If anarchists distrusted clerical rule, they were no less wary of a revolutionary Left eager to take over the state. The uprising of 1978 and early 1979 brought together Marxist intellectuals, guerrilla organizations, and, as one German anarchist paper sneered, “dogmatic communists of the Moscow school.”11 To anarchists, these groups represented the authoritarian Left: movements that claimed to speak for the people while trying to centralize power in their own hands.
This fear ran through much of the libertarian response to the Iranian Revolution. Writing in November 1978, Marie-Madeleine Hermet worried that both the “sword and the censer” might fall into “feverish and bloodthirsty hand,” whether those of “ayatollahs, of Marxists (Leninist or otherwise), of Stalinists or Trotskyists, of Maoists.”12 The danger, in her eyes, was not simply one ideology replacing another, but the recurring spectacle of revolutionary elites claiming the right to rule in the name of liberation.
For more than a century, anarchists had defined themselves against what they regarded as the authoritarian Left. They cared less about the traditional divide between Left and Right than about the divide between libertarian and authoritarian politics: between decentralization and centralized power. The German anarchist Rudolf Rocker warned in 1947 that the modern “extreme left” had embraced “a new absolutism” far more expansive than the monarchies of the past.
How Anarchists Saw the Iranian Revolution (part 2) | anarchistnews.org
Writing in Rivista Anarchica, Fausta B. pointed to the recurring illusion of “revolution” in Russia, Cuba, China, and Portugal. Echoing Joyeux, the author wondered how the Left could repeatedly lose “its capacity for understanding, analysis, and objectivity?”15
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