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Benjamin Pauli and 'the New Anarchism' in Britain and the United States

'The New Anarchism in Britain and the United States: Towards a Richer Understanding of Postwar Anarchist Thought' is an interesting essay written by Benjamin Pauli in 2015. Pauli : "This article challenges the assumption that the post-war era was relatively insignificant in the development of anarchist thought. In fact, many of the most important figures within the post-war anarchist milieu in Britain and the US were concerned with questions of theory as well as practice, and their thought comprises a distinct and coherent ideological configuration of anarchism." Benjamin Pauli succeeds quite well in describing the ideas and informed practices of what he sees as 'the New Anarchism' taking a form after WWII. Still, I miss some things in it, like writing about the influences of other social ecologists than Murray Bookchin in Britain and the US, or the influences of anarchafeminist thinking in these countries (to mention only two of the currents that had quite some influence in the post-war anarchist movement of Britain and the USA). It would also have been interesting to find out how Emma Goldman influenced this 'New Anarchism'. Instead of that, Pauli has focused a bit too much on the political ideas of not only Murray Bookchin but also those of Herbert Read, Paul Goodman, Colin Ward and Noam Chomsky.

On Communalism - short introductions

Here is my own take on it: 

If you want to understand more about communalism, texts of Murray Bookchin and Janet Biehl or websites like those of New Compass and Institute for Social Ecology would be the best way to go. Communalism is quite close to social anarchism but less interested in individualist or anarchosyndicalist thinking. Unfortunately, communalism will be often confused too much with the democratic confederalism of Abdullah Öcalan but that's just not the same thing, even when Öcalan has been quite influenced by the communalist ideas of Murray Bookchin.

On the idea 'dictatorship of the proletariat'

Something I wrote today: 'Not all forms of communism will defend the idea 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Council communism has not defended that idea, to give just one example. Marx and Engels called the Commune of Paris (1871) the dictatorship of the proletariat, but it rather was a democracy. Marx wanted to give the power to the proletariat, being the majority of the people. But a dictatorship rather is a minority of people having the only power. Like in the Soviet Union, where there was only a party saying it represented the proletariat, trying to legitimize its dictatorship that way. In fact, there never was a dictatorship of the proletariat in history. 'The proletariat' is just an abstraction of a group of people not at all homogeneous.'

Mark Restall, who once was active in Social Ecology London, replied to this. 

That's incorrect about council communism, e.g. see Pannekoek in Workers Councils: http://libcom.org/library/workers-councils-1-pannekoek

My reply was this: 'Well, dictatorship of the proletariat can not be identical with the labor democracy of council organization. But I guess you are right about this in some way. I seem to remember indeed now council communists advocating for 'a dictatorship of the proletariat.'

Wayne Price also replied to what I wrote. In an email to an online discussion list he stated this:

Hello Rafa,

I agree with your statement that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never existed, and the implication that it never could exist.  Yet your brief statement on the subject makes an error.

You present the definition: "a dictatorship rather is a minority of people having the only power." This is the current definition. But in Marx's day the phrase "dictatorship" was also used to mean the rule of a colleciive body such as a parliament, the "people," the "democracy," or a reference to the classical "dictator" of ancient Rome where someone was termporarily given power to deal with an emergency, but expected to step down after the crisis was over.  

In Hal Draper's Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution: Vol. III, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Draper examines all 12 times Marx or Engels used the term, "dictatorship of the proletariat."  He shows pretty conclusively that Marx used the term to mean the "rule of the working class," without any specific implication of how that rule would be organized, let alone any assumption that it would be authoritarian.  Marx specifically counterposed the idea of the dictatorship of a popular class to the idea of the followers of Blanqui of the dictatorship of their minority revolutionary party.  And, as you state, Engels referred to the ultra-democratic Paris Commune as "the dictatorship of the proletariat."

Draper's (shorter) book, The "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" from Marx to Lenin, has a chapter which summarizes his conclusions from the earlier book.  It goes on to show how the term "dictatorship" was twisted to mean the rule of a minority party or just one person, mainly in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.  Of the post-Marx Marxists, virtually only Luxemberg used the phrase to mean the workers' democratic class rule.  (Draper is known to have been biased against anarchism, but his analysis of Marxism is pretty much accurate in its details.)

None of this denies the authoritarian elements of Marx's program:  that the working class should organize itself to take over the centralized state (either by elections or by revolution) and use it to nationalize and centralize the economy. However much Marx aimed at a socialist democracy, this program was bound to lead to state capitalism and bureaucratic rule, as the anarchists pointed out at the time.

Solidarity,

Wayne

And then also Mason Herson-Hord replied: 

Rafa, you write that "dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be identical with the labor democracy of council organization." I don't believe this is true -- this is precisely what council communists argued was the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the failed German Revolution many council communist militants used the phrases "dictatorship of the councils" and "dictatorship of the proletariat" interchangeably. They believed that the council system was the ideal institutional form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And in my reading of council communist texts I have never come across one who rejected the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is a fundamental concept to Marxist politics, and those that adopted the label of council communist during the time when it was a living movement were all staunchly Marxist to a fault.