Reply to Anarchist comrades

Socialist Resistance (newspaper) no. 15, April 2004, p. 14

Scanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.

T leters were puble sim in poles. he three anarchist comrades whose

issue (SR 14) argue similar points, centering on the question of whether the Leninist Party, and a post-revolutionary state, are necessarily authoritarian and (as lain McKay puts it) "concentrate power in the hands of the few".

These issues are very important, and l deal with them below. But the comrades refrained from more general discussion of the question of the political party and elecTORS

In this long-term battle, elections play an enormous role. The anarchist slogan "don't vote, it only encourages them" is abstention from politics, from intervening in what is in advanced capitalism a central arena in which the political relationship of forces is determined.

This is not "electoralism", but hard-headed calculation about how mass politics works in contemporary capitalism, and how radical, socialist and revolutionary politics can get a hearing. In Scotland socialists have got into the Scottish parliament and are doing a brilliant job - a point the comrades did not reply to.

This is not a secondary issue, or a diversion, it is symptomatic of what is wrong with anarchism; as Engels put it a letter in 1872, "the mass of the workers will never allow itself to be persuaded that the public affairs of any country are not also their own affairs; they are by nature politically-minded and whoever tries to make them believe they us a call. I want to join Socialist Resistance Youth Name.. Address. Mobile... Student rate f6 a term. Cheques payable to Resistance. .... Alan Woodward says that "most anarchists believe