Precursors The roots of platformism go back as far as the organizational principles of
Mikhail Bakunin, particularly in his theory of "organisational dualism". Bakunin proposed that anarchists form their own revolutionary organisations that would encourage and agitate workers to rebel against the state and capitalism, and once a
social revolution had replaced the state with a federation of
voluntary associations, it would then further agitate against any attempted reconstitution of the state by political parties. The Platform's most direct predecessor was the
Draft Declaration of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, adopted in 1919 by the
Military Revolutionary Council of the
Makhnovshchina. The
Draft Declaration called for a "
Third Revolution" against the Bolshevik government, in order to establish a regime of
free soviets. It centered the
Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine as the nucleus of this revolution, where the organization's entire membership would carry out the decision-making process. In 1921, the Makhnovists published another
Declaration that proclaimed a
dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of an anarchist-led trade union system, for which
Nestor Makhno himself was accused of
Bonapartism. During this period, the
Nabat Confederation of Anarchist Organizations, which had originally been established as a loose-knit organization, developed into a tightly organized structure with a unified policy and an executive committee, in what a member would later describe as a precursor to platformism.
Formulation , the main theoretician of the
Platform. After their flight into exile,
Russian and
Ukrainian anarchists began to call for the reorganization of the anarchist movement, considering that chronic disorganization had led to their defeat during the
Revolution. Among the anarcho-communists,
Peter Arshinov was the most vocal advocate of reorganization. On 20 June 1926, the
Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft) was published in
Delo Truda, with an introduction penned by Arshinov. Considering the goal of anarchism to be a
social revolution that would create a
stateless and
classless society, the
Platform proposed the establishment of a General Union of Anarchists to educate the
working class and raise
class consciousness. This General Union was to be organised according to the principles of
theoretical unity,
tactical unity and
collective responsibility, and would be coordinated through an
executive committee tasked with carrying out collective action and political policy.
Debate The
Platform was first presented at a meeting of the
Delo Truda group, with attendees also including
Bulgarian,
Chinese,
French and
Italian anarchists. At the meeting, Arshinov introduced the document as a way forward for the international anarchist movement to "marshal its forces". Although supported by
Nestor Makhno, Arshinov's
Platform was opposed by most prominent anarchists at the time.
French anarchists in attendance, led by
Sebastien Faure, criticised it as Russocentric, considering it unapplicable to the material conditions in France. In the years that followed, Faure's
Anarchist Synthesis, which rejected platformism in favor of a more loose-knit organization, contributed to dividing the anarchist movement into "synthesists" and "platformists". (left),
Volin (center), and
Mollie Steimer (right), three of the
Platform's main critics. The Platform's harshest critics included
Volin,
Senya Fleshin and
Mollie Steimer, who denounced the
Platform as an attempt to create an anarchist
political party, which they feared would inevitably result in the formation of a
police state. Arshinov responded by claiming his
Platform actually abided by anarchist principles, as it consciously avoided
coercion and preserved
decentralization. The debate also took a more personal turn as Makhno and Arshinov attacked Volin, which attracted denunciations from other critics of the
Platform, including
Alexander Berkman, who denounced Makhno as a
militarist and Arshinov as a
Bolshevik. After years of defending the ideas of Platformism, in the early 1930s, Arshinov joined the
Communist Party and defected to the
Soviet Union, where he would disappear during the
Great Purge. Nestor Makhno himself died in 1934, leaving the
Platform without any prominent defenders. Nevertheless, both the opponents and remaining supporters of the
Platform managed to reconcile at Makhno's funeral. Volin himself took up the publication of Makhno's memoirs, which were published in the years after his death.
Organizational developments During the
Spanish Revolution of 1936, a number of revolutionary anarchist hard-liners formed the
Friends of Durruti Group in opposition to the state's
militarisation of the
confederal militias. After the Revolution was
suppressed, the group published
Towards a Fresh Revolution, which called for a revolutionary council to reform the militias and bring the economy back under the control of the
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), which would effectively have dissolved the
government of Spain. In the wake of the
1944 Bulgarian coup d'état, the Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB) issued its own
Platform, which argued for a specifically anarcho-communist federation, coordinated by a central secretariat, which would participate in trade unions and prepare for a social revolution. In 1953, the French anarchist
Georges Fontenis published his
Manifesto of Libertarian Communism, which attacked the prevailing synthesist orientation of the French anarchist movement, becoming the founding document for the Libertarian Communist Federation (FCL). Drawing from aspects of the
Platform, Fontenis'
Manifesto called for an anarchist
revolutionary vanguard to work within existing mass organizations in order to develop a
mass movement, with the eventual aim of dissolving itself into the movement and achieving a social revolution. In the years that followed, the FCL united together with the North African Libertarian Movement (MLNA) to establish the Libertarian Communist International (ICL), but their suppression by the French state forced the organization's dissolution in 1957. Platformism was revived in France during the events of the
May 1968 movement, when the
Revolutionary Anarchist Organization (ORA) was founded, although it would remain the minority tendency within the wider anarchist movement. The formation of the ORA accelerated the establishment of other anarchist federations throughout Europe, such as the
Anarchist Federation (AF) in Britain and the Federation of Anarchist Communists (FdCA) in Italy, while the ORA itself would eventually be succeeded by the
Libertarian Communist Union (UCL). ''''
() was first developed in 1972 by the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU), with the publication of its text , which proposed the creation of a unified political policy directly applicable to the material conditions in Uruguay. The collapse of the ruling right-wing dictatorships towards the end of the Cold War resulted in the emergence of many other groups throughout Latin America, in a process spearheaded by the FAU. In 2003, the Anarkismo.net'' website was established by an international network of anarcho-communist organizations, including both Latin American and European platformists, which publishes news and analysis in a variety of different languages. == References ==