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autonomous_hippopotamus wrote

great essay, thanks for sharing

{ The shadow of the nature of the state—as they saw it—was always present in their discussions on the subject of organization. For instance, when they call their opponents—the Socialist Revolutionaries, the Bund, the Social Democrats (Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, “iskrists or semi-iskrists,” iskrovtsy iii poluiskrovtsy)—”statesocialists” or “statist-socialists” (sotsialisty-gosudarstvenniki; socialistes d’Etat), [11] they do so for two main reasons. First, because ideologically these parties tend to create a socialist state; and second, because practically they are organized according to the state-like principles of hierarchy, centralization, and “state Jacobinism” (gosudarstvennoe iakobinstvo.) [12] These two aspects—the ends (the future society) and the means (the organization) to implement it—are closely linked in the anarchists’ worldview: the political action and the goals are shaped and determined by the form of organization. As they put it, one could not expect that a centralized and hierarchic party would bring about a socialist society; it could create only a “socialist” centralized and hierarchic state (which for the anarchists was the very negation of socialism, and for that reason they called occasionally the SDs socialists-traitors). [13] Such a party is already a state in miniature because its structure mirrors the hierarchic structure of the state and there is no hope or possibility that such a party could create an egalitarian society of free individuals. Addicts to the opium of vertical organizing cannot lead to horizontal types of association and communities. [14] And centralization breeds inevitably “revolutionary bureaucratism.” [15]

Moreover, according to the anarchists, those referred to as “state socialists,” particularly the Social Democrats, needed this kind of hierarchic and centralized party structure for the achievement of their goals, and more precisely because what they wanted and were planning to do was a vast state putsch (gosudarsvennyi perevorot), a coup d’etat. To that effect, they needed their members to be organized according to the rules of discipline and obedience to the tenets of the “orthodox church of Marxism” (pravoslavnaia tserkov’ marksizma) or of the “Marxist bible” (marksistkaia bibliia). [16] They did not want a membership in which the spirit of rebellion (buntovskii dukh) was alive, as they did not want members who would act spontaneously and on their own initiative (lichnyi pochin); they actually hated spontaneity and were afraid of it. They needed discipline because it offered them the possibility to direct and control the party from above (sverkhu), on orders from the party bosses, that is the Social Democratic chiefs (sotsial-demokraticheskoe nacharstvo). “Bossism” (general’shchina; verkhovodstvo), not spontaneity, was their most praised rule of conduct, and the cult of the personalities (kul’t lichnostei) was the means to ensure it.}

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