In the interest of strengthening the collaboration among the posters of this board, and increasing their theoretical, practical and argumentative skills, I've decided to make this Q&A thread.
Here, newish, less-read and less-experienced can ask questions about theory and history, as well as advice, to resident oldfags of the anarchist struggle.
Here is an example:
> Q: Is it true that Makhno was an asshole to the railway workers of Ukraine?> A: Patently false. That is entirely a bolshevik fabrication used to justify their regime's actions against the libertarian communists of Ukraine.> A short article by Iain McKay (author of the AFAQ) does a good job at explaining may charges made by the bolsheviks against Makhno: http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/on-the-bolshevik-myth> It should be noted that the article is a response to an ISR article by Jason Yanowitz ( http://www.isreview.org/issues/53/makhno.shtml )
> Relevant quotes from the article:> "Then there is Makhno’s advice to the railway workers. Well, that is the key thing – it was advice as he thought that working class people had to solve their own problems by themselves, through their own organisations. In contrast, Trotsky imposed martial law on them along strict military and bureaucratic lines. One-man management or workers’ control? Which is more socialist? And which the railway workers preferred? And which worked better, given the railway network totally collapsed after Trotsky got his way with it? Needless to say, in spite of the Bolshevik track record of breaking strikes, disbanding soviets, suppressing freedom of organisation, assembly and speech and imposing political and economic dictatorship onto the working class, Yanowitz still tries to argue that it was the Makhnovists who were anti-working class rather than the Bolsheviks!"> "Significantly, the one-man management imposed by the Bolsheviks made things worse. On the railways, for example, abolishing the workers' committees resulted in more confusion, isolation and ignorance of local conditions. It got so bad that "a number of local Bolshevik officials . . . began in the fall of 1918 to call for the restoration of workers' control, not for ideological reasons, but because workers themselves knew best how to run the line efficiently, and might obey their own central committee's directives if they were not being constantly countermanded." (William G. Rosenberg, Workers' Control on the Railroads, pp. D1208-9) Leninist wishful thinking and fantasy aside, the destruction of the Russian economy under the weight of centralisation confirmed the anarchist argument on the importance decentralisation, from the bottom-up organising and federalism."> The work Workers' Control on the Railroads by William G. Rosenberg is a good read on this ( http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1876231?sid=211054847941010 ).Try to make your questions as concrete as possible, so it can be satisfactorily answered in a few paragraphs at most.