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Title: Five Waves
Author: Michael Schmidt
Date: November 2005
Language: en
Topics: history, anarchist movement, anarcho-communism, anarchist organization, theory and practice, platformism
Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1550

Michael Schmidt

Five Waves

INTRODUCTION

Anarchist communism has evolved over the past 140 years as a fighting

working class tradition of revolutionary warfare against all forms of

exploitation. Its aim is the creation of the freest and most equal

society possible, balancing individual and collective interests in as

fair a way as possible. But our detractors, both of the left and the

right question whether anarchism is strong enough to work in practice.

The examples of the Mexican, Ukrainian, Manchurian, Spanish, Cuban and

Iranian revolutions show that anarchist communism — true grassroots

workers’ control and full social, political and economic equality — is

practical, sustainable and defensible, so long as its core principles of

direct democracy are deeply rooted in the working class.

But, other revolutionaries say, our style of organisation is not strong

enough to either sustain revolutionary gains or to defend them. This

brief history will show how anarchists through the last century have

grappled with the issue. It will show that far from being chaotic or

anti-organisational, true anarchist militants are lovers of equitable

social order and believe in organising their forces to achieve this.

We also believe that it is a method which is not only compatible with

anarchist organisations ranging from small “affinity groups” and cells

to large-scale union and political federations, but that by requiring a

high degree of internal education and direct participation, it is more

anarchist than looser styles of organisation which carry the

un-anarchist danger of allowing an active minority to lead a passive

majority of members.

The rule, as always for anarchists, is that the means determine the end,

so internal democracy in our organisations is the most important

guarantor that our external relations with the working class will also

remain directly democratic and truly free. Revolutionary anarchist

communism (or “anarcho-communism”) sprang from the mass workers’

organisations that founded the First International in 1864.

Since then, anarchism has waxed and waned according, largely, to the

conditions in which the global working class, peasantry and poor have

found themselves, and in their responses to the expansions and

contractions of capital as it continually sought to overcome its

inherent contradictions. Anarchist communism is not an inchoate,

emotionally juvenile, disorganised morass of self-serving, half-baked

libertarian ideas, but a consistently egalitarian, militant,

directly-democratic, organised revolutionary theory and practice.

Anarchism did not suddenly vanish from the theatre of class warfare with

the Conservative Counter-revolution of the 1920s that gave rise to both

fascism, Stalinism and other types of reformism like the welfare state.

Not only that, but it survived well beyond the collapse of the Spanish

Revolution, with significant large-scale efforts in the depths of the

Cold War in countries as diverse as Chile, Korea, China and Cuba in the

1940s and 1950s, until regenerated by the neo-liberal contraction in the

early 1970s.

Today, it has grabbed headlines around the world as it once did in its

hey-day of the 1890s-1930s, being the heart, brawn and brain of the

anti-capitalist movement, a phoenix rising from the ashes of both

collapsed pseudo-communist (“state-capitalist”) and collapsed private

capitalist regimes (ex-USSR and Argentina, for example), providing a

battle-proven, but much neglected alternate model for a world in crisis.

To take a long-term perspective, one can see the fortunes of anarchism —

like that of the militant, autonomous working class — rise and fall in

waves. The nature of these waves is a complex textile, embracing the

weft of working class culture and consciousness, with the warp of

capital in crisis, the ebb and flow of the global movements of people,

capital and ideas.

This booklet is very far from a total history of the movement — it

merely sketches the broader outlines of these waves — and the texts

quoted from are not some sort of holy canon, but indicate how, at

decisive moments, the movement grappled with the complex question that

lies at the heart of making a social revolution and which has vexed all

leftist revolutionaries: that of the relationship between the specific

revolutionary organisation and the mass of the exploited and oppressed.

FIRST WAVE: THE “INVISIBLE PILOTS” STEER THE SECRET REVOLUTIONARY

ORGANISATION

To look at the family tree of anarchism, very roughly, with reference to

watershed dates, one saw the French Revolution 1793 give rise to radical

republicanism which embraced both Jacobin authoritarianism on the

“right” and Enrage libertarianism on the “left”. The Pan-European Revolt

of 1848 saw a distinct socialist current, still containing these

contradictory strands, branch out from radical republicanism, the

contradictions coming to a head in 1868 with the separation of distinct

anarchist communist majority and Marxist minority strands within the

First International.

Marxism would further divide into rightist social-democratic and leftist

Leninist strands in the Russian Revolt of 1905–1906. Earlier, in 1881,

an anarcho-insurrectionary minority that favoured armed struggle had

branched off to the left of the anarcho-communist working class

majority, approximating in many respects the tiny “left communist” and

“council communist” tendencies that split to the left of Leninism in

about 1918–1923.

But the mass tendency of anarchism arose during an expansive phase of

mercantile-fiscal capitalism in the 1860s, when imperialist pioneers

began their surge into the unconquered half of North America, and turned

their greedy eyes towards the material — and human — resources of

Africa, Central America, China and elsewhere. It arose from the ghettos

of the newly-industrialised proletariat in the heartland of imperialism

and its key raw material producing nations, and its first decades

infused everyone from Bohemian intellectuals to Mexican peasants with

its raw self-empowerment.

The founding in 1864 of the International Working Men’s Association

(IWMA), or First International, saw all of the pre-conditions for

revolutionary anarchist communism realised: important sections of the

working class had achieved an internationalist, revolutionary

consciousness, and had created a transnational federation of their own

organisations, primarily based on organised labour.

The proto-anarchist “libertarian mutualism” of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,

son of a barrel-maker, rapidly established itself as the major current

in the IWMA, but was just as swiftly supplanted by its natural matured

expression: anarcho-communism. The main wellsprings of anarcho-communism

within the IWMA were the IWMA’s worker organisations themselves, aided

and abetted by the International Brotherhood (IB) established by Mikhail

Bakunin in 1868 as the clandestine counterpart to the public

International Alliance of Socialist Democracy (IASD).

So it was that a first wave of syndicalist organisation sprang up: the

Spanish Regional Federation (FRE) founded in 1868 by IB agent Guiseppe

Finelli; followed by the Proletarian Circle (CP) in Mexico in 1869; the

Regional Federation of the Eastern Republic of Uruguay (FRREU) in 1872;

the Northern Union of Russian Workers (NURW) in 1878; the Artisan’s

Central Council (JAC) in Cuba in 1883; and the Central Labour Union

(CLU) in the USA in 1883.

These organisations were each significant in their environs: the Spanish

FRE soared to 60,000 members within four years, while the Big Circle of

Workers (CGO), which developed out of the CP in Mexico, attained a

membership of perhaps 15,000 within six years. The significance of this

first wave needs to be underlined.

Firstly, it is important to note that of the six main countries where

this first wave entrenched itself, four were later to experience

revolutions with significant anarchist involvement. In the case of Cuba,

the anarcho-syndicalist movement there dominated the working class from

that period until the late 1920s, with a significant revival in the late

1930s through its leading role in the Cuban Revolution of 1952–1959.

In Mexico, the movement dominated the organised working class in the

1910s and was the primary engine behind the revolutionary peak of 1916,

while in Spain it became the most important revolutionary player in the

1930s, but in Russia and the USA, it never rose to be more than a

militant minority tendency. In Uruguay, the movement remained a strong

enough minority current to engage in guerrilla warfare with the state

from 1968–1976.

Secondly, the presence of non-European organisations in this first wave

undermines the convention that anarcho-syndicalism was a French

invention of the 1890s, and emphasises its adaptability and

applicability to countries as industrialised as the USA or as backward

as Russia. In other words, it arose both in the global north and in the

global south, but always in concentrations of expansive industrial

growth — not among the declining artisanal class.

Its social vectors were those of intense upheaval created by both a

massive and constant movement of workers around the world to satisfy

this new growth, and by the loss of political control the old landed

oligarchies experienced as a result of the rise of a modernising

bourgeoisie, the unintended corollary of which was the rise of a

militant industrial proletariat. Politically, anarchism rose during this

first-wave period in response to the insufficiencies, authoritarianism

and reformism of both radical republicanism and Marxist socialism, and

as an organised, mass-based corrective to the vanguard adventurism of

narodnik populism.

The first wave broke on the shore of the destruction of the Paris

Commune 1871 — itself anticipated by the earlier Bakuninist uprising in

Lyons — which saw the driving underground of most revolutionary

organisations, and with the split the following year of the First

International into an anarchist majority and short-lived Marxist rump

which dissolved in practice after only a year. But the anarchists also

gained experience in running their own “communes” of Granada, Seville,

Malagar, Alcoy and San Lucar de Barramed in Spain during the Cantonalist

Revolt of 1873–1874.

The final collapse of the anarchist IWMA in 1877 ended the first

genuinely international attempt to organise the socially-conscious

working class. Although its torch was soon taken up by the synthesist

Anti-Authoritarian International (AAI) or “Black International”, in

1881, the year of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by narodniks.

The Black International, which lasted until about 1893, was dominated by

the minority anarcho-insurrectionist tendency.

Generally, the radical working class movement entered a period of defeat

that saw an anarchist retreat from mass organisation, while terrorism

became vogue for all revolutionary tendencies as capitalism contracted

with two great depressions, the last in 1893. The Black International

took on an attitude of dangerous clandestinity and although the CLU, for

example, continued to operate until 1909, the main anarchist “highlight”

was the 1886 state murder of the Haymarket Martyrs, the militants

recalled worldwide each year today in the commemoration of May Day.

In 1868, Bakunin wrote his seminal Programme and Object of the Secret

Revolutionary Organisation of the International Brotherhood. In it,

Bakunin laid out the ground-rules for the IB that was founded that year.

The Programme reflected Bakunin’s rejection of an authoritarian statist

solution to the social revolution — “revolutionary in the Jacobin

sense”, as he put it — an indication of rising tensions between

anarchists and Marxists in the IWMA at that time.

After spelling out the principles of the anarchist revolution, the

Programme went on to address organisational matters following the

dissolution of the nation-state and its armed forces, bureaucracy,

courts, clergy and private property. Anticipating the

anarcho-syndicalist replacement of the state with a decentralised

administration of material, the Programme said that all church and state

properties would be put at the disposal of the “federated Alliance of

all labour associations, which Alliance will constitute the Commune.”

A “Revolutionary Communal Council” based on a “federation of standing

barricades”, comprised of mandated, accountable and revocable delegates

from each defensive barricade, would “choose separate executive

committees from among its membership for each branch of the Commune’s

revolutionary administration.” This administration would be, according

to anarchist principles, of public services, not of people. It would be

spread by revolutionary propagandists across all old statist boundaries

in order to build “the alliance of the world revolution against all

reactionaries combined”, the organisation of which “precludes any notion

of dictatorship and supervisory leadership authority.”

The Programme then went on to discuss the specific role of the anarchist

revolutionary organisation in advancing the social revolution: “But if

that revolutionary alliance is to be established and if the revolution

is to get the better of the reaction, then, amid the popular anarchy

that is to represent the very life-blood and energy of the revolution,

an agency must be found to articulate this singularity of thought and of

revolutionary action.”

“That agency should be the secret worldwide association of the

International Brotherhood. That association starts from the basis that

revolutions are never made by individuals, nor even by secret societies.

They are, so to speak, self-made, produced by the logic of things, by

the trend of events and actions. They are a long time hatching in the

deepest recesses of the popular masses’ instinctive consciousness, and

then they explode, often seeming to have been detonated by

trivialities.”

“All that a well-organised [secret] society can do is, first, to play

midwife to the revolution by spreading among the masses ideas

appropriate to the masses’ instincts, and to organise, not the

Revolution’s army — for the people must at all times be the army — but a

sort of revolutionary general staff made up of committed, energetic and

intelligent individuals who are above all else true friends of the

people and not presumptuous braggarts, with a capacity for acting as

intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and the people’s

instincts.”

So, in the view of the IB, the anarchist revolutionary organisation is

little more than an intermediary, a midwife and an enabler of mass

social revolution, but is clearly constituted as a distinct

organisation, albeit submerged within the social struggle.

In his earlier International Revolutionary Society or Brotherhood

(1865), Bakunin had spelled out the internal dynamics of such an

organisation, then in practice only in embryo, and the duties of members

— after having given an exhaustive account of the revolutionary’s

understanding and practical application of equality.

“He [sic] must understand that an association with a revolutionary

purpose must necessarily take the form of a secret society, and every

secret society, for the sake of the cause it serves and for

effectiveness of action, as well as in the interests of the security of

every one of its members, has to be subject to strict discipline, which

is in any case merely the distillation and pure product of the

reciprocal commitment made by all of the membership to one another, and

that, as a result, it is a point of honour and a duty that each of them

should abide by it.”

This discipline was entered into, Bakunin stressed, by the “free assent”

of the members, whose first duty was to society and only secondly to the

organisation. Bakunin, who called in one of his letters for anarchists

to be “invisible pilots in the centre of the popular storm”, has

subsequently been much-criticised for the clandestine nature of his

plottings, which have been presumed by some anarchists to be

authoritarian because of their secretive operations and requirements of

discipline.

But it must firstly be recognised that repressive conditions required

secrecy, secondly that the discipline written of was not an externally

imposed one, but a self-discipline to freely abide by commonly-agreed

commitments, and thirdly that Bakunin’s IB had the practical result of

helping to generate the first anarchist mass-based revolutionary

organisations among the working class from Russia to Uruguay: the

anarcho-syndicalist unions.

Influenced by Bakunin’s arguments, in 1877, a German-language

Anarcho-Communist Party (AKP) was founded in Berne, Switzerland, the

first of scores of anarcho-communist organisations around the world. The

key question raised by Bakunin, that of the role of the anarchist

communist revolutionary organisation, was to remain a core debate within

the anarchist movement for the following 140 years.

SECOND WAVE: THE “GENERAL UNION” BUILDS AN ORGANISATIONAL PLATFORM

Capitalism began expanding dramatically in the mid-1890s, with the

opening up of the African colonies to imperialist exploitation, and a

second wave of anarcho-syndicalist organising, larger than the first,

exploded on to the world scene. An oft-forgotten key organisation in

this resurgence was the National Labour Secretariat (NAS) of the

Netherlands which dominated the Dutch labour movement for a decade and

peaked at about 18,700 members in 1895 — but it was in that year that in

France the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) was founded on a model

that was replicated around the Latin world.

This dramatic growth was spurred on after anarchist militants captured

the CGT, which then had 203,000 dues-paying members and which declared

in its influential Charter of Amiens (1906) that the “trade union, today

a fighting organisation, will in the future be an organisation for

production and distribution and the basis of social reorganisation.”

This growth was accelerated by two other “jolts” that recalled the

direct-democratic practices of the French and Spanish communes and

anticipated the soviets of the Russian Revolution: the 1903 Macedonian

Revolt and the 1905–1906 Russian Revolt. Macedonia saw anarchist

guerrillas among those who established communes in Strandzha and

Krusevo, while anarchists were among those who established the first

soviets in Russia: St Petersburg and Moscow. The Russian Revolt also saw

the establishment in occupied Poland of the longest-lived anarchist

international organisation, the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) prisoner’s

aid network which today has sections in 64 countries.

These jolts helped light the fuse on the formation of the Industrial

Workers of the World (IWW) in the USA in 1905, establishing an

industrial revolutionary syndicalist organising model that swept the

English-speaking world in particular, including branches in Australia,

Canada, Britain, New Zealand / Aotearoa and South Africa, but also

Argentina, Chile and other Latin American countries. It still exists

today as a fighting “red” union, with branches in countries as diverse

as Iceland and Russia.

The IWW Preamble made the organisation’s class politics very clear: “The

working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can

be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the

working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all

the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on

until the workers of the world organise as a class, take possession of

the means of production and abolish the wage system.”

“It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with

capitalism. The army of production must be organised, not only for

everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when

capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organising industrially we are

forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

The 1905 Revolt also saw a gathering in London of exiled Russian

anarchists including the anarcho-communist theorists Piotr Kropotkin and

Maria Isidine (Maria Goldsmit) and the terrorist-turned-syndicalist

Novomirsky (Kirilovsky) met and discussed an organised response.

Novomirsky said that in order to fight reaction, all “anti-authoritarian

socialists should unite into a Workers’ Anarchist Party. The next step

would be the formation of a vast union of all revolutionary elements

under the black flag of the International Workers’ Anarchist Party.”

Such a party required theoretical unity to enable “unity of action”. It

would be “the only revolutionary party, unlike the conservative parties

which seek to preserve the established political and economic order, and

the progressive parties [like the Social Democratic Labour Party: both

its Menshevik and Bolshevik tendencies] which seek to reform the state

in one way or another, so as to reform the corresponding economic

relations, for anarchists aim to destroy the state, in order to do away

with the established economic order and reconstruct it on new

principles.”

Novomirsky said such a “party” was “the free union of individuals

struggling for a common goal” and as such required “a clear programme

and tactics” that was distinct from other currents. It needed to

“participate in the revolutionary syndicalist movement [as] the central

objective of our work, so that we can make that movement anarchist”, and

to boycott all state structures, substituting them with “workers’

communes with soviets of workers’ deputies, acting as industrial

committees, at their head”.

At the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907, the

insurrectionary terrorists who identified as anarchist were roundly

defeated, with the resolution that “anarchy and organisation, far from

being incompatible as has sometimes been claimed, are mutually

complimentary and illuminate each other, the very precept of anarchy

residing in the free organisation of the producers [the

anarcho-syndicalist influenced trade unions]”.

The congress further hailed the “collective action” and “concerted

movement”, stated that “[t]he organisation of militant forces would

assure propaganda of fresh wings and could not but hasten the

penetration of the ideas of federalism and revolution into the working

class”. It stated, however, that labour organisation did not preclude

political organisation and urged that “the comrades of every land should

place on their agenda the creation of anarchist groups and the

federation of existing groups”.

As a result of this powerful shift towards political action within the

context of mass organisation arose the Argentine Regional Workers’

Federation (FORA), founded in 1903, which provided the template for

similar federations across Latin America — notably Brazil, Chile, Peru,

Paraguay and Uruguay — while on the Iberian peninsula, the movement had

matured with the formation of the massive National Confederation of

Labour (CNT) of Spain, founded in 1910 and the relatively larger

National Workers’ Union (UON) of Portugal, founded in 1914.

The internationalist aspect of this new wave of syndicalism found

expression in the 1913 syndicalist conference in London that drew

delegates from 12 European and Latin American countries and laid the

groundwork for the formation of the International Workers’ Association

(IWA) in Berlin in 1922. In the same period, specific anarchist

political federations mushroomed, instigated in part by the

pro-organisationalist Anarchist International (AI), founded in Amsterdam

in 1907 by delegates from Europe, Latin America, Japan, Russia, and the

USA, and lasting until about 1915.

These anarchist federations, some of which affiliated to the AI, worked

in parallel to and sometimes inside the syndicalist unions. One of the

best examples of these is the Anarchist Communist Alliance (ACA),

founded in France in 1911 and having as its descendants in the 2000s the

Francophone Anarchist Federation (FAF), the Co-ordination of Anarchist

Groups (CGA), the Libertarian Communist Organisation (OCL) and

Libertarian Alternative (AL).

Back in 1910, the first great anarchist revolution broke out in Mexico,

providing the template, replicated in other upheavals to come, of how

anarchist political organisations, militia and unions could work in

concert: the anarcho-syndicalist House of the Workers of the World (COM)

— the direct descendant of the first-wave CP — working largely in

concert with the Magonistas of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM) and the

anarcho-communists of the Struggle (Lucha) group, and defended by the

Red Battalions.

Mexico also showed how things could go awfully wrong: despite the fact

that the interventionist USA had its imperialist intentions diverted by

its 1917 entry into the First World War, the anarchists failed their

first watershed test of class solidarity by breaking ranks with the

Zapatista peasantry, who the Red Battalions attacked. The

anarcho-communists then broke with the COM and backed the Zapatistas,

but the revolution never truly peaked, sputtered and finally died after

10 exhausting years, gutted by reformism.

The second wave was not broken on the rocks of the First World War, into

which the now-compromised CGT was drawn. The imperialist powers had

initiated the bloodbath because capital was in steep decline and beset

on all sides by a militant working class which had a lot of momentum

left. Despite the scale of the slaughter, the conflict unleashed two

other revolutions — Russia and Ukraine — both of which drank deeply from

the well of working class self-organisation before the

counter-revolution unlatched the guillotine-blade.

Russia showed the danger of anarchists withdrawing from the battle into

purist ivory towers, while at the same time proving Bakunin’s

predictions about the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat to

be chillingly correct and in stark contrast to the anarchist-flavoured

sovietism of the working class. The Ukraine showed the efficiency of

anarchist guerrilla warfare, based on popular support,

directly-democratic urban and rural communes and internal democracy, a

twin lesson that would stand anarchists in good stead in the dark

decades to come.

By the time the global revolt finally ended in 1923, the world was a

totally changed place. The second wave transformed anarchism into a

truly global phenomenon, with sizeable organisations fighting the class

war from Costa Rica to China, from Portugal to Paraguay, from Sweden to

South Africa, and with global syndicalism drawn together in the IWA,

founded in Berlin in 1922 and representing between 1,5-million and

2-million revolutionary workers globally.

The movement’s most remarkable achievements were the commune model that

proved the backbone of the Russian and Ukrainian revolutions, the

creation of a deeply-entrenched tradition of rank-and-file labour

militancy that eschewed bourgeois patronage, the establishment of

near-universal labour protections like the eight-hour working day and

worker’s compensation, a substantial contribution to the virtual

annihilation of absolute monarchism, and the mounting of the most

serious challenge to clerical control of education across the world.

But the defeats of the Mexican, Russian and Ukrainian revolutions lead a

lot of anarchists to become defeatist, withdrawing from the fields of

social and industrial struggle that they had dominated for decades,

leaving the door open to Bolshevism. Those critical of this retreat

found themselves having to defend the core principles of the social

revolution.

When Nestor Makhno and the surviving Ukranian anarchist guerrillas fled

into exile in 1921 following their defeat at the hands of the Red Army

whose backs they had protected for so many years, they faced some hard

questions. The most important was: if anarchism places so much value on

freedom from coercion, is it a powerful enough strategy to defeat a

united, militarised enemy? The survivors were not only embittered by

their experiences at the hands of the “revolutionary” reds. They were

also greatly disappointed in the poor support given to them by Russian

anarchist comrades.

Sure, there was the Nabat, the Alarm Confederation of Anarchist

Organisations (ACAO), that worked alongside the Revolutionary Insurgent

Army of the Ukraine (RIAU), the anarcho-syndicalist unions in the cities

and the various Black Guard detatchments of guerrillas like Maroussia

Nikiforova, but precious little aid had come from anarchists further

afield. And the majority of the Nabat had split with the RIAU in 1919

over the latter’s third tactical truce with the Bolsheviks.

This dispute over strategy was to play itself out in exile in France

between ex-Nabat “synthesists” like Voline and ex-Makhnovists like

Makhno. In 1926, Makhno, the metalworker Piotr Arshinov (who had helped

found Nabat), the Jewish woman guerrilla Ida Mett and other exiles of

the Workers’ Cause (Dielo Truda) group in Paris published a pamphlet

titled Organizatsionnaia Platforma Vseobshchego Soiuza Anarkhistov:

Proekt (Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists:

Draft).

We prefer the title the Organisational Platform of the Anarchist

Communists, but it is more commonly known as the Organisational Platform

of the Libertarian Communists, or simply the Platform. The text caused

big waves through the international anarchist movement because of its

call for tight internal discipline, for mutually-agreed unity of ideas

and tactics within anarchist groups, and for the formation of a “general

union of anarchists”.

By union, the writers of the Platform meant a united political

organisation rather than a trade union. As anarchist communists, they

considered anarcho-syndicalism with its focus on industrial organising,

to be “only one of the forms of revolutionary class struggle”. Anarchist

unions needed to be united with anarchist political groups, anarchist

militia, and anarchist municipal soviets. The Platform emphasised the

class struggle nature of anarchism, reminding militants that it was a

workerist movement, but one that was not exclusively focussed on

industry or the trade unions.

It called for ideological and tactical unity plus collective

responsibility and a programme of revolutionary action. More

controversially, it called for an “executive committee” to be formed

within the general union of anarchists. But by executive committee, the

writers of the Platform meant a task group of activists whose job it was

to carry out tasks mandated by the union.

The Platform’s vision of the future social revolutionary soviet society

was arguably derived from an earlier Makhnovist document, the Draft

Declaration of the (Makhnovist) Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the

Ukraine, adopted in 1919 at a congress of the Military-Revolutionary

Soviet. The Declaration called — like the Kronstadt Soviet would in 1921

— for a “third revolution” against Bolshevik coercive power over the

working class, poor and peasantry, and stated that the free soviet

system — that is, “libertarian organisation as taken up by significant

masses”, freely self-organised to oppose “the notion of political power”

— was the basis of this revolution.

However, since the Soviet and the RIAU were pluralistic organisations,

consisting of anarchist, Social Revolutionaries, non-party

revolutionaries and even dissident Bolsheviks, the Declaration did not

assign the anarchists a specific social function by name. Instead, it

stated that not only all “political activity” based on privilege,

coercion and enslavement, but all political organisation — presumably

including all genuine socialist revolutionary factions like the

anarchist communists — would “tend to wither away of themselves” under

revolutionary conditions.

But it emphasised that the RIAU, while pluralistic, volunteer, and

working class-controlled, did form the “fighting core of this Ukrainian

people’s revolutionary movement, a core whose task consists everywhere

of organising insurgent forces and helping insurgent toilers in their

struggle against all abuse of power and capital”. So the militant

minority’s task was clearly pro-organisational in support of the popular

revolutionary forces. But the document stopped short of calling for a

specific organisation of a distinct revolutionary tendency to carry out

that task — as the later Platform did.

Unlike authoritarian socialist organisations where the committee would

make all policy decisions, in a platformist organisation, the entire

membership is the decision-making body. Any delegates or committees

merely carry out tasks mandated by that membership. The Platform’s

critics included veteran anarchist militants like Voline (Vsevolod

Eikenbaum) of Russia, himself a former Makhnovist, Sébastian Faure of

France, Errico Malatesta of Italy and Alexander Berkman of the USA.

They accused the exiles of trying to “Bolshevise anarchism” — in the

sense of the substitution of a professional revolutionary elite for the

revolutionary masses — and the later “conversion” of Arshinov to

Bolshevism to enable the exhausted militant to return home gave the

critics lots of ammunition, despite the fact that he was executed in

1937 during Stalin’s purges for “attempting to restore anarchism in

Russia”. But Makhno and his co-authors argued that it was exactly

because of the disorganisation of Russian anarchists that many of them

went on to join the only group with a clear revolutionary plan — the

Bolsheviks.

Anarchists, they said, needed to be just as clear and as organised, but

along libertarian not authoritarian lines, and guiding, not dictating

revolutionary workers’ aspirations. Most of the anarchist opposition to

the Platform has sprung from misconceptions.

But its original title as a “draft” shows it was intended as an internal

discussion document within the international anarchist movement, not as

a final blueprint for the only possible style of anarchist organisation.

It was neither authoritarian (as we have seen in discussing the

executive committee), nor was it vanguardist, that is an attempt to get

a tiny group of activists to lead the working class.

It was also not intended to say that all anarchists should be absorbed

into one massive platformist organisation. It quite clearly said that

platformist groups would maintain links with other revolutionary

organisations. Platformism is also not a different strand of anarchism:

the platformist method of organising was applied to all forms of

anarchist communist organisation, whether economic, political, military

or social.

Most importantly, the Platform was not an innovation, but a clear

re-statement of the fundamentals of mass anarchist communist organising

dating back to Bakunin’s time: the necessity for commonly agreed lines

of attack on which anarchist organisations had become the primary

promoters of exclusively working class interests worldwide.

The intense debate over the Platform split the Russian and Ukrainian

anarchist movements in exile, notably in France where the Group of

Russian Anarchists Abroad (GRAZ) fractured in 1927 into platformist and

synthesist tendencies, and in North America where the Russian/Ukrainian

diaspora split into organisationalist and svobodnik, groupings. The

specific platformist tendency in France founded the International

Anarchist Communist Federation (IACF) in 1927 with sections in France

and Italy and delegates from China, Poland and Spain. The IACF can be

considered to be the ideological descendant of Bakunin’s IB and, to a

lesser extent, of the organisationalist Anarchist International.

The debate also influenced the remaining anarchists in Russia itself,

including former militants of the Nabat who had either been driven

underground or jailed. According to a Nabat veteran writing in Dielo

Truda in 1928 — unnamed for security reasons — who was then in exile in

Siberia, the Nabat itself, initially a de facto “synthesist”

organisation, had been refining its organisational structure, in the

“whirlwind of revolution”, in what approximated a “platformist”

direction.

The Nabat veteran wrote that the organisation was in a sense a “party”

in that it was not, as claimed by Voline, a loose, affinity-based

organisation, but a federation of groups that rallied “the most

determined, the most dynamic militants with an eye to launching a

healthy, well-structured movement with the prospect of a standardised

programme”. Nabat members submitted to majority decisions reached at its

congresses, and that transcended its different tendencies to promote a

unitary “policy line” — “a single, coherent platform”.

“In short, it was a well-structured, well-disciplined movement with a

leading echelon appointed and monitored by the rank and file. And let

there be no illusions as to the role of that echelon [later referred to

as the ‘Secretariat’, in echo of the Platform’s ‘executive committee’]:

it was not merely technically executive, as it is commonly regarded. It

was also the movement’s ideological pilot core, looking after publishing

operations, and propaganda activity, utilising the central funds and

above all controlling and deploying the movement’s resources and

militants”.

In Bulgaria, the platformist tendency proved strongest with the

Bulgarian Anarchist Communist Federation (BACF) adopting the document as

its constitution. This may account in part for the diversity and

resilience of the Bulgarian anarchist movement, which organised workers,

peasants, students, professionals and intellectuals, and not only

survived, under arms, the 1934 fascist putsch, but the Second World War

(only to be crushed by Stalinist-Fascist reaction in 1948). It was

unfortunate that the Platform was not translated into Spanish early

enough to influence the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), founded in

1927.

THIRD WAVE: THE “REVOLUTIONARY JUNTA” PUSHES FOR A FRESH REVOLUTION

The Conservative Counter-revolution of the 1920s generated anarchism’s

greatest challenge, fascism both brown and red, which would proceed for

the decades to come to crush the autonomous, militant working class in a

deadly vise. Bolshevism was in many ways more insidious than fascism, by

establishing a similar style of totalitarianism, but colouring it red by

posing as the liberator of the working class.

Disoriented by the propaganda success of the Bolshevik model and

silenced in its gulags, anarchism lost ground throughout the world,

despite retaining strongholds in Latin America and the Far East, and

even helped establish the first communist parties — which were initially

noticeably libertarian in orientation — in countries like Brazil, China,

France, Portugal, and South Africa.

But it was not all about repression: the second wave also broke against

reformism, the new welfare state sugar-coating that defused militancy in

countries as diverse as Uruguay and the USA. While many anarchist and

syndicalist organisations were forced underground or destroyed in this

long slide into darkness, important struggles against fascism and

imperialism were unfolding in countries like Bulgaria and Korea.

It is also amid this turmoil that impressive examples of

anarchist-influenced worker self-management — like the Shanghai Commune

1927 — arose. Of greater significance were developments in 1928 when two

huge continental anarchist organisations were founded: the East Asian

Anarchist Federation (EAAF), with member organisations in China, Japan,

Korea, Formosa (Taiwan), Korea, Vietnam and India; and the American

Continental Workingmen’s Association (ACAT), with member organisations

in 10 Latin American countries. This continued anarchist resistance lead

to the upsurge of a third wave, with the sorely understudied Manchurian

Revolution of 1929–1931, the extreme isolation of which limited its

impact to Chinese, Japanese, Manchurian and especially Korean

resistance.

The Manchurian Revolution was unusual in that it was initially inserted

from above — by the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation in Manchuria

(KACF-M) and the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria (KAF-M)

working in concert with the anarchist Korean Independence Army general

Kim Jwa-Jin. But it quickly gained grassroots support because it was

based on worker and community self-organisation. It demonstrated how the

upliftment of the working class through economic autonomy and education

could combine seamlessly with a bottom-up system of decision-making and

a militant defensive programme.

However, it was the explosion of the running class war in Spain into

full-throated revolution when the fascist-oriented colonial military

staged a coup díetat in 1936 that captured the attention of the whole

world. Seen as a laboratory of virtually every known competing political

tendency from anarchism to fascism, the Spanish Revolution was in many

ways the most compelling of the century.

But the compromises of reformists in the anarchist ranks, the outside

interference of the fascist imperial powers, the betrayals of the

Stalinists and the extremely fragmented nature of the republican camp

all lead to Spain being recalled, incorrectly, as the swan-song of

anarchism, a song soon drowned in the carnage of the Second World War.

Still, the worker-run fields and factories of Spain provided the

best-studied methods for the successful operation of an egalitarian

society on a large scale, a lesson that humanity will not easily forget.

Sadly, of course, Spain (along with the earlier experiences of the

“national anarchists” of Czechoslovakia and China and later of Korea)

showed clearly that internationalist anarchism and the interests of the

global working class are totally at odds with nationalist government,

however so-called “revolutionary”.

Although the defeat of the revolution was a great blow for the class,

the third wave did not break until the end of the Second World War, when

it peaked with armed anarchist resistance movements in France, China,

Korea, Poland, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary and of course, Francoist

Spain, a resistance that was echoed in the anti-colonial struggles to

come. Not only that, but numerous anarchist federations were formed

during and in the immediate post-war period as anarchists rebuilt their

political presence.

In France, the FAF was revived in 1944 and the UA was reformed as the

Revolutionary Anarchist Communist Union (UACR); in Italy, the Federation

of Italian Anarchist Communists (FdCAI) was founded in 1944 and the

Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI), into which the FdCAI was later

absorbed, the following year; the Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB)

was founded in 1945; and the Japanese Anarchist Federation (JAF) in the

same year.

The collapse of Spain also sent an anarchist diaspora into the world,

from North Africa to Chile. Its greatest impact was felt in Cuba, where

the movement experienced a dramatic growth-spurt, coming to dominate

both the “official” and the underground union federations after World

War Two, and in Mexico and Venezuela where the exile presence was large

enough for them to form their own significant anarcho-syndicalist

formations: the General Delegation of the CNT (CNT-DG) and the

Venezuelan Regional Workers’ Federation (FORV).

Other anarcho-syndicalist organisations that sprang up in this period

include: the clandestine International Revolutionary Syndicalist

Federation (FISR) in France in 1943, followed in 1945 by the revived

CGT-SR known as the National Confederation of Labour (CNT); the

Syndicalist Workers’ Federation (SWF) of Britain; the Federation of Free

Labour Unions (FFLU) and Conference of Labour Unions (CLU) of Japan in

1946; and the Federation of Libertarian Socialists (FFS) of Germany in

1947.

Then there was the anarchist tendency in the General Italian Workers’

Federation (CGIL), and the “pure syndicalist” Independent League of

Trade Unions (OVB) founded in the Netherlands in 1948. Another

strong-point of anarcho-syndicalist organising in the immediate post-war

period that is usually overlooked was in China where the movement grew

to be about 10,000-strong in the cities, despite the difficult

conditions of conflict between the nationalists and the communists.

Also, in Korea, the defeat of Japan lead to a rapid reorganisation of

anarchist forces with the Eastern Anarchist Federation (EAF), the Korean

Youth Federation in South China (KYFSC), the Korean Anarchist Federation

in China (KAF-C) and many other organisations combining into the huge

Federation of Free Society Builders (FFSB). Here a strong libertarian

reformist tendency also developed, with the entry of a few key members

of the Korean Anarcho-Communist Federation (KACF) and the Korean

Revolutionist Federation (KRF) into the five-party left-wing Korean

Provisional Government from 1940 until about 1946.

The same question raised in the 1920s by the Platform, of how to

organise in a free, yet effective manner, was faced during the Spanish

Revolution, at the height of the third wave. Seeing how the communists

and reformists within the trade unions were selling out the revolution,

a militant group of anarchists was formed in 1937 to maintain the

revolutionary hardline.

The Friends of Durruti (AD) were named after the brilliant Spanish

anarchist railway worker and guerrilla fighter Buenaventura Durruti who

died defending the capital Madrid against the fascist forces in 1936.

The AD was founded by rank-and-file CNT militants, key anarchist

hardliners and anarchist militia, in particular from the famous Durruti

Column and the Iron Column, which opposed the Stalinist and statist

order to turn the militia into an ordinary authoritarian army with its

class divisions and its heavy-handed punishment regime.

In 1938, when the counter-revolution, encouraged by the Stalinists, was

in full swing in the rear of and at the revolutionary front, the AD

published Towards a Fresh Revolution, a strategic document which was a

critique of the reformist tendency within the CNT which had lead to

anarchist collaboration with bourgeois, nationalist, conservative and

Stalinist forces in the Republican government. The document called for a

“revolutionary junta” (meaning a “council” or “soviet”) to maintain the

revolutionary character of the war by means of the anarchist militia,

and for the economy to be placed entirely in the hands of the

syndicates.

It was in effect a call to dissolve the bourgeois Republican government

and replace it by the organised revolutionary working class under arms.

Its other demands were: that workers seize all arms and financial

reserves; the total socialisation of the economy and food distribution;

that there be no collaboration with any bourgeois groups; the

equalisation of all pay; working class solidarity; and no peace to be

signed with foreign bourgeois powers.

Like the Makhnovist Platform, the AD manifesto was also accused of being

vanguardist and authoritarian, this time because of a misunderstanding,

mostly among English-speakers, of what was meant by the revolutionary

junta. But junta in the AD’s usage did not have the connotations of a

ruling military clique which the term carries in English. It was not to

be an “anarchist dictatorship”, supplanting the bourgeois government

with an anarchist one. Its task was merely to co-ordinate the war effort

and make sure that the war did not defer or dismantle revolutionary

gains. The rest of the revolution was to be left in civilian worker

hands.

FOURTH WAVE: THE “VANISHING VANGUARD” ADVANCES LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM

The anarchist movement is widely seen as being at its lowest ebb in the

1950s, when capitalism was in post-war boom and the Cold War between the

alternate capitalisms of the USA and USSR was at its height. To a large

extent this is true: the IWW was at its weakest in 50 years of existence

in 1955 and fascism was still in the ascendant in most of Latin America,

the Mediterranean and the Far East, with China having been largely lost

to Maoist totalitarianism in 1949, and Korea permanently carved into red

and blue totalitarian camps by 1953, closing the door on both

revolutionary anarchist and libertarian reformist options.

But this view ignores the key role played by the anarchists in the

Second Escambray Front, the Revolutionary Directorate (DR) and the

clandestine General Confederation of Labour (CGT) in igniting and

fighting the Cuban Revolution 1952–1959. Given that the Cuban Revolution

remains to this day the touchstone of diverse tendencies that arose from

the New Left, the centrality of anarchism to the revolution, and the

fraudulent, counter-revolutionary role played by the Castroites cannot

be overemphasised.

Also, the suggestion that the Swedish Workers’ Central Organisation

(SAC) was the sole remaining lighthouse of large-scale

anarcho-syndicalism until its withdrawal from the IWA in 1959, ignores

the fact that the National Workers’ Unity Movement (MUNT) of Chile was

flexing its muscles and helped establish the powerful Chilean Workers’

Central (CUT) in 1953. The CUT came incredibly close to taking power in

the Chilean Revolt of 1956 — before the reformist Stalinists and social

democrats prematurely ended a revolutionary general strike — and laid

the groundwork for decades of Chilean anarchist militancy.

The view that this period saw the end of anarchist organisation also

ignores the massive strike by the anarchist-lead Ship-building Workers’

Federation (FTB) in Argentina in 1956 — the country’s largest strike in

the 20^(th) Century — and the five-month syndicalist resistance by some

100,000 workers on the docks, mines and freezing plants of New Zealand /

Aotearoa in 1951. Still, it was a period of hibernation, in which much

of the syndicalism in evidence was “spontaneous” and divorced from its

anarchist origins.

That started to change with developments like the founding of the hugely

influential Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) in 1956, an

organisation that set the scene for non-sectarian Latin American

continental resistance in the years to come. And despite operating in

the most difficult of conditions, anarchist guerrillas plagued the

authorities in Maoist China, Kruschevite Ukraine and Francoist Spain,

while there were anarcho-communist resistance organisations in occupied

Korea: the Autonomous Workers’ League (AWL) and the Autonomous Village

Movement (AVM), both creations of the FFSB.

Still, anarchism — and the working class as a whole, with which it has

always been closely associated — was in dire straits and was only

resuscitated on a global scale by the “jolt” of 1968, which initiated a

wave of working class resistance to the various forms of capitalism from

France to Senegal, from Mexico to Czechoslovakia, from Germany to Japan,

from Pakistan to the USA. The jolt, spurred on by the neo-liberal

contraction of capital which started dismantling the West’s welfare

states and eroded working class conditions in the Soviet bloc still

further, unleashed a fourth wave of anarchist organisation and guerrilla

warfare, centred primarily in the southern cone of Latin America, but

also in the Middle East, a new field of anarchist operations.

Notable anarchist guerrilla organisations of the day in the global south

were the Popular Brigades (BP) of Chile, the FAU’s Revolutionary Popular

Organisation — 33 (OPR-33) of Uruguay, Libertarian Resistance (RL) of

Argentina, the unknown Palestinian guerrilla group that trained some RL

guerrillas, the Workers’ Liberation Group (Shagila) of Iraq and The

Scream of The People (CHK) of Iran. The last two are important in that

they developed an anarcho-communism virtually in total isolation from

the rest of the anarchist movement, giving an indication of the

universal validity of anarchist practice, and they participated in the

Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979, the most recent revolution in which

anarchist guerrillas played a role.

In the global north, anarchist guerrilla organisations included the

Angry Brigade (AB) of Britain, the East Asia Anti-Japan Armed Front

(EAAAF) of Japan, Direct Action (AD) of France, Direct Action (AD) of

Canada, the Anti-capitalist Autonomous Commandos (CAA) of the Basque

country, the Iberian Liberation Movement — Autonomous Combat Groups

(MIL-GAC), First of May Group (GPM) and the Groups of International

Revolutionary Action (GARI) of Western Europe.

During this wave, anarchism and the libertarian strains of autonomism

that sprang up in Western Europe in the 1970s usually played second

fiddle to Maoism and Trotskyism, with many anarchists influenced by the

insurgent doctrines of Guevara, Mao, Marighella and Negri rather than of

Sabate, Mechoso, Christie and Bonanno, but it was not exclusively a

period of armed struggle.

Other important developments during the fourth wave were the founding of

the synthesist International of Anarchist Federations (IAF) in 1968, the

re-establishment of the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) in the same year, a

mushrooming of anarchist organisations across the world, and the

resurgence of revolutionary syndicalism as evidenced by the Authentic

Labour Front (FAT) of Mexico or the establishment of a Marine Transport

Workers’ Industrial Union (MTWIU) section in Sweden. One of the key

spurs to the resurgence of anarchism was the end of the fascist regimes

in Portugal in 1974, then Spain in 1975, which saw the re-emergence of

the CNT with 200,000 members.

In this period, the real harbinger of things to come was the

re-emergence of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism within the

Stalinist and Maoist empires: the Movement of Revolutionary Communards

(MRC), the Communist League of Anarchists (CLA) and the Free General

Workers’ Union (SMOT), founded in 1979 in the USSR, the Polish Anarchist

Federation (PAF) and the Czechoslovak Anarchist Association (EAS),

founded in the 1980s.

Notable also were the 10-million-strong, initially syndicalist,

Solidarity (Solidarnosc) in Poland, the unstudied Neutralist Tribunal

(NT) in Vietnam, and the Federation of the Provincial Proletariat

(Shengwulian), founded in 1968 in China (where an underground Anarchist

Federation, AF, was rumoured to operate in the 1970s). Other underground

organisations were established in Latin America and Korea, and some,

notably in Chile, engaged in guerrilla warfare.

The ideas of the Platform, which were expressed in essence again by the

Friends of Durruti have maintained the anarchist hardline time and

again, especially when the movement has been in crisis. Following the

defeat of the Spanish Revolution in 1939, many anarchist militants were

disillusioned and a deathly anti-revolutionary liberalism that focussed

on “personal liberation” rather than class struggle crept into the

movement.

So in 1953, just after the anarchists had launched the Cuban Revolution,

the French anarchist militant George Fontenis wrote the Manifesto of

Libertarian Communism for the Libertarian Communist Federation (FCL).

The FCL had split from the FAF the previous year, taking the majority of

FAF members with it in yet another round of the historical tensions in

the French non-syndicalist anarchist movement between platformists and

synthesists.

But the FCL’s origins were less than honest — with the platformist

tendency having arisen within the FAF in 1950 as a secret caucus of

which Fontenis was the secretary and called the Thought-Battle

Organisation (OPB). The existence of the OPB only became known after the

FCL split from the FAF. This unaccountable secrecy and vanguardism,

which was apparently designed to attract the left flank of the French

Communist Party (PCF) tarnished the debate over the Platform.

As with other platformist-style manifestos, it created quite a few

waves, attacking as it did the “synthesis” style of anarchism that

included extreme individualism in its mish-mash of libertarian ideas. It

also rejected the usual communist theories of the dictatorship of the

proletariat (actually the dictatorship of the party) and the two-stage

revolution (actually the revolution put on hold forever). It affirmed

anarchism as a class-struggle revolutionary theory and practice and

called for a disciplined “vanguard” to push the revolution forward. But

by vanguard, Fontenis meant not the Marxist-styled, self-appointed

“leaders” of the people, which tactic he said “leads to a pessimistic

evaluation of the role of the masses, to an aristocratic contempt for

their political ability, to concealed direction of revolutionary

activity, and so to defeat”.

Instead, the Manifesto‘s “vanguard” was a revolutionary organisation

tasked with “developing the direct political responsibility of the

masses; it must aim to increase the masses’ ability to organise

themselves”. This group of activists had as its final aim “to disappear

in becoming identical with the masses when they reach their highest

level of consciousness in achieving the revolution”. It would work

within established mass organisations like unions, educational groups,

mutual aid societies and others, and actively propagate its ideas. Its

basic principles would be ideological and tactical unity, collective

action and discipline, and a federal rather than centralised structure.

In Italy in the 1950s, hardline “organisationalist” anarchists founded

the Proletarian Action Anarchist Groups (GAAP) within the synthesist

Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI), and were later expelled. The GAAP

did not survive for long on its own, but in its brief existance, the

GAAP united with Fontenis’ OPB to form a short-lived Libertarian

Communist International (ICL). Despite the disappearance of a a specific

platformist tendency in Italy, veterans of the GAAP and the memory of

its practice formed the backbone of today’s Federation of Communist

Anarchists (FdCA) when it was founded in 1985.

Fontenis is a controversial character in France because he later took a

sharp turn rightwards, becoming a Freemason, running the FCL in the

legislative elections of 1956 (the organisation collapsed a year or two

later), and recruiting the notorious dissident Stalinist Andre Marty to

FCL ranks. As with Arshinov earlier, this reversal of anarcho-communism

was crudely claimed by many synthesists to be the logical result of

platformism. But the later deviance of the FCL does not of itself

invalidate the initial FCL positions or its Manifesto.

Nevertheless, platformism remained a minority tendency within the global

anarchist movement, particularly within France where it had the longest

history, but its ideas were revived in 1968 with the founding of the

Anarchist Revolutionary Organisation (ORA) tendency that split from the

FAF in 1970, calling itself “a federation of territorial or trades

groups and not a gathering of individuals”.

The ORA’s Organisational Contract of 1970 stated that “anarchism

repudiates all authoritarianism: that of pure individualism with its

repudiation of society, and that of pure communism which seeks to ignore

the individual. Anarchism is not a synthesis of antagonistic principles,

but a juxtaposition of concrete, living realities, the convergence of

which must be sought in an equilibrium as elastic as life itself”.

While hailing the platformist principles of ideological and tactical

unity, collective responsibility, rank-and-file decision-making, and

libertarian federalism, the Organisational Contract stated that the ORA

“has no pretensions to a rigid ideological unity generating dogmatism

[or, what it named ‘stodgy uniformity’]. But on the other hand, it

refuses also to be merely a motley collection of divergent tendencies,

the frictions between which would inevitably lead to stagnation”.

An Addendum to the Organisational Contract stated that the ORA “is to be

the driving force behind mass movements against authoritarian systems”

and it appears to have achieved this in part. The ORA inspired the

creation of platformist organisations with the same acronym in Denmark

in 1973 (apparently still in existence), Britain in the mid-1970s (since

dissolved), and in Italy in 1976, the last of which in 1985 became the

FdCA of today. The French ORA became today’s French/Belgian Libertarian

Communist Organisation (OCL) and its Libertarian Alternative (AL)

splinter. The longevity of the FdCA and ORA/OCL/AL lines help put paid

to the idea that platformism is a disguised intermediary stage in a

rightward capitulation towards Stalinism.

FIFTH WAVE: THE ANARCHO-COMMUNIST “DRIVING FORCE” FIGHTS FOR A

LIBERTARIAN ALTERNATIVE

The fourth wave of anarchist insurgencies were crushed by neo-fascist

repression in Latin America in the mid-1970s, with the USA funding

death-squads into the 1980s, and by the increasingly right-wing regimes

of Western Europe and North America in the same period, but

revolutionary syndicalism steadily rebuilt, as did anarchist political

organisation. And a fifth wave, far broader than the fourth, was soon

unleashed in 1989–1991 with the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union

and the liberation of its Eastern European satellite colonies, right

down to the Stalinist oddity that was Albania and the Titoist dissident

region of Yugoslavia.

Immediately, the underground anarchist movement in those countries

surged forth, with the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists (KAS) and

the Confederation of Revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists (KRAS), both

founded in Russia in 1989, the Polish Anarchist Federation (PAF),

founded in the 1980s, and the Czechoslovak Anarchist Association (EAS),

founded in 1989, leading the way.

The explosion of new anarchist organisations in the former Soviet empire

has been remarkable: from the Baltic states to the Balkan states, and

from Belarus to Kazakhstan, there is barely a region of the ex-USSR and

its satellites which has not seen a newly emergent anarchist and

syndicalist movement. Notable is the revival of organisations like the

Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists — Nestor Makhno

(RKAS-NM) in former anarchist strongholds like the Ukraine, plus the

emergence of “Makhnovist” groups in countries like Greece and Turkey.

Probably the largest anarcho-communist organisation in the world today

outside of the syndicalist union federations is Autonomous Action (AD),

with branches in 20 Russian cities, plus branches in Armenia, Belorus,

Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. And the recent development of underground

anarcho-syndicalist organisations in “communist” countries like Cuba

which are rapidly embracing liberal capitalism, demonstrates that we can

expect a further emergence in times to come, especially as

totalitarianism loses its grip in China, Vietnam and North Korea (though

no current anarchist underground is known in those regions).

In Latin America, the collapse of the para-fascist dictatorships in

Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Uruguay in 1983–1990, and the

emergence of militant new social movements as capital contracts ever

more severely into neo-corporatist crisis, has spurred on the revival of

anarchism: Rebel — Libertarian Socialism (Auca — SL) and the Libertarian

Socialist Organisation (OSL) of Argentina; the Gaucha Anarchist

Federation (FAG), Cabocla Anarchist Federation (FACA) and the Anarchist

Federation of Rio de Janiero (FARJ) of Brazil; Women Creating (MC) and

Libertarian Youth (JL) of Bolivia; the Anarcho-Communist Unification

Congress (CUAC) of Chile, later renamed the Libertarian Communist

Organisation (OLC).

The primary organisation that helped initiate the spurt of new growth

was the revived FAU of Uruguay that rebuilt in 1985, repudiated its

earlier pro-Castroism and embraced the Platform. The result of its

leading role in regenerating anarcho-communist ideas in the southern

cone of Latin America is that most of the region’s most significant new

organisations — the FAG, FACA, FARJ, Libertarian Struggle (LL), OLC and

others like the Libertarian Socialist Organisation (OSL) in Argentina —

are platformist, or in Latin American terms, especifista (specific),

organisations.

The Mexican Revolt of 1994 provided additional impetus and helped

establish organisations like the Indigenous Popular Council of Oaxaca —

Ricardo Flores Magon (CIPO-RFM) and its splinter Magonist Zapatist

Alliance (AMZ). In Africa, the conditions of neo-colonialism lead to the

construction of anarchist organisations including the Anarchist Party

for Individual Freedoms in the Republic (PALIR) in Senegal in 1981, the

3,000-strong IWW section among diamond miners in Sierra Leone in the

late 1980s-early 1990s, the Anarchist Workers’ and Student’s Group

(ASWG) of Zambia in 1998 and the Wiyathi Collective within the

Anti-Capitalist Convergence of Kenya (ACCK) in the 2000s. The closing

phases of resistance to militarism and apartheid saw the (re-)emergence

of anarchism where its heritage was slender: the Awareness League (AL)

of Nigeria, the Anarchist Resistance Movement (ARM) and Durban Anarchist

Federation (DAF) of South Africa.

Invigorated by the “Battle of Seattle” and public disgust at the US-lead

imperialist wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, the organised anarchist

movement in North America — long plagued by individualism, primitivism

and other anti-class-war ideologies — has rediscovered itself, notably

with the founding of the North-Eastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists

(NEFAC) of the USA/Canada in 2000, which sparked the creation of similar

regional organisations across the continent.

The neo-liberal crisis has seen the establishment of anarchist

organisations in regions where they either had no historical precedent

or where the traditions were long-dead: from Lebanon to Sierra Leone;

from Costa Rica to Kenya; from El Salvador to Zambia. And a fifth wave

of syndicalism has arisen, despite the fractious debates that have cost

the IWA its Japanese and Colombian, and factions of its French and

Italian sections.

This is apparent not only in the veteran anarcho-syndicalist

organisations of Western Europe such as the General Confederation of

Labour (CGT) of Spain, which at 60,000 members is now the largest in the

world (and the third-largest union federation in Spain), but also the

6,000-strong Siberian Confederation of Labour (SKT), the 2,000-strong

RKAS-NM of Ukraine, and the National Confederation of Labour — Vignoles

(CNT-Vignoles) of France, which claims 1,000 dues-paying members and

another 4,000 mobilisable supporters, all of which identify specifically

as anarchist.

The Swedish Central Workers’ Organisation (SAC) currently claims a

membership of 9,000, a thousand lower than in the late 1990s, after it

discontinued the practice of including members who had retired from

their employment. In addition, there is the “grassroots syndicalist”

tendency wihin the union “base committee” movement of Italy, the

alternative syndicalist unions in France (Solidarity Unity Democracy,

SUD), Switzerland (SUD) and Mexico (the 50,000-strong FAT), and a

palette of new rank-and-file syndicalist organisations from the

Democratic Republic of Congo to Malaysia, from Burkina Faso to

Bangladesh.

New and old syndicalist unions are collaborating continentally by sector

(railways, communications, education etc.) across neo-liberal “Fortress

Europe” through the nascent European Federation of Alternative

Syndicalism (FESAL) network of “grassroots syndicalist” unions. This

expansive fifth wave has seen numerous splinters, but this is a sign of

rapid growth and the development of a plethora of different libertarian

communist approaches to the challenges posed to the working class by

turbo-capitalism in the new millennium.

Lastly, the current wave is also a period of intense international

organising, with the formation of two new networks: International

Libertarian Solidarity (ILS), founded in 2001, and the Insurrectional

Anti-authoritarian International (IAI), founded in 2000, representing

the majority mass and minority insurrectionist traditions, respectively.

In 1991, following the collapse of Soviet communism, the French

platformist Libertarian Alternative (AL) took up the

pro-organisationalist torch with A Manifesto for a Libertarian

Alternative. Its aim was not only to help inject a hardline perspective

into the growing anarchist movement, but to show other true

revolutionaries that there was a way out of the dead end which state

“socialism” had lead the workers into. It dealt with the situation which

the modern working class found itself in under neo-liberalism: mass

unemployment, casualisation, neo-colonialism, the enclosure of the

people’s “commons” down to the genetic level, the rise of the new

technical middle class (computer specialists etc) and so forth.

It emphasised the need for a worker-driven revolutionary project that

would aim to dismantle capitalism and all oppressions like that directed

against women. Like the Platform, it also called for “statutory rules”

in order that the anarchist organisation run efficiently and co-ordinate

its external activities. These rules would be based on “a common

identity” and strategies would be worked out by free discussion among

all members.

In 1997, the Anarchist Communist Federation of Britain (ACF, later

renamed the Anarchist Federation, AF), which had sprung into existence

as a result of the Miner’s Strike 1984–1985, published Beyond

Resistance: a Revolutionary Manifesto for the Millennium. Updated in

2003, it described the crises faced by capitalism, both private and

state, the rise of religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism. It

stated boldly that “the old workers’ movement is dead”, that “the old

shock battalions of our class, the miners, the dockers, the

steelworkers” have been seriously weakened by neo-corporatism. It said

that as a result, the revolutionary struggle was now “in the public

space of the towns, and of society in general, rather than in the

private space of the workplaces”.

The Revolutionary Manifesto said a new post-Soviet coherence would have

to be developed within the working class, which required the building of

a new mass revolutionary movement. The anarchist organisation should:

work within popular struggles; teach workers’ history; ceaselessly

agitate for revolution; host open militant debates; support the

self-organisation of workers’ struggles; attack Leninism and other

elitist “revolutionary” sects; assure the independence of worker’s

organisations; and always be at the forefront of countering capitalist

repression. Again, as in the Platform, the Revolutionary Manifesto

argued for “unified operational decision-making” involving all members.

The organisation should be based on a libertarian structure, a high

degree of internal education, collective responsibility for its actions,

and must have a collective plan of action. The organisation must be

linked into a network of workplace and community organisations that

should form a united revolutionary force when the time is ripe. It

should rotate and recall its delegates frequently, should develop among

members a variety of skills and should allow no leadership to develop.

The ACF’s earlier position paper, The Role of the Revolutionary

Organisation, stated that the organisation rejected “the Leninist

concept which springs from the managerial strata and the intelligentsia

which seek to dragoon the workers into a new form of oppression: the

worker’s state”. The anarcho-communist revolutionary organisation must

be both “part of the class” and “in ideological advance of the class as

a whole” while recognising that “it is not infallible and does not have

all of the answers all of the time. It is transformed as the working

class is transformed in the revolutionary process”.

The ACF called for a class-based approach to a diverse range of

anti-capitalist struggles that embraced gender, anti-racist,

environmental, cultural and unemployed struggles, calling for the

creation of a ìlibertarian frontî of all such movements within which the

task of the revolutionary anarchist organisation was, in echo of the

ORA, to “act as the driving force”, not in the Leninist sense of the

domination of such a front, but in the sense of acting as a catalyst of

radical mass self-organisation.

In regions like North America, where atomistic affinity-groupings and

not large-scale anarchist organising had been the rule outside of the

trade unions, the dominance of the anti-organisationalist approach seems

to have lead to the collapse of specific anarchist organisations from

the late 1920s and early 1930s until the founding of specific anarchist

communist organisations in the 1980s through the 2000s.

In regions like France, however, where mass organisations were the rule,

self-described platformist organisations have remained an important

influence on the specific anarchist movement to the present day,

spreading in the 1970s across Europe and in the 1990s to Latin America,

the ex-Soviet empire, the Middle East and Southern Africa. In the new

millennium, the mainstream mass organisational tendency is again in the

ascendancy.

As a result of the clear need for an organised anarchist fighting

strategy to counter neo-liberalism, recent and current anarchist

communist, platformist and platformist-influenced groups had or have a

presence in countries like:

ARGENTINA:

• Libertarian Socialist Organisation (OSL).

• Libertarian Communist Collective (CCL).

• Rebel — Libertarian Socialism (Auca -SL), dissolved 2004.

ARMENIA & KAZAKHSTAN:

• Autonomous Action (AD), Armenian & Kazakh sections of Russian.

AUSTRALIA:

• Melbourne Anarcho-Communist Group (MACG), formerly the Anarchist

Communist Initiative (ACI).

BRITAIN:

• Revolutionary Anarchist Workers (RAW), since dissolved.

• Anarchist Federation (AF).

BRAZIL:

• Gaucha Anarchist Federation (FAG), founded 1995.

• Cabocla Anarchist Federation (FACA), founded 2001.

• Committee for Popular Struggle (COMLUT), Bahia State.

• Libertarian Struggle (LL), Rio de Janiero.

• Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janiero (FARJ).

• Forum of Organised Anarchism (FAO), uniting especifista groups across

Brazil.

BULGARIA:

• Federation of Anarchists of Bulgaria (FAB), claims direct descent from

the Bulgarian Anarchist Communist Federation (BACF), founded in 1919.

CHILE:

• Libertarian Communist Organisation (OCL), formerly Anarcho-Communist

Unification Congress (CUAC).

COSTA RICA:

• Anarchist Communist Organisation (OAC).

CZECH REPUBLIC:

• Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists — Solidarity (ORA-S), moved

towards left-communism.

• Anarcho-Communist Alternative (AKA), 2003 ORA-S split.

• Federation of Social Anarchists (FSA).

• Direct Action — Anarcho-Communist Labour Organisation (PA-AKOP).

DENMARK:

• Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists (ORA), founded 1973, possibly

defunct.

ESTONIA:

• Anarcho-Communist Federation (AKF).

• Estonian Anarcho-Communist Movement — “Anti!” (AKDE-A!).

FRANCE, BELGIUM & LUXEMBOURG:

• Libertarian Alternative (AL).

• Libertarian Communist Organisation (OCL).

• Libertarian Occitania (OL).

• Co-ordination of Anarchist Groups (CGA), split off the FAF in 2002.

FRENCH GUYANA (French-occupied):

• Libertarian Alternative (AL), Guyanese section of the

French/Belgian/Luxembourgian AL.

GERMANY:

• Federation of German-speaking Anarchists (FdA).

GREECE:

• Federation of Anarchists in Western Greece (OADE), founded 2003.

• Makhnovist group.

IRAN:

• Nakhdar group (exiled in France & USA).

IRELAND:

• Workers’ Solidarity Movement (WSM).

• Organise!, formerly the Anarchist Federation Ireland (AFI), which

merged with the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation (ASF) and others.

ISRAEL/PALESTINE

• Anarchist Communist Initiative (ACI).

ITALY:

• Federation of Anarchist Communists (FdCA).

LEBANON:

• Libertarian Alternative (Al Badil Al-Taharoui).

MEXICO:

• Alliance of Libertarian Communists (ACL), founded 2004.

POLAND:

• Anarchist-Communist Organisational Platform (AKOP), founded 1997,

possibly defunct.

PORTUGAL:

• Revolutionary Anarchist Communist Councils of Action for Autonomous

Intervention (ACRACIA), possibly defunct.

RUSSIA:

• Platform Front (PF), founded 2004, since dissolved.

• Autonomous Action (AD).

• Federation of Anarcho-Communists (FAK), AD split.

SLOVAKIA:

• Direct Action — Anarcho-Communist Labour Organisation (PA-AKOP).

• Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists — Solidarity (ORA-S), moved

towards left-communism.

• Anarcho-Communist Alternative (AKA), 2003 ORA-S split.

SOUTH AFRICA & SWAZILAND:

• Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation (ZACF), founded 2003.

SPAIN:

• Mutual Aid Libertarian Network (RLAM).

• Andalusian Anarcho-Communist Organisation (OACA).

• Libertarian Alternative (AL).

SWITZERLAND:

• Libertarian Socialist Organisation (OSL).

TURKEY & WESTERN OCCUPIED KURDISTAN:

• BlackRed (KaraKizil) group, “Makhnovist”.

• Liberter, which together with BlackRed runs the Anarchist Communist

Initiative (AKi).

UKRAINE & BELARUS:

• Autonomous Action (AD), Ukrainian & Belarussian sections of Russian

AD.

• Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists “Nestor Makhno”

(RKAS-NM).

UNITED STATES & CANADA:

• North-Eastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC).

• Northwest Anarchist Federation (NAF).

• Furious Five Revolutionary Collective (FFRC), Pacific northwest.

• Heatwave Communist Anarchist Federation (HCAF), Texas.

URUGUAY:

• Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU).

• Cimarron Libertarian Organisation (OLC).

The lead given by both new organisations like NEFAC and older ones like

the FAU have inspired a tremendous growth-spurt of anarcho-communist

organising marked by the Platform-influenced coherence of their

critiques and practices. The new organisations have mushroomed despite

the unfounded, hoary old anti-organisationalist claims that they were

reviving anarcho-Bolshevism.

There is no real platformist international, because as we have shown,

platformism is primarily an organisational tactic within anarchist

communism, not an ideological strategic orientation in its own right,

albeit one that is oriented towards the mass line. But the

aforementioned organisations — networked together loosely as the

International Anarchist Platform (IAP) — are increasingly working

alongside other anarchist groups and federations around the world,

especially the International Libertarian Solidarity (ILS) network, the

unaligned anarcho-syndicalists and the anarcho-communists, and to a

lesser extent, the International of Anarchist Federations (IFA). There

is also the platformist Latin American Anarchist Coordination (CALA)

that links organisations in Argentina (OSL), Brazil (FAG), Chile (OCL)

and Uruguay (FAU).

This brief introduction to anarcho-communist organisation originated in

the experiences of ILS member organisation the Zabalaza Anarchist

Communist Federation (ZACF) of southern Africa (zabalaza means

struggle), a platformist organisation that was founded in 2003. The

ZACF, with its paper Zabalaza: a Journal of southern African

Revolutionary Anarchism, was built on ground established in the late

anti-apartheid struggle by the semi-clandestine Anarchist Revolutionary

Movement (ARM) and Durban Anarchist Federation (DAF) of more than a

decade before.

We believe strongly that the platformist approach is a vital

contribution to rebuild the mainstream international anarchist communist

revolutionary workers movement, to put the movement at the forefront of

the fight against capital and the state, and to ensure that its

revolutionary gains are vigorously defended.

CONCLUSION: THE ROLE OF THE ANARCHIST COMMUNIST ORGANISATION IN A

“FRONT OF OPPRESSED CLASSES”

History is not neutral. In school we are told that we need governments

and bosses. We are told that history is a struggle between different

governments, armies and ruling elites. We are told that only the rich

and powerful make history. What we are not told is that ordinary people

have fought the bosses and rulers every step of the way and that this

class war is the true engine of civilisation and progress.

We are not told that governments and capitalism are not only

unnecessary, but destructive of all that is worthwhile. We as anarchists

know that people, even the bourgeoisie, are not inherently bad. We all

merely conform to our class interests. But given the right conditions,

conditions of true equality and freedom, a powerful spirit of mutual aid

and co-operation springs up. How we act is related to the structure of

society.

When oppression and exploitation are forcibly removed, then the

“goodness” that is in most of us comes through and flourishes as it did

when the workers held the reigns in Argentina, Macedonia, Ukraine,

Spain, Mexico, Manchuria, China, Albania, Iran, Cuba, France, Nicaragua,

Bolivia, Algeria and elsewhere. We hope that we have shown that what we

anarchists are saying are not just pretty, unrealistic ideas. We hope we

have indicated with this brief introduction that these ideas can work. A

new society can be created with the workers, peasants and the poor in

control.

But it won’t happen spontaneously — we must organise for it. That is why

we need revolutionary organisations, organisations that draw together

all those fighting for workers’ control of the means of production and

directly-democratic community self-organisation, organisations that give

us the chance to exchange ideas and experiences, and to learn from the

lessons of history. We do not need groups of pushy leaders and their

passive followers.

As Rosa Luxemburg said in Organisational Questions of Russian Social

Democracy: “Let us put it quite bluntly: the errors committed by a truly

revolutionary workers’ movement are historically far more fruitful and

valuable than the infallibility of even the best central committee”. We

do not need elite political caucuses and “vanguard parties” dictating to

us from on high. What we need is working class organisations under

workers’ directly-democratic control, with strictly-mandated delegates

subject to rank-and-file decision-making, mobilising the mass of

ordinary people in the process of making a truly social, grassroots

revolution.

A most important point, however: anarchists are not, and should not, be

the sole organisers of the working class in preparation for revolution.

To put it plainly, we anarchists are not fighting for an anarchist

world, but a free world, and we are not the only social force moving in

a libertarian direction. We need to be deeply and intimately involved in

the global anti-neoliberal movement and in the practical day-to-day

struggles of the working class, demonstrating mutual aid, solidarity,

responsibility, federalism and all the other principles of revolutionary

anarchism in action.

This point was made by the anarchist group Rebel — Libertarian Socialism

(Auca -SL) of Argentina, in an explanation of its ideas on joining the

ILS in 2003: “the model of the Single Revolutionary Party is exhausted.

It has demonstrated its lack of flexibility against the different

political manifestations of our class”.

This echoes the ACF’s The Role of the Revolutionary Organisation that

stated: “A libertarian communist organisation will obviously not be the

only organised tendency within the working class. Unlike Leninist

organisations, it does not see itself as the Party but as one of several

organisations which will participate in the mass movement alongside

those without affiliation.”

In opposition to this traditional, narrow-minded political idea of the

role of the revolutionary organisation, Rebel promoted the idea of a

“Front of Oppressed Classes where syndicalist, social and political

models which, in general, struggle for revolutionary change will

converge. It is there, in the heart of the FOC, where a healthy debate

of political tendencies and positions should be engaged in, so that the

course the FOC takes is representative of the existing correlation of

popular forces.”

The FOC idea is totally different to the Popular Front idea common to

the Marxist-Leninists in which they form a front organisation supposedly

for solidarity purposes, then insert their leaders to rule this

commandeered social force which they then order about like an army.

Instead the anarchist FOC concept represents the progressive political

plurality, anti-authoritarian solidarity and innovative diversity of a

united working class in action against both capital and its siamese

twin, the state. Rebel warned against any bureaucratisation of the

social struggle along Marxist-Leninist lines.

We in southern Africa made a similar point in our position paper The

Role of the Revolutionary Organisation in the Class Struggle (1997):

“The Anarchist organisation sees itself as part of the working class,

its Anarchist ideas a historical development of the experiences of

workers, who as an exploited class seek to create a new world free of

tyranny and exploitation in any form.”

Rejecting the Marxist-Leninist concept of a “revolutionary leadership”

of the single revolutionary party, we aim for a “leadership of ideas” of

libertarian class autonomy and diversity within the class. “We support

all progressive struggles both for their own aims and for the increased

confidence that campaigning can give people.”

“Secondly, we support them because we recognise that it is in struggle

that people are most readily won to the revolutionary ideas of

anarchism. Third, we support them because it is in struggle that people

can potentially create organisations of self-management that develop

their skills and that may possibly help in the revolutionary

transformation of society.”

By involvement in everyday struggles, we build tomorrow today, build a

new world in the shell of the old, creating a dual-power situation as

exists now in Argentina: popular power of the base undermining parasitic

power of the bourgeoisie. Importantly, “[w]e defend other progressive

organisations that are involved in struggles from repression. Where

necessary, we will engage in United Front [similar to the FOC concept]

actions alongside them”.

However, whilst we defend these groups unconditionally, we do not do so

uncritically — we maintain our independence and argue for our ideas. If

you like what you have just read, if you want to be part of the fastest

growing movement on the left, you should think about joining the global

anarchist communist revolution of the workers, peasants and the poor —

and the associated libertarian social movements of the base in which we

work.

The natural skills, intelligence, innovation and solidarity owned by the

working class are the only things that can produce both the social

revolutionary dynamite needed to destroy the neo-fascist neoliberal

system — and the fertiliser that will enrich the post-revolutionary soil

so that it comes up roses: beautiful, but armed with thorns. The renewed

energy, potency and practicality of the anarchist movement has seen new

organisations spreading like wild-fire.