Chomsky on Anarchism.pdf - Zine Library

CHOMSKY ON ANARCHISM
undoubtedly other factors as well. Rudolf Rocker's comments are, I believe,
quite to the point:
... the Spanish people have been engaged in a desperate struggle
against a pitiless foe and have been exposed besides to the secret
intrigues of the great imperialist powers of Europe. Despite this
the Spanish revolutionaries have nOt grasped at the disastrous
expedient of diccatorship, but have respecced all honest convictions.
Everyone who visited Barcelona after the July battles,
whether friend or foe of the C.N.T., was surprised at the freedom
of public life and the absence of any arrangements for suppressing
the free expression of opinion.
For two decades the supporters of Bolshevism have been
hammering it into the masses that dictatorship is a vital necessity
for the defense of the so-called proletarian interests against the
assaults of the coumer-revolution and for paving the way for
Socialism. They have not advanced the cause of Socialism by this
propaganda, but have merely smoothed the way for Fascism in
Italy, Germany and Austria by causing millions of people to forget
that dictatOrship, the mOSt extreme fo rm of tyranny, can
never lead to social liberation. In Russia, the so-called dictatorship
of the proletariat has nOt led to Socialism, but to the domination
of a new bureaucracy over the proletariat and the whole
people ....
47
What the Russian autocrats and their supporters fear most is
that the success of libertarian Socialism in Spain might prove to
their blind followers that the much vaunted "necessity of a dictatorship"
is nothing but one vast fraud which in Russia has led
to the despotism of Stalin and is to serve today in Spain to help
the counter-revolution to a victory over the revolution of the
workers and peasants. ? 3
After decades of anti-Communist indoctrination, it is difficult to achieve a perspective
that makes possible a serious evaluation of the extent to which
Bolshevism and Western liberalism have been united in their opposition to
popular revolution. However, I do not think that one can comprehend the
events in Spain without attaining this perspective.
With this brief sketch-partisan, but I think accurate-for background, I
would like to turn to Jackson's account of this aspect of the Spanish Civil War
(see note 54).
Jackson presumes (p. 259) that Soviet SUppOH for the Republican cause in
Spain was guided by two factors: first, concern for Soviet security; second, the
hope that a Republican victory would advance "the calise of worldwide 'people's
revolution' with which Soviet leaders hoped to identify themselves." They