Premature Anti-Communists?: American Anarchism, the Russian Revolution, and Left-Wing Libertarian Anti-Communism, 1917-1939

Abstract

Initially among the Bolshevik Revolution's most ardent supporters in the United States, anarchists rapidly became its most outspoken left-wing critics. This article focuses on the transnational exchanges of information, analyses, and individuals that caused this about-face and its repercussions. Hundreds of Russian-born anarchists returned from the United States in 1917 and participated in the revolutionary upheavals in Russia, only to subsequently face repression and disillusionment. Their experiences in turn provided the basis for their American comrades' understanding of Soviet Communism as a betrayal of the popular revolution originating “from below” and an inherently authoritarian system. Anarchists' new anti-Communist imperative decisively shaped their activities in 1920s and 1930s, while simultaneously leading to their increasing marginalization within the labor movement and the Left. Conflict between anarchists and Communists erupted within the Industrial Workers of the World and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, to the detriment of all. It also spilled over into the anti-Fascist movement and, subsequently, into anarchist understandings of, and participation in, the Spanish Civil War. The Bolshevik consolidation of power, the advent of the Popular Front, and the fall of Spain simultaneously provided anarchists with important insights into the nature of Soviet Communism, cemented their antiauthoritarian beliefs, and rendered them ineffective by placing them outside of the emerging Cold War dichotomy of the Stalinist “Left” and anti-Stalinist “Right.”

Aiming to Overthrow the State (Without Using the State): Political Opportunities for Anarchist Movements

“…The popular revolution in February 1917 and the subsequent rise to power by the Bolsheviks in October 1917 inspired radicals throughout the world. Many anarchists and other radicals were initially drawn towards this successful anti-capitalist revolution, and even if they did not end up converting to communism, they often provided material and propagandistic support for the Bolsheviks (Zimmer 2009). The Soviet Union formed a Third Internationalism which co-opted the radicalism that had grown in opposition to World War I (Levy 2004).…”

Explaining the Collapse of the Industrial Workers of the World through Historiography

“…In fact, the Trotskyist leader deemed the IWW the " most militant, the most revolutionary section of the workers' vanguard in this country," and one that was "much nearer to Lenin's conception of a party of professional revolutionists than any other organization calling itself a party at that time." Thus, to Cannon, the collapse of the Writing over half a century after the Wobbly-turned-Trotskyist, Kenyon Zimmer (2009) also accounts for the impacts of the Bolshevik Revolution on the development of the American anarchist movement, of which the IWW was an overlapping part. However, he takes an approach that is much more sympathetic to anarchism, while hostile to socialism and Zimmer and Goldberg essentially put forward the same argument, that the anarchist and syndicalist base of the IWW generated a hostility to communism while the communist movement gained a huge following after the October Revolution.…”