Again, maybe we need to point — not to the Ukraine — but the idea of the state. Because the continued reference to the Ukraine and the how it's peasants reamaining autonomous from the 'worker's state' seem, in the last posts, to somehow repute anarchist ideas, and confirm Marxist ones. If anything, these arguments confirm suspicions of the nature of a marxist-leninist state, rather than support them.

The anarchist issue over the state is one of power. Even if the proletariat does seize political power (in a party sense), can the whole proletariat can actually exercise it. Bakunin raised the obvious questions:

"For, even from the standpoint of that urban proletariat who are supposed to reap the sole reward of the seizure of political power, surely it is obvious that this power will never be anything but a sham? It is bound to be impossible for a few thousand, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands of men to wield that power effectively. It will have to be exercised by proxy, which means entrusting it to a group of men elected to represent and govern them, which in turn will unfailingly return them to all the deceit and subservience of representative or bourgeois rule. After a brief flash of liberty or orgiastic revolution, the citizens of the new State will wake up slaves, puppets and victims of a new group of ambitious men."

He repeated this argument in Statism and Anarchy, where he asked "[w]hat does it mean, 'the proletariat raised to a governing class?' Will the entire proletariat head the government? The Germans number about 40 million. Will all 40 millions be members of the government? The entire nation will rule, but no one will be ruled. Then there will be no government, no state (anarchism); but if there is a state, there will also be those who are ruled, there will be slaves."

So, again, from a Marxist perspective, anyone or group that does not adhere to this idea of 'the worker's state', and choose to implement real socialism through their own means, become 'counter-revolutionary'. Our way or the highway, essential. Very democratic.

A quick note on other comments on the Ukraine:

a) popular malitias — such as in the Ukraine, and in the Spanish Civil War — can function perfectly based on the bottom-up methods of Federation. Of course, to acknowledge this would be acknowledging the validity of its method, so it somehow these popular militias becomes 'authoritarian' in it's critics eyes.

b) that they, and Kronstadt, put their 'class' interests before the 'soviet state'. Again look at the nature of that soviet state by 1920 — is it any wonder workers and peasants stayed clear of a system totally defunct? And as the Kronstadt workers proclaimed in their mannifesto — 'the soviet system no longer represents the will of the people'. The 'worker's state's reply: mass liqudation.

All these references to past events serve the one purpose of hiding behind history, without looking at the contradictions and weaknesses of the Marxist method that live on from those times. Anarchists refuted them in 1868 in the First International, and will again in 2008 — not through the history books, but through looking at Marxism itself: a centralised, dogmatic power structure hiding behind a veil of 'scientific realism'. After the repeated failure of this method, who now, is utopian.

Cheers

Jared D