Red & Black Revolution
 A magazine of libertarian communism

      Issue 1    October 1994

Produced by Workers Solidarity Movement

THE LEFT...ASHES TO PHOENIX  

It has become something of a cliche to 
refer to the death or collapse of the 
left.  What's still missing however is an 
analysis of what went wrong with the left.  
One that goes beyond surface 
manifestations, and reaches into its core 
politics.  This lack of analysis means 
that much of the 'new left' is not that 
new at all, merely a repackaging of old 
ideas in new wrappers.

Major changes have occurred in the left(1) 
throughout its short history.  In both 
numbers and politics there have been wide 
swings from times of hope and mass numbers 
to times of despair and collapse.  In the 
late 60's and early 70's the left grew 
internationally, attracting huge numbers 
and leading real battles.  Today this 
growth has collapsed almost totally, many 
of the organisations that led it no longer 
exist and the ideas of those that survive, 
have been for the most part so 
discredited, that it is unlikely they can 
ever recover.

 The collapse of the left

Since the Russian revolution the left has 
been divided into two great camps. There 
were those who followed the Bolshevik 
model of a revolutionary seizure of state 
power and those who followed the more 
traditional Marxist model of social 
democracy, seeking to gain state power 
electorally where possible.  Although 
there were other significant movements, 
including the anarchists, what shaped the 
left today were the splits within those 
two camps and the perimeter of debate laid 
down around them.

The Communist parties built real mass 
parties in many countries, and expanded 
their influence from Russia to a host of 
other nations.  Along with all those who 
claimed the Bolshevik legacy, they rode a 
carpet of triumphalism for many years, one 
that limited debate around revolution to 
variations on the Leninist model.  Even in 
countries like Ireland where they never 
reached significant numbers, the prestige 
of Russia and the other revolutions 
enabled them to wield an influence far out 
of proportion with their numbers, among 
intellectuals and in the unions.  But 
towards the end of the 1980's the whole 
edifice crashed to the ground almost 
overnight.  In the east the parties were 
overthrown, in the west they split into 
competing and mostly irrelevant factions.

The social-democrats in the years after 
the First World War expanded on the 
earlier success of the German SDP and came 
to power in country after country.  Most 
of the western democracies have had social 
democratic governments in the intervening 
period.  But the left social-democrats had 
always looked to the USSR as a guide, 
while their policies were very much based 
on ability to control and direct national 
capital.  In the 80's the changed nature 
of capital, from a national form to an 
increasingly trans-national one made 
social democratic economic programs 
redundant.  The control of the national 
economy needed by the nation state for 
even the limited reforms of social-
democracy is beginning to vanish.  Witness 
how even the threatened election of a 
Labour government in Britain resulted in 
rapid capital transfers out of the 
country.  The left within the social 
democratic parties collapsed due to the 
increasing impotence of their program and 
the emerging crisis in the USSR.  Their 
mass membership first dwindled and then 
collapsed.  Today in rhetoric(2) as well 
as deed they are indistinguishable from 
the liberal parties.

This twin collapse was international and 
resulted in the vast bulk of those who 
called themselves socialist abandoning 
left politics and activism.  As a related 
consequence the 1980's also saw the 'left' 
leaning national liberation organisations 
like the ANC or FMLN come to a compromise 
with imperialism and reach a settlement.  
This had a demoralising effect on those 
whose primary focus was solidarity work 
for these organisations, one that is still 
to reach its full consequences as events 
unfold in South Africa and Palestine.

There were many who saw themselves as 
outside the Communist parties and the 
social democrats.  Sometimes the 
differences were real, as with anarchists.  
Sometimes they were not so real but 
appeared so because of the very narrowness 
of debate, as with most Trotskyists.  Even 
with this perceived gap the very fact that 
huge numbersabandoned politics had a knock 
on effect.  This was demoralising but it 
also meant that effective action became 
increasingly impossible.  Even if the 
arguments were won, the networks that 
could have carried them through no longer 
existed.

It's not just the party!

All those bodies which could be described 
as 'left' have seen a collapse in 
involvement.  This effect is seen not just 
in political organisations but more 
importantly in all campaigning bodies.  
The effect is seen in the unions where the 
number of activists has dwindled to the 
point where most unpaid positions are 
uncontested.  This has led to the 
outwardly positive 'election' of 
revolutionaries to trades councils and 
branch committees.  The reality behind 
this is more to do with nobody else being 
willing to take the job.  In no sense has 
the broad layer of activists (who might 
once have seen far left politics as loony) 
been won over, rather most have dropped 
out or come to see revolutionary politics 
as irrelevant rather than dangerous.

The ability of the left to explain what is 
happening around it, to intervene in 
events and to change the course of them 
has vanished.  Although illusions in the 
state was always the major problem of the 
left, today the activity of what remains 
is little more than attempts to get the 
state to police society for the better.  
For example the far-right is to be 
countered by trying to get the Fascists 
banned by the state at national and local 
level.  In fact much of the left today see 
people themselves as the problem and see 
more police, more intrusive management, 
more control over what can be said and 
seen, as the solution.  Most notably this 
has arisen in the focus on censorship as 
not just a method but almost the only way 
of fighting both racism and sexism.

The death of the left is also reflected in 
its lack of hope.  Where once the left was 
all about an exciting vision of a future 
society now it is pre-occupied with a fear 
of the future and a longing for the past.  
New scientific discoveries instead of 
being seen as part of the process of 
liberating man from nature, are instead 
seen as part of a plan to create a Huxley 
type 'Brave New World'.  Hence recent 
articles in surviving Trotskyist journals 
argue against Chaos Theory and the Human 
Genome project as being anti-Marxist.  
Science once seen as the solution to many 
of humanity's problems is now seen as a 
major problem in itself.

This is what is meant by saying the left 
is dead.  Its numbers have collapsed, it 
has no vision or direction and instead of 
looking to the future it worships the 
past.

>From one point of view anarchists can in 
part welcome this collapse, as it is the 
collapse of authoritarian socialism.  Most 
of the left organisations were social-
democratic or Leninist in character and so 
their ideas were incapable of constructing 
socialism.  The nature of the collapse re-
enforces the anarchist rejection of the 
authoritarian methods of these 
organisations as it was these methods that 
destroyed the potential for socialism.  
After years of being told that compromises 
and deceit were the fastest (if not only) 
way to create socialism, anarchists feel 
entitled to repeat the response of Voline 
to Trotsky in 1919 at the height of the 
Russian Civil war:

Trotsky: "One can't make an omelette 
without breaking eggs"

Voline: "I see the broken eggs now where's 
this omelette of yours?"

In the English speaking countries(3) and 
in particular Ireland, the anarchist 
movement is much too small to replace the 
numbers and influence once held by the 
left.  So the collapse of authoritarian 
socialism is widely seen as the collapse 
of socialism and a demonstration that 
capitalism, whatever its flaws is the best 
that can be hoped for.  Even in the 
countries where the anarchist movement is 
substantial (and in many countries it is 
the main force on the revolutionary left) 
it is as yet inadequate for its basic task 
(i.e. revolution).  In terms of ideas, the 
anarchists may have the best ones but as 
yet they are not capable of winning the 
masses to overthrowing capitalism and 
creating anarchism.

In the English speaking countries there is 
not and has not been a significant 
anarchist movement with the possible 
exception of the period up to World War I 
in the USA.  Anarchists have operated as a 
small section of a larger left.  Because 
of the small size of the anarchist 
movement the collapse of this larger left 
has had profound effects on it, both due 
to the general climate of demoralisation 
and also because it is no longer possible 
to exist purely as an opposition to 
Leninism and social democracy.  This is a 
good thing because some anarchist 
organisations had come to limit themselves 
to explaining 'Why the left is wrong' on a 
whole number of issues rather than trying 
to construct an alternative themselves.

A new left?

It might be hoped that with the twin 
collapse of Leninism and authoritarian 
socialism people would flock to the banner 
of anarchism.  For the most part this has 
not happened.  Instead over the last 
decade we have seen the emergence of a 
number of 'new' left organisations which 
claim to represent a decisive break with 
the past.  Sometimes this represents 
little more than a change of names.  In 
other cases these new organisations arose 
as splits by members unhappy with the 
direction of exisiting organisations, 
their initial politics coming from ex-
members of that organisation. The 
Committees of Correspondence in the USA 
was formed by members of the Communist 
Party USA who lost an internal argument 
over the direction ('reforming') of that 
party.

Many members of the old left organisations 
recognised that their ideas were 
discredited and no longer relevant, and 
voted with their feet, leaving not only 
left organisations but oppositional 
politics in general.  But not all 
vanished, some have made efforts to remain 
active.  Some of these have refused to 
learn anything, or admit that mistakes 
were made, instead they carry on activity 
in a parody of yesteryear. Some of the 
Communist parties for instance reacted by 
returning to worshipping the period of 
Stalin or Brezhnev and blame the 
'reformers' for all their current woes.  
The Irish Communist Party responded to the 
collapse of the USSR by hiring a skip and 
throwing most of the Gorbachev material 
from their Dublin bookshop into it.  In 
most Communist parties however the 
majority came to the conclusion that 
revolution itself was no longer possible 
and instead became social democrats or 
abandoned left politics for 'progressive' 
politics where the working class is seen 
as just one more pressure group in a 
rainbow coalition.

Some organisations did become aware of 
their own death and sensibly dissolved 
themselves rather than causing damage as 
they thrashed around in their death 
agonies.  But they were wrong to imagine 
that just because they could conceive no 
future relevance for revolutionary 
politics that revolution was no longer 
relevant.  Instead they were faced with a 
jump that they were incapable of seeing 
the other side of.  Indeed the upturn in 
industrial disputes over the last year in 
Europe, most notably around Air France, 
indicate that the class conflict goes on 
and may even be picking up some of its 
lost momentum.  Unemployment and poverty 
have again become obvious features of 
capitalism.  To this extent the crisis on 
the left is mirrored by a crisis in 
capitalism, its hope of the early 80's of 
an eternal boom now dashed on the rocks of 
recession.

What went wrong?

That the left has collapsed is contested 
by only the most irrelevant sects.  But 
the attempts to explain why it happened 
are poor, focusing on the surface 
manifestations; the economic crisis of the 
USSR in the 80's, or conspiracy theories 
about the CIA.  The right and many on the 
left went for the simplest explanation of 
all, socialism cannot work and revolutions 
have to end in dictatorship.   But the 
failure is not with the idea of socialism 
but rather with what those who called 
themselves socialists became.  It was not 
socialism that failed but the socialists!  
Above all, this failure arose from the 
left ideologies that looked to good 
leaders to liberate the rest of us.  To 
these ideologies the role of 'ordinary 
people' differed, from the tickers of 
ballot papers to the stormers of 
barricades.  The role of decision makers 
however was denied, it was to be placed in 
trust with an intellectual elite until the 
far off day when this power could be 
returned.

The tragic part about this is that the 
warnings about where the statist path 
would lead have been around since the 
working class first became a formidable 
force at the time of the Paris Commune 
(1871).  The debate between the anarchists 
and Marxists that split the 1st 
International was fought around this 
issue.  But for various reasons those 
issuing the warning, the anarchists, 
failed to convince the rest of the 
left(4).

The two major trends of the 20th Century 
socialist movement, the Leninists and the 
social-democrats, were not as radically 
different as it may have seemed but rather 
represented two sides of the same coin.  
The actual structure of rule in the Soviet 
Union was never really a major problem for 
either of these groupings, their 
disagreements were over whether such a 
society had to be established through 
revolution, or could be 'reformed' into 
being.  Both currents sought to create 
socialism through the actions of  a few, 
wielding state power, on behalf of the 
many.  Left social-democrats like Tony 
Benn went further and were commonly happy 
enough to describe the USSR as actually 
existing socialism.  In Ireland, 
organisations like the Workers Party held 
a similar (if quiet) position towards 
North Korea and, along with members of 
Labour Left went there on junkets.

The argument between Leninism and social-
democracy was not about how a socialist 
society could be built, both aimed to use 
state power to do this.  Rather it was 
whether sufficient control of the state 
could be gained through  the parliamentary 
system.  Many Leninists may have claimed 
to wish for more democracy(5) in the USSR 
but they all stood over the Bolshevik 
destruction of democracy, only moving to 
opposition when their particular hero was 
ousted.  Organisations like the Socialist 
Workers Party that claim to stand for 
'socialism from below' defend the actions 
of the Bolsheviks in imposing one man 
management, crushing workers councils and 
censoring, imprisoning and executing 
members of other left tendencies.  This 
has to call into question any claimed 
commitment to democracy, or socialism from 
below.

Aiding struggle?

Even in the short term the left commonly 
offered no way forward.  It would be wrong 
to overstate the case but a large section 
of the left was not interested in helping 
workers win struggles except in the most 
abstract sense.  Instead involvement in 
struggle had just one thing behind it: 
'build the party'.  This commonly took the 
form of setting up a party controlled 
'front' which would campaign around an 
issue solely in order to recruit those who 
were motivated to fight on this issue.  
Once the potential recruits dried up, then 
the campaign was quietly wound up.  A 
common response to contacting someone 
about a new campaign was the question of 
'whose front is it'.  Anyone who has been 
involved with left activity for any period 
of time will have been through meetings 
and campaigns disrupted and possibly 
destroyed by different left factions 
wrestling for control.

The effect this had on activists was seen 
by the way membership of many left 
organisations operated like a revolving 
door, with people interested in socialism 
walking in one side, only to be thrown out 
the other, disillusioned and burnt out. 
'Everything for the organisation' was the 
unofficial slogan of the left.  This 
destroyed many peoples' belief in 
socialism as a source of inspiration as 
they got sucked into the methods of 
treachery and deceit that this involved.

Many of today's activists have either come 
through this mill, or have had bad 
experiences of the left using them.  This 
has created a legacy of suspicion and even 
hostility which forms a real barrier in 
building solidarity today.  It also means 
that many activists have no interest in 
building revolutionary organisations but 
instead limit themselves to building 
campaigns.  Revolutionary organisations 
are seen as self-serving edifices rather 
than bodies with a positive and vital 
contribution to make to struggle.  The 
attitude that characterises these 
activists' view of the revolutionary 
organisations is suspicion.

So in this way the left has actually 
played a substantial negative role.  It 
has constructed a monstrous caricature of 
socialism and the methods of socialism.  
Rather than bringing people forward, it 
has sucked the spirit out of them.  Not 
just those parts of the left who created 
and worshipped the USSR but also those 
whose methods have alienated tens of 
thousands of activists.  In this context 
many activists see left organisations as 
useless barriers, interested only in 
selling papers and sectarian squabbles.
 
The 'new left'

This crisis of the left has become 
increasingly apparent over the last decade 
and has resulted in the formation of many 
new groups, including ourselves.  As the 
crisis became particularly obvious, the 
process of disintegration speeded up and 
the new organisations if anything became 
more confused.  Most of the more recent 
ones have no common vision of anything 
positive in the past but are united solely 
by a feeling of 'that's not the way to do 
it' towards the existing left.  But 
consciously or unconsciously, various 
strategies have been adopted by some as 
the way forward.  It is these strategies 
that must be examined to judge the 
potential of such new groups.

Groups whose aim is a new flavour of 
Leninism or social-democracy can be 
written off at the start.  The record of 
their strategies for the last century 
speaks for itself.  From the libertarian 
point of view the fault is in their core 
politics, that which makes them statist.  
However many have become aware of these 
flaws and so many of the groups that have 
arisen in the last decade would claim to 
be neither.  It is these forces which are 
important in terms of the emergence of a 
new left.

Certain limitations have to be recognised 
from the start.  It is inevitable that 
many of the newer left organisations have 
a blinkered vision, brought about by their 
youth and small size.  Their memory 
extends back maybe a decade or so at most.  
They are unaware of events outside their 
own country except in the broadest terms, 
and force events to fit into an analysis 
generated from their immediate and narrow 
experience(6).  This is a real if 
unavoidable problem, but one that is 
greatly reduced when it is recognised and 
taken into account.  It is also a reason 
why it is vital to convince many of the 
older layer of activists that there is 
still a point in revolutionary politics, 
but that a thorough re-examination of 
basic politics is necessary.

It is not intended to discuss 
organisations claiming to be in the 
anarchist tradition in this article.  What 
will be discussed is organisations who 
believe that the wheel needs to be re-
invented (i.e. that there is no historical 
tradition worth basing themselves on).  
These see the solution in junking the left 
to date, and re-building from scratch.  
This is the most common set of strategies 
to have emerged in the last few years.  
What has united these different strategies 
to date is that although it is pointed out 
repeatedly that mistakes were made and the 
old left is irrelevant, there is little 
analysis as to the cause of this 
irrelevancy.  The assumption is that with 
the verbal break from the 'old politics', 
all the problems it created fade away.

This assumption is fundamentally flawed as 
it assumes that the reasons for the 
failure of the left to date are 
understood.  In fact for the most part, 
instead of analysis, all that exists is a 
set of popular prejudices and some surface 
understanding of the problem.  This 
approach also assumes that there is little 
need for newer members to re-discover the 
cause of the previous problems, that this 
information will somehow be transmitted 
down by the older members (leadership?).  
This in itself is a direct example of the 
re-appearance of one of the problems 
associated with the failure of the old 
left.  The division into leaders and paper 
sellers.

Organisations adopting these strategies 
are often faced with an additional 
problem.  They attract long time members 
of various other organisations who have 
brought a fair amount of political baggage 
with them.  Although they can say 'yes we 
were wrong' they can't admit the 
possibility that some of their former 
critics were right, at least in part.  One 
British group, Analysis(7), decided that 
the Russian revolution was not so relevant 
after all.  To them the turning point for 
the failure of socialism was the support 
the social democratic parties gave to 
their various ruling classes in voting for 
World War I.  As they put it "Had the 
revolution never occurred, had Stalinism 
never existed, Marxism would still face 
the crisis it does today"(8).  This was a 
handy way for a bunch of 'ex'-Leninists to 
avoid facing why they had remained 
uncritical of the Bolsheviks for so many 
years.

This political baggage also surfaces in 
that although many can admit the Russian 
revolution was in part destroyed by the 
politics of Bolshevism, they can only do 
so after first making clear that their 
critique is not related to the 'moralism' 
of the anarchists.  This is the hallmark 
of an organisation that never sees itself 
as addressing 'ordinary people'.  Who in 
their right mind would approach such a 
discussion with 'I've nothing against 
shooting leftists to achieve revolution, 
but it does not work'.  The anarchists 
were full of moral indignation at the 
Bolshevik shooting of leftists and workers 
and quite right too!  But they also argued 
that terror was crushing the revolution by 
destroying popular initiative and debate.  
To read Voline's or Maximoff's, (two of 
the exiled Russian anarchists) accounts, 
is not to encounter page after page of 
moralism but to find concrete example 
after example of the crippling of a 
revolution by a party obsessed with its 
need to be in control.  It is also 
fundamentally dishonest and reflects the 
attitude of the guru to his followers.  It 
is obviously not expected that anyone will 
look at the original 'moralism'.

It is the strategies that are based around 
this method that are looked at here.  
Strategies based on the premise that 
little if anything can usefully be 
salvaged from the left's history.  
Strategies based above all on the idea 
that to date nothing useful has been done, 
except perhaps in the field of theory.  
And it is in this approach to theory and 
its perceived relationship to practice 
that the greatest problems arise.

Shopping trolley

To see nothing coherent in the past but 
still wish to be active leaves an 
organisation with an immediate problem.  
What do you base this activity on?  One 
strategy used in this case, where a wide 
body of theory is quickly needed, is 
equivalent to filling a shopping trolley 
at a car boot sale.   What appears to be 
the most useful ideas from the past are 
picked up, regardless of their 
relationship with each other.

The adoption of such a strategy is often 
characterised by a tendency for the 
organisation to see itself as the only one 
capable of understanding what's going on.  
It's not hard to see how this mentality 
develops when all around seem to be intent 
on carrying on regardless on a sinking 
ship.  Apart from this inherent elitism, 
this strategy carries it own problems.

Chief among these is that, if an 
organisation places itself in the role as 
saviour it must be able to provide answers 
to everything.  The development of 
coherent ideas takes time.  This time can 
be reduced considerably by picking what 
appear to be the best ideas around.  While 
this approach is highly flawed it can 
perhaps be feasible if sufficient time is 
spent re-developing these ideas to fit 
into the core of the organisations 
existing politics.  (There is also the 
wider question of 'is it necessary'?)  In 
practice however, temptation wins and one 
gets treated to a frantic super-market 
spree as the group hurtles around quickly 
grabbing whatever has the best packaging 
off the shelves.  Unfortunately at some 
later stage it's discovered all the bits 
don't quite go together.  But by then 
everybody's got their pet piece and no one 
has much in common. 

The Ivory Tower

Another strategy that is emerging is for 
organisations to shun activity in favour 
of a retreat to academia, to re-examine 
the text books in order to emerge some 
time in the future with a shiny new 
theory.  This is often the next stop for 
individuals who have been in a group where 
the shopping trolley fell apart.  Activity 
or contact with the outside world is 
diagnosed as the problem, what's needed is 
temporary isolation, with your message 
just being aimed at others on the left who 
have realised something is wrong.

Their deliberate use of archaic language 
shows us that what we have is politics 
designed to impress the existing 
intellectual left(9).  There is no excuse 
for putting across simple ideas in complex 
terms unless you intend your material to 
be used as a sleeping aid.  These may seem 
like irrelevant stylistic matters but 
actually they reflect an important point. 

This is that the new left is repeating 
many of the mistakes of the old, in a re-
packaged form.  The idea that the answers 
are to be found in text books, that 
somewhere, there is a magic theory or 
theories which will show the way forward 
is just a re-working of the old Trotskyist 
idea of a 'crisis of leadership'(10).  
Ideas are important and the right ideas 
are vital but it is people who are the 
life blood of the revolutionary process.  
Far more people are aware that the current 
system is offering an inadequate future 
for themselves and their children than are 
involved in revolutionary politics.  Most 
people come into conflict with the system 
at one stage or another.  What is lacking 
is the belief that there can be an 
alternative, that change is possible.

What's needed are arguments on why 
revolutions have failed in the past and 
how they can succeed in the future.  But 
what is also needed is the development of 
a tradition of success.  People must 
believe that they can win in order for 
them to start to fight back.  This belief 
can be created by winning small victories.  
What's more it is only by real experience 
in struggle, that ideas can be tested, it 
is only by encountering real life that the 
ability to convince people can be honed.  
Those who would retreat to the libraries 
are like armchair tourists who imagine 
watching Holiday '95 is the same thing as 
walking down those far away streets.

All action, no talk?

There is another side to this 'emphasis on 
theory' coin.  Another strategy which has 
been adopted by some organisations is one 
in which theory is either discarded beyond 
rudimentary aims and principles, or left 
to a small elite.  No need is perceived 
for politics developed beyond a 'we hate 
capitalism'.  Nor is a need seen for 
politics to be developed within the whole 
organisation as opposed to a small elite, 
steering the ship.  In many cases this 
last strategy is not adopted in a 
conscious fashion but rather is the end 
result of an anti-organisation attitude.  
It stems from an alienation from and 
rejection of the traditional methods of 
the left so that these methods themselves 
rather than just their implementation are 
rejected.  It can perhaps be characterised 
as 'all action and no talk'!

Such a strategy frequently results in the 
organisation's activities being limited to 
cheerleading for others, unwilling and 
unable to influence the actual course of 
events. Blind activism is substituted for 
theoretical discussion.  Most of such 
organisations are short lived, quickly 
becoming demoralised after finding 
themselves being used as foot soldiers by 
some more organised section of the left.  
Even for those who survive for some 
considerable period this is often as a 
result of hermetically sealing themselves 
off from the rest of the left.  This is 
achieved by dismissing other groups 
through crude labels whose political 
content is zero or close to zero (such as 
'students',  'trendies', 'sad', 'middle 
class', 'boring', the reader will probably 
be familiar with other examples).

This labelling is similar to the technique 
used by many Leninists and so demonstrates 
the unconscious vanguardism some of these 
organisations have assumed.  Their 
publications cover their activities along 
with those whom they cheer on alone, they 
also present themselves as the 'only 
revolutionaries'.  They reject attempts to 
involve wider forces if they are not going 
to dominate the resulting alliance.  This 
vanguardism, along with the sectarian 
characterisation of others, in conditions 
of feared defeat or frustration, has even, 
with a number of organisations, resulted 
in poorly excused physical attacks on 
other leftists!

The last two strategies discussed, the 
'Ivory Tower' and the 'all action, no 
talk' are in fact twins. They share in 
common the idea that theory and practice 
can be separated, and perhaps need bear no 
relationship to one another at all. To 
believe that one can be developed without 
the other is a fallacy.  So also is the 
idea that one is the work of 
intellectuals, the other the work of 
activists.  The two go hand in hand. It 
may be possible to come up with fine ideas 
in your back room or carry out actions on 
the streets but it is only where these two 
combine that the potential for revolution 
gains space to emerge.  In the development 
of ideas and the activity of struggle it 
is not just the results that matter.  As 
important is the process, the development 
of the ability and confidence to make 
decisions and carry them through.  This 
ability must be developed not just in the 
organisation but in every individual, if 
the division into leader and led is to be 
avoided.

This is an echo of the anarchist 
insistence that the end (the revolution) 
cannot be separated from the means 
(revolutionary organisation) used to 
obtain it.  The surest safeguard against 
future hijacking of revolutionary 
movements by authoritarianism is not to 
have a golden rule book or a sub group to 
keep the movement pure(11) but a tradition 
of self-activity.  This is a hint at the 
direction that needs to be taken.

We are coming through a time of 
cataclysmic change for the left.  The old 
methods of organisation have failed, the 
new ones that are evolving are flawed and 
sometimes not even all that new.  Some of 
the problems faced have been identified in 
this article, the more difficult question 
is how to go about constructing a new 
left?  Part of the answer to this question 
is the realisation that the problems 
discussed above have a common solution.  
Is it necessary to re-invent the wheel?  
Or is there already a left tradition whose 
analysis is a starting point explaining 
the failure of the left in the past.  Such 
a tradition does indeed exist and what's 
more it also provides from its history a 
positive model of socialist organisation.

Footnotes

1   It is intended here to avoid the 
practice of pretending to be somehow 
separate from the 'left' and share nothing 
in common with it.  All those on the left 
operate in a common environment, despite 
their political differences in approaching 
this environment.  Differences are in the 
politics held and the methods used, not in 
any mysterious force.

2  And it was rhetoric along with their 
mass membership that gave them their only 
claim to be socialist.  The record of 
social democrats in power has been dismal, 
with even the most favourable reading of 
history giving them few achievements and a 
multitude of sell outs.

3  The situation in the English speaking 
countries is being addressed in 
particular.

4  These reasons among others include the 
confused politics of part of the anarchist 
movement at the time, demonstrated by its 
turn to 'propaganda by deed' 
(assassinations) in the 1890's.  

5  Democracy is being used here as 
shorthand for a society under socialism 
where all decisions are made at the lowest 
possible level by those they affect, or by 
delegates who are mandated, recallable 
etc.  Not what's called parliamentary 
'democracy'.

6  So for instance because at the moment 
the unions in Britain or Ireland are weak 
and completely under the domination of the 
bureaucracy they presume no real struggle 
can emerge from them and that the 
bureaucracy is unbeatable.

7  They produced three issues of a journal 
of the same name before disintegrating.

8  Analysis No 2., page 3.

9  Recently a letter in the science 
journal Nature accused researchers of 
writing papers in such a way so as to be 
impossible to understand unless you worked 
in the field.  It is as if the use of 
obscure terms is how you prove your 
credentials.  If this is true of 
mainstream science it is certainly true of 
many of the new left publications. 

10  Basically that the time is ripe for 
revolution and all that's needed is for 
the right leadership to come along, raise 
the correct slogans and break the working 
class from the current reformist/centrist 
misleaders.

11 As with the FAI in the Spanish CNT, 
whose role was to combat reformist 
tendencies (as well as carrying out 'fund 
raising' and retaliation for attacks by 
the bosses hired guns on union 
organisers).

Andrew Flood

anflood@macollamh.ucd.ie
Phone: 706(2389)