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Title: Anarchism – a scattered history Author: Aragorn Eloff Date: 31 Jul 2015 Language: en Topics: African anarchism, history, memory, anarchism without adjectives Source: https://meme.co.za/?p=165 Notes: This was a piece developed to be read out at one of the sessions of the Cape Town Anarchist Winter School, which was run by the bolo’bolo anarchist collective in mid-2015. https://www.bolobolo.co.za/
It is time to tell our story again; our many stories. To trace back the
countless threads that lead to this present moment; weaving back through
time and place to locate, if not an origin, then at least those singular
moments where the flame of anarchy shone brightest.
It is hard to know how to begin and we will necessarily miss and gloss
over much. Our history has seldom been told by us and those who have
deemed to tell it have maligned and marginalised us. Out of fear
perhaps, or a desire for power over others. Because of this we have only
some fragments to piece together; a map with so many places still marked
‘unknown’.
But still, we have kept some of our memories safe from those who sought
to erase them. Through our hidden archives, our clandestine publications
and our international networks of all who resist domination, we have
passed along our stories of struggle, our victories and defeats, so that
they may serve to nurture new struggles in these urgent times.
How far back do these stories go? Every time we attempt to locate an
origin, we find it to be little more than an impure mix of all that came
before it. Our ideas, our aspirations, our practices, did not spring
fully formed from the minds of intellectuals. Rather, they emerged from
the lives of common people, from the broad masses of humanity,
articulated in various ways in different times and places. There is no
pure beginning, only a continuous coming together and drifting apart.
Let us nonetheless attempt to start right at the beginning.
Who did we first learn all this from? Who were the first among us to
defy authority? To seek the abolition of all governance, all hierarchy,
all domination. When first did we hold the land in common, in conditions
of free equality?
If we are honest with ourselves, then the origins of anarchy are
identical with the origins of humanity itself. For the tens of thousands
of years that preceded the emergence of sedentary, state-driven
societies – civilization – all of us lived in relatively leaderless,
egalitarian, face to face communities where nobody had any real power
over anybody else.
The gender-egalitarian Inuit, the small family bands of San, or Bushmen,
the Mbuti pygmies who solve conflict and power imbalances through
humour. The Yurok, the Lugbara, the Nuer, the Guarani, Konkomba, Tiv,
Tonga, Ifugao, Santals…
None of these communities was pristine or perfect, of course. There was
some gender bias. There was some violence. There was some mystification
and there was some conformism. But there was not what we today
understand as entrenched hierarchy. There was no private property. There
was no entrenched coercion. There was no exploitation. Even today, in
the mountainous Zomia region of South East Asia, millions of us still
live in these stateless conditions of free exchange and direct
participation.
But it is dangerous to limit ourselves to our mythic origins. We can
learn much from how we have been in the past, and how some of us remain
in the present, but we should not seek to simply return to this. What,
then, of anarchy within civilization, within our state-driven, highly
centralised societies?
Did it begin with the Daoists in ancient China? The radical
communitarianism of the Anabaptists or the Heresy of the Free Spirit?
What of the Doukhobors, or the Ranters or the Levellers? Doubtless some
of the threads of our anarchist tradition wove their way through these
movements.
We stood alongside the Diggers of 17th century England, who through
Gerard Winstanley called for all of humanity to reclaim the land that
had been enclosed; to hold and work it in common as equals, to give and
receive freely, without measure. Do you remember what it felt like as
they fought us on St George’s Hill, seeking to eradicate this new life
we had created? Do you remember the anger and fear in their eyes?
Then we were roused by the polemic of William Godwin and by the
relentless individualism of Max Stirner and his union of egoists. With
him we sought an end to all abstractions – all spooks of the mind as he
called them – that separated us from our being in the world.
And then came Proudhon. He was the first to proudly identify as an
anarchist; to give a name to what we all had in common. We can still all
recall what he said of the theft that is private property: “If I were
asked to describe slavery,” he said, “I should answer in one word, It is
murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument
would be required to show that the power to remove a man’s mind, will,
and personality, is the power of life and death, and that it makes a man
a slave. It is murder. Why, then, to this other question: What is
property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!”
Recall also how he wanted no part of laws and acknowledged none; how he
protested against every order with which some authority felt pleased on
the basis of some alleged necessity to over-rule his free will. Laws: We
know what they are, and what they are worth! They are spider webs for
the rich and mighty, steel chains for the poor and weak, fishing nets in
the hands of government.
But it was the Russian Mikhail Bakunin who first ignited the flames of
revolution for us; who raged along with us against the church and the
State, goading us on in our call for the creative destruction of all the
tyrannical institutions that claimed to rule us.
And then the common people in France seized Paris, and for two glorious
months the Paris Commune offered us a glimpse of the world that could
be. Living and fighting together in revolutionary solidarity, we also
attempted to prefigure new relations between us, women and men
struggling together side by side. Our compassion was not forgotten then
either. Who among us will forget the night that, as we were being
mercilessly bombarded by those who would reclaim control of the city,
Louise Michel risked her life at the barricades to rescue a kitten,
terrified and hiding from the noise of falling mortar shells.
Roused by revolutionary fervour, and carrying the spirit of the Commune
in our hearts, we joined the First International, along with Marx and
his followers. Bakunin was right from the beginning though: the Marxists
would never give up the state they sought to capture for the good of the
workers. The whole 20th century was a terrible vindication of this for
all of us. And so we left the international and travelled from all
across Europe to St Imier in Switzerland, where in 1872 we joined the
Jura Federation in the creation of our own Anarchist Congress. 150 years
later, when we regrouped in St Imier in celebration we numbered over 5
000 from every corner of the globe. Did you feel it there in St Imier?
As we shared free vegan food and the black flags flew in the streets,
the threads had all woven together again and the ghosts of our long
history walked among us: Bakunin, Proudhon, the anarchist watchmakers of
Jura.
But let’s return to that time when anarchism was first taking root in
the fertile soil of dissent across the world. Do you remember how with
the Spanish Regional Federation we ran entire cities in southern Spain
on anarcho-syndicalist principles during the Cantonalist Revolt? Do you
remember the Black International we formed, uniting anarchist unions in
Mexico, Uruguay, Cuba and Argentina? There was barely a Marxist in sight
back then: almost all of us who became radicalised in our workplaces, in
our communities, were anarchists.
Indeed the works of Kropotkin were far more popular back then than the
writings of Marx. We understood something for the first time through
Kropotkin: that the egalitarian relations we found among the workers of
the Jura mountains reflected a principle of mutual aid that was a key
factor of our evolutionary heritage. And through this understanding we
realised that as anarchists we had to achieve full communism; the
collectivism of Bakunin and the mutualism of Proudhon were insufficient
and still bore the vestiges of capitalism.
Do you recall how in Italy, fueled by rage at the injustices perpetrated
against us by the state, thirty of us gathered together and began an
insurrection in Benevento, spreading anarchy through the villages,
burning cash registers and declaring the end of the king’s reign? Even a
priest joined us that first day!
Soon after, not content with mere declarations, one of our own, Gaetano
Bresci, murdered King Umberto I and we came up with a term to describe
his act: propaganda by the deed.
How complex our movement is, that at the same time we were murdering
kings in Italy we were advocating nature conservation, vegetarianism and
the abolition of vivisection in France along with Elise Reclus and
fighting anti-Chinese racism in Australia.
It felt like we were everywhere back then. Do you remember all the
anarchist newspapers in Brazil? Over a hundred of them, some daily. In
them we shared our vision just as we shared it in the schools we ran, in
the theatre groups we performed in, in our rallies against war and
conscription and in our mobilisations against exploitation in the
workplace. They deported over a thousand of us, and in Sao Paulo in 1898
they murdered Polenice, but wherever they put out a fire, ten more would
spring up in its place. Chased from the cities we founded Cecilia, our
free love commune where two hundred of us lived and worked the land
together. Even today the descendants of those original Cecilians speak
of those times with a wild passion in their eyes.
We established communes in Macedonia too, in Strandzha and Krusevo, and
soviets in St Petersburg and Moscow. In Poland we formed the Anarchist
Black Cross to bring aid and justice for anarchist prisoners. In the
Netherlands we even had our own library. Our own musical society. Our
own choir. We sought to apply anarchy to every aspect of our collective
and individual being and we created much of beauty.
We were never content to simply hide away in our communes and clubs
though. We knew that capital and the state were forever expanding their
reach and that soon no refuge would be available. And so we rose up with
the peasants in Patagonia in Argentina only to be brutally repressed,
with over 1 500 of us dead.
Even when there were few of us, we followed Galleani in Vermont and
Goldman in New York in their attempts to bring about mass uprisings
through political assassinations. Csolgosz even managed to kill
president McKinley, but too many of our bombs exploded in the wrong
places and killed the wrong people and the masses did not rise up and
much repression was brought against us. Still, who can forget poor
Nestor the anarchist chef who tried to poison the guests at an elite
banquet of bankers and lawyers in Chicago.
We were powerful then. We were such a threat, that they formed the FBI
to stop us. And Interpol. Who would believe that today?
We also learned at this time that it was pointless to argue about
whether property is greedy or not, if masters are good or bad, if the
state is paternal or despotic, if laws are just or unjust, if courts are
fair or unfair, if the police are merciful or brutal. When we talked
about property, state, masters, government, laws, courts and police, we
said only that we don’t want any of them.
We learned fast not to tolerate half measures and reforms; that
oppression would be brutal even when we marched peacefully in the
streets. In Chicago we we marched for the eight hour working day and the
police responded with brutality. A bomb was thrown and a short while
later a handful of us were hung. Today we celebrate the first of May as
International Workers Day but do we know that we are celebrating the
lives of the anarchist martyrs of Haymarket Square and that we owe the
eight hour working day at least in part to their resolve?
In the years following the Haymarket anarchism spread rapidly through
the United States. In many cases it was brought by immigrants from
Italy, Spain and other parts of Europe, often seeking escape from
oppression and deprivation in their homelands. Together we created
strong, resilient and diverse communities that saw no need to exclude
anyone based on gender, race or nationality.
We travelled the country, spreading the black flames of dissent wherever
we went. We stood on platforms in the center of cities, surrounded by
tens of thousands of workers and poor, as Lucy Parsons and Emma Goldman
and Voltairine de Cleyre spoke to us of liberty, of the abolition of the
state, of free love and free thought. True to her anarchist ethos,
Voltairine even forgave the man who tried to assassinate her at one of
her speeches; nobody should be imprisoned; justice should restore the
dignity of human beings and not diminish it, she said. Such powerful
words these women spoke. We laughed when the Chicago police department
said that Lucy was more dangerous than a thousand rioters, but we knew
it was true, and the riots unfolded wherever she visited.
Inspired by the radical Spanish educator Francesco Ferrer, we created
our own anarchist schools in New York. One, the Modern School, ran for
over forty years before we decided it was time to close.
Back in Spain, we formed federations, linking workplaces in resistance
and seeking to reclaim the land and the factories from the bosses. We
fed and housed each other as the massive general strikes unfolded across
the country. Wary of reform, we made impossible demands: seven and a
half hours of rest in an eight hour working day. These were
demonstrations of the real power we held together. We knew they could
not stop us. When they tried to conscript us into the army in order to
break up our communities we simply did not print the conscription
notices. After all, we were those who did the work at all the printing
presses. When they begged us to return to work, we told them to release
every single political prisoner in Spain, and they did.
We saw the power of these workplace unions and so in 1905 we formed the
International Workers of the World, uniting anarcho-syndicalists from
South Africa to Argentina to France.
Even in Mexico, the anarchist revolution was in the air. In the northern
regions we formed an armed insurgent anarchist movement with the Magon
brothers and in 1910 started the Mexican revolution against the
capitalists and the oppressive state. At the same time in the south, we
struggled together with Emilio Zapata and the peasants who were losing
their land to the wealthy elite; we fought to establish communal land
rights across Mexico and we almost succeeded. Today our memory is kept
alive by the Zapatistas and the hundreds of autonomous communities they
have created across the southern parts of the country.
As we worked to establish our movement across the globe, we made many
mistakes. Many of us united with the Bolsheviks in Russia during the
revolution; we believed the lies of Lenin and Trotsky that the state
would wither away and we would reach full communism in our lifetimes.
How brutally they oppressed us as soon as they took power. We will not
forget how they murdered us in the anarchist uprisings in Kronstadt and
St Petersburg, or how they rounded so many of us up in the streets and
executed us merely for posing a threat to their hegemony; how every free
soviet became a hierarchy run by the central bureaucracy. Emma Goldman
visited us during this time and left horrified at the creeping
totalitarianism.
Still, even though our revolution had failed in Russia, we were
heartened by the Makhnovists in the Ukraine, where militants formed the
Revolutionary Insurgent Army and liberated a shifting territory of seven
million people. In some parts of the Free Territory we lived in
conditions of near anarchy for almost three years, until the war crushed
our hopes. It was not perfect, but for almost three years we lived and
breathed the powerful vision that had been set out by Bakunin,
Kropotkin, Malatesta and all the others. Who would believe that today?
And who would believe that just after this, we ran the entire city of
Guangzhou in China as an anarchist commune for a year until, once more,
the iron fist of repression struck us down once more.
We were strong, even in the East. In Japan we published the Farmer’s
Gospel; a radical anarchist text that inflamed hearts and minds. With
Noe Ito and Sakae Osugi we began an anarcho-feminist journal and
translated the works of Kropotkin, Goldman and others into our tongue.
For this we were arrested, beaten to death and thrown into an abandoned
well by the military police.
In Manchuria, in 1929, we even established the Shinmin free zone where
two million of us lived for several years in directly democratic
villages and our own peasant militia. There was such power back then;
such possibility between us. Everybody could look each other in the eyes
as an equal.
Back in the US our hearts broke when they hung Sacco and Vanzetti to
send a message to the anarchist community. We rose up in solidarity
Tokyo, Sydney, Sao Paulo, Rio, Buenos Aires and Johannesburg on that
day. Who can forget the selfless last words of Sacco, as the noose was
tied around his neck: I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure.
Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in
our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice,
for man’s understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words — our
lives — our pains — nothing! The taking of our lives — lives of a good
shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler — all! That last moment belongs to us
— that agony is our triumph.
Some of us had such courage. When the Nazis arrested our playright and
poet Erich Muhsam in 1930 for making fun of their repulsive regime, he
remained defiant in the face of their abuse. After they had broken his
teeth with their muskets, stamped a swastika on his scalp with a red hot
brand and turned his body in a mass of bleeding flesh, they made him dig
his own grave and then, standing him up, tried to force him to sing the
Nazi anthem. Instead, Erich straightened his shoulders, held his head
high and sang the Internationale.
It is time to speak of Spain.
It was Fanelli who first brought anarchy to us in Spain, after meeting
with Bakunin in 1868. It was his passion, kept alive for decades, that
inspired us to rise up against the exploitative bourgeois landowners in
the town of Casas Viejas in 1933. We learned repression then too, when
they rounded us up in our comrade’s cottage and set us all alight. The
rest of our comrades they shot in the back after forcing them to watch
our last moments.
But we were not afraid of ruins. With Durruti and Berneri and Montseny
and all the others we were going to inherit the earth; there was not the
slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might have sought to blast
and ruin its own world before it left the stage of history but we
carried a new world in our hearts. And that world was growing in that
very minute. And so, when the civil war broke out in 1936, we united
millions of workers through our union, the CNT, kept strong in turn by
the anarchists of the FAI. In Aragon, in Catalonia, we created free
communes and liberated workplaces. We ran the fields and factories
together; from each according to ability and desire, to each according
to need. We socialised the tramways. We created ways of reaching
decisions together without creating hierarchies. By all accounts we ran
the cities far better for those short few months before the war
overwhelmed us and we were forced to side with our class enemies against
the fascists, who came to power anyway and quickly wiped our newly-found
way of life from the landscape. They could not erase those most powerful
memories though, of when millions of us, liberated women and men, lived
rich and thriving lives without landlords, without bosses, without the
competition of capitalism.
There was a dark time after that. War had spread across the globe and
our movement was in retreat. We kept the spirit alive in our social
centers, through our books, in the small communities that remained. And
with the help of our gifted printer friend Lucio, who forged official
documents and even bank notes so convincingly that the authorities found
it possible to detect them, many of us managed to escape imprisonment
and certain death by fleeing to other countries with the passports he
gifted us.
Anger at the fascism in Spain never died down. Decades later our comrade
Stuart Christie, whose anarchist cell the Angry Brigade had caused havoc
against the state in his home country of England, travelled here to
assassinate Franco, the dictator. He almost succeeded.
Then in May of 1968, the streets exploded in Paris in spontaneous revolt
and our hope in the revolutionary desire of common people was rekindled
when we saw the black flags waved high, the bricks flown through bank
windows, and more so the solidarity between students and workers and the
homeless. Beneath the paving stones, the beach, said the graffiti, and
all of us immediately understood what it meant. All of us apart from the
authoritarian communists and those who fetishised organisation, of
course.
Once again, there were small glimmers of life, seeds growing up through
the thawing snow and, once we had again built up our numbers and
reflected on where had been and what was still possible, we saw that in
fact anarchism had spread much further than we could ever have imagined.
In Iraq we came together as anarchist communists to fight the
Ba’athists. We crossed over into Iran and formed The Scream of the
People, a movement committed to supporting the autonomous neighbourhood
shorahs and workers kommitehs.
In Italy we joined Alfredo Maria Bonanno, father of the new wave of
insurrectionary anarchism, in daring bank robberies, where we liberated
ill gotten capital and redistributed it to revolutionary projects. Even
at 70, Alfredo was robbing banks.
In the Netherlands we called ourselves Provos and Kabouters and we
created provocative, radical art in public spaces, poking fun at the
grey-faced banality of the society of the spectacle. Today when we ride
around Amsterdam on our white bicycles we’re proud to remember that it
was us, the anarchist Provos, who first gifted these free bicycles to
the city.
In the US, we formed Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers.
We forced our way into the pentagon to protest against the war. We set
up free housing, free clinics, free stores and free food for
marginalised and radical communities.
In Greece we united with the students in 1973 when they rose up at the
Polytechnic in Athens against the military junta. We painted Down With
The State on the front gates and thousands of us occupied the space,
putting up barricades in the streets and fighting battles against the
police. They killed so many of us that dark night of November 17th, the
army with their tanks. Undefeated, we occupied the neighbourhood of
Exarchia, turning it into an anarchist free zone that survives to this
day, however much heroin the government tries to flood our communities
with. However severe their so-called anti-terrorism tactics are.
We went underground in Brazil and Uruguay and Argentina during the
various dictatorships and military juntas. We forged alliances with the
Mapuches and other indigenous South American people. We fought in
solidarity with them against the encroachment of ecocidal capitalism on
their way of life. So many of us were disappeared by the government in
those times, but we kept our movements strong even when we had to meet
in secret, even when our printing presses were seized and our newspapers
banned. We hid each other in the basements of our houses and our ateneos
in Rio de Janeiro. We built up an enormous archive of anarchist history
in Buenos Aires. We built the powerful practice of especifismo and
organised neighbourhoods in Montevideo.
In Germany we donned our balaclavas and as autonomen took the streets
three thousand strong, destroying corporate property and clashing with
police and fascists using the now widespread tactics of the black bloc.
And when we left the streets it was to the many squats we had occupied,
where we could escape from the pressure of capitalist life in order to
spend our time plotting resistance and exploring alternative ways.
In Switzerland we became enraged at the expansion of the nuclear
industry and Marco, brave Marco Camenisch, single-handedly blew up so
much of their destructive infrastructure that he is still, 25 years
later, in prison.
Since the beginning we have seen what capitalism and the state mean for
all of life on Earth; what cruelty and destruction they bring. And so we
formed the Earth and Animal Liberation Fronts, breaking into
laboratories under cover of night to rescue rabbits and beagles from
unspeakable and pointless experiments and to destroy research into GM
crops. We burned mining equipment. We drove ceramic spikes into trees so
that the logging machines could not cut them down. We destroyed a luxury
ski resort built over a pristine natural habitat. We freed horses from
glue factories and chickens from battery farms. Today under the names
Conspiracy of Cells of Fire and the Informal Anarchist Federation we are
active in Mexico, Italy, Chile and Russia, and we make no compromise in
defence of the Earth and wildness.
In England we shouted ‘enough is enough’ when the government tried to
impose the poll tax and we were overawed when millions joined us and the
tax failed to pass. We reclaimed the streets so many times in those
heady years, protesting against industrial expansion and the ongoing
destruction of the natural world. We came together as travellers,
throwing free dance festivals in forests and in squats, temporary
autonomous zones where anything was possible. We tasted real freedom
here and, looking to share it further, we opened infoshops, autonomous
social centers, Food Not Bombs networks, anarchist bookfairs and radical
publishers in every city where an anarchist could be found.
We were in Senegal too. And in Sierra Leone, where we formed a 3
000-strong branch of the IWW with those exploited in the diamond mines.
In Nigeria we worked as the Awareness League, in Zimbabwe we were the
Uhuru Network and in South Africa we gathered together as the Anarchist
Resistance Movement and then the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front.
In the years of globalisation, inspired by the 1994 Zapatista uprising
in Chiapas, we gathered in our hundreds of thousands and found each
other again for the first time in far too long in the streets of
Seattle, then in Italy, then in Canada; wherever the World Bank and the
WTO and the IMF, all these new neoliberal financial institutions tried
to meet, we tried to shut them down. Sometimes we succeeded. In
Argentina when the economy collapsed due to the machinations of these
same institutions, we gathered together and reclaimed the thousands of
businesses that had been abandoned. Today over 1 000 of these businesses
still exist. We have a hotel in Buenos Aires where each of us works for
the same wage, where each of us has the same decision-making capacity,
where none of us is above any other of us.
Then the economy began to collapse all across the world. In Greece the
streets erupted as never before. We stormed parliament and almost
managed to claim it. We looted supermarkets and dispensed the food and
money to poor and immigrant communities, many of whom were living in
fear the right wing fascism that was emerging in our country. We invited
them into our homes, into our neighbourhoods, and we protected each
other.
In Israel we protested against the apartheid wall, and worked in
solidarity with our Palestinian sisters and brothers.
In universities across Europe and the US we occupied, releasing ringing
manifestos and denouncing the dominant order that had left us without a
future. Our numbers growing once again we decided to occupy everything:
in Egypt, in Syria, in New York, in London…Anarchism was everywhere in
Occupy; at the beginning anyway, before the inevitable co-optation by
liberals and politicians and NGOs and power seekers. Next time we will
not make the same mistakes.
And today, right now, we hear reports of anarchist movements,
insurgencies, struggles and projects in Rojava, in Costa Rica, in
Estonia, French Guyana, Lebanon, Turkey, Slovakia and Swaziland.
It is hard to know how to end and we have necessarily missed and glossed
over much. There is so much more. But we have remembered some things. We
have told one story.
Perhaps in closing, there is one more hard-earned lesson we can remind
ourselves of. For 170 years the black flag – the flag that signifies an
end to all flags – has flown over us; over our free territories, our
communes, our squats, our barricades, our strike lines and our
infoshops; in the streets – or in our streets, rather, because all this
is ours – and in our communities, in our workplaces and in our daily
lives. And, although this flag carries all of our rich history with it,
we must always remember that we fight and live together for a day when
we no longer need it.
As Jean Genet once reminded us, we may need the black flags in order to
win, but we must make sure to burn them all afterwards.