point taken. "Smash the state" is more than a bit juvenile. I was simply using it an illustration. If you were a Leninist I would have used instituting a dictatorship of the proletariat as an example. In both cases we are talking about political goals that will not be realized in either of our lives. But accomplishing the goal isn’t what matters, what matters is being “down with the revolution” and all that jive.
Most of the current examples you provided were international (Zapatistas, etc.) and largely irrelevant to the vast majority of folks living in the United States. They are certainly relevant to people on the ground in those countries but the impact here is insignificant outside of the rad-left.
I understand why radical lefties focus on these movements, they are much more sexy than the mundane reformist struggles happening here in the U.S. But again, I think the reason people focus on what's happening abroad is due to their impotency at home. Things aren’t working out the way you want at home? No social revolution around the bend? Then hop on a plane to Chiapas or Venezuela or the World Social Forum so you can play revolutionary! Woo-hoo!
As far as the domestic movements you mentioned, LES squatters? I’m sure you’re aware that most working-class folks have no interest in living the squatter/fregan lifestyle. Yes, Seattle was a fantastic moment. But rather than heralding the grand emergence of the “anti-globalization” movement in the U.S. it really was the movement’s last hurrah.
I first read the Bookchin, Dolgoff, and Peirats books quite a while ago, when I was in my 20s. At the time they were fantastic. But as I grew older and acquired more knowledge I began to see the first two books for what they are, polemic rather than history. The Bookchin text is practically a hagiography. Dolgoff is a bit better. Peirats is far and away the best of the three but even he admits “lack of access to Spanish archives.”
The difference between these accounts and Seidman's is largely in the approach. Bookchin, Dolgoff and Peirats wrote their books to make a political point, which is fine. But Seidman's books are historical analyses based on archival research. This is evident by the sources they each use. If you have a look at the sources used by Dolgoff in "The Anarchist Collectives," or by Bookchin the overwhelming majority of their citations are from secondary sources. With Seidman, primary sources prevail. In other words, Seidman did original research, in archives, to come to his conclusions. That’s what makes Seidman’s book different from these three and in many ways superior.
Seidman shows the CNT had to resort to tying pay to output, like in capitalist firms. The CNT did engage in forced collectivization and other unsavory methods--including forced labor. Seidman's research discovered that certain CNT unions copied the "Stakhanovism of the Bolsheviks in order to promote production", used forced work camps for "delinquents," and in a meeting of officials of the Metallurgical Union (CNT) on May 27, 1937, it's president Rubio declared that in a war and Revolution workers must work until exhaustion. By May 1938, CNT unions also reestablished the hated piecework wage scale. As Seidman writes, "When the unions were faced with industrial problems such as poor productivity and workers' indifference, they were forced to tie pay to output, just as the capitalists had done."
In addition to Republic of Egos, Seidman also wrote Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Fronts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Another excellent historical account is Benjamin Martin's, The Agony of Industrialization: Labor and Industrialization in Spain (Cornell: ILR Press, 1990).
I realize it’s difficult to communicate tone through typing. I definitely do not consider you a useful idiot or fellow traveler. I’ve linked to your website on my blog. However, I think you are a lone voice in a vast wilderness. You are a small drop of lucidity in a sea of lunacy. When I look at the broader lib-left, to say nothing of the rad-left, I think the vast majority of people involved in these forms of “politics” are bonkers.
As far as the anarchists and rad-lefties speaking out against Dolgoff and the Cuban libertarians all I can say is look at the man’s papers. They are open and available to the public.
This excerpt may give you an idea what anarchists thought about the Cuban libertarians (MLCE) after the revolution. It’s from Frank Fernandez’ Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement:
http://www.ainfos.ca/04/feb/ainfos00400.html
“[A]lmost unbelievably, certain sectors of international anarchism refused to accept that the “Cuban Revolution” (that is, the Cuban government) had become a
totalitarian system that persecuted, imprisoned, and shot their Cuban comrades..
The confusion in the anarchist camp regarding the Cuban situation was fomented by the Castro government’s propaganda apparatus, which had enormous resources, talent, imagination, and great political ability…
They called the Cuban anarchists “CIA agents, go-betweens, drug traffickers, Batista supporters,” and many other epithets common to Marxist propaganda. But above all they circulated the DDG in all of the libertarian milieus to which they had access, in this manner creating confusion first and doubt later in regard to the MLCE…
Of course, one would have expected this maneuver. What really surprised the Cuban anarchists was the reaction to it in the anarchist world...given the justness of their charges against Castroism, the rest of the world’s anarchists would naturally and spontaneously rally to their aid, as they had to the Spanish anarchist victims of Franco.
But this didn’t happen. Doubts were raised in anarchist groups in Mexico, Venezuela, Uruguay, France, and Italy. Initially, these doubts were comprehensible in relation to the revolutionary process that was coming to a head in Cuba - especially so given that the same Cuban anarchists who were now in exile and attacking Castro had initially supported the revolutionary system.”
Check it out. It’s all there for you to see with your own eyes. From this brief exchange it's obvious that neither one of us is going to change the other's opinion so that isn’t my point. All I’m trying to do is provide sources of information that you may be unfamiliar with. How you interpret this information is up to you.
Have a nice day.
»
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The inconvenient facts and unanswered questions surrounding the attacks are legion, but the endemic sloppiness of the self-styled "researchers" is delegitimizing the entire project of critiquing the "official version." The ostentatiously named "Truth movement" is not clearing the air, but muddying the water.
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Point taken. "Smash the state" is more than a bit juvenile. I was simply using it an illustration. If you were a Leninist I would have used instituting a dictatorship of the proletariat as an example. In both cases we are talking about political goals that will not be realized in either of our lives. But accomplishing the goal isn’t what matters, what matters is being “down with the revolution” and all that jive.
Most of the current examples you provided were international (Zapatistas, etc.) and largely irrelevant to the vast majority of folks living in the United States. They are certainly relevant to people on the ground in those countries but the impact here is insignificant outside of the rad-left.
I understand why radical lefties focus on these movements, they are much more sexy than the mundane reformist struggles happening here in the U.S. But again, I think the reason people focus on what's happening abroad is due to their impotency at home. Things aren’t working out the way you want at home? No social revolution around the bend? Then hop on a plane to Chiapas or Venezuela or the World Social Forum so you can play revolutionary! Woo-hoo!
As far as the domestic movements you mentioned, LES squatters? I’m sure you’re aware that most working-class folks have no interest in living the squatter/fregan lifestyle. Yes, Seattle was a fantastic moment. But rather than heralding the grand emergence of the “anti-globalization” movement in the U.S. it really was the movement’s last hurrah.
I first read the Bookchin, Dolgoff, and Peirats books quite a while ago, when I was in my 20s. At the time they were fantastic. But as I grew older and acquired more knowledge I began to see the first two books for what they are, polemic rather than history. The Bookchin text is practically a hagiography. Dolgoff is a bit better. Peirats is far and away the best of the three but even he admits “lack of access to Spanish archives.”
The difference between these accounts and Seidman's is largely in the approach. Bookchin, Dolgoff and Peirats wrote their books to make a political point, which is fine. But Seidman's books are historical analyses based on archival research. This is evident by the sources they each use. If you have a look at the sources used by Dolgoff in "The Anarchist Collectives," or by Bookchin the overwhelming majority of their citations are from secondary sources. With Seidman, primary sources prevail. In other words, Seidman did original research, in archives, to come to his conclusions. That’s what makes Seidman’s book different from these three and in many ways superior.
Seidman shows the CNT had to resort to tying pay to output, like in capitalist firms. The CNT did engage in forced collectivization and other unsavory methods--including forced labor. Seidman's research discovered that certain CNT unions copied the "Stakhanovism of the Bolsheviks in order to promote production", used forced work camps for "delinquents," and in a meeting of officials of the Metallurgical Union (CNT) on May 27, 1937, it's president Rubio declared that in a war and Revolution workers must work until exhaustion. By May 1938, CNT unions also reestablished the hated piecework wage scale. As Seidman writes, "When the unions were faced with industrial problems such as poor productivity and workers' indifference, they were forced to tie pay to output, just as the capitalists had done."
In addition to Republic of Egos, Seidman also wrote Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Fronts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). Another excellent historical account is Benjamin Martin's, The Agony of Industrialization: Labor and Industrialization in Spain (Cornell: ILR Press, 1990).
I realize it’s difficult to communicate tone through typing. I definitely do not consider you a useful idiot or fellow traveler. I’ve linked to your website on my blog. However, I think you are a lone voice in a vast wilderness. You are a small drop of lucidity in a sea of lunacy. When I look at the broader lib-left, to say nothing of the rad-left, I think the vast majority of people involved in these forms of “politics” are bonkers.
As far as the anarchists and rad-lefties speaking out against Dolgoff and the Cuban libertarians all I can say is look at the man’s papers. They are open and available to the public.
This excerpt may give you an idea what anarchists thought about the Cuban libertarians (MLCE) after the revolution. It’s from Frank Fernandez’ Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement:
http://www.ainfos.ca/04/feb/ainfos00400.html
“[A]lmost unbelievably, certain sectors of international anarchism refused to accept that the “Cuban Revolution” (that is, the Cuban government) had become a
totalitarian system that persecuted, imprisoned, and shot their Cuban comrades..
The confusion in the anarchist camp regarding the Cuban situation was fomented by the Castro government’s propaganda apparatus, which had enormous resources, talent, imagination, and great political ability…
They called the Cuban anarchists “CIA agents, go-betweens, drug traffickers, Batista supporters,” and many other epithets common to Marxist propaganda. But above all they circulated the DDG in all of the libertarian milieus to which they had access, in this manner creating confusion first and doubt later in regard to the MLCE…
Of course, one would have expected this maneuver. What really surprised the Cuban anarchists was the reaction to it in the anarchist world...given the justness of their charges against Castroism, the rest of the world’s anarchists would naturally and spontaneously rally to their aid, as they had to the Spanish anarchist victims of Franco.
But this didn’t happen. Doubts were raised in anarchist groups in Mexico, Venezuela, Uruguay, France, and Italy. Initially, these doubts were comprehensible in relation to the revolutionary process that was coming to a head in Cuba - especially so given that the same Cuban anarchists who were now in exile and attacking Castro had initially supported the revolutionary system.”
Check it out. It’s all there for you to see with your own eyes. From this brief exchange it's obvious that neither one of us is going to change the other's opinion so that isn’t my point. All I’m trying to do is provide sources of information that you may be unfamiliar with. How you interpret this information is up to you.
Have a nice day.