Dear Subversion,
Reprinting an article from Wildcat that is at least ten years old crassly called the End of Anarchism, on the Spanish revolution, goes against everything I expected from people I regarded as intelligent, critical revolutionaries. So Anarchism ended with the Spanish Revolution, did it? You might as well say that Marxism ended with the First World War, with the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, with the German Revolution. Sure, Anarcho-Syndicalism was proved wanting but that doesn't mean that Anarchism, in its revolutionary and Anarchist Communist form died.
Indeed, despite Subversion seeming to be experts on Anarchism, there seems to be a general ignorance of key Anarchist theorists and thinkers. At last year's Subversion-Anarchist Communist Federation joint day school, one long-serving Subversion comrade expressed no knowledge of the Italian Camillo Berneri, one of the key critics of CNT-FAI involvement in the Republican government.
Despite your criticisms of the rural collectives, they do remain the most advanced attempts at trying to put libertarian communism into practice, and it would be churlish to say otherwise. Of course the rural collectives were limited by the fact that war was substituted for social revolution, and for that the Spanish Anarchist movement has a lot to answer for. To cite an "anarchist puritanism" as if it were general is ill-informed, certainly in the towns amongst the Anarchist working class there were no such attitudes. And anyway, if it was collectively decided not to use tobacco or even coffee - and these are isolated instances - so what?
Of course you are right to cite the condition of women which failed to change in any qualitative way. But to fail to mention the libertarian organisation of women Mujeres Libres (especially after a major article on them in Organise! 32 which you must have read) which grouped 27,000 women together is misleading. But perhaps this goes along with your expressed view that working class women should not, on any occasion, organise specifically against their particular oppressions?
The criticisms you make of how the rural collectives functioned are correct as far as they go. But you place their functioning in a void. You fail to relate it to the general situation where the bourgeois Republican government was allowed to exist, where Anarchists joined both the local Catalan government and the national government, where workers councils failed to take the place of union committees, where capitalism continued to function, and where the myth of anti-fascism was substituted for social revolution.
To mention the Anarchist participation in the Republican government without mentioning the revolutionary opposition from the likes of the Friends of Durruti, sections in the Libertarian Youth, the Iron Column and Berneri is remiss. And why is it the Spanish "Revolution" throughout? Despite everything, what happened in Spain was a Revolution, and in many ways went further than other Revolutions in the 20th Century. Because if you applied the same criteria, you would be talking about a Russian "Revolution" an Hungarian "Revolution" a German "Revolution" etc.
Subversion comrades, it's time to come clean. You talk about the end of Anarchism yet you take an active part in Northern Anarchist coordinations, both in the present and the past. And what are you, exactly? At various stages, depending on your fancy, you have described yourselves as libertarian communists, anti-left communists (confusing one that - many might think you were against left communism rather than against the left) or anti-State communists. Your criticisms of Marx remain restrained, whilst you have in the past published an article on Bakunin, critical in the extreme, which contained many distortions of his ideas.
Hoping to hear from you,
Yours for libertarian communism,
NH (member of Anarchist Communist Federation)