Revolutionaries by Eric J. Hobsbawm Page B

be natural to expect this to have had some effect on them. On the whole there is little sign of this within the communist parties. To take merely one representative example, the discussions on ‘bolshevizing the Communist International’ in the Enlarged Executive of that organization, March-April 1925, which dealt specifically with the problem of non-communist influences within the communist movement. There are little more than a half-dozen references to syndicalist and none to anarchist influence in this document. 2 They are confined entirely to the cases of France, Italy and the United States. As for France, the loss ‘of the larger part of theformer leading officials [of social democratic origins in Germany], and of petty-bourgeois syndicalist origins in France’ is noted (p. 38). Treint reported that ‘our Party has eliminated all the errors of Trotskyism: all the individualist quasi-anarchist errors, the errors of the belief in legitimacy, of the coexistence of diverse factions in the Party. It has also learned to know the Luxemburgist errors’ (p.99). The ECCI resolution recommended, as one of ten points concerning the French party ‘in spite of all former French traditions, establishment of a well-organized Communist Mass Party’ (p. 160). As for Italy, ‘the numerous and diverse origin of the deviations which have arisen in Italy’ are noted, but without reference to any libertarian trends. Bordiga’s similarity to ‘Italian syndicalism’ is mentioned, though it is not claimed that he ‘identifies himself completely’ with this and other analogous views. The Marxist-Syndicalist faction (Avanguardia group) is mentioned as one of the reactions against the opportunism of the Second International, as is its dissolution ‘into trade syndicalism’ after leaving the party (pp. 192–3). The recruitment of the CPUSA from two sources – the Socialist Party and syndicalist organizations – is mentioned (p. 45). If we compare these scattered references to the preoccupation of the International in the same document with a variety of other ideological deviations and other problems, the relatively minor impact of libertarian-syndicalist traditions within communism, or at least within the major communist parties of the middle 1920s, is evident.
    This may to some extent be an illusion, for it is clear that behind several of the tendencies which troubled the International more urgently, such traditions may be discerned. The insistence of the dangers of ‘Luxemburgism’ with its stress on spontaneity, its hostility to nationalism and other similar ideas, may well be aimed at the attitudes of militants formed in the libertarian-syndicalist school, as also the hostility – by this time no longer a matter of very serious concern – to electoralabstentionism. Behind ‘Bordighism’, we can certainly discern a preoccupation with such tendencies. In various western parties Trotskyism and other marxist deviations probably attracted communists of syndicalist origins, uncomfortable in the ‘bolshevized’ parties – e.g. Rosmer and Monatte. Yet it is significant that the
Cahiers du Bolchevisme
(28 November 1924), in analyzing the ideological trends within the French CP , make no allusion to syndicalism. The journal divided the party into ‘20 per cent of Jauresism, 10 per cent of marxism, 20 per cent of leninism, 20 per cent of Trotskyism, and 30 per cent of Confusionism’. Whatever the actual strength of ideas and attitudes derived from the old syndicalist tradition, that tradition itself had ceased to be significant, except as a component of various left-wing, sectarian or schismatic versions of marxism.
    However, for obvious reasons, anarchist problems preoccupied the communist movement more in those parts of the world where before the October revolution the political labour movement had been almost entirely anarchist and