Flogging away

Since this issue has been literally flogged to death I wish to make only two points. One is that a great many anarchists myself included, adopt a critical stance to Bakunin's legacy as well as towards the anarchist movement generally. Our rejection of Marxism is not monolithic. Many anarchists openly recognize that Marx made some very important contributions to revolutionary thought.

In giving the impression that anarchists, generally, view Marx and Marxism as the incarnation of all evil, Ulli is setting up a straw man that ban easily be knocked down.

He does the same thing in portraying anarchists as "advocates of a secret network of cadres" which conludes with his matching Bakunin up with Stalin. In over five years of involvement with the anarchist movement I have only met one anarchist who liked this idea on organization and he dropped out of sight quite some time ago. We anarchists overwhelmingly advocate federalism as the basis for organization just as Bakunin did in most of his writings.

The Red Menace can be a great paper but not if its writers continue to engage in the kind of vindictiveness which underlies an identification of someone like Bakunin with a butcher like Stalin.

For Anarchist Communism,
Bruce Allen
St. Catharines

Published in The Red Menace, Number 5, Summer 1980.

Red Menace home page