According to Chris Harman of the SWP ("Street fighter
turned salesman", Socialist Review, no. 249), we can learn
a lot from the history of Germany's foreign minister Joschka Fischer.
The street fighter turned Green can be seen as a warning for certain
elements of the "new anti-capitalist movements." Ironically, he
directs his comments to the Black Block when, in fact, they should be
applied to his own party.
He argues, correctly, that radicals like Fischer "found in practice that street fighting by an isolated minority could not budge German capitalism." This isolation, Harman argues, lead to some of the radicals embracing terrorism (as in Red Army Fraction) and others to become Green Party parliamentary candidates. Once "they found that they could get no more than about 5 percent of the vote" the Greens transformed and the "realists" argued that they must embrace hierarchical organisation, tone down their politics and so gain more votes. The net effect, of course, was collaboration with the very system they had originally organised to transform.
A sad tale. Unfortunately, as analogies go, it hardly supports the politics of the SWP. While inflicting a history lesson on us, he seems incapable of understanding it. After all, the SWP are now urging us, as the Green Greens did, to combine direct action and mass demonstrations with electioneering. The degeneration of the Marxist Social Democrats is likewise unmentioned. They, following Marx and Engels, had used elections to spread their message into "the organised working class." The result? Like the Greens nearly a century later, a sorry story of reformism, betrayal and bureaucracy.
Not that anarchists were surprised. Harman's history lesson simply confirmed Kropotkin's argument that "in proportion as the socialists become a power in the present bourgeois society and State, their socialism must die out." Just as the experience of Social Democracy confirmed it. And, undoubtedly, the experience of the current Socialist Alliance's will confirm it. The SWP will be working within the capitalist state, trying to influence it from within and, by necessity, subject to the same institutional pressures that generated reformist tendencies in the Social Democrats and Greens. Unless, of course, the SWP argue that it is the ideas of the party leaders that are the decisive factor rather than the social environment in which they operate. But, unfortunately, such a position would be pure idealism.
Incredulously Harman comments that the "Black Block" is "misnamed" because "almost all" are white! Just to state the obvious, the Black Block is so-named because the anarchist flag is black. Presumably he does not call himself a Red because he is not that colour? That, in itself, shows the quality of his argument, the flaws of which we have just noted.
Anarchists are well aware of the importance of (in Harman's words) carrying "political argument into the organised working class" (and disorganised, of course). As Kropotkin argued, "to make the revolution, the mass of workers will have to organise themselves. Resistance and the strike are excellent means of organisation for doing this." He stressed that "the Anarchists have always advised taking an active part in those workers' organisations which carry on the direct struggle of Labour against Capital and its protector, the State." This "better than any other indirect means, permits the worker to obtain some temporary improvements in the present conditions of work, while it opens his eyes to the evil done by Capitalism and the State that supports it, and wakes up his thoughts concerning the possibility of organising consumption, production, and exchange without the intervention of the capitalist and the State."
Harman is hardly saying anything which anarchists had not been arguing for over a hundred years. We are well aware that demonstrations are not enough and that we need to organise in our communities and workplaces to challenge and overcome the state and capitalism.
Thus, Harman creates a straw man with which to argue with. Anarchists, whether in the "Black Bloc" or not, are well aware that an anarchist revolution will be a mass revolution and so are well aware of the importance of "involving the mass of working [class] people." The real lesson of the history of Joschka Fischer is lost on Harman -- electioneering, even "socialist" and "radical" electioneering, inevitably results in betrayal. It happened to the German Greens. It happened to the "revolutionary" Marxists of the Social Democracy. And yet the SWP urge us to join them at the ballot box! Incredible.
As a certain German once said, history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce.