Do you believe that orthodox, class-deterministic Marxism has had a negative influence on anarchist theory?

Question

While anarchists I have worked with over the years have expressed a wide range of views on domination and oppression, I find that media-based anarchists (anarchist newspapers, anarchist historians, published theorists, etc), seem to fall back on a very class-determinist view of domination that often seems disturbingly familiar to the kind of analysis put forth by Trotskyists, except with a rejection of the state.
I find this a bit odd, since my reading of Bakunin is that he was not so reductionist and that he did see that numerous institutions (church, family, the state itself) were locations which historically produced domination. He was also not as much a fan of Marx's theories as many anarchists seem to believe, in some instances referring to Marx's historical materialism as pseudo-scince. I also find it a bit ironic that theoretical post-Marxism (Foucalt, Derrida) has, since the 1960s, rejected this kind of deterministic thinking, though anarchism, as a movement, has not. This is strange, since anarchism should, by definition, be a place where ideas are free from reification and dogma and that anarchism on "the street" does seem to be more wide open (I'm thinking here of the diverse kinds of actions anarchists have been involved in, from anti-globalization, anti-war, to Black Blocks, ELF, Earth First!, Food Not Bombs, radical queer/transgendered activism). Compare this to the Trotskyists, who basically show up at protests to sell their newspaper.
Just curious what other people think about this...cheers.

Answer 1

If you are speaking about the tendency known as "Platformism". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platformism I agree.

In the mid 20th century french anarchist movement there happened this horrible episode which can be seen to the extent that marxism-leninism can have a negative influence in anarchism. A platformist named George Fontenis started to gain power over the top of the Fedearation Anarchiste http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9d%C3%A9ration_Anarchiste and tried to get rid of opponents to his plans for that organization just like in any leninist party. Afterwards he decided to change the name of the organization to Libertarian Communist Federation. His new organization didn´t last too long while the people who had been thrown out by Fontenis went on to found a new Fedearation Anarchiste which exists until this day.

A more detailed explanation of that incident is available here
http://www.theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Giovanna_Berneri__The_French_Anarchist_Movement.html

Comments

Finally, we reached a situation where the humanists admitted the possibility of creating internal tendencies. And they created their own, though they never spoke about it. They always talked about the Platformist tendency, the Organisation - Pensée - Bataille [OPB - Organization, Thought, Battle, though a better translation, one closer to the thinking of Berneri, originator of the phrase, might be Organization, Theory, Action], but never talked about their group, organized in the Commission d'études anarchistes [CEA - Anarchist Studies Commission]. In fact there were two tendencies, two kinds of writings, two modes of activity, two types of activism. This went on from one congress to the next with increasingly violent confrontations. We ended up telling each other a few home truths, in no uncertain terms, and the FA entered a phase of survival.

That was until the Bordeaux congress in May 1952, when some people left. The first to leave were those we called the "charlatans." Later, at the Paris congress in May 1953, came the rupture, because our Platformist friends from the Paris-Nord group, from Aulnay-sous-Bois, and so on, presented revolutionary texts that the Synthesists could not accept. Then we asked them: "Do you accept or not? Are we the majority or not?", and they left. Because it was not actually a split. It was called a split for the sake of convenience, but what happened was that the purists and the Synthesists went off and left us alone. For our part, we had the most active groups - in the Renault and Thomson factories for example - or those in the working-class neighborhoods and suburbs of Paris, in Aulnay-sous-Bois, Bondy, Paris-Nord, Paris-Est. Some of the members of these latter two groups were certainly Platformists, even if the term was not used much at that time. And we had also active comrades in the provinces, where some had heard of the Platform and made contact with us.

http://libcom.org/library/george-fontenis-life-militancy-future-libertarian-alternative

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"In this case the elite was very small. To make their will and plans prevail, they took possession of the responsible jobs in the central organization, and gradually transformed these into posts of command. They gained absolute control of the editorial and business management of the newspaper and internal bulletin — of the means, that is, for “tending the souls” of the militants, of domesticating them, of giving them predeformed information about events in the FAF, of pushing them into that ideological unity around a new Catechism which was said to be the only way to save the unity and cohesion of the organization. So powerful did this intolerance and sectarianism become, that everybody who disagreed with the tactics and ideology of Quai de Valmy had to go. Those who tried to resist were expelled. All this, to repeat, is the usual story of the political sect, of the Bordighist and Trotskyist groups and the like. So that finally there was really nothing strange in the decision to change the name of the FAF to the Libertarian Communist Federation (FCL) and in the explicit repudiation of the word “anarchism” in its official organ. "

"In October, 1953, [Georges] Fontenis, the little boss of the organization, was invited by the Spanish groups in Paris to present his views on anarchist organization to a meeting of comrades. One member of the audience felt he had to express his disagreement with Fontenis: he felt it a duty, in fact, because he was still a member of the FCL. He said it wasn’t right to quote Berneri to justify these Marxist ideas (it’s always the same dishonest game: to use Bakunin, Malatesta or Berneri to put over something quite different), and that this kind of distortion of ideas explained why authoritarianism and centralism reigned within the anarchists’ organization."

"Fontenis’ elite guard has itself — it must be said — contributed directly to clearing up the situation. As mentioned, the 1953 Congress of the FAF gave up a word which no longer had any meaning for the leaders of the organization: “anarchist.” The FAF designated itself the FCL. Now we have an exact definition of what the little group around Fontenis is. As there are “Catholic Communists,” or “internationalist Communists,” so in France around Fontenis, holding as gospel the Libertarian Communist Manifesto — a mishmash of a few pages in which all problems and difficulties are disposed of out of hand — there are the “libertarian communists.” Now there is no longer even a formal contradiction between the Statutes of the organization, in which the Leninist principles are re-affirmed, and the activities of the new “leaders,” and the name they have given themselves."

Giovanna Berneri (http://libcom.org/history/caleffi-giovanina-1897-1962)
The French Anarchist Movement
http://www.theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Giovanna_Berneri__The_French_Anarchist_Movement.html

Answer 2

Addendum, Reference point: http://editor-horns.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/steaming-cauldron-of-horse-meat-vasily.html

Yes. While I'm not entirely sure what the word “class-deterministic” means, and I don't feel that conflating Marxist influence on anarchism with Trotskyist ideology is appropriate, I would agree that historical materialism and other Marxist ideology has left a harmful, or at least less than useful, impression on many anarchists and continues to do so.

Some initial, concise thoughts which I may expand later since I don't want to type out another inconclusive scrawl of exposition that I'll never publish:

The prevailing belief that capitalism's chips need to merely be cashed in through the expropriation of industry and the wealth that industry has materialized; that living human beings, transmutated through the magical properties of socialism, will possess the ability to command the accumulated circumstances they've inherited and master what capitalistic classes couldn't. That the social phenomena Marx designated as “use-value” should triumph over the exchange based mediation of capital as an institutional expression of communism's solution to production, despite the fact that use-value is not a distinct expression of any relation apart from the commodity form.  That class is merely a “relationship to the means of production” and so no attention should be paid to social roles and their function as discrete conduits for ideology*, to the interaction between caste and class**, etc.

* Ex. Social professionals' exceptional role in the body of the state as purveyors of consciousness and as provisional units of leadership material, despite many of them being in quite precarious and poor financial circumstances and often being paid in the form of a wage or some not really being paid at all while employed through internships.

** Ex. Stalin's destruction of the kulaks, mystifications of peasants as signs of a “feudalist” regime, etc. A more archaic example would be the de facto governorship of wealthy, privileged Jewish bankers and middlemen over the segregated Jewish communities, which was a severe point of contention for the first generation of educated Jewish intellectuals like Marx. (Hence his anti-Jewish essay(s).)

Comments

This answer is 100% oblique. You're welcome!