Black Flame sputterings
Hyper-organisationalism leads to bureaucracy and hierarchy
~ Jay Arachnid ~
Roundly condemned by most anarchists when initially published, The Platform was an attempt to out-organise the Bolsheviks without a centralised party structure. Its tenets were ideological and tactical unity, collective responsibility to the organisation, and a formal membership with an executive committee (all looking suspiciously like a quasi-militarist formation). The document itself resulted in no General Union in the years immediately following its publication, and the ideas promoted in it were abandoned soon after Arshinov (known to be the primary author) went back to the Bolshevism of his earlier years and voluntarily returned to the Soviet Union in 1930.
It is also clear and obvious from all internal documents and discussions that the Platform never figured into the structure or culture of the Spanish FAI. Indeed, Juan Gomez Casas states unambiguously in his comprehensive history that “I must point out that the issues raised in The Platform made hardly any impression on anarchism in Spain” (Anarchist Organisation: The History of the FAI, p. 105).
For six decades The Platform languished in well-deserved obscurity, a curio of a particular time and place.
Until the late 1990s. NEFAC (North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists) was founded in 2000 because, according to one participant, “the late 1990s was a depressing time for anarchists in North America.” This, despite the proliferation of micropower radio, infoshops, collective housing, community gardens, cafés, small publishers, and other forms of semi-permanent as well as enduring infrastructure. What the neo-platformists wanted, however, was a formal membership organisation for “class struggle anarchists” so that they could intervene as a caucus of disciplined militants in the heroic struggles of the American proletariat. Their interventions often looked like not much more than handing out leaflets at informational pickets. Needless to say, their numbers did not swell.
Black Rose/Rosa Negra (BRRN) is the longest running neo-platformist group in North America, and like other such groups, they fabricated a non-existent “global anarchist tradition of platformism.”
Platform centenary: Two readings | anarchistnews.org
