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Title: Post Colonial Anarchism Author: Roger White Date: 2005 Language: en Topics: colonialism, Anarchist People of Color, anti-pacifism, decolonization, Black Anarchism, nationalism
I should be clear up front. I’m not a nationalist. Nor am I a tribalist,
nor an internationalist, nor a municipalist. Peoples from all over the
globe have been figuring out how to organize themselves into various
collectives long before I came onto the scene and no one in any of these
groups has ever bothered to ask me what I thought about their decisions.
I won’t hold my breath.
I do believe in free association and federalism because they usually
represent the most non-coercive avenues for people to develop ways to
live together in self-determined freedom and community. Anarchists have
traditionally been particularly hostile to nations and have often
attributed the worst crimes of states to them. This rejection of nations
and their struggles for self-rule (nationalism) may not be the same as
the anarchist demand for no rule, but getting free from foreign
domination is a step in the right direction. This is one reason why
anti-authoritarians (including anarchists) have generally supported
anti-imperialist movements regardless of their nationalist aspirations.
The rejection of nationalism by many North American anarchists is often
an expression of a colonial mindset that requires all of the peoples of
the world fighting for liberation to define their social selves in
relation to the class war. In this war there are two classes—the workers
and the ruling class. The downtrodden of the world are to see themselves
as workers. For this identity shift we gain the solidarity of the class
war anarchists.
Other anarchists who don’t subscribe to industrial age class war dogma
simply would like to see anarchists cut their ties to the left
completely. This severance would presumably free them of all of the
political baggage that solidarity with revolutionary nationalists and
indigenous autonomist struggles attract. The two above interpretations
of the international role and responsibility of the anarchist movement
with respect to the fight against neo-colonialism and imperialism are
not the ideas of an anti-state fringe. They represent the two strongest
tendencies in the North American scene.
Not all nations are states. In fact there are about 1600 nations in
existence today (about eight times the number of states in the world).
And as Sylvia Walby points out in her essay “The Myth of the
Nation-State,” “Nation-states are actually very rare as existing social
and political forms…there are many states, but very few nation-states.
The notion that there have been neatly bounded societies …is
inadequate.”[1] There are many different types of
states—theocratic-states (the Vatican, Iran), city-states (Singapore,
Luxemburg), familial states (Saudi Arabia) tribal-states (Israel),
multinational states (Canada, Spain) and super-states (the United
Nations). Each type of state has been implicated in crimes against
various peoples over their histories. Since the European enlightenment
these various social groupings that states have succeeded in attaching
themselves to have been understood by the left as backward and
atavistic. They argue that peoples of the world should transcend things
like families, clans, tribes, and nations and embrace “universal”
principals of human identity. In truth, many of the social ideals that
the left has asserted as universal are culturally situated in 19^(th)
century Europe.
It’s regular for North American anarchists to use their political label
as a synonym for anti-authoritarian; although one is a term referring to
a specific social and political movement born in the 1800’s in Europe
and the other is a broad description of a political tendency that has
reared its head in some form in just about every society over the last
few centuries. A mainstream definition of authoritarian describes
someone who favors “blind submission to authority; of relating to,
favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not
constitutionally responsible to the people.”[2]
Now certainly anarchists are not the only folks on the world scene who
are against the “blind submission to authority” and the “concentration
of power” in an unaccountable leader. But this easy inter-changeability
is an effect of a larger attitudinal cause. The attitude being that
non-white legacies of struggle and our histories of stateless, communal
modes of existence are at best, irrelevancies to the current struggles
against state/ corporate domination or, at worst, an obstacle to be
swept aside.
This attitude pervades the intellectual history of all the major
European political traditions—not just anarchism. But if those of us who
identify with the historical movement for non-hierarchical, free and
non-coercive social relations don’t begin to fundamentally rethink the
way we understand our struggle both internally and externally, we will
lose international allies and continue to alienate ones closer to home.
A different way of understanding anarchism in relation to the
centuries-old struggle against arbitrary power is to view it as the
newest member of a global family that includes numerous historical and
present day communal societies and struggles against authority. The
village communalism of the Ibo, and First Nations like the Zuni and the
Hopi are a part of the family. The indigenous autonomist movements for
self determination going on today in West Papua and Chiapas, Mexico with
the EZLN are a part of the family. The international prison abolitionist
movement, perhaps to most coordinated attack on the state’s monopoly of
the administration of justice, has deep anti-authoritarian currents,
just as the numerous stateless hunter and gatherer bands, clans, and
nomadic tribes that have managed to survive centuries without armies,
flags, or money systems do.
Anarchist movements have also played a part in the fight against
authority. Some valiant, if rather short-lived, episodes include the
Spanish CNT and FAI battles during the 1930’s and the Paris Commune 50
years earlier. The full record shows that North American anarchists
haven’t had much experience in maintaining long-term stateless, social
formations. But they have produced theory and “analysis”—plenty of it.
And it’s this busy intellectualism that has scorned and turned its nose
up at our national struggles for liberation as “statist” and “reformist”
while demanding that global south anti-authoritarians adopt anarchism’s
workerist mantle or conform to some romantic notion of how
pre-agricultural peoples lived. To help put this in context it’s
important to look at the universalist underpinnings of the traditional
anarchist worldview and how its adherents understand their movement in
relation to other struggles around the non-European world.
To many, a critique of universalism on the left will seem like an
anachronism. After all, if post-modern social philosophy has had any
discernable political thrust, it’s been in opposition to foundationalist
claims and totalizing theories of human nature, relations, and power.
But despite the last six decades of post-world war II thinking and
action against universalism, there are still plenty of stubborn
anarchists who refuse to let go of the most Euro-centric aspects of
historical materialism.
Marx’s critique of capitalism has had an influence way beyond those who
choose to identify themselves as marxists. On the left, it has
encouraged analysis that puts the class struggle at the center of the
historical stage. Before the identity movements of the late 60’s this
analysis would regularly portray racism and other historical oppressions
as subalterns of class oppression. But after these movements began to
challenge some of the dogmas of class struggle orthodoxy some
accommodations were made.
Progressives embraced multiculturalism even as they focused most of
their attention towards corporate globalism and the international
institutions that protect them. Marxists supported revolutionary
nationalism, arguing that the modern vanguard is the black and brown
working class. Even liberals argued for a cultural pluralism that made
limited accommodations for social, cultural and religious differences
while clinging to the last vestiges of the welfare state. Anarchists
have largely rejected such left-of-center developments in response to
the legacy of white supremacy and cultural imperialism, but have failed
to develop their own. The default has been a rigid century and a
half-old economic determinism that even some marxists have abandoned.
The embrace of universalism by anarchists has had a significant impact
on their analysis of important issues and events. The interpretation of
imperialism as an economically driven regime of capital and the view of
nationalism as inherently retrograde and divisive owes a lot to the
internal logic of universalism. If imperialism has as much to do with
cultural hegemony or geo-political dominance as the capitalist market
expansion and raw material exploitation of private business, then maybe
an international workers revolution may not come first or be the most
fundamental task before all the world’s oppressed. If nations and
national liberation movements are not necessarily the statist antithesis
of internationalism but represent just another social grouping of
peoples with a common land, culture, and language, some of whom are
willing to fight to maintain their ways of life, then maybe anarchists
need to rethink their opposition to nationalism.
European universalism has never truly been about the recognition of our
common humanity. In practice it’s been about forcing the particular
norms, prejudices and ideals of white, Christian cultures on the rest of
the peoples of the earth, sometimes through economic domination,
sometimes through cultural imperialism, sometimes through force.
Christendom used appeals to universalism as a justification for crusades
and the persecution of “non believers” and native populations practicing
their traditional religions in various parts of the world. For left
internationalists, universalism provided a nice humanitarian cover for a
massive social engineering project that sought to strip the masses of
their national and communal identities in exchange for a workerist one
because, as Murry Bookchin put it, there was a “need to achieve
universality in order to abolish class society.”[3]
Under this view the universality and primacy of the class struggle is a
strategic necessity for the overthrow of the capitalist order. It’s not
a conclusion that comes out of the study and analysis of the history,
situation and cultures of all peoples. At this stage, anarchists,
autonomists, abolitionists and anti-authoritarians of color can not
afford to be swept up by theories that have never bothered to view
non-white peoples as historical subjects. We are not mere props in the
political stagecraft of white leftists.
Political universalism is part of the philosophical residue of
Anglo-European colonialism. Today we witness this in the attempts of the
U.S. to impose democracy in the Middle East and other parts of the
world. One of the problems with this view is that it “offers a hegemonic
view of existence by which the experiences, values and expectations of a
dominant cultural are held to be true for all humanity” and is a
“crucial feature of imperial hegemony because its assumption of a common
humanity underlies [an] imperial discourse for the advancement or
improvement of the colonized, goals that mask the extensive…
exploitation of the colony.”[4]
So when the anarchists behind the FAQ web-site project declare that
anarchists “oppose nationalism in all its forms as harmful to the
interests of those who make up a given nation and their cultural
identities,”[5] we recognize that the blatant condescension imbued in
those sentiments are a reflection of the conviction that they know
what’s best for the colonized, not the colonized themselves.
Ever since Antonio Gramsci’s writings on marxism in the 20’s and 30’s
the left has been re-thinking the role of the worker in revolutionary
practice. He argued that cultural hegemony was the key to class
subordination and that in order to change economic and political
structures we had to take over the institutions that transmit
culture—the schools, the church, the media, etc. This shift from the
economic determinism of orthodox marxism to the identitarian pluralism
of what some call “cultural marxism” lead a shift in emphasis away from
the worker towards a broader group of the marginalized that included
women, racial and sexual minorities and outlaws.
This thinking had little effect on the way marxist organizations and
regimes have operated over the last 90 years. Groups like the Spartacist
League in the U.S. have spent decades trashing black nationalism and
feminism as ‘petty bourgeois’ and ‘separatist’ and claiming that their
class analysis of racism, sexism, and other social systems of hierarchy
(as by-products or divide and conquer tactics of capitalism) is more
relevant to people of color and women than our own studies of how white
supremacy and patriarchy have maintained systems of domination over us.
Many Marxists groups have had an even worse record on LGBT liberation.
Khrushchev’s imperial attitude towards Mao’s peasant-led cultural
revolution in China reflected, in part, his inability to make common
cause with an Asian leader with the audacity to question the dogmas of
soviet communism. As the U.K. Guardian noted a few years back “Mao
deeply resented the Soviet assumption of superiority towards China,
which he described as the unacceptable behaviour of “a father towards
his son.”[6] Its been argued by anarchists like Murray Bookchin that the
Marxist support for nationalist movements is strategic not ideological.
In this instance we can attribute the failure of the two most powerful
and populous communist countries on the globe to unite against the
capitalist world in large part to a colonialist mentality that couldn’t
accept non-white regimes who strayed too far from the European
materialist intellectual plantation—strategy be damned.
The most organized elements of North American anarchism today are class
war based and anti-nationalist. The Northeast Federation of
Anarcho-Communists state “anarchists oppose the idea of nationalism” and
instead “believe in waging a class war.”[7] The Workers Solidarity
Alliance equates nationalism with “the idea that somehow both the rich
and poor can be wrapped in the same flag and thus have the same
interests…”[8] Of course class war anarchists attempt to wrap the
victims of colonial imperialism and the beneficiaries of it together in
the same black flag as if the two have the same interests. As it turns
out, it’s just as hard for whites to give up imperial race privilege as
it is for rich people to give up class privilege.
Rather than acknowledging the importance of class stratification along
side other societal hierarchies and recognizing that each of them are
potentially as repressive and exploitative as the other depending on the
social context, class war anarchists have adopted a hierarchy of
oppressions that makes the class war the primary struggle and the worker
the primary agent of that struggle. The popular slogan “no war but the
class war” masks a deep historical truth over which many white leftists
are still in denial. White elites and their dupes, pawns, agents and
allies have been waging a race war on peoples of color for centuries.
When people of color who share a common culture, language and land
decide it’s time to make defending ourselves a priority, we’re told by
anarchists that they “never call for the victory of the dominated
country over the imperialist. Instead we call for a victory of the
workers (and peasants) of that country against both home and foreign
exploiters (in effect, ‘no war but the class war’)” Are Anarchist
Against Nationalism?[9]
If communities of color can’t count on anarchists to do more than merely
recognize their ‘right’ to defend themselves against white imperialism,
then perhaps all anarchists can expect from communities of color is the
recognition that they have a right to protest against the IMF every time
they meet. If the price of solidarity is that we abandon our communal
identities and accept one created for us by some left-wing Euro-elites
over 150 years ago, then the hope of developing closer alliances with
other movements against authority around the globe is doomed.
Many anarchists have recognized that opposition to native or national
self-determination against Euro-Anglo colonial domination is a betrayal
of their anti-authoritarian principals and commitment to anti-racism.
This is why despite all the finger wagging that goes on by the scribe
defenders of the anarchist faith about global south movements not being
anarchist enough, there is a long history of anarchist solidarity with
nationalist movements for self rule. Lucien van der Walt, a South
African anarchist activist, details the many national struggles
anarchists have been involved in his essay “Towards a History of
Anarchist Anti-Imperialism.” He mentioned how groups like the Anarchist
Group of Indigenous Algerians, the Mexican Liberal Party and other
anti-imperialist anarchists “paid in blood for [their] opposition to
imperial domination and control.”[10]
The movements and organizations he wrote about were by-and-large made up
of activists of color working in their own struggles for both social
revolution and national liberation. What these activists didn’t do was
refuse to fight along side nationalists because they believed that the
class war was the most important or only fight worth engaging in. They
didn’t try to convince their people that getting rid of the factory
bosses, of whom their were relatively few, was a bigger priority than
getting rid of the colonial administrators who controlled where they
could go and when they could go there, how or whether they could
practice their faith, and what they could produce on their own land,
among other things. They didn’t spend time trying to foment hatred
between urban workers (who represented a relatively privileged class in
many of these countries) and the middle classes in an effort to polarize
their nation into a class war. They knew that the colonial masters
controlled both groups and would only use internal divisions to solidify
their own domination. They instead worked to educate the masses about
how class also contributed to their oppression and how national
liberation wouldn’t necessarily address those issues.
National liberation struggles don’t end when the imperialists decide
that economic control and the threat of military intervention are more
effective means of domination than army bases and colonial governments
on native soil. They continue through early independence when the
imperialist powers are busy stabilizing their puppet regimes, and
corporate markets. It continues through the imposition of neo-liberal
economic pressures and dictates from organizations like the IMF, World
Bank, and the World Trade Organization along with a host of regional
outfits and private organized interests. And if and when those
mechanisms aren’t enough, the Security Council or the U.S. military will
step in. International solidarity is not about committing to a process.
It’s about committing to a people and their struggle for liberation.
This commitment means viewing solidarity not as a reward for doctrinal
compliance among the colonized but as a discourse betweens peoples and
across cultures about how we all can live, not in some imposed western
ideal of freedom and equality but in a self-determined freedom where
different people decide for themselves how they will arrange their
affairs. This doesn’t mean that anarchists always must agree and when we
don’t we should support voices in those societies who are committed to
the visions most like our own.
It’s not that anarchists have always been closed to nationalist
arguments or have never questioned class war fundamentalism. Hakim Bey
in his book Millennium suggests that anarchists align their struggles
against authority with anti-colonial and nationalist movements around
the globe.(See his chapter “Notes on Nationalism” Hakim Bey Millennium
Autonomedia & Garden of Delight. 1996). Bob Black has rightly observed
that the anarchist ideal of the worker revolutionary in syndicalism is
more popular among college professors than with workers in North
America.[11] Even Bookchin in his 1971 essay “Listen Marxist” offered a
devastating critique of class war fundamentalism and argued that “Marx’s
emphasis on the industrial proletariat as the ‘agent’ of revolutionary
change, and his ‘class analysis’ in explaining the transition from a
class to a classless society” are “false in the context of our
time.”[12] The problem is that these writers and others either hide in
the safe shadow of critique where they debunk but don’t bother to offer
alternatives (Black) or come up with alternatives just as colonial as
the universal worker (Bookchin gives us the universal citizen).
But there’s an even bigger problem. Not only do these critics and
theorists fail to offer non-colonial alternatives, they actually find
time to dismiss efforts among activists of color and anarcho-feminists
who dare to work for liberation from domination from our own self
identities. Black dismisses anarcho-feminism as “separatist in tendency”
and “oriented more toward statist feminism than anarchism.”[13] Bookchin
in his essay Nationalism and the National Question lamented that the New
Left in the 60’s embraced “the particularism into which racial politics
had degenerated instead of the potential universalism (read European) of
a humanitas…the New Left placed blacks, colonial peoples, and even
totalitarian colonial nations on the top of its theoretical pyramid,
endowing them with a commanding or ‘hegemonic’ position in relation to
whites, Euro-Americans, and bourgeois-democratic nations.” He adds, “In
the 1970’s this particularistic strategy was adopted by certain
feminists…”[14]
Bookchin’s assertion that blacks and “colonial peoples” occupied the top
of some theoretical new left pyramid is reminiscent of the stereotypical
poor white in the U.S. who’s convinced that blacks get all the breaks
and the reason for their own condition has more to do with affirmative
action than with the system of corporate feudalism that they’re the
victims of. To the extent that any white radicals on the new left in the
early 70’s paid more attention to what black, brown, red and yellow
revolutionaries we’re saying than intellectuals like Bookchin, it was
because they realized that the prime victims and biggest targets of
state/ capitalist repression and exploitation around the world were in
communities of color and their voices needed to be taken seriously.
Given the lack of clearly articulated alternatives, it’s not hard to
understand why many white anarchists cling to this narrow conception of
workers revolution. They feel that nationalism is in opposition to their
work because historically its Euro-and Anglo-manifestations have been so
closely tied to imperialism, and racism that, for them, it’s not a
revolutionary option. But the categorical rejection of all nationalisms
due to their perceived hostility to class revolution is not a necessary
conclusion of anarchist intellectual history.
For most of Bakunin’s political life he could be described as a
pan-Slavic revolutionary nationalist and an anarchist. He didn’t believe
that his anti-imperialism and his anarchism were in conflict. He felt
“strong sympathy for any national uprising against any form of
oppression” declaring that “no one is entitled to impose its costume,
its customs, its language and its laws.”[15] Bakunin was not agnostic on
the issue of self-determination. He clearly supported peoples who were
fighting for it.
Not only did Bakunin support self-determination, he recognized the
distinction between a nation and the state. “The state is not the
fatherland, it is the abstraction…of the fatherland. The common people
of all countries deeply love their fatherland, but that is a natural
real love. The patriotism of the people is not just an idea, it is a
fact; but political patriotism, love of the state, is not the faithful
expression of that fact…”[16] Nationalism is not the worship of the
state, because it refers to a people and the love that they have for
their land, their cultural and their language.
This was before the era of ‘diversity’ so Bakunin didn’t see anything in
the commitment people had to the preservation of their national culture
to celebrate. But he was smart enough to know that being anti-national
was pointless. “Therefore we bow before tradition, before history, or
rather, we recognize them, not because they appear to us as abstract
barriers raised meta-physically, juridical and politically…but only
because they have actually passed into the flesh and blood, into the
real thoughts and the will of populations.”[17]
What Bakunin objected to was the principal of nationality because he
felt that it wasn’t universal. He gradually became more intolerant of
national struggles against colonialism because he saw how these
movements inspired national chauvinism and hatred across Europe. His
growing internationalism and commitment to workers solidarity put
distance between him and national liberation advocates towards the end
of his public life. “There is nothing more absurd and at the same time
more harmful, more deadly, for the people to uphold the fictitious
principal of nationality as the ideal of all the people’s aspirations,
nationality is not a universal human principal.”[18] It’s important to
remember that Bakunin’s critique of nationalism was within the context
of intra-European conflicts.
True internationalism is not anti-nationalist. It is a constructive
ideal that seeks to create mutual respect, solidarity, and alliances
among nations. To the extent that class elites attempt to use race,
religion, gender, immigrant status, sexuality, age, or disability to
divide the people in the name of the nation, anarchists should stand
against it. But there are many nationalist struggles that are about self
determination and human dignity, not division. The Palestinian struggle
comes to mind along with the anti-colonial movement in Puerto Rico.
Anarchists may fairly critique the statist elements in these movements.
But the across the board opposition to the national unity of people of
color in our struggle against imperialism renders many anarchists
incapable of supporting even non-state, indigenous movements for
autonomy in places like Chiapas, Mexico, or the Tamil struggle for
autonomy in Sri Lanka.
If there was some level of ambiguity around the relationship between
anarchism and nationalism in the 19^(th) century, that ambiguity ended
with Rudolf Rocker’s opus Nationalism and Culture. Written in the
1930’s, the book highlighted the role that nationalist appeals were
playing in solidifying domestic support for European fascist imperialism
abroad and racial hatred at home. It also challenged the mythology of
nationhood as an organic social grouping. He wrote “the nation is not
the cause, but the result of the state. It is the state that creates the
nation, not the nation the state.”[19]
The nation is a construction. And political leaders who resort to blood
and soil tales of national origins do so because their reactionary
nationalism is rooted in appeals to racism and imperialism and therefore
needs a biological–land tie. But the fact that nations are developed by
human action does not somehow invalidate their authenticity. Tribes are
also human constructions, as are families, bands, etc… The only way to
judge the usefulness of different social groupings is by observing their
longevity and their tendency to support the type of lasting bonds
between people that make human survival and growth possible. Families,
and ethnical based tribes have survived the three most significant
revolutions in human history—agriculture, industry, and the information
age. Nations are a newer development. Only time will tell whether this
construct will survive globalization and what some call ‘the new world
order.’
For Rocker the free-city of Europe’s middle ages represented “that great
epoch…of federalism whereby European culture was preserved from total
submersion and the political influence of the arising royalty was for a
long time confined to the non-urban country.”[20] He compared this age
to the rise of the monarchical nation-state and claimed that among the
medieval, European men of the free-cities “there never existed…those
rigid, insurmountable barriers which arose with the appearance of the
national states in Europe.”[21]
Rocker’s comparison of the golden age of autonomous, federated medieval
cities to the rise of the nation wasn’t very useful. This is because the
two are different in kind. The city is a geographic designation, like a
province, or a country, or a county. A nation is a human
designation—like a family, a tribe, or a gang.. This distinction is
important because it sharpens the dilemma that anarchists of color find
themselves in when we’re sorting through our politics. Since Rocker
slammed the door shut on nationalism, non-white anarchists have been
told to choose between our nation (or people) and our social philosophy.
This choice is much more profound and, in the end, unnecessary, than
whether we think cities are better units of social organization than
counties. This choice has also led some to abandon anarchism.
Perhaps the most illustrative passage in Rocker’s book on the colonial
character of universalism and its role in the construction of
anti-nationalism can be found in his description of the social glue that
tied medieval man together. “Medieval man felt himself to be bound up
with a single, uniform culture…It was the community of Christendom which
included all the scattered units of the Christian world and spiritually
unified them.”[22] Fair enough. But now for the kicker. “Church and
empire likewise had root in this universal idea…For pope and emperor
Christianity was the necessary ideological basis for the realization of
a new world dominion…For medieval man it was the symbol of a great
spiritual community…” but “while the Christian idea united them, the
idea of the nation separated and organized them into antagonistic
camps.”[23]
What Rocker leaves out are the crusades, the inquisitions, the witch
burnings, the Jewish pogroms, the slaughter of pagans. And that’s only
in Europe. By the late medieval period the conquistadors were in Central
and South America committing genocide against the heathen indigenous
populations in the name of Christianity. The Church may have had a
unifying effect for some Europeans, but this unity was achieved with the
blood of millions both inside and outside of the continent. I’ll take
the divisions of the nation over the “unity” of the Christian Church any
day.
For all its limitations, Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture was a mammoth
effort and clearly a classic of anarchist literature. More than any
other book, it detailed the connections between reactionary nationalism
and racism and made clear how the state used both to enhance its power
over the masses. While his sweeping dismissal of all nationalism is
regrettable, it is at least politically understandable within the
context of the rise of Euro-fascism in the 1930’s. What’s harder to
reconcile are post-world war II anarchists who have witnessed the
anti-colonial movements in the global south and still maintain that
national movements for liberation against colonialism are “the same” as
the imperial nationalist movements of Europe in the last two centuries.
Murry Bookchin addressed himself specifically to anarchist universalism
within the context of the ‘national question’ in 1993. After echoing
Rocker’s idyllic view of the free cities of medieval Europe, he warned
“the great role assigned to reason by the enlightenment may well be in
grave doubt” if we forget that “our true social affinities are based on
citizenship, equality and a universalistic sense of a common
humanity.”[24]
Are ‘our’ true affinities based on citizenship? I’m not sure that the
tens of millions of non-citizens in the U.S. who, due to their status as
undocumented immigrants, would agree. In fact, citizenship has
historically been a construction of property owners as a way to exercise
privilege and power over poor migrants, and religious and racial
minorities. This has been true from Roman times to present day America.
And affinities based on a “universalistic sense of a common humanity”
sound good, but who gets to define what that common humanity is? The
First International (an almost exclusively European affair)? Or maybe a
bunch of Institute for Social Ecology graduates?
The underlying issue is not the lack of diversity of various left
circles and movements that purport to represent universal principals.
It’s the very supposition that any single movement or political ideal
could represent any meaningful global consensus on how communities
should arrange their social institutions. Anarchists have their ideas
and should work in their communities to, among other things, demonstrate
that those ideas can work in the real world for other peoples around the
globe. Some success in this endeavor should be a prerequisite for
international anarchist criticism of national liberation and indigenous
struggles against western imperialism.
In the essay Bookchin evokes fondly the lyrics of the socialist anthem
the Internationale—“Tis the final conflict!”– and longs for the “sense
of universalistic commitment” that those words embodied.[25] Forgive me
for not being two inspired by the image of Bookchin and a group of his
old left New York buddies, hunched over in a semi-circle ready to bust a
note. But he goes into attack mode when he picks up where Rocker left
off and applies his across-the-board rejection of nationalism to the
colonial struggles of Africa, Asia, and the Americas of the 1950’s and
60’s. Bookchin mocked the national liberation movements of the period
through his sophomoric use of quotes in describing their “attempts to
achieve ‘autonomy’ from imperialism…even at the expense of a popular
democracy in the colonized world.”[26]
Bookchin doesn’t bother to identify one colonial popular democracy (a
contradiction in terms) that was overthrown by nationalists or native
movements in the quest for autonomy. He doesn’t because none existed.
But that’s alright…we all know that darkies are always better off under
white rule. Bookchin’s larger point is that the nice, idealistic, white
kids in the new left got duped and intimidated into supporting
authoritarian national liberation movements by the usual assortment of
black national revolutionary thugs, solemn and sympathetic Native
Americans fighting to hang on to their land, Latino political gangs
lurking in the barrio, and other stereotypical ghosts of 1960’s radical
mythology. It’s astonishing that at this late date Bookchin would still
be walking around blaming black revolutionary nationalists and Asian
Maoists for the decline of the new left and the rise of ‘micro
nationalism.’ It’s always easier to blame others than it is to look in
the mirror.
There seems to be a developing split between anarchist journal writers
and activists on the national question. To their credit, lots of
anarchists have participated in anti-imperialist struggles with respect
for the people with whom they’ve struggled. Currently, anarchist
organizers and cultural workers in North America are increasingly
throwing off the shackles of dogma and are doing solidarity work with
national and autonomous movements against colonialism. But as this
divergence has taken place, the colonial anarchists have become even
more desperate in their attempt to hang on to the tradition. And on this
front the attempt to protect colonial anarchy has been led not by the
class war anarchists, but by a loosely knit network of green and
primitivist intellectuals who argue that anarchists should cut their
lingering ties to the left altogether.
A 1993 screed by Fredy Perlman that appeared in Anarchy: A Journal of
Desire Armed asserts that the fascist nationalism of Europe in the
1930’s and 40’s “could now be applied to Africans as well as Navahos,
Apaches as well as Palestinians. The borrowings from Mussolini, Hitler,
and the Zionists are judiciously covered up, because Mussolini and
Hitler failed to hold on to their seized power…”[27]
This appeared in the same journal that did a four-part series called
‘Post-Left Anarchy’ in the fall of 1999 in which Lawrence Jarach
reprimanded anarchists who dared to show solidarity with the EZLN for
their “uncritical support.” “The name of the organization should be
enough to cause anarchists to pause” (Zapatista National Liberation
Army) because “national liberation has never been part of the anarchist
agenda…The EZLN, for all its revolutionary posturing, is a broad based
democratic movement for progressive social change within the fabric of
the Mexican state.”[28] How do you even engage with people about
colonialism who treat “Africans” as some sort of Hitler-inspired
nationalist monolith or who claim that indigenous autonomists who have
successfully sustained a decade-old uprising through disciplined armed
struggle are basically revolutionary poseurs? Generally, you don’t.
But in the Spring 2002 issue of Green Anarchy a Zapatista did. It was a
response to an article that appeared in the paper a few months earlier
entitled “The EZLN is NOT Anarchist.” The article labels the EZLN as
“fundamentally reformist” not working towards anything “that could not
be provided for by capitalism.”[29] The piece went on to instruct
anarchists to find ways to “intervene in a way that is fitting with
one’s aims, in a way that moves one’s revolutionary anarchist project
forward.”[30]
The Zapatista responded “It would be difficult for us to design a more
concise list of colonial words and attitudes than those used in this
sentence. “Intervene?” “moves one’s ‘project’ forward?” Mexicans have a
very well developed understanding of what ‘intervention’ entails.”[31]
He ended with this, “Colonialism is one of the many enemies we are
fighting in this world and so long as North Americans reinforce colonial
thought patterns in their ‘revolutionary’ struggles, they will never be
on the side of any anti-colonial struggle anywhere. We in the Zapatista
struggle have never asked anyone for unflinching, uncritical support.
What we have asked the world to do is respect the historical context we
are in and think about the actions we do to pull ourselves from under
the boots of oppression.”[32]
If and when North American anarchists learn how to do this with all of
the struggles against colonial and neo-colonial domination around the
globe—whether they’re nationalist or go under some other label, then
we’ll be welcomed into a much larger and richer international tradition
of people’s struggles against domination. This is where we belong.
[1] Sylvia Walby, The Myth of the Nation-State: theorizing society and
polities in a global era. British Sociological Association, August 2003.
[2] Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary.
[3] Murry Bookchin. “Nationalism and the ‘National Question’”
March 1993 P.1
[4] Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Post Colonial
Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge New York, NY 2000.
[5] Are Anarchist Against Nationalism? The Anarchist FAQ. Alternative
Media Project.
[6] John Gittings, The day Khrushchev and Chairman Mao saw red Spitting
images mark the end of the Sino-Soviet alliance. The Guardian (UK) 27
November 2001.
[7] Northeast Federation of Anarcho-Communists. November 2002.
[8] Against the Madness. Workers Solidarity Alliance.
.
[9] The Anarchist FAQ. Alternative Media Project.
[10] Van der Walt, Lucien. Towards a History of Anarchist
Anti-Imperialism. Northeast Federation of Anarcho-Communists.
.
[11] Bob Black. Anarchy after Leftism. Cal Press 1997 p. 149.
[12] Murray Bookchin. Post Scarcity Anarchism. Ramparts Press 1971
p.211.
[13] Black, p.150.
[14] Bookchin. “Nationalism and the National Question.” P. 11.
[15] Cited in D. Guerin, 1970, Anarchism, Monthly Review, p. 68.
[16] The Political Philosophy of Bakunin. Edited by G.P. Maximoff. The
Free Press New York 1953 P.324.
[17] ibid.
[18] Maximoff P.325.
[19] Rudolph Rocker. Nationalism and Culture. Black Rose Books 1998
(Reprint) Original 1937 P. 200.
[20] Rocker P.2.
[21] Rocker P.3.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Bookchin, “Nationalism and the National Question.” P. 11.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Bookchin, “Nationalism and the National Question.” P. 10.
[27] Fredy Perlman, “The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism” Anarchy: A
Journal of Desire Armed. #37, Summer 1993.
[28] Lawerence Jarach, “Don’t let the Left (overs) Ruin Your Appetite”
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. #48, Fall – Winter 1999–2000.
[29] Green Anarchy. The EZLN is NOT Anarchist. #6 Summer 2001.
[30] Green Anarchy. A Zapatista Response to The EZLN is NOT Anarchist #8
Spring 2002 P. 3.
[31] Green Anarchy P. 4.
[32] Ibid.