Mike Davis on an insightful libertarian socialist
Andrea Caffi The New York Essays ed Mike Tyldesley published by Little Big Eye
This collection of essays taken largely from Dwight McDonald’s innovative New York based politics magazine reveals an insightful, principled and steadfast humanist who popularised the ideas of “sociability”, the importance of dialogue on the left across and outside state institutions.
Caffi is something of an enigma. A libertarian socialist, radical federalist, anti-colonialist and fierce critic of violence, he spent much of his life as an outsider. A Russian-born anti-Czarist revolutionary, he then fell out with the Bolsheviks in Russia. He escaped fascist hoodlums in Italy and the Gestapo in occupied France, retreating to the USA.
His critique of the Jacobins, particularly Robespierre and Saint-Just, who centralised the military, opening the door to Napoleonic despotism, is convincing. Similarly, he sees Bolshevik leaders as responsible for crushing the soviets and installing the all-powerful Cheka, preparing the way for Stalinist autocracy. In a telling phrase, he sums up their anti-social mentality: “the French Jacobins and the Russian communists saw society exclusively in terms of certain power relationships aiming at governmental organisation or controlled economy in the name of the people or the proletariat, while considering as mere by-products the manners, sociability, justice, happiness which constitute the immediate content of real existence and real freedom.”
Caffi’s sweep is wide, with the strongest essay, “Violence and Sociability”, considering resistance, revolt, coup de etats across Europe and the USA. His big question: can humans forge a society based on sharing cultural well-being, new ways of living, opportunity and love? Impatience and hence a “prompt return to normalcy” over far-sighted putting up with inconveniences which might well prove healthy in the end lead to more chaos and violence.
Thus, after six years of world war, Caffi struggles to find a peaceful collectivist future. His conclusion is that stress needs to be on society rather than institutions. With the Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat based on the Committee of Public Safety, we can’t say such means have not been thoroughly tried, he argues.
The “socialism-democracy” model of the Second International with its combination of reform and collaboration with the bourgeois state gave workers material advantages, “but inevitably handed more power over resources and more bureaucracy for the state”.
His essay, “French Condition”, looks back to the 1789 revolution and the ideas and intellectuals that grappled with developments into the 20th century. It contains a powerful critique of French colonialism, but ends with an optimism about the future of Vietnam, Algeria, Morocco, and other states at the end of the “sordid life” of a colonial empire.
The problem of violence and the inclination to a pacifist politics remains unresolved in the context of fighting fascism and in contemporary struggles for self determination viz Ukraine and Palestine.
Further essays explore Mythology, Marx, Mass Culture, Mass Politics and a socialist program. The Afterword by Alberto Castelli cogently sums up the key tenets of Caffi’s world view. Tyldesley has done an excellent job in bringing his ideas back into publication.