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Title: Non-Western Anarchisms Author: Jason Adams Language: en Topics: history, Asia, Middle East, Africa, Latin America, Caribbean Source: Retrieved on January 20th, 2014 from http://tahriricn.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/non-western-anarchisms-rethinking-the-global-context/
“The future of anarchism must be appraised within a global context; any
attempt to localize it is bound to yield a distorted outcome. The
obstacles to anarchism are, in the main, global; only their specifics
are determined by local circumstances.”
— Sam Mbah
“To the reactionists of today we are revolutionists, but to the
revolutionists of tomorrow our acts will have been those of
conservatives”
— Ricardo Flores Magon
The purpose of this paper is to help anarchist / anti-authoritarian
movements active today to reconceptualize the history and theory of
first-wave anarchism on the global level, and to reconsider its
relevance to the continuing anarchist project. In order to truly
understand the full complexity and interconnectedness of anarchism as a
worldwide movement however, a specific focus on the uniqueness and
agency of movements amongst the “people without history” is a deeply
needed change. This is because the historiography of anarchism has
focused almost entirely on these movements as they have pertained to the
peoples of the West and the North, while movements amongst the peoples
of the East and the South have been widely neglected. As a result, the
appearance has been that anarchist movements have arisen primarily
within the context of the more privileged countries. Ironically, the
truth is that anarchism has primarily been a movement of the most
exploited regions and peoples of the world. That most available
anarchist literature does not tell this history speaks not to a
necessarily malicious disregard of non-Western anarchist movements but
rather to the fact that even in the context of radical publishing,
centuries of engrained eurocentrism has not really been overcome. This
has been changing to an extent however, as there here have been several
attempts in just the past decade to re-examine this history in detail in
specific non-Western countries and regions, with works such as Arif
Dirlik’s Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, Sam Mbah’s African
Anarchism and Frank Fernandez’ Cuban Anarchism. It is within the
footsteps of this recent tradition that this paper treads further into
the relatively new ground of systematically assessing, comparing and
synthesizing the findings of all of these studies combined with original
investigation in order to develop a more wholly global understanding of
anarchism and its history.
To begin our inquiry we first must make clear what it is that is
actually meant by the term “Western anarchism.” Going back to the
debates within the First International, it quickly becomes apparent that
this term is a misnomer, as it is actually the opposite case that is
true; anarchism has always been derived more of the East / South than of
the West / North. As Edward Krebs has noted “Marx (and Engels) saw
Russianness in Bakunin’s ideas and behavior” while “Bakunin expressed
his fears that the social revolution would become characterized by
‘pan-Germanism’ and ‘statism.’” This debate has led some to characterize
it as largely between Western and Eastern versions of socialism; one
marked by a fundamental commitment to order and the other marked by a
fundamental commitment to freedom (1998, p. 19). So in this sense
anarchism can be understood as an “Eastern” understanding of socialism,
rather than as a fully Western tradition in the usual sense of the term.
At the same time it should be remembered that there also developed an
extremely contentious North / South split between the more highly
developed nations of England and Germany and the less developed
semi-peripheral nations of Spain, Italy and others. This split was based
on differences of material reality but developed largely along
ideological lines, with the northern Anglo-Saxon nations siding
primarily with Karl Marx and the southern Latin nations siding with
Mikhail Bakunin (Mbah, p. 20). So in both the East / West and the North
/ South sense, anarchism has often been the theory of choice for the
most oppressed peoples; particularly in those societies whose primarily
feudal nature writes them out of historical agency in the Marxist
understanding of the world. This may explain a good deal of why
anarchism became so popular throughout Latin America, and why
immigrating anarchists from the Latin nations of Europe were so well
received in country after country that they visited, attempting to
spread the anarchist vision.
So by employing the label “Western” I am not referring to the actual
history of anarchism but rather to the way in which anarchism has been
constructed through the multiple lenses of Marxism, capitalism,
eurocentrism and colonialism to be understood as such. This distorted,
decontextualized and ahistoric anarchism with which we have now become
familiar was constructed primarily by academics writing within the
context of the core countries of the West: England, Germany, France,
Italy, Spain, Canada, United States, Australia and New Zealand. Since
there was virtually no real subversion of the eurocentric understanding
of anarchism until the 1990s, the vast majority of literature available
that purports to deliver an “overview” of anarchism is written in such a
way that one is led to believe that anarchism has existed solely within
this context, and rarely, if ever, outside of it. Therefore, the
anarchism that becomes widely known is that which has come to be
identified with the West, despite its origins in the East; Kropotkin,
Bakunin, Godwin, Stirner, and Goldman in first wave anarchism: Meltzer,
Chomsky, Zerzan, and Bookchin in second and third wave anarchism. Rarely
are such seminal first wave figures as Shifu, Atabekian, Magon, Shuzo,
or Glasse even mentioned; a similar fate is meted out for such second
and third wave figures such as Narayan, Mbah, and Fernandez — all of
non-Western origin. This construction of anarchism as Western has
unfortunately led to an unintentional eurocentrism that has permeated
the writings of many second and third wave theorists and writers. Their
work then becomes the standard-bearer of what anarchism actually means
to most people, as it is printed and reprinted, sold and resold
perennially at anarchist bookfairs, infoshops, bookstores and other
places, as it is quoted and analyzed, compared and debated in reading
circles, academic papers, at socials, parties, demonstrations, meetings
and on picketlines. Clearly, there has been a great deal of reverence in
second and third wave anarchist movements for this “Western anarchism” —
the result has been that much of anarchism has moved from being a
popular tradition amongst the most exploited in societies the world over
to being little more than a loose combination of an academic curiosity
for elite Western academics and a short-lived rebellious phase of youth
that is seen as something that is eventually, and universally, outgrown.
This paper demonstrates an alternative understanding in the hope that
this fate can be overcome; that anarchism, in the first quarter of the
20^(th) century, was the largest antisystemic movement in almost all
parts of the world, not just in the West. Upon considering that over
three quarters of the global population is situated outside of the West,
it quickly becomes clear that anarchism actually claimed the greatest
number of adherents outside of the West rather than within it as well.
Therefore, it is fair to say that not only has anarchism been a globally
significant movement from its very inception, it has also been a
primarily non-Western movement from its inception as well. This basic
fact was reconfirmed with the rise of second wave anarchism, spanning
from the late 1960s and on into the early 1970s in India, Argentina,
Mexico, and South Africa (Joll, 1971, pg. 171). In turn, third wave
anarchism, which has risen to popularity from the late 1990s to the
present, also reconfirms this in resurgent movements in Brazil,
Argentina, Korea, Nigeria and elsewhere. The relevance of this
particular essay, however, is to critically reexamine the first global
wave of anarchism in order to enable anarchists to think more
holistically and effectively about the relevance of the past and its
long-term effect on the present. This attempt to critique the narrow
vision of “Western anarchism” should of course result in a more accurate
understanding of the significance and potentiality of second and third
wave anarchism in both the present and the future as well. Indeed, it
was a similar motivation that drove the critique of Leninism / Stalinism
that came out in the wake of the largely anarchist inspired events of
May 1968, as well as the critique of Maoism that came in the wake of the
Democracy Movement of the late 1970’s in China; both of which
contributed greatly to the development of second and third wave
anarchism worldwide.
In working to critique our understanding of the past though, there are
several points that should be kept in mind at all times. A cursory
reading into the contextual history surrounding these waves of anarchism
could easily seem be to unearthing several “historical stages.” For
instance one might get the impression that first wave anarchism
universally fell into decline worldwide with the rise of the Bolsheviks,
or that the decline of state socialism since 1989 has been the
“lynchpin” that brought anarchism back in its third wave. While both
statements are indeed true to a certain extent, the temptation to
systematize and essentialize global social movements in order to make
them easier to digest is one that should be undertaken with great care
and discrimination; indeed, often it is a step that should not be
undertaken at all. The reason is that one cannot ever fully understand
the nuance and complexity of the thousands of social movements that have
pulsed through non-Western societies through the lens of any singular
overarching theory; even seemingly small factors of social difference
can render them worthless. For instance, while anarchism declined in
much of the world after the October Revolution of 1917, in large
sections of the planet this was precisely the point at which anarchism
rose to a level of unprecedented popularity. In these countries this was
largely due to the saturation of anarchist-oriented periodicals in a
particular local language — which meant of course that anarchism became
the major filter for general alternative understandings of the nature of
events in the world. In other words a rather minor variation in language
and social conditions from one region of the world to the next rendered
any broad statement on the global significance of Lenin’s rise to power
completely indefensible. Or, for instance, if one was to posit that
primitive communism “inevitably” has given way to feudalism, followed
lockstep by capitalism, socialism and finally communism, that person
would be rendering the entire history of hybrid African socialisms
non-existent. These attempts at constructing universal laws in the
understanding of history are the sorts of things that need to be
deliberately avoided in order to understand the significance of
difference in the creation of the whole. Indeed, as Theodore Adorno has
shown in Negative Dialectics, it is only through negation and difference
that one can conceive of the historical process in its entirety (Held,
1980, p. 205).
So, while the world has been connected on the global level for several
centuries now, and there are many patterns that seem to present
themselves as a result, it is important to remember that this connection
has also been entirely uneven, chaotic and unpredictable. As a result,
what is true for one particular region is not true for another, and what
is true for a particular country within a particular region is often not
true for a sub-region lying within it. Therefore universal declarations
about history tend to crumble quite easily when put to the test of
criticism. This critique becomes especially simple amongst the
representatives of the worst of such deterministic thinking. For
instance, as Sam Mbah has pointed out, many Marxist-oriented academics
have even gone to such an extent as to argue that colonialism can be
understood as being a “good” thing as it has allowed all parts of the
world to reach the capitalist “stage” of history, a “necessary”
precondition of course, to the dictatorship of the proletariat. In order
to avoid this sort of univeralistic absurdity, I have chosen to focus in
this paper not just on the positivism of sameness and homogeneity
between disparate regions, but equally so on negation, heterogeneity and
difference. That is, I attempt to discover that which makes the
anarchisms of various non-Western countries, regions and subregions
unique, with an eye as well to what aspects they may have in common and
how they have been interconnected. It is my hope that in this choice I
will have made a greater contribution to the future of the global
anarchist project by consciously choosing not to define the histories of
non-Western societies for them. Instead I let the individual histories
speak for themselves, drawing connections where they actually exist,
while allowing contradictions to arise freely as they must. I do this
deliberately, as this is the approach of one who would be an ally.
Despite my decision to avoid adopting any one overarching theory, I have
decided to focus primarily on one particular time period; from the late
19^(th) Century up until the end of the first quarter of the 20^(th)
Century. While second and third wave anarchists typically describe this
time period as the being the domain of what they call “classical”
anarchism I argue that anarchism has always been a decentered and
diverse tradition. Rather than essentializing an entire time period as
being of one persuasion or another I choose to focus instead on the
primacy of contradiction and difference, using the “wave” concept as a
means of understanding the wax and wane in the global spread of
anarchisms rather than as a way of defining the nature of the anarchisms
themselves. While this would seem to put a temporal framework over the
development of a historical ideological current that is not necessarily
bound by such frames, my approach in this regard is not related to the
pursuit of temporal frameworks but rather to the refutation and
deconstruction of the concept of “classical” anarchism as a homogenous
body of thought that can be located in a specific time and place. This
is because I believe that this notion of classical anarchism plays a key
role in the construction of the concept of Western anarchism, as it is
in the context of the West that this conception has developed and it is
never in reference to non-Western anarchism that such terminology is
used. Ironically, by focusing on a particular time period, I actually am
attempting to deconstruct the false dichotomy of “classical” vs.
“postmodern” currents of anarchism in order to show that such temporal
understandings of the “progressive” development of anarchist currents
are ultimately flawed. This is because they do not recognize anywhere
near the full spectrum of thought that has existed on the global level
in the history of anarchist ideas; nor do they recognize the direct
connections between early ideas and more recent ideas.
If “Western anarchism” is a eurocentric construction, then of course,
“non-Western” must also be somewhat problematic. By employing it, I do
not mean to give the impression that non-Western societies can or should
be seen as some homogenous singular “world” in any sense. Nor am I
implying that within the West itself there are not peoples who are
originally or ancestrally of non-Western societies or that these peoples
have never engaged in anarchist activity. Indeed, a more complete study
of non-Western anarchisms would investigate additionally the history of
anarchism amongst indigenous peoples and people of color within the
borders of Western countries. However, I do make a particular point to
focus on the considerable impact global migrations and the resultant
ideological hybridity has had on the development of anarchism – some of
this has even been within the borders of the Western countries, notably
Paris and San Francisco. Another criticism that I anticipate is my
inclusion of Latin America in the context of this study and what exactly
the term “the West” is supposed to mean here. To this question I reply
that by including Latin America I am denying that the region can be
understood as being wholly a part of “the West” simply because much of
the region’s populations identify strongly with the colonist culture –
or perhaps it could be said that it is the colonist culture that
identifies them. Rather, in the tradition of Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, I
recognize the “deep” indigenous context that these largely mestizo
societies were born within and the lasting impact this has had, and
continues to have on these societies. In this way, Latin America can
indeed be seen as being part of the context of non-Western societies.
For the purposes of this study, which is to attempt to piece together a
history of anarchism in those countries in which it has been largely
ignored, I would define the term “the West” as essentially being
comprised of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United
States. These regions and nation-states are grouped together because
they have represented the heart of world domination from the late
15^(th) Century to the present, both in opposition to the
self-determination of the rest of the world, and in opposition to the
self-determination of indigenous peoples, people of color and working
class people within their own borders.
All nation-states in the world are today hybrids of both Western and
non-Western as the phenomenon of globalization has enforced the hegemony
of the neo-liberal capitalist project the world over. This is not just a
result of the force of arms: it is also because non-Western countries
largely responded to encroaching domination by the Western world by both
emulating it and by adopting its basic values and ideas. But what the
West never counted on was that by promoting and enforcing
“modernization” through the Social Darwinist cocktail of neo-liberalism,
colonialism, industrialization and capitalism, they were also indirectly
legitimizing the anti-Social Darwinist versions of modernization, that
is to say, the socialist and anarchist projects. However, as Turkish
anarchists have recently pointed out, non-Western “socialism” often fell
in line with the modernization project, even allowing neo-liberal
capitalist Structural Adjustment Programs. In contrast, they have
pointed out that “anarchism was born of the Western and modern world,
yet at the same time it was a denial of these things…anarchism was a
denial of modernity and Western domination” (Baku, 2001). So throughout
the world, many non-Western peoples saw their governments bowing to the
pressures of the West and took the only options that came within that
modernist package which seemed to offer either a modicum of liberty or
equality, anarchism or socialism. In this way, it can be said that the
modernist project was turned inside out and against itself by those it
would intend to victimize and place under its control. This inside-out
modernism (or anti-modernism) was spread through the global migration of
anarchists and anarchist ideas, more often than not a result of forced
exile. Erricco Malatesta for instance, helped to spread anarchist
communism from countries a far apart as Lebanon and Brazil, and Egypt
and Cuba. Kotoku Shusui almost single-handedly delivered anarchist
syndicalism to Japan after spending time organizing with the American
IWW in San Francisco in 1906. And Kartar Singh Sarabha became a major
influence influence on the Indian anarchist Bhagat Singh after
organizing Indian workers in San Francisco in 1912.
Throughout this work, which will consider anarchism in its Asian,
African, Latin American and Middle Eastern regional contexts, there are
three primary areas of investigation that we are interested in. The
first of these is a consideration of what specifically local social
conditions lead to the rise of anarchism as an ideology and how these
conditions shaped its growth into a uniquely hybrid manifestation of the
world anarchist movement. The second is to map and to analyze the
influence of the migrations and inmigrations of peoples and ideologies
and how these differing social contexts influenced each other through a
hybrid exchange. The last area of investigation, which is contained in
the conclusion, is to assess which unique aspects of first wave
non-Western anarchisms carried over into second wave anarchism, as well
as to consider what valuable aspects of first and second wave anarchism
have to the continuing anarchist project, now in its third wave.
In order to begin to challenge the predominant Eurocentric understanding
of anarchism and its history, one should begin first with the most
populated continent on the planet, Asia. With over half of the global
population, to ignore the volatile political history of the region is to
engage in the worst sort of eurocentrism; this is of course, not to
mention the shallow and warped understanding of anarchism that one then
arrives at as a result. Throughout many parts of Asia, anarchism was the
primary radical left movement in the first quarter of the 20^(th)
Century. This should be considered quite significant to the anarchist
project because within the global context China is by far the most
populated country with a population of over 1.2 billion people. India
comes in second in population at just over 1 billion. The two countries
hold over 1/5 of the world’s population respectively, and in each,
anarchist thought has risen to a level of political importance
unparalleled in the other smaller nation-states within Asia. In terms of
population share alone, these facts make a rethinking of the global
context extremely valuable, and this is why I begin here. Within the
continent, we will begin first with China then move on to the other
countries of East Asia, and then I will proceed to India.
There were multiple locally specific reasons why anarchism gained such
widespread popularity in China. Many have pointed out the “limited
government” (wuwei) element in traditional Chinese thought, ranging the
gamut from Taoism to Buddhism to Confucianism. In line with this view,
Peter Zarrow claims in Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture that
anarchism was “created out of the ruins of Neo-Confucian discourse.”
Building on this belief, he goes on to trace the connections between
Taoist ideas of “order without coercion” and the later emergence of
anarchism (1990, p. 5). While there certainly is some truth to Zarrow’s
claims, what must be deliberately avoided is any overfocus on the
“anarchistic” elements contained within Chinese traditional thought to
the detriment of an understanding of the important role played by global
migration and by colonialism itself. As Arif Dirlik has remarked, an
overfocus on traditional thought can also be said to be somewhat
Orientalist, as it attributes “everything new in China to Chinese
tradition…another way of saying that there is never anything
significantly new in China.” Alternatively, Dirlik posits that “the
Chinese past is being read in new ways with the help of anarchism, and
conversely there is a rereading of anarchism through Taoist and Buddhist
ideas” (1997). In other words the development and spread of ideas is
never a completely one-way process, it is always an exchange.
In any case, this is just one part; another major reason was that
practically no Marxist theoretical works had been translated into
Chinese until around 1921, and even then a movement based around it
failed to materialize until around the end of the decade. As a result,
anarchism enjoyed a nearly universal hegemony over the movement from
1905–1930, thereby serving as a sort of filter for developments in the
worldwide radical movements. Even Russia’s October Revolution of 1918
was claimed as an “anarchist revolution” as a result, though this
distortion did not last. So unlike in the rest of the world, the
anarchist movement in China did not fall with rise of the Bolshevik
victory in Russia, but instead rose in popularity along with it (Dirlik,
1991, p. 2).
In China, anarchism arrived at the apex of its popularity during the
“Chinese Enlightenment,” also known as the New Culture Movement. It was
through the conduit of influential Western ideas of liberalism,
scientism and progress that anarchism was able to gain a foothold. And
ironically, it was from the new realization of China as a nation-state
in a decentered, cosmopolitan world of nation-states, rather than as the
center of all culture, that brought about the rise of an ideology that
called for the abolition of the nation-state (p. 3).
The concept of “cultural revolution,” which is the very definition of
variance between Chinese socialism and that of the rest of the socialist
movement, can be traced directly back to this heavily anarchistic “New
Culture” period when Mao himself was a member of the anarchist People’s
Voice Society and enthusiastically endorsed the thinking of the
important anarchist leader Shifu amongst others (Dirlik, p. 195; Krebs,
p. 158).
Of course, the anarchist conception of cultural revolution varied
greatly from the Cultural Revolution which Mao actually put into
practice, as by then he had been thoroughly convinced of the need for
centralized, absolute authority after extensive contact with the
Comintern. It is from the anarchist movement of this period that most of
the later leaders of the Chinese Communist Party would later emerge.
When speaking of “Chinese anarchism” one might be tempted to think of it
as simply that which developed within the actual borders of the country.
But to do so would be to disregard the important influence migration has
had on the movement, which was quite internationalist in scope. On the
mainland, Chinese anarchist activity was concentrated primarily in the
Guangzhou region of southern China, as well as in Beijing. In Guangzhou,
Shifu was the most active and influential of the anarchists, helping to
organize some of the first unions in the country. Students from
Guangzhou formed the Truth Society, the first anarchist organization in
the city of Beijing amongst many other projects. But like other
nation-states around the world at this time, China was quickly becoming
a more dynamic, diverse nation marked deeply by the repeated invasions
of foreign powers as well as by the global migrations of it’s own
peoples. Anarchists lived and organized in Chinese communities the world
over, including Japan, France, the Philippines, Singapore, Canada and
the United States; of these, the two most significant locations were the
diaspora communities in Tokyo and Paris.
Of the two, the Paris anarchists were ultimately the more influential on
a global level. Heavily influenced by their European surroundings (as
well as whatever other personal reasons brought them there), they came
to see much of China as backwards, rejecting most aspects of traditional
culture. Turning towards modernism as the answer to China’s problems,
they embraced what they saw as the universal power of science, embodied
largely in the ideas of Kropotkin. In this spirit, Li Shizeng and Wu
Zhihui formed an organization with a strong internationalist bent,
called “the World Society” in 1906 (Dirlik p. 15). In contrast the
Chinese anarchists in Tokyo were such as Liu Shipei were blatantly
anti-modernist, embracing traditional Chinese thought and customs.
Living in a different social context, for many different reasons, they
were far more heavily influenced by anarchism as it had developed in
Japan; which brings us of course, to the question of Japanese anarchism.
As in China, the October Revolution in Japan did not carry the same
downward impact on the movement as it had in so many other parts of the
world. In fact, the period immediately following 1917 became the apex of
Japanese anarchism in terms of actual numbers and influence (Crump, p.
xvi). Anarchism in Japan was quite diverse, but from amongst the broad
array of anarchisms were two major tendencies; the class struggle ideals
of anarchist syndicalism, promoted by figures such as Kotoku Shusui and
Osugi Sakae, and the somewhat broader tendency of “”pure anarchism”
promoted by activists like Hatta Shuzo. Both tendencies attracted a
sizeable number of adherents, and both had their heyday at different
points in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
The anarchist-syndicalists followed in the footsteps of the Bakuninist
tradition of collectivism, which was largely based on exchange
relations: to each an amount equal to their contribution to the greater
collective. In addition, the syndicalists were largely concerned with
the day-to-day struggles of the working class, reasoning that the larger
goal of revolution had to be put off until they had reached a
significant degree of organization. After the revolution, the
revolutionary subjects would retain their identities as “workers” as
they had been before the revolution. The most prevalent embodiment of
this tendency was the All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labour Unions
(Zenkoku Jiren), an important anarchist-syndicalist federation of labor
unions founded in 1926 that boasted over 16,000 members (Crump, p. 97).
In 1903 Kotoku Shusui resigned from his job as a journalist in Tokyo
when it announced its support for the Russo-Japanese war and the
occupation of Korea. He went on from there to start the anti-war Common
People’s Newspaper (Heimin Shinbun) for which he would soon be
imprisoned. While in jail, he made contact with anarchists in San
Francisco, and became more and more intrigued by anarchist theory. After
getting out of jail, Shusui moved to San Francisco, organized with
members of the IWW, and returned to Japan with the intellectual and
practical seeds of syndicalism. This development would soon influence
figures such as Osugi Sakae and lead to the formation of Zenkoku Jiren
(Crump, p. 22).
In contrast, the pure anarchists were more similar to anarchist
communists in the tradition of Kropotkin, combined with a strong
anti-modernist, pro-traditionalist bent. As a group they were embodied
largely in the militant organization the Black Youth League (Kokuren).
Historically, the mid-19^(th) Century “agricultural communist anarchist”
theorist Ando Shoeki is considered by many to have been their primary
philosophical predecessor. The pure anarchist critique of anarchist
syndicalism was focused largely on the syndicalist preservation of a
division of labor in the administration of the post-revolutionary
society. This division of labor meant that specialization would still be
a major feature of society that would lead to a view that focused
inwardly on particular industries rather than blending the intellectual
and the worker. The pure anarchists also sought to abolish exchange
relations in favor of the maxim from each according to their ability, to
each according to their need. In a sense, they can be seen as attempting
to develop a more uniquely Japanese interpretation of anarchism. For
instance, they questioned the relevance of syndicalism to a society that
was still largely peasant-based and had a relatively small industrial
working class (Crump, p. 7).
Despite the variance between syndicalist and pure anarchisms, in general
the one thing they had in common was that all Japanese interpretations
of anarchism were hybrid theories, made relevant for the local
situation. That situation was an extremely repressive one; meetings were
broken up, demonstrations suppressed and anarchist publications banned
on a regular basis throughout the life of first wave anarchism. The Red
Flags incident of 1908 is a good example of this, when dozens of
anarchists celebrating the release of political prisoner Koken Yamaguchi
were brutally attacked and arrested simply for displaying the red flag.
Translation and publication of anarchist texts were often done secretly
in order to avoid repression, as was Kotoku’s translation of Kropotkin’s
The Conquest of Bread. Another aspect of unique local conditions was
that texts that described Western realities had to be made relevant to
the local population. For instance, in the widely available Japanese
translation of Kropotkin’s Collected Works, the European “commune” was
transformed into a traditional Japanese farming village (Crump, p.
xiii). But this process also occurred partially through the conduit of
Western anarchists, and through the migration and inmigration of people
and ideas. This is of course, is the way in which these essays became
translated into Japanese. Kropotkin corresponded directly with Kotoku
several times and agreed to allow him to translate several of his major
works, while his travels to San Francisco resulted in dramatic changes
in Japan’s anarchist movement as well. So this global connection of
anarchists was extremely important, but as I have demonstrated, it was
made relevant to people on the local level.
Another local condition that shaped the development of East Asian
anarchism was that Japan had its own “Monroe Doctrine” of sorts over
most of region. As has often been the case elsewhere, Japanese
anarchists used their relative degree of privilege as a means to spread
anarchism throughout the region. These efforts throughout Asia led to
the formation of the Eastern Anarchist Federation, which included
anarchists from China, Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan. This is in fact, how
anarchism first reached Korea after Japan’s 1894 invasion in order to
“protect” it from China. Korean migrants living in Tokyo came under the
influence of Japanese anarchism and engaged heartily in the
anti-imperialist movement. As a result, over 6,000 were rounded up after
incredulously being blamed by the authoritarian Japanese state for
Tokyo’s 1923 earthquake. They were beaten, jailed, and two were even
sentenced to death along with their Japanese comrades in the “High
Treason Case” (MacSimion, 1991). Later, during the 1919 independence
struggle, in which anarchists were prominent, refugees migrated into
China, which was at the height of anarchist influence as a result of the
New Culture movement. At the same time, Japanese anarchists at the time
continued their solidarity work with the Korean liberation movement.
By 1924, the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF) in China had
formed with an explicitly anti-imperialist focus and helped to organize
explicitly anarchist labor unions as well. At the same time, anarchist
tendencies were developing within Korea itself. For instance the
Revolutionists League is recorded to have organized around this time and
to have maintained extensive communications with the Black Youth League
in Tokyo. By 1929, their activity had materialized fully in Korea
itself, primarily around the urban centers of Seoul, Pyonyang and Taegu.
The apex of Korean anarchism however came later that same year outside
the actual borders of the country, in Manchuria. Over two million Korean
immigrants lived within Manchuria at the time when the KACF declared the
Shinmin province autonomous and under the administration of the Korean
People’s Association. The decentralized, federative structure the
association adopted consisted of village councils, district councils and
area councils, all of which operated in a cooperative manner to deal
with agriculture, education, finance and other vital issues. KACF
sections in China, Korea, Japan and elsewhere devoted all their energies
towards the success of the Shinmin Rebellion, most of them actually
relocating there. Dealing simultaneously with Stalinist Russia’s
attempts to overthrow the Shinmin autonomous region and Japan’s
imperialist attempts to claim the region for itself, Korean anarchists
by 1931 had been crushed (MacSimion, 1991).
Throughout East Asia, anarchists demonstrated a strong commitment to
internationalism, supporting each other and reinforcing each other’s
movements rather than thinking simply in terms of their own
nation-states. The “nationalism” of Chinese and Korean anarchists can
thus be seen as a form of anarchist internationalism dressed up in
nationalist clothing for political convenience. In both of these
countries, the anarchist movement sought to reinforce nationalist
struggles insofar as they cast off imperial domination; but they were
decidedly internationalist in that the long term goal was to abolish
both the Chinese and Korean nation-state systems as well. The same can
be said for Japanese anarchists who lent their solidarity to the
anti-imperialist movements in Japan, Korea and other parts of East Asia.
As noted earlier, the rise of the Eastern Anarchist Federation and its
paper “The East” (Dong Bang) is testament to the global nature and focus
of anarchism during the early 20^(th) century.
Though India is located on the Western border of China, connection and
communication between the anarchisms of both are relatively unknown
since in India anarchism never really took on much of a formally named
“anarchist” nature. In India, the relevance of anarchism is primarily in
the deep influence major aspects of it had on important movements for
national and social liberation. In order to understand the development
of the heavily anarchistic Satyagraha movement in India, one must first
consider the objective local conditions in which it developed. India is
the second most populated country in the world, weighing in at over 1
billion people. Going back into ancient Hindu thought, one can indeed
find predecessors to the concept of a stateless society; the Satya Yuga
for instance, is essentially a description of a possible anarchist
society in which people govern themselves based on the universal natural
law of dharma (Doctor, 1964, p. 16). But at the same time that a
stateless society is seen as a possibility, much of Hindu political
thought is focused on the inherently evil nature of man and the
therefore “divine right” of kings to govern, so long as they maintain
protection from harm for the people. If they do not govern on the basis
of dharma, however, the Chanakyasutras allow that “it is better to not
to have a king then have one who is wanting in discipline” (p. 26). This
of course is a major contrast with the Western notion of a universal
divine right of kings regardless of the consequences.
Anarchism finds its first and most well-known expression in India with
Mahatma Gandhi’s statement “the state evil is not the cause but the
effect of social evil, just as the sea-waves are the effect not the
cause of the storm. The only way of curing the disease is by removing
the cause itself” (p. 36). In other words, Gandhi saw violence as the
root of all social problems, and the state as a clear manifestation of
this violence since its authority depends on a monopoly of its
legitimate use. Therefore he held that “that state is perfect and
non-violent where the people are governed the least. The nearest
approach to purest anarchy would be a democracy based on nonviolence”
(p. 37). For Gandhi, the process of attaining such a state of total
non-violence (ahimsa) involved a changing of the hearts and minds of
people rather than changing the state which governed them. Self-rule
(swaraj) is the underlying principle that runs throughout his theory of
satyagraha. This did not mean, as many have interpreted it, just the
attainment of political independence for the Indian nation-state, but
actually, just the opposite. Instead, swaraj starts first from the
individual, then moves outward to the village level, outward further to
the national level; the basic principal is that of the moral autonomy of
the individual above all other considerations (p. 38).
So overall, Gandhi’s passion for collective liberation sprang first and
foremost from a very anarchistic notion of individualism; in his view,
the conscience of the individual is truly the only legitimate form of
government. As he put it, “swaraj will be an absurdity if individuals
have to surrender their judgement to a majority.” While this flies in
the face of Western notions of governance, Gandhi reasoned that a single
sound opinion is far more useful than that of 99.9% of the population if
the majority opinion is unsound. It was also this swaraj individualism
that caused him to reject both parliamentary politics and their
instrument of legitimization, political parties; he felt that those who
truly wanted a better world for everyone shouldn’t need to join a
particular party in order to do so. This is the difference between
Raj-Niti (politics of the state) and Lok-Niti (politics of the people).
Swaraj individualism meant that everything had to be rethought anew: for
instance, the notion that the individual exists for the good of the
larger organization had to be discarded in favor of the notion that the
larger organization exists for the good of the individual, and one must
always be free to leave and to dissent (p. 44).
However, Gandhi’s notions of a pacifist path to swaraj were not without
opposition, even within the ranks of those influenced by anarchism.
Before 1920 a parallel, more explicitly anarchist movement was
represented by India’s anarchist-syndicalists and the seminal
independence leader, Bhagat Singh. Singh was influenced by an array of
Western anarchisms and communisms and became a vocal atheist in a
country where such attitudes were extremely unpopular. Interestingly, he
studied Bakunin intensely but though he was markedly less interested in
Marx, he was very interested in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky who
“had succeeded in bringing about a revolution in their country.” So
overall, Singh can be remembered as something of an Anarchist-Leninist,
if such a term merits use. In the history of Indian politics, Singh is
today remembered as fitting somewhere between Gandhian pacifism and
terrorism, as he actively engaged in the organization of popular
anti-colonial organizations with which to fight for the freedom of India
from British rule. However, he was also part of a milieu which Gandhi
referred to as “the cult of the bomb” — which of course he declared was
based upon Western notions of using violence as a means to attain
liberation. In response, Indian revolutionaries countered that Gandhi’s
nonviolence ideas were also of Western origin, originating from Leo
Tolstoy and therefore not authentically Indian either (Rao, 2002). It is
in fact likely that Singh was influenced by Western notions of social
change: like his Japanese counterpart Kotoku Shusui, Singh’s comrade and
mentor Kartar Singh Sarabha organized South Asian workers in San
Francisco, leading both of them to eventually commit their lives to the
liberation of Indians the world over.
Notable amongst this milieu was the Hindustan Republican Association as
well as the youth organization Naujawan Bharat Sabha; both of which
Singh was involved in. Despite his earlier reluctance, by the mid-1920s
Singh began to embrace the strategy of arming the general Indian
population in order to drive the British out of the country. In service
to this mission he traveled throughout the country organizing people’s
militias, gaining a large following in the process. In 1928 this
strategy of organized armed revolt gave way to an open support for
individual acts of martyrdom and terrorism in an article Singh published
in the pro-independence paper Kirti. In other issues of this same paper
he published his famous essay on “Why I am an Atheist” as well as
several articles on anarchism. In the anarchist articles, Singh equated
the traditional Indian idea of “universal brotherhood” to the anarchist
principle of “no rulers,” focusing largely on the primary importance of
attaining independence from any outside authority whatever. Though he
had been influenced by the writings of Lenin and Trotsky, Singh never
did join the Communist Party of India even though he lived for six years
after its original founding. (Rao, 2002). Perhaps this was due to the
anarchist influence in his ideas; either way anarchist ideas (if not
anarchist ideology as a whole) played a major role in both Gandhian and
Singhian movements for swaraj.
Early African anarchism developed along the extreme continental margins,
primarily in the context of ethnically diverse North African and South
African port cities. Other than the small amount of literature available
on these movements, very little has been published on the subject. As in
the Indian context, this is partially because there is less of a history
of anarchism here as a coherent ideologically based movement. But it is
also partially due to the hegemony of either capitalist-imperialist
nation-state systems or post-colonial “African socialist” sytems
throughout the region. The largest anarchist movement on the continent
in the first quarter of the 20^(th) century was that of South Africa.
Indeed, recent studies conducted by Nigerian anarchists such as Sam Mbah
have noted that anarchist thought as an ideology did not in any
substantial way reach much of the African continent until the
mid-20^(th) century (1997, p. 1). However, while acknowledging the lack
of an ideologically coherent form of anarchism, throughout their study
anarchistic social elements found amongst many African tribes are
greatly emphasized. In this way tribal “communalism” is understood as a
non-Western form of anarchism, uniquely and specifically within an
African context. In their own words “all…traditional African societies
manifested ‘anarchistic elements’…the ideals underlying anarchism may
not be so new in the African context. What is new is the concept of
anarchism as a social movement or ideology” (p. 26).
In this usage, the term communalism is used somewhat similarly to Marx’s
conception of “primitive communism” – a stateless society that is
post-hunter gatherer and pre-feudal — though such grand narratives are
not taken seriously. This is because this “historical stage” is one that
most of Africa never “advanced” beyond, especially in the rural areas of
the continent. In this context, elders in the tribal community are
recognized as leaders on the basis of experience, but not as authorities
with access to any form of a legitimate use of coercion, per se.
Religion and “age-graded” groups of males who performed specific tasks
for the village acted as methods of maintaining an internal social
cohesion, though some stateless societies were also matrifocal (p. 33).
In particular the Igbo, Niger Delta Peoples, and Tallensi are well known
for being marked by anti-authoritarian, directly democratic social
formations. They organized primarily around the supreme authority of
mass village assemblies in a form of direct democracy, tempered with the
advice of the council of elders. Though these societies were primarily
patriarchal, women played certain roles in the governance of society
through their own organizations as well (p. 38).
The advent of so-called “African socialism” emerged out of the
colonization, industrialization and urbanization of the continent. This
began with the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 in which Europe carved
Africa up into nation-states, placed over and between the stateless
societies that had formed the basis of decentralized continental social
administration in the past. These colonial nation-states facilitated the
extraction of natural resources to the benefit of European elites,
destroying, displacing, dividing and undermining stateless societies. In
many African nation-states, the anti-colonial movement was led by
“African socialists” such as Muammar Gadhafi of Libya, Gamel Abdel
Nasser of Egypt and “negritude socialists” such as Senghor. The one
thing most of these had in common was that they were very quickly
co-opted and subjugated to the interests of Western capital. But while
such African socialisms were largely controlled by a Marxist
orientation, shaped and guided by outland capitalist interests, not all
were.
After Nigeria gained independence in 1960, it implemented a nationwide
collective farming system based on a synthesis of elements of
traditional African communalism and the Israeli Kibbutzim system.
Likewise it can be seen that Gadhafi’s well-known “Green Book” was as
influenced by his reading of Bakunin as it was by his reading of Marx.
His concept of jamarrhiriyah was also quite similar to that of the
Nigerian collective farming system. But far more exemplary than either
of these is the theory and practice of Julius Nyerre’s Ujamaa system. In
this system, where capitalism is opposed as much as “doctrinaire
socialism,” a renewed form of African communalism became the basis of
postcolonial Tanzanian society. Unfortunately the Ujaama system
ultimately failed as a result of a rapid degeneration into state control
over the peasantry under the watchful tutelage of the World Bank (p.
77). On the African continent, Tanzania was by no means alone in this
development, which curiously occurred as often in the “socialist”
nation-states as it did in the capitalist nation-states.
As mentioned earlier, one country that did have a significantly large
organized anarchist movement in the early 20^(th) Century was South
Africa. A white Afrikaner by the name of Henry Glasse had helped to
organize the earliest rumblings of an anarchist movement in the country
in the late 19^(th) Century. Shortly after the turn of the century, the
Social Democratic Federation was founded in Cape Town by a coalition of
anarchists and other anti-state socialists, followed by the emergence of
the short lived South African IWW. The one thing that stood out about
these formations at the time was that they were overwhelmingly made up
of whites, in a nation-state in which the vast majority was not. Most of
the higher paying skilled labor jobs went to whites, while Indians,
coloureds (mixed-race people), and poor whites took the “in-between”
jobs and blacks were stuck with the most labor intensive unskilled labor
jobs (van der Walt, 2002).
This situation finally changed in 1917 when members of the International
Socialist League helped to organize the mostly black syndicalist
organization, the Industrial Workers of Africa. While heavily influenced
by the IWW, it retained the early pro-political DeLeonist elements that
had been abandoned in the IWW after the split between syndicalists and
DeLeonists in 1908 (Mbah, p. 66). When some began to question the
efficacy of engaging in electoral politics the Industrial Socialist
League was born with an explicitly direct-action, anti-electoral
orientation. From 1918 to 1920, the African National Congress had
several anarchist syndicalists amongst its leadership. But by 1921 first
wave anarchism was on its last feet in South Africa, as leading
activists abandoned anarchism in the service of building the Communist
Party of South Africa. As has been shown already, anarchists in many
countries became important communist leaders in China, and as we will
soon see, such was also the case in Brazil and other Latin American
countries as well.
As in South Africa, North African port cities on the Mediterranean
played a major role in the spread of anarchist ideas as well. The
Egyptian anarchist movement is a good example of this trend, for here
anarchism was almost entirely an immigrant phenomenon. As early as 1877,
the Egyptian anarchist movement began to put out the Italian language
anarchist journal II Lavoratore, which was followed shortly by La
Questione Sociale. Its primary audience was Egypt’s thriving Italian
immigrant community concentrated primarily in the Mediterranean port
city of Alexandria. As Alexandria was a port city, it was quite diverse
and would act as a reservoir not only for anarchist activity but for
anarchist exiles from around the Mediterranean region as well. In the
late 19^(th) Century Malatesta sought refuge here after the attempted
assassination of King Umberto I, as did Luigi Galleani in the year 1900.
Soon, the anarchist ideas of the Italian community would spread to Greek
immigrant workers, who would then go on to organize an
anarchist-oriented labor union for shoemakers in Alexandria. However,
there is little evidence that anarchist ideas spread in any significant
way out of the immigrant communities and into the indigenous Egyptian
communities themselves (Stiobhard).
Tunisia and Algeria were the two other countries where anarchism gained
a foothold. The port city of Tunis in northern Tunisia featured an
anarchist movement amongst Italian immigrants, and as in Egypt, they
engaged in publishing several journals including L’Operaio and La
Protesta Umana. The latter was published by the well-known pamphleteer
Luigi Fabbri, who was living in Tunis at the time. In addition, the port
city of Algiers in northern Algeria was a major repository for anarchist
activity featuring several anarchist newspapers including L’Action
Revolutionnaire, Le Tocsin, Le Libertaire, and La Marmite Sociale.
Though there is little information available about the interim period,
it well documented that after the failure of the Spanish Civil War in
1939, many anarchists relocated to Algeria around the port city of Oran
(Stiobhard).
and Cuba
The development of anarchism in Latin America was a process shaped by
the unique nature of each country within the region, as well as by those
factors which many of them had in common. One thing they all had in
common was their subordinate relation to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which
held “the Americas” under the tutelage of the one country that
arrogantly refers to itself as the only “America” — that is, the United
States. As such, shortly after independence was achieved from Spain and
Portugal, the Western Hemisphere was promptly re-colonized —
unofficially – in the name of U.S. interests. It was in this subordinate
context that the first anarchist movements in Latin America arose, all
too often under the iron fist of dictators imposed from above, in El
Norte. In addition, it is important to note that the Latin American
governmental context was far more influenced by the thinking of
Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas than it was by liberalism, the largest
philosophical influence in the Anglo-Saxon democracies (Erickson, 1977,
p. 3). Here, corporatism was the major philosophical force, espousing a
view of the state as “organically” reflecting the moral will of the
people, rather than as a “referee” for different political forces in
society as in North America. The ironic result of this was that all
oppositional forces would be seen by much of society as essentially
anti-liberatory. The ideological process of corporatism involved a sly
combination of officialistic cooptation of revolutionary movements and
violent repression of those who would not accept such moves. The
prevalent role of the Roman Catholic Church in society combined with the
tradition of Roman law made up the other two primary factors that set
Latin American societies apart from much of the North. This meant of
course, that the anarchisms that developed there were qualitatively
different as they arose in a significantly different political
environment.
In Latin America, the anarchist movement was without a doubt strongest
in South America; and in South America, anarchism was without a doubt
strongest in the “southern cone” countries of Argentina, Uruguay and
Brazil. It was the largest social movement in Argentina from around 1885
until around 1917 when state-socialists took control of the large union
federations (Joll, 1971, p. 218). The movement was extremely contentious
due to the prevalence of the latifundia system in which a very few
families controlled almost all of the land. This extreme social
stratification set the stage for Peronism, a system in which the old
elite families ruled with impunity over the masses of newly arrived
immigrants in an extreme aristocratic fashion. Since the only legal
means of affecting change in this society was voting, the fact that up
to 70% of the urban population was legally disenfranchised did not
endear many to the system; in fact, it created a social situation ripe
for the development of anarchism.
Anarchism was most popular amongst Argentina’s working class sectors: it
really never attained a high degree of organization amongst the
peasantry. However, there were some attempts to organize anarchist
student unions in addition to anarchist labor unions (Joll, p. 222).
Stirnerist individualist anarchism never found much audience here and so
as in many countries around the world, the movement was a balance
between anarchist-communists in the tradition of Kropotkin and
anarchist-collectivists in the tradition of Bakunin; however there was
very little conflict between the two streams. The Italian
anarchist-communist Erricco Malatesta immigrated in 1885 and within two
years had organized the country’s first Baker’s Union in 1887. This move
helped to set the stage for the organizing of the Resistance Societies,
an affinity-group form of worker organization that was the backbone of
the FOA, which in 1904 became the FORA.
From 1905 — 1910 the anarchist movement exploded in popularity,
generalizing into the popular movements and pulling off general strikes
in Buenos Aires and other places. Society became so unstable that
martial law was routinely imposed for short periods of time. Workers
were shot at Mayday demonstrations, others imprisoned at Tierra Del
Fuego, and torture was rampant. Simon Radowitsky, a youth who threw a
bomb at the Chief of Police’ car quickly became a well-known martyr when
he was sentenced to life in prison. In fact he was so popular that
eventually determined comrades organized to a plan to successfully break
him out of jail (p. 219).
La Semana Tragica— the Tragic Week — was an important event that
occurred in 1919 when a general strike was declared but was brutally put
down by Colonel Varela, resulting quickly in his assassination. By 1931,
the military had taken over and the anarchist movement was suppressed
through a combination of death squads, prison sentences and general
intimidation. When martial law was finally lifted nearly two years
later, all the anarchist newpapers and organizations that had previously
been at odds discarded with the past and published a joint declaration
called Eighteen Months of Military Terror. The intense repression in
Argentina had resulted in a great deal of solidarity and mutual aid
amongst different types of anarchists, leading to a number of joint
publications and actions that transcended diverse ideologies. It was
from this new solidarity that both the FORA and other anarchist
organizations sent delegations to the International Brigades for the
Spanish Civil War against Franco. But soon Argentina would have it’s own
fascist government to contend with. General Peron officially seized
power in 1943, forcing the FORA to go underground again, along with La
Protesta Humana. When the Peron regime finally fell, another joint
publication involving all anarchist tendencies was issued called
Agitacion. Other publications included El Descamisado, La Battallaand La
Protesta Humana, the paper with which Max Nettlau and Erricco Malatesta
were involved. In the face of such repression, much of the population
had accepted the strategic cooptation of popular movements by the
Peronist state; those who didn’t accept it often looked to the Bolshevik
Revolution in Russia as proof that anarchism was no longer a viable
idea. The eventual failure of the Spanish Civil War didn’t help matters
either, and eventually anarchism became of marginal influence (p. 230).
As in Argentina, Uruguay’s anarchist movement was largely composed of
immigrant European workers who had come from industrialized societies,
this meant that anarchism was in the early years primarily a working
class rather than a peasant movement. Here too, it was the largest
revolutionary movement in the first quarter of the 20^(th) Century. The
movement was largely based on affinity group based Resistance Societies
affiliated to the FORU, which formed in 1905. Malatesta soon became
involved in the FORU as well, influencing it away from Bakuninist
collectivist anarchism and towards Kropotkinist communist anarchism. The
FORU worked on a wide variety of issues, well outside the scope of the
business unions. For instance, a major campaign against alcoholism was
initiated, as well as initiatives to set up cooperative schools and
libraries. These developments came largely due to the anarchist focus on
the importance of creating a parallel anarchist culture. While much of
this came out of the FORU, most anarchist culture, including plays,
poetry readings and other events of the time, came out of those
affiliated with the Center for International Social Studies (CIES) in
Montevideo (p. 224). The CIES was heavily involved as well in the
anarchist press, with such publications as La Batalla – presumably named
after the earlier Argentine paper of the same name — which was published
continuously for over fifteen years.
Dynamic in many ways that other anarchist movements were not, the
Uruguayan anarchists were very internationalist in scope as well; some
would say too much so. When the Mexican revolution erupted onto the
global stage in 1910, Uruguay’s anarchist movement sent delegations to
help the Magonistas; they likewise aided the CNT-FAI with International
Brigade soldiers in the thick of the Spanish Civil War (p. 226). The
eventual decline of anarchism in Uruguay stemmed primarily from the
successful Bolshevik revolution and the enormous ideological
loyalty-based splits that emerged in the movement between the FORU and
the USU as a result.
The final anarchist movement of the southern cone countries we will
examine that which developed within the massive nation-state of Brazil.
Within the context of Brazilian latifundia, corporatism and
authoritarianism in which large landholders held great sway over the
destiny of the vast majority of the population with the backing of the
military and the state, mutual aid societies and cooperatives were the
only recognized legal form of organization. But as in Argentina and
Uruguay, clandestine affinity-group based Resistance Leagues formed the
backbone of militant Brazilian unionism, protecting anarchists from
repression. However, this anarchist unionism was limited largely to
skilled artisans and other workers, leaving the majority of other types
of workers such as immigrants and women without union representation.
As in China and South Africa, the Brazilian communist party, the PCB,
grew out of the ruins of the once-volatile anarchist movement (Chilcote,
p. 11, 1974). However, anarchism had the greatest influence in Brazil
primarily from 1906 to 1920, mostly amongst urban immigrant workers. It
was in this context it became the predominant stream within the labor
movement by 1906, far more important in fact, than state-socialism (p.
19). Anarchist labor militants, active in the Congresso Operario do
Brasil (COB) are remembered for helping the Brazilian working class to
win the eight-hour day as well as significant wage increases across the
board. The Sao Paolo General Strike of 1917 marked the first of three
years of militant anarchist activity within the labor movement. During
these years, a strategy of repression combined with cooptation became
the strategy of the corporative state. Anarchists did not initially call
the General Strike, rather it was initiated by those masses of female
textile workers whom anarchist organizers had ignored. At first this
self-activity of working women and other sections of the industrial
working class put male anarchist leaders on the defensive. But
ultimately the anarchists accepted female leadership and chose to work
with them rather than against them (Wolfe, 1993, p. 25).
The anarchist movement in Brazil began its decline for several reasons;
one was that it often failed to adequately reach out to the rural
majority population. Another is that the success of the Bolshevik
revolution spelt the beginning of the end anarchist ideological
hegemony. As in Argentina and Uruguay, anarchist movement split evenly
into two camps: pro-Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik. Many of the most
active anarchists would soon move on to become heavily involved in the
activities of the PCB as a result of this split. The party shunned those
who did not do so, and internal purges eventually ousted those who
retained some anarchist sympathies (p. 33). The final nail in Brazilian
anarchism’s coffin was the Revolution of 1930, which marked the
beginning of a new era of the officialistic, paternalistic, cooptative
system of “corporatism.”
While anarchism in the southern cone countries impacted the global
movement to an extent, the anarchist movement that most affected and
influenced the direction of anarchism throughout Latin America and much
of the rest of the word as well was that which developed in Mexico. This
began in 1863, when a Mexico City philosophy professor of Greek descent
named Plotino Rhodakanaty formed the first anarchist organization in the
country, a coalition of students and professors called the Club
Socialista de Estudiantes (CSE). The CSE proceeded to spread their ideas
through organizing anarchist labor unions amongst the urban working
class; shortly this lead to the first strike in Mexican history, to
organizing amongst Indian populations in southern Mexico and eventually
to a new organization called La Social, which featured activists from
the Paris Commune in exile, eventually reaching a peak level of 62
member organizations nationwide (p. 9). For all of this considerable
activity, Rhodakanaty and many of his comrades were eventually executed
at the hand of Porfirio Diaz.
As elsewhere in Latin America, the postcolonial period had been marked
by dictatorship after dictatorship and then finally a major social
revolution in 1910. In this revolution, the cause of the Mexican worker
and peasant was taken up by a temporary alliance between Ricardo Flores
Magon, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa and Pascal Orozco. Of these, Magon
can be characterized most accurately as being an anarchist; his brother
Enrique and he published a popular anarchist newspaper called
Regeneracion beginning in 1900. Of Zapotec Indian background, the two
were driven largely by a determination to ensure the autonomy of Indian
peoples in whatever social arrangement would arise out of the revolution
(Poole, 1977, p. 5). By 1905, they had formed the anarchist-communist
oriented Mexican Liberal Party (PLM); named as such in order to not
drive people away, while still remaining thoroughly anarchist in
demands. This strategy worked well eventually leading to two armed
uprisings that involved members of the IWW as well as anarchists from
Italy (p. 22).
Activists with the PLM crossed borders freely to relocate to Los
Angeles, San Antonio and St. Louis, several cities in Canada, as well as
numerous cities throughout Mexico. In doing so, a loose network of
anarchists from all over the world participated in the project of
building an anarchist contingent within the Mexican Revolution. Yet this
relationship was not always healthy: at one point Magon was even forced
to write an angry anti-racist essay in response to a statement by Eugene
Debs that Mexicans were “too ignorant to fight for freedom” and that
they would surely lose any attempt to rise up (p. 88). The essay pleaded
with North American anarchists to take the PLM seriously; “Throughout
the world the Latin races are sparing neither time nor money to assist
what they recognized immediately as the common cause. We are satisfied
that the great Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic branches of the army of labor
will not lag behind; we are satisfied ignorance due to language
difficulties alone is causing a temporary delay” (p. 90) Then in 1910,
Francisco Madero published his “Plan de San Luis Potosi” which called
for an uprising starting November 20 of that year; the uprising spread
quickly until it became a nationwide revolt led by Magon, Zapata, Villa
and Orozco.
Amidst the uprising, one of the few honest elections ever to occur in
Mexico took place, which Madero won easily. Before the election
occurred, however, Magon, Zapata and their followers had already broken
sharply with Madero over the issue of land reform and Indian autonomy
and as a result had published their own Plan de Alaya. The Zapatistas
and Magonistas took up arms together, bound by a common southern Mexican
tribal background that within a few years had lead to the successful
encirclement of Mexico City. Huerta’s dictatorship continued as the
revolution continued to grow, then, when Huerta resigned and Venustiano
Carranza became president in 1917, the Mexican Constitution also came
into effect. Due to the influence of Zapata and Magon, many extremely
progressive features were included such as the right to an education
free of charge, the right of Indians to collectively run farms (ejidos),
and other social and land reforms. Unfortunately, Carranza exploited the
divisions between anarchist-syndicalists and anarchist-communists and
successfully bribed the anarchist-syndicalist Casa del Obero Mundial to
organize “Red Battalions” to fight against Zapata and Villa. By 1919,
Mexican Col. Jesus Guajardo had ambushed and murdered Zapata, ridding
the Carranza regime of their main populist enemy. But once Carranza had
been overthrown, Obregon, Calles, as well as a long line of other
centrists came to power, opposing the domination of the clergy but
supporting foreign investment into Mexico; this development marked the
beginnings of the PRI dictatorship and the end of first wave anarchism.
Cuban anarchism developed in the mid-19^(th) Century due to the early
intellectual influence of Proudhonian mutualism in the workers movement.
By the late 1800s it had reached a higher level of maturity with the
rise of the anarchist leader Roig San Martin, the paper he edited El
Productor, and the national anarchist organization Alianza Obrera
(Fernandez, 2001, p. 20). As with Chinese, Indian and Mexican anarchism
however, Cuban anarchism cannot be properly understood solely within the
confines of the Cuban nation-state; much important activity occurred in
Cuban immigrant communities in Key West, Merida (Mexico) and Tampa as
well. In fact, in October 1889 a general strike broke out in Key West
with solidarity and support from Cuban workers in Havana, Tampa and Ybor
City. Just months before this historic strike, San Martin had died of a
diabetic coma, with over 10,000 Cubans coming from all over the island
to attend the funeral.
By the turn of the century, the fight for Cuban independence had become
a major source of division within the anarchist movement; the working
class anarchists accused the independentistas of “taking money from
tobacco capitalism” (p. 30). Eventually however, most anarchists rallied
around Jose Marti and his Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC) which was
analogous in its advocacy of democracy and decentralization to Mexico’s
PLM. In Europe, anarchists such as Elisee Reclus helped to helped to
form international solidarity organizations to support the independence
movement. But shortly after independence the United States occupied the
island; Errico Malatesta decided to move from New Jersey to Havana to
help the anarchist movement there. The Mexican Revolution deeply
impacted Cuba’s anarchist movement, and the Magon brothers found their
way over to Cuba several times both in the pages of Regeneracion and in
person. But the Cuban anarchist movement finally fell into a period of
steep decline with the rise of the October Revolution (p. 51). It is
remembered however, that it was the anarchists who paved the way in Cuba
for both the trade union movement and the socialist revolution that
occurred later.
In light of both historical and recent events, it could easily be argued
that the Middle East is and has been of central importance to many
developments around the world. As in Africa, this region saw first wave
anarchism develop primarily along the margins of the region; Armenian
anarchists, for instance, were already being brought under control by
the Ottoman Empire by the late 19^(th) Century due to their widespread
agitational activity. Of the Armenian anarchists, Alexandre Atabekian
maintained the highest international profile and had the most
connections to the international anarchist movement, befriending Petr
Kropotkin, Elisee Reclus and Jean Grave while studying in Geneva. His
friendship with Kropotkin was so great in fact that he was actually with
him at his deathbed and subsequently helped to organize the famous
funeral procession through the streets of Moscow. Atabekian translated
several anarchist works into Armenian and published and distributed an
anarchist journal called Commonwealth (Hamaink) that was translated into
Persian as well.
Atabekian made a serious attempt to make the politics of anarchism
relevant to the political situation of the Middle East. Throughout his
writings there is a clear pattern of opposition to both the domination
of the Ottoman Empire over Armenia and to European intervention and
domination over the region in general. These culminated eventually in
the development of the Revolutionary Armenian Federation
(Dashnaktsouthian), which was a coalition of anarchists, nationalists,
and socialists who amongst other activities, published and distributed
several anarchist tracts throughout Armenia. Though their manifesto was
early on compared to the rhetoric of the Russian nihilists,
Dashnaktsouthian anarchism seems to have been largely replaced by
Marxism-Leninism within a few years. However, even as Marxism-Leninism
rose to popularity in Armenia, anarchist ideals became popular amongst
Armenian immigrants heading to the nation-states of the West, as is
evidenced by the publication of several anarchist journals in the
Armenian language in the United States around the same time (Stiobhard).
Apart from Armenia, Malatesta is known to have spent time in anarchist
communities in the port cities of Beirut, Lebanon as well as Izmir,
Turkey (Stiobhard). However, very little is known about the nature of
these communities or the extent to which these communities were
successful in building an anarchist movement locally amongst the
non-immigrant populations. As we have seen in the case of Alexandria and
Tunis, Mediterranean port cities were often very diverse and chances are
that these anarchist communities were primarily composed of Italian
immigrant workers. But there is one more country that anarchism has been
present in that has not been discussed: that is Palestine / Israel.
Before the creation of the Israeli state, in the first quarter of the
20^(th) century, an anarchist movement had already begun amongst both
Palestinians and Jews which resisted the creation of the Jewish state
and worked instead for a stateless, directly democratic, pluralistic
society of both Jews and Arabs. Anarchist sections of the
“communitarian” movement, inspired by the collaboration of notable
Jewish anarchists such as Gustav Landauer and Rudolf Rocker, formed the
basis for the early Kibbutzim movement in Palestine, and according to
Noam Chomsky, was the original meaning of the term “Zionist.” The
original communitarian Zionists opposed the creation of the state
because it would “necessitate carving up the territory and
marginalizing, on the basis of religion, a significant portion of its
poor and oppressed population, rather than uniting them on the basis of
socialist principles” (Barsky, 1997, p. 48). Of the
anarchist-communitarians at the time, Joseph Trumpeldor was one of the
most important, drawing members of the first kvutzot over to the
anarchist-communist thought of Petr Kropotkin. By 1923, Kropotkin’s
Mutual Aid had become one of the first books ever to be translated into
Hebrew and distributed throughout Palestine; this early anarchist
groundwork by activists like Trumpeldor became a major influence in the
thought of Yitzhak Tabenkin, a leader in the seminal Kibbutz Hameuhad
movement. The anarchist-communitarian newspaper, Problemen was the only
international anarchist periodical to be published in both Yiddish and
Hebrew, and was one of very few voices calling for the peaceful
coexistence of Jews and Arabs in the communitarian manner that existed
before the creation of the Israeli state. This movement began to die out
after 1925, with the creation of the movement for an Israeli state and
the solidification of the party (Oved, 2000, p. 45).
Through this work it has been demonstrated that one of the most
fundamental factors in the development of anarchist ideas and movements
has been that of global migration of peoples, which is of course the
result of the development of a capitalist and imperialist world-system.
Throughout East Asia, it was demonstrated that global anarchist networks
between San Francisco, Tokyo and Paris were of prime importance in the
development of both anarchist syndicalism as well as “pure anarchism”
forms of anarchist communism. In the South Asian context, we know that
Gandhi first became involved in his lifelong struggle against British
rule while living in South Africa; this was at a time when the
anarchist-syndicalist Industrial Workers of Africa were at their prime.
The development of African anarchism itself arose originally from
imported movements of European immigrant workers in the country, both in
South Africa and in the Mediterranean port cities of North Africa. What
little anarchist movements there were in the Middle East were largely
the result of Italian immigrant workers who had been attracted to
anarchist thought primarily within their own community. Throughout Latin
America, migrations of peoples were especially important as well with
Malatesta’s residence and agitation in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina,
Mexico and Cuba being the prime example.
It has been further demonstrated that in the non-Western context, first
wave anarchism arose both as part of the “package” of the modernity
project and as a reaction against it, ironically providing subject
countries with a “modern” weapon with which to fight modernity and
Westernization itself. A similar dialectic is present within second and
third wave anarchism, both of which arose largely around the global
countercultures of the late 1960s and again in the late 1990s. In the
1960s the United States was busy securing its position as the only
superpower on the planet; brutal interventions in Southeast Asia and
several other regions demonstrates the importance this goal had for the
United States at the time. Yet, not content with simple military
operations to secure this power, the promotion of American culture as
universal – also understood as the activation of “the spectacle” –
became a centrally important part of this strategy. As in the first
wave, tucked in along with the society of the spectacle was its
antidote; spectacular counterculture. This counterculture had arisen as
part and parcel of the broader rise of spectacular culture; but as with
the rise of modernity, it also was understood that it was a reaction
against it. For example, in Middle Eastern countries like Israel,
anarchist organizations such as the “Black Front” arose out the youth
counterculture, and published journals like Freaky. These journals,
while ostensibly part of the general spectacular culture of Pax
Americana, were also some of the only publications in the country to
actively oppose and critique wars such as the Yom Kippur War (Do or Die,
1999).
Third wave anarchism is largely regarded as having roots as a cultural
phenomenon as well; its gestation period beginning in the decline of the
1980s with the globally networked independent punk counterculture.
Unlike second wave anarchism, this counterculture prized independence
from corporations at least as much as it did internationalism and worked
to build independent networks between punks, bands, zines and local
scenes the world over. Small self-produced fanzines became the medium
for exchanging ideas and non-corporate record labels, record stores and
distribution services. In countries like Brazil, Israel and South Africa
the punk counterculture was instrumental in the rebuilding of the
anarchist movement. While the encroaching Pax Americana brought a
McDonalds to nearly every city on the planet, it also brought – through
its distributive arms, cultural magazines and ceaseless promotion of
English as a lingua franca – anarchopunk bands like Crass, Conflict and
others to the local record store. For many, the 1991 Gulf War provided
the first real opportunity to put these ideals into action by organizing
mass demonstrations and direct actions all over the world. The very next
year this was followed by the actions surrounding the 500^(th) year
anniversary of the colonization of the Americas by Europe. And just a
few months later came the Los Angeles riots; in the ensuing continental
and global reverberations, anarchist punks began to get more involved in
direct social activism and organizing. This meant not only a
politicization of punk, but also a concomitant ‘punkification’ of
radical activism as well as both played off against each other.
The Zapatista rebellion in January 1994 solidified this trend as
decentralized, internet-based support networks were formed that spanned
the globe, helping to ensure the otherwise unlikely success of a largely
non-violent autonomist movement in southern Mexico. By the late 1990s
many anarchist punks had diversified their cultural affiliations and
began to identify more with activism and anarchism itself than with the
independent punk counterculture, which was largely dying. Many engaged
themselves with the Zapatista struggle, travelling to Chiapas and
working as international observers, or attending the International
Encuentros held in Mexico and Spain. The new anti-political tradition of
Zapatismo, with its rejection of the universalism of both socialism and
anarchism, had a large influence on anarchists the world over. By the
time the 1999 WTO uprising in Seattle occurred, many anarchists were
already entering the post-Western anarchist paradigm, refusing to label
themselves as anarchists per se but still strongly identifying with its
basic ideas. Many began to refer to themselves as “autonomist” rather
than as specifically “anarchist” per se. The real change brought about
by this development was that countercultural resistance had been
transcended as a morphing process in the attainment of the “new
anarchism” which can be characterized as “post-hegemonic” or as some
have called it “post-Western.”
In conclusion then, I would like to briefly assess the results of the
synthesis between the social nests which first wave anarchism has formed
and the rise of second and third wave anarchism as a counter-spectacle
amongst non-Western anarchisms. Despite the common dismissal of almost
all anarchism from the early 20^(th) Century as a monolithic “classical
anarchism” and therefore worthless and outdated in the context of
anarchism’s current third wave, this study of early non-Western
anarchism demonstrates that in fact anarchism at the time was no less
diverse ideologically than it is today in the early 21^(st) Century. The
“pure anarchism” of Japan for instance, in many ways prefigured the
current development of a more green anarchism, elements of which are
present in anarchist currents within both deep ecology and social
ecology. Indeed, John Crump remarked on the remarkable similarities to
pure anarchism between Bookchin’s balance of economic self-sufficiency
and intercommunal trade (p. 203). Early Japanese anarchism also helped
to set the stage for the development in the late 1960’s of Zengakuren, a
militant student organization that was praised by the Situationists for
its uniting of student and working-class struggles. In its focus on
culture, the anarchist movement in China prefigured Mao’s Cultural
Revolution but even more so the Democracy Movement of the 1980’s, and it
may have helped to inspire the Tiannemen Square incident. Certainly the
reassessment of the socialist history of China has been informed by a
renewal of interest in anarchism even today in the country. Korea’s
early anarchist movement can be seen as a precursor to the Kwangju
Rebellion of 1980. As George Katsiaficas has remarked, “like the Paris
Commune, the people of Kwangju spontaneously rose up and governed
themselves until they were brutally suppressed by indigenous military
forces abetted by an outside power” (2001). That military power, was, as
one might guess, the United States. The anarchist influence on Gandhi’s
Satyagraha movement in India carried through into Vinoba Bhave’s and
Narayan’s Sarvodaya movement in the 1960’s and can be seen in more
recent movements as well.
In the late 1960’s Argentina experienced a resurgence of its ongoing
anarchist tradition through the student movement. The split between the
FORU and the USU in Argentina after the Bolshevik revolution meant that
not until the 1960’s would anarchism regain somewhat of a constituency.
This time around however, it was not based primarily in the working
class movements. Rather it was in the student movements as a result of
the 1956 formation of the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU). Some of
those originally involved with the FAU, which would eventually move
towards more deterministic Marxist tendencies, would go on to form
anarchist-oriented student organizations. These activists later helped
to build the Center for Popular Action (CAP) as a means to engage wider
sectors of the population in anti-authoritarian struggles without the
ideological pressures of being explicitly anarchist per se. This
tendency shied away from ideological universalism and in favor of a more
subjective pluralism or “panarchy” — which would interestingly
foreshadow the direction of antiauthoritarian movements at the dawn of
the 21^(st) Century all over the world. One of CAP’s pamphlets stated ”
in place of hypocritical ‘unity’ we provide an open arena for everyone
to do what they feel is necessary…let positions be defined and each work
his own way (p. 232).” One other change in the 1960’s was the branching
out of anarchists into non-working class sectors such as the peasant
movement. All the anarchist groups, indeed all of the left, were
involved in building the Movement for the Land (MT) thus uniting both
working class and peasant movements in alliance for the first time.
Unfortunately, the vision that these new tendencies displayed would
ultimately be short-lived due to the imposition of a long series of
military dictatorships, meant to serve U.S. corporate interests.
But it is only recently, since December 2001, that these ideas have been
seriously tested after the overthrow of the neo-liberal De La Rua
regime. First the government destroyed the lives of millions throughout
the country by accepting several successive austerity measures handed
down from the IMF and World Bank. And on top of state employees not
being paid for months in a row, many workers were only allowed to
withdraw a limited amount of money from their bank accounts. But then
came the final straw: the government took away the full freedom of
people to protest by declaring a state of siege. It was at this point
that the movement took the radical turn of calling for all politicians
to be ousted, and not to be simply replaced by a “more acceptable” set
of suits. This is also the point at which people began to take power
into their own hands by creating self-governing, horizontally structured
neighborhood assemblies, as well as city-wide, regional and national
networks of these neighborhood assemblies. Whenever various ideological
factions would attempt to seize control of the assemblies, they would be
told that no one wanted to follow their ideology, they just wanted
direct control of their country (Federacion Libertaria Argentina).
In the Middle East today, anarchism has grown especially in those
countries where relatively small movements had emerged in the early
20^(th) Century, largely amongst immigrants. Italian anarchist
communities in Turkish and Lebanese port cities have spread since the
1980’s to the local populations, often through the conduit of punk
culture. For instance, since the mid-1990’s a Lebanese group called
Alternative Liberty (Al Badil al Thariri) has been sending delegates to
international anarchist meetings, as well as composing reports on the
local anarchist movement and translating anarchist works into Arabic.
From around the same time period, anarchism has become a recognized
force in Turkish politics as well with the appearance of anarchist
contingents at May Day celebrations, and their appearance amongst
international anarchist meetings as well. Anarchist Italian and Greek
immigrants helped to spread their ideas around the Meditteranan region
into the North African countries of Tunisia and Egypt, mostly in the
port cities. Though their activity at that point seems not to have had a
major effect on the local populations, by the mid-1960’s it seems that
at least some Tunisian national was open to anarchist ideas. In 1966, a
Tunisian Situationist by the name of Mustapha Khayati helped to write
the seminal text On the Poverty of Student Life while studying in Paris.
The Algerian section of the Situationist International was represented
by Abdelhafid Khatib at its 1958 conference (Stiobhard).
African anarchism has built on first wave anarchism as well as on the
traditional society. In Nigeria, the communalist nature of certain
traditional tribal societies formed a social environment that would
provide a framework for the transformation of the once-Marxist Awareness
League in 1990 into a 1,000-member strong anarcho-syndicalist branch of
the International Workers Association based primarily in the southern
part of the country. In addition to indigenous communalism, the fall of
Marxism also formed an important basis for the rise of the Awareness
League. Interestingly, Awareness League members have expressed interest
not only in the anarchist-syndicalism of the IWA but also in the newer
ecological anarchism as expressed by both Murray Bookchin and Graham
Purchase. The Awareness League was preceded by an anarchistic coalition
in the 1980s that went by the name of “The Axe” (Mbah, p. 52). In 1997,
amidst major social upheaval, over 3,200 workers in Sierra Leone are
said to have joined the IWW, according to local delegate Bright Chikezie
who had come into contact with British IWW member Kevin Brandstatter. A
military coup later the same year resulted in mass exile of these IWW
members to the neighboring country of Guinea where Bright immediately
set about attempting to organize metal workers into the union. After
arrival in Guinea, the General Secretary Treasurer of the IWW traveled
to Guinea to meet with him and discuss the situation (Brandstatter,
1997).
The strong South African anarchist movement in the early 20^(th) century
lead also to the current proliferation of anarchism in the form of
anarchist media organizations, bookstores and other organizations.
Bikisha Media Collective is an example of this, as is the South African
Workers Solidarity Federation. Much of this came out of white and Indian
members of the urban punk scene who wanted to put their ideas into
practice. The high point of this renewal was the year 1986, which saw
the largest general strike in the history of the country when over 1.5
million workers and students struck, demanding recognition of Mayday as
a public holiday (Mbah, p. 64). Throughout Africa in general, capitalism
is becoming more and more unworkable; a downward development from which
“African socialism” already has largely fallen from as a result. Beyond
the crises of capitalism and socialism, the post-colonial nation-state
system further threatens to give way under the weight of imminent
pressure from below; the stateless societies they were propped on top of
in order to facilitate imperialism and capitalism cannot function in the
context of such a foreign body. Indeed, Mbah has stated quite clearly
that the ethnic violence and riots that are seen throughout the
continent spell “the beginning of the collapse of the modern
nation-state system.” He goes on to say “the rise of a new angry
generation during this chaos is an important factor in determining how
and in which direction the present crisis is resolved” (p. 104). Such a
situation is ripe for the (re)introduction of the decentralized,
democratic, self-determined nature of an anarchist system synthesized
with the indigenous African system of autonomous yet interconnected
stateless societies.
In the final judgement, the relevance of this work to the future of
social movements may not be so complex but alternatively, it might be
simply to “keep the maps that show the roads not taken” as Edward Krebs
has put it (1998, p. xiii). Academics often have a tendency to see
everything they develop as being new and unprecedented; I believe this
work has demonstrated that while there are several new currents within
anarchism today, many of them were preceded by other roads that were not
taken or that were conveniently forgotten in the construction of what
has become the phenomenon of Western anarchism. In league with the other
more specific attempts at such a project in the recent past, I say “let
the deconstruction begin.” While we may not know exactly where this
project will ultimately lead us, we do know that it will be a place
radically more holistic, global, and aligned with the origins of
anarchism as a counterhegemonic force than what has developed in the
tradition of Western anarchism in the past several decades.
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