OUR REPLY

by the APCF

We find it very difficult to maintain regular contact with the U.S.A. and we know that our readers - and comrade Frank Maitland - will bear with us until such time as we get a reply from the pen of Paul Mattick himself.

In the meantime, however, without committing comrade Mattick in any way, we append a rejoinder in the name of the A.P.C.F.

First, anti-parliamentarians are not necessarily obliged to accept the label anarchist, and second, if so, they do not on that account deny one jot of their socialism.

Further, in so far as our Bolshevik friends reject and defy capitalist and orthodox labourist conceptions, they also are as much "individualistic" as the anarchist. Is it not boasted, for example, that on many occasions Marx, Lenin and Trotsky were prepared to be in a minority of one - if they thought they were more correct than all others on the question at issue? In this, like Galileo, they were quite in order. Where they and their followers, obsessed by the importance of their own judgement, go wrong, is in their tendency to refuse this inalienable right to other protagonists and fighters for the working class. The historical example of this is Russia - long before Stalin turned the tables on the Old Bolsheviks.

In Kronstadt 20,000 of the cream of the working class were needlessly slaughtered in 1921. Yet one of the main slogans of the heroic Kronstadt sailors - in conjunction with thousands of workers in Petrograd was "All Power to the Workers".

We agree with Comrade Maitland that every revolutionary individual should have due regard to his social duties. Anarchists like Durruti and Alex Berkman give the practical and theoretical confirmation that this was likewise their posture.

Just as Comrade Maitland disagrees with non-revolutionary Marxists, so do we repudiate non-revolutionary Anarchists.

We are told we cannot c~ party or no party, but it appears to be as big a difficulty which party to choose'. However, we ask the workers to choose the principles and methods in harmony with their fundamental class interests. They will find much that is helpful - and, alas, much that is not - in many parties, however satisfied they may be with their - exclusive - correctness.

Comrade Maitland must note that there are intelligent, active, courageous workers in several revolutionary groupings. He must, also, never forget no party can fail to have a proportion who are prone to develop a bureaucratic or power complex, and the larger the party grows, the greater the proportion of such potential renegades or dictators. The ideology of these people is easily changed by changing economic needs. They soon use their influence for the party rather than for the class and finally exert it for themselves rather than for even the party. This is an historic phenomenon.

The analogy of the party being the brain of the working class is unsound. The first difficulty is the number of sections claiming to fill this post, each giving different yet more or less pontifical directives. To the extent that our opponent believes that any single party could direct millions of workers on a continental scale he appears to us strangely utopian for a Marxist. Centralisation of such a character - even if possible or desirable - would be a simplified target for the ruling classes.

We have consistently advocated - and participated in - a revolutionary alliance for common objectives. This seems to us to afford the maximum possibility of using as many brains as possible and the highest degree of courage and class loyalty. The fruits of the best in the propaganda of all sections tends to fructify, the crisis rendering obsolete or clarifying many of the errors previously held.

Not that we discourage internationalism. Our campaigning for the Spanish workers, including the P.0.U.M., made that clear. But precisely because we are not utopian we know, in advance, the magnitude of the problem. The task is so great that the brains of all revolutionary socialists will be required. Whether we like it or not, and all attempts at clarification notwithstanding, these most genuine elements will be in many different parties.

In the final crisis however, as Maitland agrees, the workers will be the deciding factor - though he here negates his previous assumption that the' party (and not the class) is the brain.

And as in 1926 - and Spain in 1936 - workers through their own committees will show a surprising degree of brain, ingenuity, courage, etc. And many of the political pretenders may be found wanting, if not in brain, then in guts!

Like Comrade Maitland, we desire the maximum extension of solidarity in any crisis. It is utopian, however, to expect this to result from either a Ukase or an appeal from any one section Solidaric action is more likely to result from a joint appeal by all revolutionary sections. It is still more likely to succeed - in fact only likely to succeed - when similar economic conditions throw up workers' committees simultaneously and reciprocal action taken in the name of the working class roused to action, not alone by propaganda, but by economic necessity.

The only guarantee of final success is that we sow as much socialist propaganda as possible, together with a minimum of party sectarianism. To impregnate the workers so that they will be as immune as possible to the danger of the various types of Fuehrers, who, on the promise of solving the problems they must ultimately solve themselves, will but change the form of slavery.

All useful factors are more than necessary for such a stupendous task as the emancipation of mankind. To aim at being the most important factor - or a cog in it - is understandable and to be praised. But let us beware lest a false sense of our own or our party's importance causes us to spurn others equally necessary, thereby hindering the realisation of our mutual ideal - the conquest by the workers of economic and social equality.

(February-April l941)