Saint Charlie

Note of ANARQUÍA: This is the fourth part of a series of articles by comrade Gustavo Rodriguez, in response to the critiques of Marxism and some anarchist individualities, who seek revolutionary unity and label those of us who do NOT forget the objective and the path we must create for anarchy as a sect.

1. IN DEFENCE OF ASSOCIATIVE SPECIFICITY – ABOUT (INTRINSICALLY) ANARCHIC “SECTARIANISM
2. CONSULTING THE DICTIONARY: CONCEPTS AND DEFINITIONS OF “SECTARIANISM”.
3. THE MARXIAN CHURCH AGAINST ANARCHIST “SECTARIANISM”.

The Marxian religion was imposed in Russia by blood and fire with the Bolshevik coup d’état. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (alias Lenin) would be in charge of canonizing the dogma -glorifying its metaphysical character with ontological and metahistorical pretensions- and implementing it as a disciplinary instrument and tool of domination. As could not be otherwise, the institutional faith produced its high priests who, in the end, would turn out to be “more papist than the Pope”; reaching its dogmatic paroxysm with the rise of Soviet orthodoxy after 1930 and the development of the schools affiliated with Stalinism (read: most of the Marxian currents that were implanted in the so-called Third World). Certainly, in this context, the “struggle against sectarianism”¹ was exacerbated in the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Circus-trials, mass imprisonments, state surveillance and extrajudicial executions – by means of Cheka -,² were the response to “sectarianism” in the land of the “soviets” during 70 years of red fascism. Thousands of anarchists, critical Marxians, Mensheviks, social-revolutionaries and other “sychophants” went to the concentration camps created by Trotsky, accused of “sectarianism”. In those same extermination camps, the survivors of the Kronstadt massacre served their sentences, under the same accusation. In East Germany, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, China, North Korea, Mongolia, Cuba, Cambodia and Ethiopia, “sectarians” were persecuted and killed by their respective states/churches. Continue reading “Part IV: In Defense of Anarchist “Sectarianism”” →

Concerning (Inherently) Anarchist “Sectarianism” Part I

Consulting the dictionary: concepts and definitions of “sectarianism” Part II

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Part III: “The marxian church against anarchist “sectarianism””.

Anti-sectarian grammar achieved preeminence amidst the entanglements of the First International between 1864 and 1872. While during its first years the conceptual discrepancies between Proudhonians, Blanquists, Lassalleans and Marxists had been resolved without major tantrums within the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), in 1868 tensions increased with the incorporation of Bakunin and a large group of like-minded people. The anarchists went so far as to demolish all the economistic onanism of Saint Charlie and his acolytes, placing in their sights the “gravest evil”. That is to say, the State (in particular) and all authority (in general). Thus, they erected their strongest theoretical specificity on the assumption that property or, generically, the relationship with the means of production, was not the only and excluding factor of “class” domination, but that the very instances of domination – and the State in particular – were also mechanisms that generated social groups that could be considered privileged.

On top of all that, the anarchists defended the full autonomy of the different sections of the IWA against the statutory centralism of the General Council tooth and nail. This position provoked the definitive rupture with the Marxists during the celebration of the V Congress of the Association in 1872. The theoretical-practical positions were irreconcilable and markedly antagonistic. For Saint Charlie, the International had to be the centralizing and guiding organ of the “movement”; while for the Russian anarchist and his comrades, it had to be a planetary conspiracy lacking a directing organ, centred on the concrete individual and his freedom; capable of eradicating all authority from the face of the earth, even that which was instituted in the name of the proletariat. By placing individual freedom and voluntary and autonomous association “before the historical development of society”, they received the eternal condemnation of the marxian Church and were accused of being “sectarians”; becoming the target of the wrath of Saint Charlie and his fervent sacristans. Continue reading “In Defence of Associative Specificity – Part III: “The marxian church against anarchist “sectarianism”” by Gustavo Rodriguez” →