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J.7.5 Quel est le rôle des anarchistes dans la révolution sociale?

Toutes les grandes révolutions sociales ont été spontanées. C'est cliché de dire que les révolutionnaires sont habituellement les plus surpris quand une révolution naît. Les anarchistes n'assume également pas que la révolution est initialement libertaire par nature. Tout ce que nous assumons c'est qu'il va y avoir des tendances libertaires sur lesquelles nous préfèrerons travailler et solidifier. En celà, le rôle des anarchistes et des organisations anarchistes est de pousser la révolution vers la révolution sociale en encourageant les tendances, dont nous avons discuté dans la dernière section, et en posant les idées et les solutions anarchistes. Dans les mots de Vernon Richards:

   "We do not for one moment assume that all social revolutions are necessarily anarchist. But whatever form the revolution against authority takes, the role of anarchists is clear: that of inciting the people to abolish capitalistic property and the institutions through which it exercises its power for the exploitation of the majority by a minority." [Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, p. 44] 

For anarchists, their role in a social revolution is clear. They try to spread anarchist ideas and encourage autonomous organisation and activity by the oppressed. For example, during the Russian Revolution anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists played a key role in the factory committee movement for workers' self-management. They combated Bolshevik attempts to substitute state control for workers' self-management and encouraged workplace occupations and federations of factory committees (see Maurice Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control for a good introduction to the movement for workers' self-management during the Russian Revolution and Bolshevik hostility to it). Similarly, they supported the soviets (councils elected by workers in their workplaces) but opposed their transformation from revolutionary bodies into state organs (and so little more than organs of the Communist Party and so the enemies of self-management). The anarchists tried to "work for their conversion from centres of authority and decrees into non-authoritarian centres, regulating and keeping things in order but not suppressing the freedom and independence of local workers' organisations. They must become centres which link together these autonomous organisations." [G. P. Maksimov in Paul Avrich (ed.) The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution, p. 105]

Therefore, the anarchist role, as Murray Bookchin puts it, is to "preserve and extend the anarchic phase that opens all the great social revolutions" by working "within the framework of the forms created by the revolution, not within the forms created by the party. What this means is that their commitment is to the revolutionary organs of self-management . . . to the social forms, not the political forms. Anarcho-communists [and other revolutionary anarchists] seek to persuade the factory committees, assemblies or soviets to make themselves into genuine organs of popular self-management, not to dominate them, manipulate them, or hitch them to an all-knowing political party." [Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 215 and p. 217]

Equally as important, "is that the people, all people, should lose their sheeplike instincts and habits with which their minds have been inculcated by an age-long slavery, and that they should learn to think and act freely. It is to this great task of spiritual liberation that anarchists must especially devote their attention." [Malatesta, Op. Cit., pp. 160-1] Unless people think and act for themselves, no social revolution is possible and anarchy will remain just a tendency with authoritarian societies.

Practically, this means the encouragement of self-management and direct action. Anarchists thus "push the people to expropriate the bosses and put all goods in common and organise their daily lives themselves, through freely constituted associations, without waiting for orders from outside and refusing to nominate or recognise any government or constituted body in whatever guise . . . even in a provisional capacity, which ascribes to itself the right to lay down the law and impose with force its will on others." [Malatesta, Op. Cit., p. 197] This is because, to quote Bakunin, anarchists do "not accept, even in the process of revolutionary transition, either constituent assemblies, provisional governments or so-called revolutionary dictatorships; because we are convinced that revolution is only sincere, honest and real in the hands of the masses, and that when it is concentrated in those of a few ruling individuals it inevitably and immediately becomes reaction." [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, p. 237]

As the history of every revolution shows, "revolutionary government" is a contradiction in terms. Government bodies mean "the transferring of initiative from the armed workers to a central body with executive powers. By removing the initiative from the workers, the responsibility for the conduct of the struggle and its objectives [are] also transferred to a governing hierarchy, and this could have no other than an adverse effect on the morale of the revolutionary fighters." [Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, pp. 42-3] Such a centralisation of power means the suppression of local initiatives, the replacing of self-management with bureaucracy and the creation of a new, exploitative and oppressive class of officials and party hacks. Only when power rests in the hands of everyone can a social revolution exist and a free society created. If this is not done, if the state replaces the self-managed associations of a free people, all that happens is the replacement of one class system by another. This is because the state is an instrument of minority rule -- it can never become an instrument of majority rule, its centralised, hierarchical and authoritarian nature excludes such a possibility (see section H.3.7 for more discussion on this issue).

Therefore an important role of anarchists is to undermine hierarchical organisation by creating self-managed ones, by keeping the management and direction of a struggle or revolution in the hands of those actually conducting it. It is their revolution, not a party's and so they should control and manage it. They are the ones who have to live with the consequences of it. "The revolution is safe, it grows and becomes strong," correctly argues Alexander Berkman, "as long as the masses feel that they are direct participants in it, that they are fashioning their own lives, that they are making the revolution, that they are the revolution. But the moment that their activities are usurped by a political party or are centred in some special organisation, revolutionary effort becomes limited to a comparatively small circle from the which the large masses are practically excluded. The natural result of that [is that] popular enthusiasm is dampened, interest gradually weakens, initiative languishes, creativeness wanes, and the revolution becomes the monopoly of a clique which presently turns dictator." [Op. Cit., p. 65]

The history of every revolution proves this point, we feel, and so the role of anarchists (like those described in section J.3) is clear -- to keep a revolution revolutionary by encouraging libertarian ideas, organisation, tactics and activity. To requote Emma Goldman:

   "No revolution can ever succeed as factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSE to be achieved." [Patterns of Anarchy, p. 113] 

Anarchists, therefore, aim to keep the means in line with the goal and their role in any social revolution is to combat authoritarian tendencies and parties while encouraging working class self-organisation, self-activity and self-management and the spreading of libertarian ideas and values within society.