193
Reflections on the
revolution in France
JOHN VANE
France. The revival of the great tradition after nearly a century—
1789,
1830,
1848,
1871—
from the
storming of the Bastille to the fall of the
Commune. A reminder that most of our political ideas (and the words they are expressed in) come from France. (It makes it easier to understand why old
Kropotkin wanted to fight for
France in
1914.) But how the tradition has become divided! The
Tricolour, the
Republic, the
Marseillaise, the
Resistance—
all symbols of the establishment, of the extreme right. But that is nothing new. “
Liberty, equality, fraternity, when what the Republic really means is
infantry,
cavalry,
artillery”—
said
Marx 120 years ago. What is new is that people are surprised when the French students occupy the universities and the French workers occupy the factories. The tradition must be part of the French people’s political education. We still remember our
Hunger Marches, our
General Strike, our
Suffragettes, our Black Sunday, our
chartists; surely the French may be expected to remember the Resistance, the
sit-in strikes of 1936, the <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia: mutinies
194
of 1917">
mutinies 194
of 1917, the
syndicalist movement before the
First World War, the Commune, the
July Days, the
Great Fear. We are hardly in close touch with French affairs, but recent issues of
anarchy mentioned “the sort of activism which is endemic at the bourgeois
Sorbonne” (
Peter Redan Black in
anarchy 84) and described the sit-
in strike in
Besancon (
Proudhon’s home town!) at the beginning of last year (
Chris Marker in
anarchy 76). After all, the
Nanterre students have been struggling with the authorities for a year; where have all the experts been?
★
Revolution. A timely reminder that when you come down to it you have to go out into the streets and confront the forces of the state. That in the end ony a tremendous and terrifying change in the way society is organised can bring about what we want. That this will not happen by itself, but that someone has to decide to make it happen. That we have to be premature (only premature action leads to mature action), that we have to make mistakes (people who don’t make mistakes don’t make anything), that we have to take risks (the blood of martyrs is still, alas, the seed of the faith), that we have to begin by looking ridiculous and end by looking futile. A reminder of William Morris, in A Dream of John Ball, pondering “how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name”. A reminder of the danger of revolution, in being what Engels called “the most authoritarian thing imaginable”, in provoking counter-revolution, in tending towards nihilism, in exposing one’s weaknesses and giving away one’s strengths, in raising false hopes and bringing despair.
Tragic to be so near and yet so far. The young people taking the streets, the intellectuals taking the universities, the workers taking the factories, the farmers on their tractors—if only the workers had run the factories that made cars to replace those destroyed in the fighting, if only the farmers had sent food into the towns for nothing and received tractors for nothing in return, if only the shops had opened and the public transport had run without payment, what could the police or even the army have done? Who dare say it couldn’t happen, after Russia in 1917 and Spain in 1936?
★
Comités d’action. The action committees which sprang up in Paris are the obvious descendants of the councils and committees (Soviets) which have always spontaneously appeared in popular risings of this kind. Here is the natural administrative unit of society which we want in place of the parliament, executive committees, representative council, or whatever, which takes decisions out of the hands of the people they affect. Here is the administration of things which must come instead of the government of people.
★
195
“Groupuscules”. Odd how small political groups—
such as the anarchists—
are often hated and feared by the establishment, but are patronised and written off by many rebels. Surely both sides are wrong. They have no power, and yet in revolutionary conditions it is often their members who keep their heads and feed the ideas which the movement lives on. Of course traditionalists and sectarians have little to contribute when things really begin happening, but conscious extremists still seem to have a part to play, and it is good to see them pulling together when things do happen.
★
Marxism. Interesting how it has managed to survive what the Communists and Social Democrats have done to it between them, to say nothing of the sociologists. The libertarian Marxists seem closer to Marx and Engels than the orthodox Communists, Trotskyists and Maoism one one side, and the various revisionists and reformists on the other. It is good that the anarchist strain in Marxism should be remembered. At the same time we should remember the Marxist strain in anarchism; the early anarchists always acknowleged Marx’s immense contribution to socialist thought, and most of us still stand on his analysis of the class society. If we are glad to see some Marxists moving towards us, perhaps we could see how far we can move towards them; Marxism without the party or the state isn’t very far away. In the London demonstration of solidarity with the French on May 26th, it was significant to see the International Socialism and Solidarity groups welcoming the anarchists in a common front against the Socialist Labour League when Healy and Banda tried to keep things under traditional Trotskyist control. The same kind of thing on a much larger scale seems to have been happening in France; the March 22nd Movement is described as an informal coalition of anarchists, situationists, Trotskyists and Maoists, united by common action. The new unformed, unnamed Fifth International may get back to the original aims of the First International after more than a century.
★
Anarchists. Well the part played by the anarchists at last convince people that anarchism is still a revolutionary force? We are still playing our private game of watching other groups picking up ideas which they think are new but which we know are old ones from the anarchist past. The importance of young middle-
class intellectuals, especially university students and graduates—
now attributed to
Herbert Marcuse and the student leaders in
Germany, France and
Britain, but developed by
Mikhail Bakunin a century ago from his observation of the <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia:
Italian Republicans">
Italian Republicans and the <span data-html="true" class="plainlinks" title="Wikipedia:
Russian populists">
Russian populists, and later expressed by
Kropotkin in
An Appeal to the Young (1880). The importance of a conscious minority, though not an elite, a nucleus of agitators, though not of conspirators—
now attributed to
Guevara and
Debray, but again developed by Bakunin at the end of his life and later one of the central principles of the
anarchist communists and
syndicalists.
196
Nearly every single proposal made by the new rebels appears in Kropotkin or
Malatesta—
but this is not important; what is important is that anarchists are among the new rebels. Ironic that the
BBC programme on anarchism, which was broadcast in the
Third Programme last January (and was printed in
anarchy 85 last March), was called
Far from the Barricades, despite the protests of some of the contributors who didn’t feel very far; very near indeed, it seems. And yet how far is the
English movement from being able to follow the French example? About as far as England is from being able to have such an example.
★
Syndicalists. It seems to be forgotten that the CGT, which has played such a disgraceful part, was not always a Communist organisation but was in fact the original syndicalist organisation, being formed in 1895 precisely to free the French trade union movement from part political control and prepare for the social revolution by way of the general strike. The Federation des Bourses du Travail should be equally well known because of Emile Pouget, the great editor of its paper, La Voix du Peuple—to say nothing of the 1906 Charter of Amiens (the classic statement of syndicalist principles) and the great wave of strikes sixty years ago, which should put the present events into proper perspective. Typical that young rebels in the industrial movement have to relearn old lessons again and again, just like those in the intellectual movement.
★
Sorel. Is he so completely forgotten? He is pretty well discredited as a serious intellectual figure (and of course he wasn’t an anarchist or a theoretician of syndicalism), but he did have some good ideas, and it’s odd that they haven’t been mentioned. The general idea of the function of myths—“not descriptions of things but expressions of a determination to act”—and the particular idea of the myth of the general strike both seem relevant. Add the myth of the barricades, the myth of the working class, the myth of the soviet, and you have a fairly good picture of what has happened. How he would have enjoyed the attempt to burn down the Bourse!
★
Communists. Will the part played by the Communists at last convince people that Communism is not a revolutionary but a counter-revolutionary force? The French Communist Party, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) which it controls, and the paper L’Humanité which it publishes, have together been one of the main factors preventing the success of the revolution, after the government, the army, and the police. Here is the culmination of Bolshevism after fifty years. (And the traditional Trotskyists were better only because they were weaker.) But the Communists have now survived so many exposures—Kronstadt, China, Spain,
