From red & black notes by Matt Crossin
David Glanz, a member of the Trotskyist organisation Solidarity, recently gave a talk on the Spanish Revolution, offering it as evidence of the ‘failure of anarchism’. The talk is reasonably representative of the standard Leninist position, and therefore follows the same tendency to misrepresent both the events in Spain and the content of anarchist theory. In misrepresenting anarchism, Glanz is unable to recognise that the real failure of the anarchist movement in Spain was in breaking with anarchist ideas, rather than implementing them. Furthermore, an honest accounting of the facts shows that the anarchist idea of revolution, as theorised by the original and historically dominant ‘mass’ (or ‘social’) tendency, is entirely in line with the revolutionary strategy that Glanz describes as the Leninist alternative.