Free Revolutionaries by Eric J. Hobsbawm Page A

analysis of why the illusion of communism took such a powerful hold in Europe into a mere denunciation of what communism did to Russia, which is not quite the same thing. It is that he writes about the history of communism as he might have done had Stalin, or even Brezhnev, still presided over its destinies. His book reads like a belated product of the Cold War era. But, to reverse and adapt a famous phrase of Marx: ‘The historians have been concerned with changing the world. The point is to interpet it.’ Especially when it has actually changed.
(1996)
    1 François Furet,
Le passé d’une illusion. Essai sur l’idée communiste au
xxe siècle, Robert Laffont/Calmann Lévy, 1995.
    2 Furet’s description of both as ‘les deux plus constants antifascistes européens’ should be regarded as a rhetorical flourish. Churchill was against Hitler, but not against Italian fascism, and, as a strong anti-communist, could not bring himself to support the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
    3 Noel Annan,
Changing Enemies: The Defeat and Regeneration of Germany
, London 1995, p.183.
    4 Eugene Varga,
Die wirtschaftspolitischen Probleme der proletarischen Diktatur
, Vienna 1921, p. 19. My translation.
    5 Tony Judt,
Times Literary Supplement
, 7 July 1995, p. 25.

II
ANARCHISTS

CHAPTER 8
Bolshevism and the Anarchists
    The libertarian tradition of communism – anarchism – has been bitterly hostile to the marxist ever since Bakunin, or for that matter Proudhon. Marxism, and even more leninism, have been equally hostile to anarchism as theory and programme and contemptuous of it as a political movement. Yet if we investigate the history of the international communist movement in the period of the Russian revolution and the Communist International, we find a curious asymmetry. While the leading spokesmen of anarchism maintained their hostility to bolshevism with, at best, a momentary wavering during the actual revolution, or at the moment when the news of October reached them, the attitude of the bolsheviks, in and outside Russia, was for a time considerably more benevolent to the anarchists. This is the subject of the present paper.
    The theoretical attitude with which bolshevism approached anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements after 1917, was quite clear. Marx, Engels and Lenin had all written on the subject, and in general there seemed to be no ambiguity or mutual inconsistency about their views, which may be summarized as follows:
    (
a
) There is no difference between the ultimate objects of marxists and anarchists, i.e. a libertarian communism in which exploitation, classes and the state will have ceased to exist.
    (
b
) Marxists believe that this ultimate stage will be separated from the overthrow of bourgeois power through proletarian revolution, by a more or less protracted interval characterized by the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and other transitional arrangements, in which state power would play some part. There was room for some argument about the precise meaning of the classical marxist writings on these problems of transition, but no ambiguity at all about the marxist view that the proletarian revolution would not give rise immediately to communism, and that the state could not be abolished, but would ‘wither away’. On this point the conflict with anarchist doctrine was total and clearly defined.
    (
c
) In addition to the characteristic readiness of marxists to see the power of a revolutionary state used for revolutionary purposes, marxism was actively committed to a firm belief in the superiority of centralization to decentralization or federalism and (especially in the leninist version), to a belief in the indispensability of leadership, organization and discipline and the inadequacy of any movement based on mere ‘spontaneity’.
    (
d
) Where participation in the formal processes of politics was possible, marxists took it for granted