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Title: Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism
Author: Michael Schmidt
Date: 17th May 2012
Language: en
Topics: revolutionary anarchism, history
Source: Retrieved on 9th April 2021 from https://anarchyinaction.org/index.php?title=Cartography_of_Revolutionary_Anarchism
Notes: This book’s author Michael Schmidt has been https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alexander-reid-ross-and-joshua-stephens-about-schmidt as secretly espousing highly reactionary and perhaps even fascist views. As a result, AK Press has stopped publishing this book and it should be read with particular caution.

Michael Schmidt

Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism

Introduction

The revolutionary vision of anarchism gained a foothold in the

imagination of the popular classes with the rise of the anarchist

strategy of revolutionary syndicalism in the trade unions affiliated to

the First International.[1] It has since provided the most devastating

and comprehensive critique of capitalism, landlordism, the state, and

power relations in general, whether based on gender, race, or other

forms of oppression. In their place it has offered a practical set of

tools with which the oppressed can challenge the tiny, heavily armed

elites that exploit them. Anarchism and syndicalism have been the most

implacable enemies of the ruling-class industrialists and landed gentry

in state and capitalist modernisation projects around the world. They

have also unalterably shaped class struggle in the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries, producing several key effects that we now

presume to be fundamental aspects of civilised society.

This broad anarchist tradition had constructed, and continues to

construct today, concrete projects to dissolve the centralist,

hierarchical, coercive power of capital and the state, replacing it with

a devolved, free-associative, horizontally federated counter-power. This

concept of “counter-power” echoes that of radical feminist Nancy

Fraser’s “subaltern counterpublics.”[2] In essence, her subaltern

counterpublics are socio-political spheres separated from the

mainstream, which serve as “training-grounds for agitational activities

directed towards wider publics.” Likewise, anarchist counter-power

creates a haven for revolutionary practice that serves as a school for

insurgency against the elites, a beachhead from which to launch its

assault, and as the nucleus of a future, radically egalitarian

society—what Buenaventura Durruti called the “new world in our

hearts.”[3] As Steven Hirsch notes of the Peruvian anarchist movement,

they “transmitted a counter-hegemonic culture to organised labour.

Through newspapers, cultural associations, sports clubs, and resistance

societies they inculcated workers in anti-capitalist, anti-clerical, and

anti-paternalistic beliefs. They also infused organised labour wit an

ethos that stressed self-emancipation and autonomy from non-workers’

groups and political parties.”[4] In a sense, anarchist counter-culture

provides the oppressed classes with an alternate, horizontal

socio-political reality.

Beyond the factory gates, the broad anarchist tradition was among the

first to systematically confront racism and ethnic discrimination. It

developed an antiracist ethic that extended from the early multi-ethnic

labour struggles of the Industrial Workers of the World, through

anti-fascist guerrilla movements of Europe, Asia, and Latin America in

the 1920s–1950s, to become a key inspiration for the New Left in the

period of African decolonisation, and later of indigenous struggles

today in regions like Oaxaca in Mexico. But anarchism was more than a

mere hammer to be used against prejudice: over the last one hundred and

fifty years, generations of proletarians developed a complex toolkit of

ideas and practices that challenged all forms of domination and

exploitation. The world has changed dramatically over those decades,

shaped in part by the contribution of anarcho-syndicalists and

revolutionary syndicalists, a contribution usually relegated to the

shadows, derided, or denied, but woven into the social fabric of

contemporary society.

THE COHERENCE OF THE BROAD ANARCHIST TRADITION

Anarchism did not rise as a primordial rebel state of mind as far back

as Lao Tzu in ancient China or Zeno in ancient Greece as many have

speculated, nor was it the child of declining artisanal classes facing

extinction by modern modes of production as so many Marxist writers

would have us believe.[5] On the contrary, it grew within the seedbed of

organised trade unions as a modern, internationalist, revolutionary

socialist, and militant current with a vision of socialism-from-below,

in opposition to classical Marxism’s imposition of socialism-from-above.

Marxism has historically included some minority libertarian currents,

such as the “Council Communists,” “Left Communists,” and “Sovietists” of

the 1920s. However, the vast majority of historical Marxist movements

strived for revolutionary dictatorship based upon nationalisation and

central planning. Every Marxist regime has been a dictatorship. Every

major Marxist party has renounced Marxism for social democracy, acted as

an apologist for a dictatorship, or headed a brutal dictatorship itself.

Even those mainstream Marxists who critique the horrors of Stalin or Mao

defend Lenin and Trotsky’s regime, which included all the core features

of later Marxist regimes—labour camps, a one-party dictatorship, a

secret political police, terror against the peasantry, the repression of

strikes, independent unions and other leftists, etc. Marxism must be

judged by history and the authoritarian Marxist lineage that exists

therein: not Marxism as it might have been, but Marxism as it has been.

Accordingly, I do not refer to “Stalinism” but rather simply to Marxism

or to Bolshevism in the post–1917 period.

Over the past 15 decades, the global anarchist movement and its progeny,

the syndicalist movement, have been comprised mainly of the industrial

working class—seamen and stevedores, meat-packers and metalworkers,

construction and farm workers, sharecroppers and railwaymen—as well as

of craftspeople such as shoemakers and printers, and of peasants and

indentured labourers, with only a sprinkling of the middle classes, of

doctors, scientists, déclassé intellectuals, and journalists. It

developed a sophisticated theory of how the militant minority related to

broader trade unions, and to the popular classes as a whole, seeking to

move beyond an insurrectionary general strike (or “lock-out of the

capitalist class”) to a revolutionary transformation of society. The

movement sought to achieve this through organised,

internally-democratic, worker-controlled structures, including unions,

rank-and-file networks, popular militia, street committees, consumers’

co-operatives, and popular policy-making assemblies.

Many would ask what the relevance of the broad anarchist tradition would

be in today’s world, a world of nanotechnology and space tourism far

removed from the gas-lit origins of the movement. The world has changed.

In 1860, Washington D.C. was a rough, provincial town. Today, it is the

unchallenged imperial capital of the world, the heart of the US

“hyperpower.” The telegraph had already begun to unite people, just as

barbed wire divided their land—yet successful trans-Atlantic telephone

cables and the Fordist production line had yet to see daylight. Many

countries, notably Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic

and Balkan states, Vietnam, and South Africa, did not yet exist, nor did

much of the Middle East. Those countries that did, like Argentina,

Egypt, Algeria, and Canada, were narrow riverine or coastal strips of

the giant territories they would later lay claim to. In 1860, women,

even in countries as advanced as France, would have to wait a lifetime

merely to secure the bourgeois vote. Serfdom and slavery were

widespread, and the divine right of kings reigned supreme over vast

territories, including Imperial Japan, China, and Russia, and the

Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

And yet, there are strong echoes of that world that still resonate

today, for it was a world experiencing a disruptive upsurge of

globalisation, evident in the colonial scramble, the ascendancy of the

modern banking system, and the integration of modern industrialising

economies. As the means of production modernised, shadows of unilateral

military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia were cast,

and corporations wielded more power than governments in the developing

world. Established societal norms broke down and the rise of terrorism,

populism, religious millenarianism, and revolutionary politics took

their place, as means for the oppressed to explain their pain and fight

back. These phenomena are all remarkably familiar in today’s world.

The broad anarchist movement has currency primarily because it remains a

proletarian practise that grapples with the question of power, in

relation to both intimate, interpersonal relations and the broader

balance of forces in society. The anarchist conception of power is in

opposition to the Marxist conception of the seizure and adaptation of

coercive, vertical, centralised, bourgeois power. Instead, anarchists

argue for, and in their innumerable revolts and their four main

revolutions have practiced, a free, horizontal, federalist, proletarian

counter-power that would equitably distribute decision-making powers and

responsibilities across liberated communities. In particular, anarchist

theorists have grappled with how to construct a real, living libertarian

communist praxis, thereby encountering the key question facing all

revolutionaries: how does the militant minority transmit the ideas of a

free society to the oppressed classes, in such a way that the oppressed

makes those ideas their own, moving beyond the origins of those ideas

into the realm of libertarian autogestion. Central to this essay are the

decisive moments in its history when the anarchist movement engaged with

that very question.

In parallel to this drive to build counter-power, the early anarchist

movement of the 1860s–1890s was remarkable for its deliberate

construction of educational institutions everywhere that it put down

roots, including rational, modernist schools in many parts of the world,

and popular universities in Egypt, Cuba, Peru, Argentina, and China. The

movement realised the necessity of buttressing these attempts at

building structures of counter-power with a proletarian counter-culture,

at creating social conditions for counter-power to flourish—by cutting

the mental bonds binding the oppressed to the oppressor. While the

movement aimed to cause a cultural and mental rupture between the

oppressed classes and parasitic elites, they united elements of society

divided by those elites: anarchist educators trained freed black slaves

alongside white workers, and educated women and girls alongside men and

boys, on the grounds that the oppressed of all races and genders had

more in common with each other than with their exploiters.

Between 1870 and the early 1880s, the anarchist movement spread

dramatically around the world, establishing anarcho-syndicalist and

revolutionary syndicalist unions in Egypt, Cuba, Mexico, the US,

Uruguay, Spain, and arguably in Russia. This was due in part to the fact

that, until Lenin, there was no serious engagement in classical Marxism

with the peasantry or the colonial world. The founders of the doctrine,

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, had dismissed in their Communist

Manifesto (1848) the colonised and post-colonial world as the “barbarian

and semi-barbarian countries.” Instead, Marxism stressed the virtues of

capitalism (and even imperialism) as an onerous, yet necessary stepping

stone to socialism. Engels summed up their devastating position in an

article entitled “Democratic Pan-Slavism” in their Neue Rheinische

Zeitung of 14 February 1849: the United States’ annexation of Texas in

1845 and invasion of Mexico in 1846, in which Mexico lost 40% of its

territory, were applauded as they had been “waged wholly and solely in

the interest of civilisation,” as “splendid California has been taken

away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it” by “the

energetic Yankees” who would “for the first time really open the Pacific

Ocean to civilisation…” Engels extended his racist polemic of inherent

ethno-national virility giving rise to laudable capitalist overmastery,

to argue that the failure of the Slavic nations during the 1848

Pan-European Revolt to throw off their Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and

Russian yokes, demonstrated not only their ethnic unfitness for

independence, but that they were in fact “counter-revolutionary” nations

deserving of “the most determined use of terror” to suppress them.

It reads chillingly like a foreshadowing of the Nazis’ racial

nationalist arguments for the use of terror against the Slavs during

their East European conquest. Engels’ abysmal article had been written

in response to Appeal to the Slavs by a Russian Patriot written by

Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), a minor Russian noble who moved from a

position of Pan-Slavic liberation to become, over a lifetime of

militancy and clandestinity, in exile and on the barricades, anarchism’s

giant founding figure and Marx’s most formidable opponent in defining

the path to true communism; it was the dispute between their supporters

that would sunder the First International in 1872 into an anarchist

majority and a Marxist rump. In his Appeal to the Slavs, Bakunin—at that

stage not yet an anarchist—had in stark contrast argued that the

revolutionary and counter-revolutionary camps were divided not by

nationality or stage of capitalist development, but by class. In 1848,

revolutionary class consciousness had expressed itself as a “cry of

sympathy and love for all the oppressed nationalities.”[6] Urging the

Slavic popular classes to “extend your had to the German people, but not

to the… petit bourgeois Germans who rejoice at each misfortune that

befalls the Slavs,” Bakunin concluded that there were “two grand

questions spontaneously posed in the first days of the [1848] spring…

the social emancipation of the masses and the liberation of the

oppressed nations.” By 1873, when Bakunin, now unashamedly anarchist,

threw down the gauntlet to imperialism, writing that “Two-thirds of

humanity, 800 million Asiatics, asleep in their servitude, will

necessarily awaken and begin to move,” the newly-minted anarchist

movement was engaging directly and repeatedly with the challenges of

imperialism, colonialism, national liberation movements, and

post-colonial regimes.[7]

The record of the broad anarchist movement in the pre-World War II era

is dramatically more substantial than that of their Marxist

contemporaries, especially in the colonial and post-colonial world.[8]

The anarchist movement focused on encouraging the oppressed to start

resisting immediately, without promising an imminent revolution. There

was an understanding that revolutions are processes, not events,

requiring a massive confluence of historical circumstances, in addition

to the clear-sighted agency of the oppressed. It is because of this very

early and radical challenge to colonialism and imperialism, and to the

constructs of gender and race, that the anarchist movement penetrated

parts of the world that Marxism did not reach until the 1920s.

THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF ANARCHIST COUNTER-POWER

An examination of the movement’s industrial and social foundations helps

to explain the spread of anarchism and its appeal to the popular

classes. Aside from Guiseppe Fanelli’s dramatic conversion of the bulk

of the organised Spanish working class to anarchism in 1868,[9] there is

probably no better example of an industrial vector of anarchism and

anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism than the Marine Transport

Workers’ Industrial Union (MTWIU), a section of the Industrial Workers

of the World (IWW), the most international of all the syndicalist

unions. The IWW had been founded in the United States in 1905, as the

joint heir of the anti-racist, anti-sexist, internationalist traditions

of the Knights of Labor founded in 1869, which had dominated organised

American labour with a peak of 700,000 members by 1886 (weirdly, while

the Knights had a large black membership, it violently opposed Chinese

immigration, it also established sections in Canada and Australia, only

closing up shop as a shadow of its former self in 1949), and of the

explicitly anarcho-syndicalist traditions of the Central Labor Union

(CLU) of 1883–1909. Despite intense repression and splits over the

question of the majority’s opposition to electoral politics, the IWW

rose to about 250,000 members in 1917 in the US alone, and in its

incarnation as the “One Big Union,” perhaps 70,000 members in Canada in

1919. It was above all a movement of the poorest and most marginal

workers—poor whites, immigrants, blacks, Asians, and women—many of whom

worked in insecure and dangerous jobs as dockworkers, field hands,

lumberjacks, miners, and factory operatives—and earned its stripes

organising across racial lines in the American South. It was also an

international phenomenon, with IWW groups and unions, and IWW-inspired

organisations forming in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, Chile,

Cuba, Ecuador, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Mexico, Peru, Siberia, South

Africa, Ukraine, and Uruguay; it had direct influence on the global

labour movement as far afield as Burma, China, and Fiji; and in more

recent times, it established sections in Iceland, Sweden, and Sierra

Leone. In his essay on the IWW’s MTWIU,[10] Hartmut Rübner writes,

“Based on statistical information on the period between 1910 and 1945,

the evaluated material indicates an over-proportional number of

industrial actions in the sector of shipping. In many of these labour

disputes, seamen exhibited a close affinity to those forms of action

which are generally characterized as typically syndicalist patterns of

conflict behaviour.”

Asking why syndicalism was so prevalent, and why a relatively small

group of revolutionary syndicalist militants could exercise such great

influence, Rübner concludes that the sheer cosmopolitanism of maritime

labour’s

common experiences in remote parts of the world[11] certainly created a

“sense of internationalism,” that helped to overcome the separations

between union activists and the rank and file… In the harbour districts,

the seafaring-reliant community maintained a tight-knit communication

network that provided the individual seaman with the necessary

information interchange to accomplish recreation and job opportunities.

Loadinghouses, employment agencies, hiring halls, trade union offices

and International Seamen’s Clubs were situated in the direct

neighbourhood of the docklands. When conflict situations arose, the

localities and meeting places of the harbour districts often functioned

as initial positions for collective strike activities.

This docklands community was not automatically progressive or

revolutionary, but as Rübner notes, traditional socialist and union

organisers tended to shy away from organising there, leaving the field

open to proletarian revolutionary syndicalists. Moreover, the strongly

anti-racist stance of the revolutionary syndicalists stood in sharp

contrast to those of the traditional unions, in keeping with the

seafaring and longshoring communities, where discrimination made no

sense. In fact, he argues that the strength of “syndicalism in shipping

should be seen in correlation to the dwindling attractiveness of

exclusive trade union policies” that weakened workers’ power by

splintering them into ethnic groupings. On the other hand, according to

Rübner,

syndicalism promoted a programmatic internationalism and placed its

perspectives upon the idea of a multinational counterpole to the

interconnections of capital… [and] Organizations like the Industrial

Workers of the World (IWW) offered access for the semiqualified or

non-white workforce. Due to this accessibility, the IWW scored their

first organizational successes amongst those black and Hispanic seamen

and dockworkers, formerly neglected by the exclusive and chauvinist

union policy. An indication for the outgrowth of seamen’s radicalism can

be seen in the fact, that maritime [revolutionary] syndicalism had

gained remarkable strongholds in France, Netherlands, Italy and the USA

before 1914. Through seafaring members of the IWW (“Wobblies”) and

returning immigrants, the idea of industrial unionism spread over to

Australasia, Latin America and Europe. In the aftermath of the war, the

Maritime Transport Workers’ Industrial Union No.510 of the IWW developed

to be the driving force behind international maritime syndicalism…

Between 1919 and 1921, maritime syndicalism overrode its minority

position and became a factor to be seriously reckoned with.”

Thus, maritime revolutionary syndicalism both counteracted the economic

concentration of the industry and rose to meet the challenge of the

motorisation of shipping. While Rübner incorrectly writes of the MTWIU’s

“centralized industrial unionism,” rather than its decentralised

structure, he recognises its superiority over the outmoded craft

unionism of competing mainstream unions, and notes that the union’s

“elementary council democracy” was based on “‘ship’s committees.’ Its

delegates were supposed to cooperate with the dockworkers in a common

‘port district council.’ This model of ‘industrial communism’ which

[was] based on regional councils connected to an ‘international

headquarters,’ was implemented to overcome the ‘national frontiers.’”

In Rübner’s final analysis of why maritime revolutionary syndicalism

lost the high ground of the early 1920s, he says that, firstly, the

revolutionary syndicalists were excluded from new corporatist

arrangements implemented in many countries, and, secondly, despite their

flexible approach to modernisation, crew reductions and the redundancy

of entire classes of maritime labour (such as the firemen and coal

trimmers) put members out of work. Lastly, the general dilution of

radicalism ashore seriously undercut the ability of the anarcho- and

revolutionary syndicalist cause to stay afloat. Rübner does recognise

that “syndicalism displayed its greatest effects in its attempt to

overcome both the divisions in craft as well as… ethnic segregation…

[but] failed to stabilise radical workplace militancy in a lasting

framework.”

Rübner goes on to admit that the Marxist movement stepped into the

vacuum, but could only do so by “implementing the proven parts of the

syndicalist strategy,” including ship’s committees. Today, as the

corporatist labour arrangements that sustained the status quo in both

Marxist and right-wing dictatorships collapse, and neoliberal austerity

bites deep into the welfare gains once assured elsewhere, many workers

are again as industrially excluded as their forebears were. And thus,

revolutionary syndicalism, sometimes under the mentorship of the old

anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist unions and traditions, is being

rediscovered as a means of shifting power back onto the shopfloor. As

globalisation creates conditions whereby, for example, Bangladeshis are

working for slave wages in Sudan, the appeal of anarcho- and

revolutionary syndicalism’s multi-ethnic approach is becoming viable

again.

THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS OF ANARCHIST COUNTER-POWER

The social conditions in which workers live, and not only their working

life, contribute greatly to their understanding of the world, and inform

the methods they adopt to defend their interests. Bert Altena offers

insight into the importance of class and culture in various communities

of workers, in determining whether anarchism and anarcho- and

revolutionary syndicalism gained a foothold within them.[12]

As Altena states,

revolutionary syndicalism contains [both] an authentic labour movement

and one with a tradition. Revolutionary syndicalism was in fact either a

continuation of very old labour movements or, as I will argue, a

phenomenon in which the world of the workers was isolated from the rest

of society. In these circumstances, workers generally had to rely on

themselves for social security and they could develop their own workers’

culture. Parliamentary politics belonged to the world of the

bourgeoisie, which was completely foreign to workers… The anarchists,

who during the 1880s and 1890s saw that their strategy of insurrection

and terror did not help their cause, brought to these workers only a

sharper theoretical articulation of their beliefs by introducing them to

the concepts of the general strike, direct action, the value of action

by workers themselves, the importance of direct democracy. They also

gave them a broader cultural perspective. They only taught the workers

to state more clearly what they already thought, to do better what they

already practiced and they brought them the perspective of a class

society beyond the local sphere.

Altena takes as his examples two neighbouring towns of equal size

(approximately 20,000 residents) in the Netherlands in 1899: the

industrial port town of Flushing; and the local government seat and

market town of Middelburg, a mere six kilometres away. At this time,

Dutch anarcho-syndicalism was enjoying its first successes, evidenced by

the growth of the National Workers’ Secretariat (NAS), and Flushing was

dominated by one big shipyard, while other employment was to be found on

the docks or on the ferry to England. By comparison, Middelburg had

small construction yards, a metalworks, and a timber company. According

to Altena,

As a result of the town’s economy, the social structure of Flushing

consisted of a broad working-class base, a rather small layer of middle

classes (shopkeepers, teachers and clerical workers) and a very small

elite. The social structure of Middelburg was much less lopsided and at

the same time more differentiated. The town had a rather broad layer of

shopkeepers. The educated middle classes were much stronger because of

Middelburg’s function as the administrative and judicial centre of the

province and its rich collection of educational institutions. The elite

of Middelburg (gentry, magistrates and some entrepreneurs) consequently

was much larger and more strongly represented in the town than its

equivalent in Flushing.

The shopkeepers in Flushing were pretty poor themselves, so the class

function they could have performed as social middlemen between workers

and the elite was weak. The municipality itself was too impoverished to

assist workers in times of crisis, forcing them to rely on themselves.

By comparison, in Middelburg, the broad middle class produced many

social-democrat teachers, artisanal entrepreneurs, and lawyers, who not

only provided the workers with a social connection to the elite, but

who, enabled by the town’s greater wealth, could assist the workers in

troubled times. As Altena notes,

Socialism appeared in Flushing much earlier (1879) than it did in

Middelburg and it was entirely a working class affair. It developed in a

libertarian direction. For the next forty years the labour movement of

Flushing would be dominated by revolutionary syndicalism. It proved

extremely difficult to establish a branch of the social-democratic party

in this working-class town. Only in 1906 a tiny and weak branch was set

up. The revolutionary syndicalists, however, developed a rich culture:

choirs, a freethought union with its own library, musical societies and

a very good theatrical club, which performed an ambitious repertoire… it

was much easier to keep the syndicalist principle intact with the help

of cultural activities than on the shopfloor only… Flushing presented no

problem to the syndicalists in further developing their cultural

activities. Bourgeois cultural life, with its own concerts, plays and

libraries hardly existed in the town.

By comparison, in Middelburg, “After 1895, even their [the workers’] own

branch of the social-democratic party was dominated by socialists from

bourgeois origins… The workers of Middelburg not only found it much more

difficult to develop an independent culture of their own, independence

was also repressed on the shopfloor.” In Middelburg, where women often

worked as maids in the houses of the wealthy, a working-class attitude

of servility was cultivated, whereas in Flushing, where women were

active and visible anarchists/syndicalists, workers’ pride in their

skills, established through job control, was high. Altena concludes that

working-class cultural counter-power is as important to the

attractiveness of anarchism and anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism

(which he equates) as its industrial counter-power. “When workers can

build a world of their own, the choice for syndicalism is a logical,

though not a necessary one. This could explain why syndicalist movements

tend to appear in mono-industrial, company towns…,” according to Altena.

This was certainly true of, say, the mining towns of the American

Midwest, where the IWW became a force to be reckoned with, but not in

the more economically diversified worlds of port cities, where anarcho-

and revolutionary syndicalism entrenched itself, except to the extent

that maritime workers formed their own subculture, distinct from their

neighbouring railwaymen and meat-packers—as within the maritime workers,

the cooks and the stokers performed different social as well as

industrial roles. Altena argues that, whereas syndicalism created an

alternate world for workers, the mainstream social-democratic and

Christian unions, especially through parliamentarism, “integrated

workers into the political structures and processes of the country.”

Except in countries where they were forced to act much like the

syndicalists, as an illegal counter-power, the Marxist unions also

served to integrate workers into the needs of capital and the state,

instead of standing opposed to it.

As Altena notes,

In cultural activities too the syndicalists were confronted with

competitors: sports (which many syndicalists disliked because sports

diverted from the essential struggle of the workers) or ‘capitalist’

forms of entertainment such as movies and dancing. The radio challenged

the syndicalist music and theatre with “real” professional culture and

made them look poor and amateurish. Possibly the most important factor

was that syndicalist culture was intimately intertwined with the

movement as a whole. It was always imbued with syndicalist norms and it

pointed to the big syndicalist goal. As soon as syndicalism lost the

realisability of its vision, its culture became hollow because its

message became hollow… In so far as the syndicalists did not abandon

their principles or disbanded, they had to accept marginalization.

Marginal movements, however, can still be very useful movements.

ASSESSING ANARCHIST/SYNDICALIST HISTORY IN FIVE WAVES

From a long-term perspective, the fortunes of the broad anarchist

tradition—like those of the militant, autonomous working class

itself—rise and fall in waves. The nature of these waves is a complex

textile, entwining the weft of working class culture and activity with

the warp of capital in crisis, and the ebb and flow of the global

movements of people, capital and ideas.

However, anarchist historiography has been distorted by the myth of the

“Five Highlights” or the crude potted history by which many anarchists

understand the high-water marks of their movement: the Haymarket Martyrs

of 1887 [13]; the French General Confederation of Labour’s 1906 Charter

of Amiens [14]; the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921 [15]; the Spanish

Revolution of 1936–1939 [16]; and the “French” Revolt of 1968 [17]. This

anaemic version of anarchism’s history suffers from a confused notion of

what anarchism is, by, for instance, over-inflating anarchist

involvement in the Kronstadt and Parisian Revolts, where anarchist

influence was marginal, and accepting the verdict of hostile state

socialists, by, for example, caricaturing the Ukrainian Revolution as an

adventurist peasant sideshow of the Russian Revolution. It also

completely ignores other Revolutions impacted by a major anarchist

influence, such as Morelos and Baja California, Mexico in 1910–1920

(where anarchist praxis was influential), the Shinmin Prefecture of

Manchuria in 1929–1931 (where the constructive anarchist social

experiment was profound), and the Escambray Mountains and underground

trade unions of Cuba in 1952–1959 (where mass anarchist traditions ran

eight decades deep), as well as several urban anarchist communes,

including in southern Spain in 1873–1874, in the mountains of Macedonia

in 1903, and in the port city of Guangzhou in southern China in

1921–1923.

The most obvious weakness of this history, however, is that it is

notably North Atlanticist, and ignores even the significant Dutch,

Scandinavian, and Eastern European anarchist movements.[18] A far more

important omission is the massive Latin anarchist and anarcho- and

revolutionary syndicalist movements which dominated the organised

working classes of Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Portugal, Argentina, and

Uruguay—which I will detail later in this essay. Also excluded are the

powerful East Asian anarchist currents. Lastly, there was the key role

played by anarchist militants in establishing the first trade unions and

articulating the early revolutionary socialist discourse in North and

Southern Africa,[19] the Caribbean and Central America,[20]

Australasia,[21] South-East Asia,[22] South Asia,[23] and the Middle

East.[24]

To take a few examples: the initially anarchist anticolonial Ghadar

(Mutiny) Party, established in 1913, built a world-spanning movement

that not only established roots on the Indian subcontinent in Hindustan

and Punjab, but which linked radicals within the Indian Diaspora as far

afield as Afghanistan, British East Africa (Uganda and Kenya), British

Guiana (Guiana), Burma, Canada, China, Fiji, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaya

(Malaysia), Mesopotamia (Iraq), Panama, the Philippines, Siam

(Thailand), Singapore, South Africa, and the USA, with Ghadarites

remaining active in Afghanistan into the 1930s and in colonial Kenya

into the 1950s—after Indian independence; meanwhile, in South Africa, a

constellation of revolutionary syndicalist organisations such as the

Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA) and the Indian Workers’ Industrial

Union (IWIU) were explicitly built on IWW lines for people of colour in

1917–1919, and consolidated into a single organisation, the

ideologically mixed Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU), which peaked

at 100,000 members in 1927, but which created sections in South-West

Africa (Namibia) in 1920, in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1927—which

survived into the 1950s—and in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1931;

lastly, from 1907, a Socialist Federation of Australasia (SFA) began

spreading syndicalist ideas in Australia and New Zealand, with the

result that in Australia, the IWW established itself in 1910, becoming

the most influential radical labour tendency, albeit a minority one,

peaking at perhaps 2,000 members in 1916, surviving into the 1930s,

while in New Zealand, the IWW-influenced New Zealand Federation of

Labour (NZFL) was founded in 1911 and within a year, the “Red Fed”

numbered all the unionised miners and dockworkers in its ranks, had

15,000 members; given the small size of the New Zealand population, the

“Red Fed” was—in relative terms—fifteen times larger than the American

IWW; overshadowed by the reformist federation, New Zealand syndicalist

tradition would nevertheless fight a last-ditch defence during the great

waterfront lockout of 1955.

In other words, “Five Highlights” is largely a martyrology and a

museum-piece, a quasi-religious tragedy recited like an anarchist

rosary, thereby reducing the broad anarchist tradition to an honourable,

yet failed, minority tradition of romantically doomed resistance. This

convention must be replaced with a far broader, balanced narrative of

the movement’s triumphs and tragedies, one that demonstrates its

universal adaptability and its global reach, its overwhelming dominance

in the organised labour movements of many countries, its numerous

revolts against capital and the state, its breakthroughs in fighting for

labour rights, gender equality, and against racism and imperialism, its

successful revolutionary experiments in building a new society in the

shell of the old, its complexities, challenges, and numerous arguments

over tactics and strategies, and its multi-generational lines of

ideological and organisational descent, as well as its current

relevance.

Instead of this impoverished convention—which excludes the early

anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist trade unions of Cuba, Mexico,

Spain, the United States, and Uruguay in the 1870s and 1880s—I prefer to

speak of “Five Waves” of anarchist and anarcho- and revolutionary

syndicalist militancy that rose and fell in accordance with a more

general expansion and contraction of objective conditions for the

organised popular classes. In the first volume of Counter-power,[25]

linkages between the poorly-understood international First Wave of

1868–1894 and the far better studied Second Wave of 1895–1923, including

the Revolutions in Mexico, Russia and Ukraine, are discussed, and I will

explore them in greater depth in this essay. In the forth-coming Volume

2 of Counter-power,[26] we will examine the equally famous Third Wave of

1924–1949, which embraces the Revolutions in Manchuria and Spain and

which, together with the Second Wave, constitutes anarchism’s “Glorious

Period.” Discussion will also focus on the Fourth Wave of 1950–1989,

which peaked with the Cuban Revolution in 1952–1959 and again with the

New Left of 1968, and the current Fifth Wave, generated in 1989 by the

fall of the Berlin Wall, and the rising “horizontalist” challenge to

hoary old Soviet-style Marxist “communism” (in reality, authoritarian

state capitalism), right-wing dictatorship, and neoliberalism by the new

movements of the globalised popular classes. Our “Five Waves” theory is,

however, meant as a historical guide to high- and low-water marks, not

as an ironclad law of cyclical progress and reaction.

Firstly, our approach in Counter-power expands the history of the

broader anarchist movement beyond the limitations of the “Five

Highlights,” which presuppose an initial prominence through the French

CGT of the early 1900s, and a death on the barricades of Barcelona in

1939, with a belated last gasp in 1968. Secondly, it extends the

movement’s geographical range beyond the usual West European and North

American territories to the furthest reaches of the earth. By means of

this approach, adequately supported by primary research, we debunk the

common notion of “Spanish exceptionalism”: the false idea that only in

Spain did anarchism achieve anything like a mass movement of the popular

classes. We also show the universality of the anarchist message, a

message that, while it was adapted to local circumstance, and which,

like all political tendencies, has its aberrations and betrayals,

remained and remains largely coherent and intact across space and time,

relevant to oppressed people everywhere.

DEFINING ANARCHISM, ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM, AND REVOLUTIONARY

SYNDICALISM

This essay is very far from a total history of the movement. It merely

sketches the broader outlines of the Five Waves theory. The anarchist

texts quoted do not form a holy canon, but rather indicate how, at

decisive moments, the movement grappled with the complex question at the

heart of making a social revolution, which has vexed all leftist

revolutionaries: what is the relationship between the specific

revolutionary organisation and the mass of the exploited and oppressed.

It is also deliberately imbalanced, for it is unnecessary to rehash the

wealth of knowledge on, for instance, the French and Spanish anarcho-

and revolutionary syndicalist movements. Rather, the emphasis is on the

comparatively larger but understudied Latin American anarchist and

syndicalist movements, as well as the powerful and significant, yet

often unknown, movements in regions such as South-East Asia or North and

Southern Africa.

First, however, we need to define what precisely we mean by “anarchism”

and a vision of “libertarian communism,” although these are sometimes

held to be two distinct tendencies (a distinction we find too fine and

unconvincing). The term “anarchist-communism,” often opposed to plain

“anarchism” and also opposed to anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism,

has been used quite differently, in different circumstances, in

different eras. In Black Flame, we show that it is false to set up a

dichotomy between anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism and

“anarchist-communism”—we prefer the overarching term “anarchism.” As we

write: “Not only is this alleged distinction absent from the bulk of

anarchist writings until recently, but it also simply does not work as a

description of different tendencies within the broad anarchist

tradition. Moreover, the vast majority of people described in the

literature as ‘anarchist communists’ or ‘anarcho-communists’ championed

syndicalism… On the other hand, the majority of syndicalists endorsed

‘anarchist communism’ in the sense of a stateless socialist society

based on the communist principle of distribution according to need. It

is difficult to identify a distinct ‘anarchist-communist’ strategy or

tendency that can be applied as a useful category of anarchism.”

Instead, we develop a distinction within the broad anarchist tradition

between two main strategic approaches, which we call “mass anarchism”

and “insurrectionist anarchism.” Mass anarchism stresses that only mass

movements can create a revolutionary change in society and are typically

built by formal, directly-democratic organisations, such as

revolutionary syndicalist unions, through struggles about

bread-and-butter issues and immediate reforms. Anarchists must

participate in such movements, to radicalise and transform them into

levers of revolutionary change. Critically, reforms are won from below

and act as a “revolutionary gymnasium,” preparing the masses for taking

power in their own right. These victories must be distinguished from

reforms applied from above, which undermine popular movements. The

insurrectionist approach, in contrast, claims that reforms are illusory,

that even revolutionary syndicalist unions are willing or unwitting

bulwarks of the existing order, and that formal organisations are

automatically authoritarian. Consequently, insurrectionist anarchism

emphasises catalytic, armed action by small “affinity groups” (such

action called “propaganda by the deed”) as the most important means of

provoking a spontaneous revolutionary upsurge by the masses. What

distinguishes insurrectionist anarchism from mass anarchism is not

necessarily violence, as such, but its place in strategy. For

insurrectionist anarchism, propaganda by the deed, carried out by

conscious anarchists, is seen as a means of generating a mass movement;

for most mass anarchism, violence operates as a means of self-defence

for an existing mass movement.

By syndicalism, we mean a revolutionary anarchist trade union strategy,

which views unions—structured around participatory democracy and a

revolutionary vision of libertarian communism—as a key means to resist

the ruling class in the here-and-now, and as the nucleus of a new social

order of self-management, democratic economic planning, and universal

human community. The “anarcho-syndicalists” explicitly root their

politics and practices within the anarchist tradition, whereas the

“revolutionary syndicalists” avoid the anarchist label, either for

tactical reasons, or due to ignorance about the anarchist roots of

syndicalism. Both are simply variants of a basic revolutionary trade

union approach. That approach, as previously argued, was developed by

the anarchists of the First International. Anarcho-syndicalism and

revolutionary syndicalism are both part of a key mass anarchist strategy

of building revolutionary counter-power and revolutionary

counter-culture. The anarchist tradition, including all of anarcho- and

revolutionary syndicalism, is what we refer to as the “broad anarchist

tradition.”

In this essay, an “anarchist-communist” versus anarcho- or revolutionary

syndicalist binary will not be used to frame the issues discussed.

However, I will highlight at key points an important thread in anarchist

theory and strategy: the question of whether anarchists and syndicalists

need political groups dedicated to the promotion of the ideas of the

broad anarchist tradition, and, if so, what form such groups should

take. When the editors of the Paris-based, anarchist newspaper Dielo

Truda (Workers’ Cause) issued the Organisational Platform of the

Libertarian Communists in 1926, they were met by a storm of controversy.

Some anarchists saw the editors’ advocacy of a unified anarchist

political organisation with collective discipline as an attempt to

‘Bolshevise’ anarchism, and accused its primary authors, Pyotr Arshinov

and Nestor Makhno, of going over to classical Marxism. Nestor Makhno

(1889–1934), born a peasant in small-town south-eastern Ukraine, was

imprisoned in 1908 for terrorist actions, freed during the Russian

Revolution in 1917, and established the Group of Anarchist Communists

(GAK) and the Union of Peasants in his home town. Widely recognised as a

brilliant military strategist, the libertarian armed forces that he

established, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (RPAU),

successfully defeated the Central Powers, Ukrainian nationalist, and

White monarchist armies, before being betrayed by the Red Army. He died

in exile in Paris of tuberculosis.[27] Pyotr Arshinov, sometimes

rendered Archinov (1887–1937), was a Ukrainian anarchist metalworker,

who was jailed for 20 years for arms smuggling. He met Nestor Makhno in

prison, and went on to become a co-founder of the Alarm Confederation of

Anarchist Organisations (Nabat), and the key partisan historian of the

Makhnovist movement. Having escaped into exile in Paris, he returned to

Russia in 1935 where he was murdered during Stalin’s purges for

“attempting to restore anarchism in Russia.”

But Makhno’s and Arshinov’s idea, essentially, originates with Bakunin,

and may be called a Bakuninist dual organisationist strategy. Namely,

this is the idea that a revolutionary anarchist/syndicalist movement

requires two distinct types of organisation: revolutionary mass

organisations of the oppressed classes, open to all working and poor

people, including a revolutionary anarchist/syndicalist line to form the

bases of counterpower; and specific, exclusive, anarchist/syndicalist

political organisations, based on tight political agreement. The former

are the mass movements that can overthrow the system; the latter are the

specific political organisations that systematically promote

revolutionary anarchist/syndicalist ideas through engagement with the

popular classes, ranging from propaganda to political struggles within

the mass organisations.

Thus in Black Flame, we argue that the Platform and “Platformism” were

not a break with the anarchist tradition, but rather a fairly orthodox

restatement of well-established views. From the time of Bakunin, himself

part of the anarchist International Alliance of Socialist Democracy

operating within the First International, the great majority of

anarchists and anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalists advocated the

formation of specific anarchist political groups in addition to mass

organisations, such as syndicalist unions, peasant soviets, workers’

militia, neighbourhood assemblies, and others. In other words, most

supported organisational dualism: the mass organisation, such as a

union, must work in tandem with specifically anarchist and syndicalist

political organisations. Moreover, most believed that these groups

should have fairly homogeneous, principled, strategic, and tactical

positions, as well as some form of organisational discipline. Today, the

term “anarchist-communism” is sometimes used to refer to the Bakuninist

dual-organisationist approach. This is notable especially in Western

Europe and North America, whereas in regions such as Latin America,

terms such as Bakuninist and especifismo (specificity) are preferred.

Due, however, to the confusion surrounding the term

“anarchist-communism,” I have chosen to avoid the term wherever

possible.

The First Wave, 1868–1894: The Rise of the Broad

Anarchist/Syndicalist Movement in the Era of State and Capitalist

Expansion

Looking briefly at the family tree of the broad anarchist movement and

its watershed dates, the French Revolution of 1793 gave rise to radical

republicanism, which embraced both Jacobin authoritarianism on the

“right,” and Enrage libertarianism on the “left.” As a result of the

Pan-European Revolt of 1848, a distinct socialist current, containing

contradictory tendencies, branched out from radical republicanism, the

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

anarchist majority and Marxist minority currents within the First

International. Marxism would further divide into moderate Menshevik and

radical Bolshevik strands in the Russian Revolt of 1905–1906. Earlier,

in 1881, an anarcho-insurrectionary minority favouring armed struggle

had branched off to the left of the anarchist working class majority,

approximating in many respects, in its purism and immediatism, the tiny

“left communist,” “council communist,” and “sovietist” tendencies that

split to the left of Leninism in Germany, Italy, France, the

Netherlands, Bulgaria, and Britain during the period between 1918 and

1923.

The mass tendency of anarchism arose during an expansive phase of modern

capitalism in the 1860s, when imperialist pioneers began their surge

into the unconquered half of North America, and turned their greedy eyes

towards the material—and human—resources of Africa, Latin America,

China, and elsewhere. It arose from the ghettos of the

newly-industrialised proletariat, in the heartland of imperialism and

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

everyone from déclassé intellectuals to Mexican peasants with its raw

self-empowerment. The founding in 1864 of the International Working

Men’s Association (IWMA), or First International, realised all of the

pre-conditions for revolutionary anarchism/syndicalism: important

sections of the working class and peasantry had achieved an

internationalist, revolutionary consciousness, and created a

transnational federation of their own organisations, primarily based on

organised labour. The proto-anarchist, libertarian socialist mutualism

of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, son of a barrel-maker, rapidly established

itself as the major current in the IWMA, but was just as swiftly

supplanted by its natural matured expression: anarchism/syndicalism

under the influence of Mikhail Bakunin and his circle. The main

wellsprings of anarchist-communism within the IWMA were the IWMA’s

worker organisations themselves, aided and abetted by the International

Brotherhood (IB) established by Bakunin in 1864, and replaced in 1868 by

his International Alliance of Socialist Democracy (IASD).[28]

So it was that a First Wave of anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist

organisations sprang up: the Spanish Regional Federation (FRE), was

founded in 1870 by workers radicalised by IB agent Giuseppe Fanelli,

peaked at 60,000 members by 1873 when it ran several cities in southern

Spain during the Cantonalist Revolt, making it the largest section of

the First International, was revived in 1881 after the post-Revolt

repression as the Spanish Regional Labour Federation (FTRE), the largest

section of the anarchist “Black International,” but was repressed in

1889, revived in 1891 under the influence of the Spanish Regional

Anarchist Organisation (OARE) as the Pact of Union & Solidarity (PUS),

but repressed again, a cycle that would repeat until anarcho-syndicalism

rooted itself intractably in 1910 with the foundation of the famous

National Confederation of Labour (CNT).[29] The early syndicalist

Proletarian Circle (CP) in Mexico founded in 1869, became the Grand

Circle of Workers (GCO) the following year with a significant anarchist

presence, growing to 10,000 members within five years, then a parallel

Grand Circle of Mexican Workers (GCOM) was established in 1876, with the

anarchists in control of both organisations, representing the bulk of

the organised Mexican working class, by 1881 (the CGO attained 15,000

members, while the GCOM attained 50,000 members and affiliated to the

“Black International”). Both were repressed in 1882, but the GCOM was

revived as the Grand Circle of Free Labour (GCOL) in the early 1900s,

but was swiftly crushed, the syndicalist movement only reviving in 1912

during the Mexican Revolution.[30] The Regional Federation of the

Eastern Republic of Uruguay (FRROU) was founded in 1872, affiliated to

the anarchist wing of the First International, and was followed in 1885

by an anarcho-syndicalist Worker’s Federation (FO).[31] In Cuba, the

syndicalist Artisan’s Central Council (JCA) was founded in 1883,

becoming reorganised as the Labourer’s Circle (CT) in 1885, followed by

a string of initiatives culminating in the establishment of the

anarcho-syndicalist Cuban Labour Confederation (CTC) in 1895.[32] And

lastly, in the US, the anarcho-syndicalist Central Labor Union (CLU) in

was founded in 1883 (in anticipation of what would become a key

anarchist strategy in the twentieth century, the CLU was established by

and worked closely with an anarchist-insurrectionist “political”

organisation, the International Working Person’s Association, IWPA,

which was affiliated to the anarchist “Black International,” and grew to

about 5,000 members, surviving in much-reduced form until the First

World War).[33] The short-lived Northern Workers’ Union (NWU)

established in Russia in 1878 was arguably part of this First Wave:

echoing anarchists like Bakunin, the NWU demanded the abolition of the

state and its replacement by a federation of industrial and agrarian

communes, but took what could be seen later as an essentially De

Leonist[34] line in proposing the parallel tactic of working-class

domination of a constituent assembly.

The significance of this First Wave of anarcho- and revolutionary

syndicalist organising needs to be underlined—not least by comparing the

sheer size of these working class organisations to the meagre 1,000

members world-wide who were affiliated to the Marxist rump of the First

International at the time. Firstly, it is important to note that of the

five countries where this First Wave entrenched itself, three were later

to experience revolutions with significant anarchist involvement. In

Cuba, the anarcho-syndicalist movement dominated the working class for

50 years, until the late 1920s, with a significant revival in the late

1930s and again in the mid–1940s, until its key, but usually ignored,

role in the unions during the Cuban Revolution of 1952–1959. In Mexico,

the movement was involved in the armed peasant risings in 1869 and in

1878, dominated the unions in the 1910s, and was the primary engine

behind the revolutionary peak of 1915–1916. In Spain, the movement had a

continuous trade union presence, in the FRE of the 1860s, continuing on

in five different organisational incarnations, each suppressed in turn,

until the formation of the famous National Confederation of Labour (CNT)

in 1910, and onwards into the 1930s, when it became the most important

revolutionary player in Spain. In Uruguay, the movement dominated

organised labour in the early twentieth century, and remained a strong

enough minority current to re-establish the dominant union centre in the

1960s, and to engage in guerrilla warfare and underground student work

against the state between 1968 and 1976. In the USA, however,

revolutionary syndicalism never grew to be anything more than a militant

minority tendency, overshadowed by more reformist unions. In Imperial

Russia, the movement was swiftly crushed, and it would take more than a

generation to establish a minority anarchist presence in the trade

unions there.[35]

Secondly, the presence of non-European organisations in this First Wave

undermines the convention that anarcho-syndicalism—the application of

anarchist federalism and direct democracy to the trade union

movement—was a “French invention” of the 1890s, and emphasises its

adaptability and applicability to countries as industrialised and

sovereign as the USA or as agrarian and colonised as Cuba. In other

words, it arose in both the global North and the global South, in

concentrations of expansive industrial and commercial agricultural

growth—but not among the declining artisanal classes, as Marxists often

claim. Its social vectors were those of the intense upheaval created by

a massive, constant movement of workers around the world to satisfy new

growth, and the loss of political control experienced by the old landed

oligarchies, the latifundistas, resulting from the rise of a modernising

bourgeoisie and state bureaucracy, the inevitable corollary of which was

the rise of a militant, industrial proletariat. Politically, anarchism

arose during this First Wave period in response to the insufficiencies,

authoritarianism, and reformism of both radical republicanism and

Marxist socialism, and as an organised, mass-based corrective to the

vanguard adventurism of narodnik[36] populist terrorism.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was a dramatic, innovative, two-month-long

popular insurrection, in which several Proudhonists, alongside

Blanquists[37] and others, ruled the city after the bourgeoisie fled

from their guilt over initiating the disastrous Franco-Prussian War.

Although the Commune was not an anarchist affair, its salient feature,

that of workers’ control of the city, was anticipated by the earlier,

short-lived Bakuninist uprisings in Lyons and Marseilles. The fall of

Paris and the murder of approximately 20,000 Communards by the

reactionaries resulted in the First Wave break, the driving underground

of most European revolutionary organisations, and the subsequent split

of the First International into an anarchist majority—based on the

massed strength of the First Wave syndicalist unions—which survived

until 1877, as well as a tiny, short-lived Marxist rump of perhaps only

1,000 adherents, which dissolved in practice after only a year. The

defeat also saw a huge Communard Diaspora radiate out from France and

settle in Belgium, Britain, Spain, Italy, the United States, and

French-speaking Québec, where they often had a significant radicalising

influence on the nascent working class organisations and where many of

them turned to anarchism/syndicalism. Meanwhile, the Spanish anarchists

gained valuable experience, as the 60,000–strong, anarcho-syndicalist

Spanish Regional Workers’ Federation (FORE) ran its own “communes” in

the southern cities of Granada, Seville, Málagar, Alcoy, and San Lucar

de Barramed, and co-operated on local communes with federalist

“intransigents” in Grenada, Seville, and Valencia, during the

Cantonalist Revolt of 1873–1874.[38] While the experience with these

communes grounded all future, large-scale, anarchist revolutionary

projects, the early “social cantonalist” model was a narrow one, focused

on the FORE’s defence and provisioning of single cities, with no

overarching revolutionary plan. There were, nonetheless, significant

levels of social change, including measures of land reform and wealth

taxation, and large-scale peasant mobilisations, including land

seizures.

Meanwhile, insurrectionist strategies and tactics were tested by armed

anarchist uprisings against the newly consolidated Italian state in 1874

and 1877 and they failed because of their lack of social support. The

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

genuinely international attempt to organise the socially-conscious

working class, although its torch was soon taken up by the

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

by the likes of Pyotr Kropotkin[39] in 1881, the year of the

assassination of Tsar Alexander II by narodniks. Pyotr Kropotkin

(1842–1921), was a Russian prince, polymath geographer, zoologist,

economist, and evolutionary theorist who turned his back on privilege to

become Bakunin’s ideological heir and champion of anarchism. Kropotkin’s

The Great French Revolution, 1789–1793 (1909) is the definitive

libertarian communist analysis, while his books The Conquest of Bread

(1892), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), and Fields, Factories

and Workshops (1912) remain among the most accessible and widely read

anarchist texts. The Black International included the anarcho- and

revolutionary syndicalists of the CGO and the body that merged with it,

the Mexican Workers’ Grand Circle (CGOM), representing the majority of

organised workers in Mexico by 1880, and the Central Labor Union (CLU)

in Chicago. The Black International, however, later took an increasingly

purist stance, became dominated by the minority anarcho-insurrectionist

tendency, and only lasted until about 1893. More generally, the radical

working class movement entered a period of defeat that saw an anarchist

retreat from mass organisation, while terrorism became vogue for all

revolutionary tendencies, and capitalism contracted with two great

depressions, the last in 1893. The Black International cultivated an

attitude of dangerous clandestinity and, although the American CLU, for

example, continued to operate until 1909, it is primarily remembered

today for the 1886 state murder of the Haymarket Martyrs, its militants

who are recalled worldwide each year during the commemoration of May

Day.[40]

THE BAKUNINIST RESPONSE: THE “INVISIBLE PILOTS” STEER THE SECRET

REVOLUTIONARY ORGANISATION

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

Secret Revolutionary Organisation of the International Brotherhood.[41]

He laid out the ground-rules for the International Brotherhood (IB)

founded that year. The Programme reflected Bakunin’s rejection of an

authoritarian statist solution to the social revolution, “revolutionary

in the Jacobin sense,” as he put it, an indication of rising tensions

between anarchists and Marxists in the IWMA at that time. After spelling

out the principles of the anarchist revolution, the Programme went on to

address organisational matters following the dissolution of the

nation-state and its armed forces, bureaucracy, courts, clergy, and

private property. Anticipating the anarcho-syndicalist replacement of

the state with a decentralised administration of material production and

consumption, the Programme said that all church and state properties

would be put at the disposal of the “federated Alliance of all labour

associations, which Alliance will constitute the Commune.” A

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

barricades,” comprised of mandated, accountable and revocable delegates

from each defensive barricade, would “choose separate executive

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

revolutionary administration.” This administration would be, according

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

spread by revolutionary propagandists across all old statist boundaries

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

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

of dictatorship and supervisory leadership authority.”

The Programme discussed the specific role of the anarchist revolutionary

organisation in advancing the social revolution:

But if that revolutionary alliance is to be established and if the

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

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

revolution, an agency must be found to articulate this singularity of

thought and of revolutionary action… That agency should be the secret

worldwide association of the International Brotherhood. That association

starts from the basis that revolutions are never made by individuals,

nor even by secret societies. They are, so to speak, self-made, produced

by the logic of things, by the trend of events and actions. They are a

long time hatching in the deepest recesses of the popular masses’

instinctive consciousness, and then they explode, often seeming to have

been detonated by trivialities. All that a well-organised [secret]

society can do is, first, to play midwife to the revolution by spreading

among the masses ideas appropriate to the masses’ instincts, and to

organise, not the Revolution’s army—for the people must at all times be

the army—but a sort of revolutionary general staff made up of committed,

energetic and intelligent individuals who are above all else true

friends of the people and not presumptuous braggarts, with a capacity

for acting as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and the

people’s instincts.”

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

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

social revolution, but is nevertheless clearly constituted as a distinct

organisation, albeit submerged within the social struggle.

In his International Revolutionary Society or Brotherhood, published in

1865,[42] Bakunin had spelled out the internal dynamics of such an

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

members, following an exhaustive account of the revolutionary’s

understanding and practical application of equality. “He [sic] must

understand that an association with a revolutionary purpose must

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

for the sake of the cause it serves and for effectiveness of action, as

well as in the interests of the security of every one of its members,

has to be subject to strict discipline, which is in any case merely the

distillation and pure product of the reciprocal commitment made by all

of the membership to one another, and that, as a result, it is a point

of honour and a duty that each of them should abide by it.” This

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

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

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

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

subsequently been much criticised for the clandestine nature of his

plotting, which has been presumed by some anarchists to be authoritarian

because of its secretive operations and requirements of discipline.

In light of such criticism, it must firstly be recognised that

repressive conditions required secrecy. Secondly, the discipline of

which he wrote was not an externally imposed one, but a self-discipline

to freely abide by commonly-agreed-upon commitments. Thirdly, Bakunin’s

IB had the practical result of helping to generate the first anarchist,

mass-based, revolutionary organisations among the working class, from

Spain to Uruguay: namely, the anarcho-syndicalist unions. In 1877,

influenced by Bakunin’s arguments, a German-language Anarcho-Communist

Party (AKP) was founded in Berne, Switzerland, one of the first of

scores of specific, self-identified anarchist/syndicalist organisations

around the world. The key question raised by Bakunin, that of the role

of specific anarchist/syndicalist political organisations, was to remain

at the centre of a core debate within the anarchist/syndicalist movement

over the ensuing 150 years.

The Second Wave, 1895–1923: Consolidation of Syndicalism and Specific

Anarchist Organisation in a Time of War and Reaction

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

opening up of the African colonies and significant parts of Asia to

imperialist exploitation, and a Second Wave of anarcho- and

revolutionary syndicalist organising, larger than the first, exploded on

to the world scene. An oft-forgotten precursor to this resurgence was

the National Labour Secretariat (NAS) of the Netherlands, founded in

1893, which dominated the Dutch labour movement for a decade and peaked

at about 18,700 members in 1895. In 1905, a Federation of Freedom-loving

Communists (FVC)—later renamed the Country-wide Federation of

Freedom-loving Communists (LFVC)—was founded in the Netherlands, and

worked alongside the NAS, but the syndicalists were forced by the

state’s move towards an early version of the welfare state to cede

ground to the moderate Netherlands Union of Trade Unions (NVV). The NAS

experienced somewhat of a revival in 1919–1922 with a membership of

30,000 climbing to 51,000—before Bolshevik competition eclipsed it. This

Second Wave expansion took two primary forms: anarcho-syndicalism which

explicitly recognised its anarchist roots established itself across much

of Latin America; and revolutionary syndicalism which obscured its

roots, spread across much of the English-speaking world.

Latin American anarcho-syndicalism was largely modelled on, but was a

more explicitly anarchist version of, the General Confederation of

Labour (CGT) of France, established in 1895. The model proved attractive

because anarchist militants of the Federation of Labour Exchanges

(FBT)—a horizontal network of labour hiring halls and worker social

centres founded in 1892, spreading across France and into

French-colonised Algeria and French West Africa, that often survived

until independence in the 1960s[43]—had established the CGT by merger in

1902 with the primary union centre, the National Federation of Trade

Unions (FNS), meaning that the CGT was based on the local democracy of

its FBT sections. In France, this powerful and worker-responsive

bottom-up structure had lead to a dramatic growth, with the CGT boasting

of 203,000 dues-paying members by 1906. Especially influential was its

ringing Charter of Amiens (1906), which famously declared that the

“trade union, today a fighting organisation, will in the future be an

organisation for production and distribution and the basis of social

reorganisation.” However, the CGT was expressly “apolitical,” a weakness

that would later allow Marxists and other reformists to hijack it.[44]

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

direct-democratic practices of the French and Spanish communes, and

anticipated the soviets of the Russian Revolution: the 1903 Macedonian

Revolt and the 1905–1907 Russian Revolt. In Macedonia, anarchist

guerrillas were among those who established communes in Strandzha and

Kruševo,[45] while anarchists were involved in establishing the first

soviets in Russia, in St. Petersburg and Moscow.[46] The Russian Revolt

also saw the establishment in occupied Poland of what is arguably the

longest-living, international anarchist organisation, the Anarchist

Black Cross (ABC)—originally the Anarchist Red Cross, a splinter off the

Political Red Cross—a prisoner’s aid network which has member sections

in 64 countries today.[47] These jolts helped light the fuse on the

formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the USA in

1905, establishing an “industrial revolutionary” syndicalist organising

model that swept the Anglophone world in particular, including branches

in Australia, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa, but also

in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Germany, the Ukraine, Siberia, and

elsewhere.[48] The IWW still exists today as a fighting “red”

union—although usually as a transverse rank-and-file network across

competing unions—with branches in countries as diverse as South Africa

and Russia. The IWW Preamble was as influential in the Anglophone world

as the CGT’s Charter was in the Hispanophone world, because of the

clarity and intransigence of its class politics. According to the

Preamble,

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

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

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

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

go on until the workers of the world organise as a class, take

possession of the means of production and abolish the wage system. It is

the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.

The army of production must be organised, not only for everyday struggle

with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall

have been overthrown. By organising industrially we are forming the

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

The 1905–1907 Russian Revolt—and especially the exultation by colonised

peoples all over the world at the spectacle of the defeat of a “white”

empire by a “yellow” empire—had a direct impact on the radicalisation of

social struggles in the Far East. Anarchism implanted itself in Japan

from 1906, challenging the second-class status of both women and the

Burakumin outcasts who worked with meat products—and the divine status

of the Emperor. Initially embroiled in attempts to assassinate the

Emperor, and bloodily persecuted for supposedly causing the devastating

1923 earthquake, the movement finally consolidated in 1926 with the

formation of the All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labour Unions

(Zenkoku Jiren), the third-largest of Japan’s labour federations, after

the moderates and the Marxists, which rose to 16,300 members in 1931,

when an explicitly “anarcho-syndicalist” faction, the Libertarian

Federal Council of Labour Unions of Japan (Nihon Jikyō) split off,

claiming 3,000 members. These numbers exclude the ethnic Korean

syndicalist unions in Japan, the various “black societies” (anarchist

political groups), and the anarchist tendencies within the Burakumin and

peasant movements—all of which were suppressed by the fanatically

militarised state from 1934 onwards—despite maintaining a twilight

presence that survived into the post-war era.[49]

In China, where the movement was first activated in the early 1900s in

the Portuguese enclave of Macau (near British-occupied Hong Kong, which

became an entry point for IWW ideas) by deported Portuguese anarchists,

the nascent anarchist movement threw itself alongside republican forces

into the overthrow of the royal dynasty in 1911—the shock of which

echoed across Asia. Shifu, the nom de guerre of Liu Szu-fu (1884–1915),

was the leading Chinese anarchist, who modelled his views on Kropotkin,

founded the Society of Anarchist Communist Comrades, and was the pioneer

of Chinese syndicalism: the anarcho-syndicalists took the honours of

establishing the first modern Chinese trade unions, with the

11,000–strong Teahouse Labour Union in the southern port city of

Guangzhou in 1918; Guangzhou would remain an anarchist stronghold for at

least a decade after the 1921–1923 period when the entire city was run

as an anarchist commune. Further afield in the landmass of China,

anarcho-syndicalism initially established itself by 1921 as the majority

tendency within the Shanghai-based Confederation of Labour Associations

(GLH), which had provincial affiliates as dispersed as the 5,000–strong

syndicalist Hunan Workers’ Association (HLH). Black Societies, anarchist

schools, and peasant associations flourished, but the flirtations of

some leading figures with the heterogeneous Guomindang proved fruitless

and the movement was suppressed from 1927 as the nationalists

consolidated their hold on the cities. By the time the “Maoist” Marxists

(Mao having been an anarchist in his youth), defeated the nationalists

in 1949, the remaining 10,000 syndicalists had to choose between

absorption into the official communist union federation—or exile in

reactionary Taiwan.[50]

In Korea, the movement initially arose as a result of radical migrant

labour exchanges with Japan, but truly consolidated after the 1910

invasion of the peninsula by Imperial Japan. Despite the proliferation

of Black Societies and even of syndicalist trade unions such as the

Wonsan General Trade Union and the Free Trade Union in the 1920s, it was

in exile across the border in Manchuria that the Korean anarchist

excelled. There, in 1929, in a long, mountainous valley, they achieved

the least-known anarchist revolution, establishing the Shinmin free

zone, based on village direct-democracy and defended by a peasant

militia (I will detail this in the Third Wave). When Shinmin was

defeated by direct Japanese invasion in 1931, the Korean anarchists

fought a long retreat alongside their Chinese comrades, and both

guerrilla units and some syndicalist unions survived into the post-war

era.[51]

The Russian Revolt also resulted in a London gathering of exiled Russian

anarchists, including the anarchist theorists Pyotr Kropotkin, Maria

Isidine, and Daniil Novomirsky to discuss an organised response. Maria

Isidine, the nom de plume of Maria Isidorovna Goldsmith (1873–1933), was

a Russian-French scientist and anarchist, and an advocate of an extreme

anti-organisationist—svobodnikist—position. Daniil Novomirsky, the nom

de guerre of Yakob Kirilovsky (1882–193?), the foremost Russian

anarcho-syndicalist of his Second Wave generation, was sent to a labour

camp in Siberia in 1905, but escaped and settled in New York where he

became a prominent pro-organisationist—burevesnikist—anarchist

journalist. Novomirsky argued that, in order to fight reaction, all

“anti-authoritarian socialists should unite into a Workers’ Anarchist

Party. The next step would be the formation of a vast union of all

revolutionary elements under the black flag of the International

Workers’ Anarchist Party.” Such a party required theoretical unity to

enable “unity of action.” It would be “the only revolutionary party,

unlike the conservative parties which seek to preserve the established

political and economic order, and the progressive parties [like the

Social Democratic Labour Party: both its Menshevik and Bolshevik

tendencies] which seek to reform the state in one way or another, so as

to reform the corresponding economic relations, for anarchists aim to

destroy the state, in order to do away with the established economic

order and reconstruct it on new principles.” Novomirsky said such a

“Party” was “the free union of individuals struggling for a common goal”

and as such required “a clear programme and tactics” that were distinct

from other currents. It needed to “participate in the revolutionary

syndicalist movement [as] the central objective of our work, so that we

can make that movement anarchist,” and to boycott all state structures,

substituting them with “workers’ communes with soviets of workers’

deputies, acting as industrial committees, at their head.”

In 1907, at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, 80

delegates from Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bohemia, Britain, Bulgaria,

France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Serbia,

Switzerland, and the United States met and debated anarcho- and

revolutionary syndicalism and the role of specific anarchist/syndicalist

organisations.[52] The individualists, who opposed all formal

organisation, were roundly defeated by the organisationists, the key

resolution being that “anarchy and organisation, far from being

incompatible as has sometimes been claimed, are mutually complimentary

and illuminate each other, the very precept of anarchy residing in the

free organisation of the producers [the syndicalist influenced trade

unions].” The congress further hailed the “collective action” and

“concerted movement,” stating that “[t]he organisation of militant

forces would assure propaganda of fresh wings and could not but hasten

the penetration of the ideas of federalism and revolution into the

working class.” The Amsterdam Congress also agreed that labour

organisation did not preclude political organisation and urged that “the

comrades of every land should place on their agenda the creation of

anarchist groups and the federation of existing groups.” As a result,

participating delegates helped establish a plethora of new anarchist

specific organisations. These anarchist federations, some of which were

affiliated to the “Amsterdam International,” worked in parallel to (and

often inside) the anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist unions. One of

the best examples is the Anarchist Communist Alliance (ACA), founded in

France in 1911—its descendants in the 2010s are the Anarchist Federation

(FA), founded in 1945, and the recent FA splinter the Co-ordination of

Anarchist Groups (CGA)—as well as the anarchist Libertarian Communist

Organisation (OCL) and Libertarian Alternative (AL).[53]

This powerful shift towards the adoption of Bakuninist-type,

specifically anarchist/syndicalist organisations, within the context of

mass (including anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist) organisations

and movements, was driven by the likes of the Argentine Regional

Workers’ Federation (FORA), founded as the country’s primary labour

centre in 1901, which adopted anarchist-communism as its goal in 1904

and provided the template for similar Second Wave anarcho-syndicalist

federations across Latin America, almost all named in echo of the

FORA.[54] The FORA totally dominated Argentine organised labour for two

decades. It first converted to revolutionary syndicalism its socialist

rival, the Argentine Regional Workers’ Confederation (CORA), then

absorbed it in 1914, leading to the hardline “anarchist-communists”

splitting off and forming the FORA of the 5^(th) Congress (FORA-V), and

leaving a rump French CGT-styled “apolitical” anarcho-syndicalist FORA

of the 9^(th) Congress (FORA-IX), which had peaked at perhaps 120,000

members in 1919. The FORA-IX was absorbed into a new union centre in

1922, which later became Marxist-dominated, but the FORA-V, which peaked

at 200,000 members in 1922, reverted to the name FORA and maintained a

continuous, if tenuous, presence through decades of dictatorship from

1930, until today. And this is not to mention the MTWIU, which

established its Latin American headquarters on the Buenos Aires docks in

1919—or the constellation of specific organisations such as the

FORA-IX-affiliated Argentine Libertarian Alliance (ALA), the

FORA-V-affiliated Anarcho-Communist Port-workers’ Group (ACAOP), the

5,000–strong autonomous Resistance Society of the Port-workers of the

Capital (SROPC), and scores of women’s organisations and resistance

societies.

Inspired by the FORA, anarcho-syndicalism spread rapidly across the

“Southern Cone” of Latin America. The Uruguayan Regional Workers’

Organisation (FORU) was founded in 1905, drawing on 40 years of

anarchist organisational experience dating back to the

anarcho-syndicalist FRROU section of the First International from 1872.

The the FORU peaked at 90,000 members in 1911 as Uruguay’s dominant

labour federation—with a powerful “Feminine Section” (this was not a

gender ghetto, but rather a vanguard, reflecting the dominance of women

in the textile sector which was at the forefront of industrialisation

across Latin America; and the Feminine Section model was replicated by

all anarcho-syndicalist unions on the continent). Although the FORU’s

dominance was undercut by an early form of welfare state, and from 1923

by the incursion of Bolshevism into the workers’ movement, the movement

survived the imposition of dictatorship in 1930 and established an

Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) in 1938 that appears to have

survived until 1941—being powerfully revived in 1956.[55]

The Brazilian Regional Workers’ Federation (FORB) was founded in Rio in

1906, but within months, it was replaced by a Brazilian Labour

Confederation (COB) at national level and a Workers’ Federation of Rio

de Janeiro (FORJ) at state level. Although revolutionary syndicalism

rather than a more explicit anarcho-syndicalism, dominated Brazilian

labour during the Second Wave, the sheer size of Brazil meant the COB

never achieved true national status and it folded in 1909, being revived

between 1913 and 1915. However its constituent regional federations, the

FORJ, the Local Federation of Labour of Santos (FOLS), the Workers’

Federation of the state of Rio Grande do Sul (FORGS), and the powerful

Workers’ Federation of São Paulo (FOSP), predated and outlived the COB:

the FOSP was still São Paulo state’s most important union centre by 1931

under the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship.[56]

In 1905, anarcho-syndicalists formed the Chilean Labourers’ Federation

(FTCh), which was reformed in 1912 along FORA lines into the Chilean

Regional Workers’ Federation (FORCh). The FORCh attained a peak of

60,000 members by 1921—but operated alongside the Chilean IWW which was

a significant labour centre in its own right with 25,000 members by

1920.[57] The Paraguayan Regional Workers’ Organisation (FORPa), founded

in 1906, was absorbed in 1916 as the Paraguayan Regional Workers’ Centre

(CORP), Paraguay’s main labour federation, but which in the 1920s lost

ground to the Marxists. In 1928, Paraguayan anarchists established among

the peasantry a Nationalist Revolutionary Alliance (ANR) the objective

of which was “to establish Paraguay as a Communal Republic, part,

ultimately, of a ‘Federal Union of the Peoples of Latin America.’” But

an anarchist insurrection in 1931 was crushed and the unions outlawed,

so syndicalists played a role in the underground Workers’ Trade Union

Reorganisation Council (CORS) until all resistance was suppressed by a

joint Marxist and fascist coup in 1936 which laid the groundwork for the

pro-Nazi dictatorship of Higinio Morínigo in 1940.[58]

On the Caribbean Rim, the Havana Labour Federation (FOH) was a

reformation in 1921 of the moribund Cuban Workers’ Confederation (CTC),

founded in 1895, and was a forerunner of the Cuban National Labour

Confederation (CNOC) which was founded in 1925 on Spanish CNT lines with

200,000 members, Cuba’s main labour federation.[59] The Mexican Regional

Workers’ Organisation (FORM) was a reorganisation in 1915 of the House

of the World Worker (COM), founded in 1912 but with a resilient

organisational heritage stretching back to the 1860s, Mexico’s main

labour federation with 150,000 members, and rebuilt as the General

Confederation of Labour (CGT) in 1921, which broke apart a decade

later.[60] In the late Third Wave, the Venezuelan Regional Workers’

Federation (FORV) was formed—I will address this later.

In the Andes, the Peruvian Regional Workers’ Federation (FORPe), founded

in 1913, was replaced in 1918 with the Local Workers’ Federation of Lima

(FOL), which became Peru’s dominant labour federation.[61] The Colombian

Workers’ Federation (FOC) was founded in 1925 as the national Colombian

trade union central.[62] In Bolivia, the Local Workers’ Federation (FOL)

of La Paz was founded in 1927 as the reformation of a body founded in

1908, and in the same year, established its formidable Feminine Workers’

Federation (FOF). The FOL was reformed in 1930 on FORA lines as the

Bolivian Regional Workers’ Confederation (CORB). Although the CORB was

suppressed by dictatorship in 1936, its FOL/FOF core survived, the

latter until 1964.[63] In Ecuador, the Guayas Workers’ Regional

Federation (FORG) was established by 1928 by the anarcho-syndicalist

current in the 30,000–strong Ecuadoran Regional Federation of Labour

(FTRE), founded in 1922. The FORG was suppressed by dictatorship in

1934.[64]

On the Iberian Peninsula, the movement matured with the formation of

Spain’s massive National Confederation of Labour (CNT), founded in

1910,[65] and the relatively larger National Workers’ Union (UON) of

Portugal, founded in 1914.[66] The CNT was a revival of a long line of

Spanish anarcho-syndicalist labour federations, stretching back to the

“grandmother” of them all, the FRE founded in 1868, and rose to 2

million members in 1936. The UON, founded in 1914 with 50,000 members,

changed its name to the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) in 1919

when it peaked at 90,000 members, but was suppressed in 1926 by the

militarist regime that survived until the “Carnation Revolution” of

1974—which had a devastating effect on anarchist organisations in the

Portuguese sphere of influence, such as Mozambique (where an anarchist

Revolutionary League had been established in the early 1900s).

In 1910, the first great anarchist-influenced revolution broke out in

Mexico, providing the template to be replicated in other upheavals, as

to how anarchist-specific organisations, anarcho- and revolutionary

syndicalist unions, and armed worker-peasant militia could work in

parallel, and sometimes in concert: in the north, the eastern seaboard

oil-fields, and Baja California, the Mexican section of the IWW and the

Magónistas of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM)[67] worked together.

Ricardo Flores Magón (1874–1922) was the leading figure behind the PLM,

which he turned into an armed insurgent anarchist organisation whose

militants initiated the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Living much of his

life in exile, he died apparently of diabetes in an American prison. In

Mexico City and the the central Mexican states, the

anarchists/syndicalists of the Struggle (Lucha) group worked with the

50,000–strong anarcho-syndicalist House of the World Worker (COM)—the

direct descendant of the First Wave Proletarian Circle—defended by its

Red Battalions; while south of the capital in Morelos state, Emiliano

Zapata’s deeply anarchist-influenced Industrial Union of North and South

America (UIANS), defended by its Liberation Army of the South (ELS),

based on guerrilla militia of 200 to 300 fighters each, numbering 70,000

in total by 1915. This Mexican Revolution also illustrated how things

could go awfully wrong. Despite the fact that the interventionist USA

had its imperialist intentions diverted by a 1917 entry into the First

World War, the Magónistas in the north failed to link up with the

Zapatistas in the south, and the anarcho-syndicalists of the COM

dramatically failed their watershed test of class solidarity, with some

in the COM leadership breaking ranks with the Zapatista peasantry, and

sending COM Red Battalions to fight the ELS, on behalf of the statist

Constitutionalists. This class betrayal provoked a massive rupture in

the COM, with revolutionaries siding with the Zapatistas in the rural

areas and the IWW in the oil fields, and the reformists with the

treacherous leadership. In disgust, some of the Lucha anarchists, such

as Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama (1880–1967), broke with the COM, by then

reorganised as the FORM. Originally a middle-class lawyer, Soto y Gama

had been jailed for writing against the dictatorship in the PLM

newspaper, became involved with the Lucha organisation and then the ELS,

then backed the Zapatistas. But the fragmented Revolution never

consolidated its libertarian zones. It sputtered and finally died after

ten exhausting years, gutted by the Constitutionalists’ ability to

divide and rule the working class and peasantry. A disillusioned Soto y

Gama founded the libertarian reformist National Agrarian Party (PNA) in

1920, serving in parliament until 1928. He later wrote the seminal work,

The Agrarian Revolution of the South and Emiliano Zapata, Its Leader.

The internationalist aspect of this new wave of anarcho- and

revolutionary syndicalism found expression in the 1913 Syndicalist

Conference in London (the British syndicalist movement was at its peak,

with the Industrial Syndicalist Education League, ISEL, boasting 150,000

members, while the IWW-influenced Irish Transport & General Workers’

Union, ITGWU, in occupied Ireland, had some 25,000 members and would

peak at 120,000 members in 1917),[68] drawing delegates from trade union

federations in Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Britain, Cuba, Denmark,

France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden. American IWW

and Russian observers also attended, while Austria adhered without

representation. The congress established an International Syndicalist

Information Bureau. Although disrupted by World War I, this conference

laid the initial groundwork for the formation of the International

Workers’ Association (IWA) in Berlin in 1922. Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist

historian hostile to anarchism, was forced to admit that “in 1905–14 the

Marxist left had in most countries been on the fringe of the

revolutionary movement [and] the main body of Marxists had been

identified with a de facto non-revolutionary social democracy, while the

bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much

closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of

classical Marxism.”[69]

The most powerful anarchist movement in Eastern Europe was the Bulgarian

movement, which rose in the 1870s, blooded itself with its valiant

defence of Macedonian freedom from the Ottoman Empire in 1903, and which

established its first trade unions in 1910. The Federation of

Anarchist-Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB) which was founded in 1919 had

branches across the country with youth groups in every large school and

was a multifaceted armed force to be reckoned with—the third-largest

organisation on the left after the agrarians then the Marxists— by the

time it resisted the 1923 fascist coup, an extermination campaign in

which perhaps 35,000 leftists were slaughtered. By 1931, the rural

syndicalist Vlassovden Confederation had 130 sections nationwide, and

the urban Anarcho-Syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (ASNKR)

embraced 40 unions (excluding the IWA-affiliated Bulgarian Confederation

of Autonomous Unions). The movement fought against the 1934 fascist

coup, then as an underground force against the Nazi and later the Soviet

invasions, and by liberation in 1945, the FAKB newspaper Rabotnicheska

Misal (Workers’ Thought) had a circulation of 60,000 (at a time when the

communist Bulgarian Worker’s Party had only 15,000 members)—before being

suppressed by a cynical Marxist-fascist-agrarian alliance.

The Second Wave was not broken on the rocks of the First World War, into

which the CGT, now dominated by reformists, was drawn. The imperialist

powers had initiated the bloodbath because capital was in steep decline

and beset on all sides by a militant working class with a lot of

remaining momentum. Despite the scale of the slaughter, the conflict

unleashed two other Revolutions—Russia and Ukraine—both of which drank

deeply from the well of working class self-organisation before the

counter-revolution unlatched the guillotine-blade. The events in Russia

illustrated the danger of anarchists withdrawing from the battle into

purist ivory towers, while simultaneously proving Bakunin’s predictions

about the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be chillingly

correct, in stark contrast to the anarchist-flavoured sovietism of the

working class. The Ukrainian Revolution showed the efficiency of an

innovative, armed, anarchist struggle, based on conventional armed

forces using rapid-deployment shock tactics. Out of the original

Makhnovist detachment (the Chernoye Sotnia, a cavalry unit of 500 with

machine-gun carts) arose the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine

(RPAU), which, by December 1919, was just over 110,000 strong, divided

into four Corps, consisting of 83,000 infantry, 20,000 cavalry, assault

groups, artillery, reconnaissance, medical, and other detachments,

including armoured cars and seven armoured trains, and was headquartered

at Aleksandrovsk, Nikopol, Yekaterinoslav, and Crimea, but swept like a

storm across south-eastern Ukraine.[70]

The true innovation, however, was not so much in battlefield tactics,

but in the fact that the RPAU forces were politically pluralistic

volunteers (including anarchists, social revolutionaries, Maximalists,

non-party fighters and even dissident Bolsheviks), who elected their

officers and, most importantly, secured the backing of the populace by

redistributing the landed gentry’s estates to the peasants. The forces

also submitted themselves to four Congresses of Peasants, Workers, and

Insurgents, which set the general socio-political direction of the

movement. In addition, they were linked, more organically than formally,

to Nestor Makhno’s Anarcho-Communist Group (GAK) of Gulai-Polye, to the

Alarm Confederation of Anarchist Organisations (Nabat), founded in

Khar’kov, Kursk, and other centres in 1918, as well as to

directly-democratic urban and rural communes, anarcho-/ revolutionary

syndicalist-run factories, and the anarchist Black Guard militia which

defended them, as well as the 30,000 revolutionary syndicalist

coal-miners of the neighbouring Donetz Basin in the eastern Ukraine

organised along IWW lines (it must be stressed that the Donetz Basin was

by far the largest industrial zone in Europe at that time, putting paid

to the notion of the movement as merely a bunch of peasants with

pitchforks). Apart from those organisations in the broader Makhnovist

movement, which included the Congress of Peasants, Workers, and

Insurgents, most of these linkages were fluid and informal. Further

afield, insurgent Ukraine was linked to the Russian Revolution via the

clandestine network of the Pan-Russian Insurgent Committee of

Revolutionary Partisans, based in Moscow, which had branches in Russia,

the Ukraine, and Latvia. I presume that insurgent Ukraine maintained

links via the Trans-Siberian Railway to the 5,000 to 10,000–strong armed

formations of I. P. Novoselov’s Anarchist Federation of the Altai (AFA)

in south-central Siberia[71] and to the revolutionary syndicalist

coal-miners of the Kuzbas Basin’s 16,000–strong IWW section in Siberia,

founded in 1919, which appears to have survived as part of the

IWW-dominated “Autonomous Industrial Commune” until being shut down by

Stalin’s regime as an anomaly in a command economy in 1928. The

now-familiar fluid mixture of syndicalist unions, specific anarchist

“political” organisations, anarchist militia, and popular communes was

replicated in European Russia itself, albeit on a smaller scale: the

increasingly beleaguered All-Russian Confederation of

Anarcho-Syndicalists (ARKAS), which claimed 88,000 members in 1918, was

linked on the factory floor in the Petrograd working class district of

Vyborg on the east bank of the Neva River to organisations such as Iosif

Bleikhman’s Petrograd Anarchist Communist Federation (PACF). In Moscow,

the Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda (UASP), and the Moscow

Federation of Anarchist Groups (MFAG) were linked to the force of 1,000

Black Guards who defended the factories, and the nuclei of pluralistic

popular communes were discernible at the anarchist-occupied Villa

Durnova in Moscow and more so at the soviet at the Kronstadt naval base

located on an island which guarded the Baltic Sea approaches to

Petrograd.

While the self-described anarchist/syndicalist movement in Russia,

barring the critical exception of the PACF and the anarchist tendency

within the Kronstadt Soviet, failed to grasp the bull of power by the

horns—in part because they never managed to achieve critical mass among

the popular classes as in the Ukraine, the Makhnovist strategy of

combining flexible military daring with a libertarian praxis of

pluralistic internal democracy, and submitting the whole to civilian

plenums, thereby liberating (for a time at least) a shifting territory

with some 7 million inhabitants, made the Ukrainian Revolution the most

holistic of the anarchist social experiments, despite the dire and

continually-shifting circumstances of the war, which prevented it from

achieving the continuity of the later Spanish Revolution. Both the

Ukrainian and Russian Revolutions, defended so bravely by the anarchist

forces from the assaults of the imperialists, indigenous nationalists,

and pro-monarchist Whites, were mercilessly put down by the Bolsheviks.

By the time the Global Revolt finally collapsed, with the last gasp of

the failed 1918–1923 German Revolution, during which libertarian

councillist praxis—the Munich Soviet in particular—had been tested and

found wanting, the world was a totally changed place. The First World

War and the Spanish Influenza epidemic had wiped out an entire

generation, the Conservative counter-revolution was in full swing, the

Chinese, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had collapsed, and

had been replaced by a constellation of fragile nation-states in which

right-wing nationalism ran rampant, and technological innovations like

steamships, tanks, aircraft, the telephone, and the automobile had

shrunk the world. All of this took place while Fascism and statist

Marxist “communism” (or, rather, authoritarian state-capitalism) were

deluding the working class with false alternatives to capitalism.

And yet, the Second Wave transformed anarchism into a truly global

phenomenon, with sizeable mass anarchist organisations fighting the

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

South Africa. Furthermore, global anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism

was drawn together in the International Workers’ Association (IWA),

founded in Berlin in 1922, a reformation of the libertarian wing of the

First International, and representing between 1.5 million and 2 million

revolutionary workers globally.[72] In 1922, the IWA’s largest sections

were the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) with half a million members,

the Argentine FORA, with some 200,000 members, the General Confederation

of Labour (CGT) of Portugal, with 150,000 members, the Free Workers’

Union of Germany (FAUD), with 120,000 members, and the Committee for the

Defence of Revolutionary Syndicalism (CDSR) in France, which had taken

100,000 members away from the now irrevocably reformist CGT, which had

peaked at 2.5–million members, most of them white-collar workers far

removed from the blue-collar origins of the CGT (one of the ironies of

this period is that when the CDSR founded the CGT Unitaire (CGTU) in

1921 as a revolutionary rival to the CGT, the new federation attracted

Senegalese sailors who had abandoned the Marxists in 1919 after a failed

strike). Minor anarcho-syndicalist organisations present at the founding

of the IWA came from Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Norway, and Sweden, as well

as the Chilean IWW (while most other branches of the IWW were closely

sympathetic, they never joined the new international).

The movement’s most remarkable achievements at this time included the

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

militancy and a global proletarian counter-culture that eschewed

bourgeois patronage, the establishment of near-universal labour

protections, such as the eight-hour working day and worker’s

compensation, a substantial contribution to the virtual annihilation of

absolute monarchism, and the mounting of the most serious challenge to

clerical control of education across the world. The defeats of the

Mexican, Russian and Ukrainian revolutions did, however, lead a lot of

anarchists to become defeatist, withdrawing from the fields of social

and industrial struggle they had dominated for decades, leaving the door

open to Bolshevism. Those critical of this retreat found themselves

having to defend the core principles of the social revolution.

THE PLATFORMIST RESPONSE: THE “GENERAL UNION” BUILDS AN

ORGANISATIONAL PLATFORM

Following their defeat at the hands of the Red Army whose flanks they

had protected for so many years, Nestor Makhno and many surviving

Ukrainian anarchist guerrillas fled into exile in 1921 (a Makhnovist

underground would operate in the USSR into the 1930s), where they faced

some hard questions. The most important question was: if anarchism

places so much value on freedom from coercion, is it a powerful enough

strategy to defeat a united, militarised enemy? The survivors were not

only embittered by their experiences at the hands of the “revolutionary”

Reds, they were also greatly disappointed in the poor support they

received from Russian anarchist comrades. Sure, the Nabat had worked on

an ad-hoc basis alongside the RPAU, the anarcho-syndicalist unions in

the cities, and the various Black Guard detachments of guerrillas like

Maroussia Nikiforova, but precious little aid had come from anarchists

further afield—and the majority of the Nabat had split with the RPAU in

1919 over the latter’s third tactical truce with the Bolsheviks.

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

between ex-Nabatists like Voline and ex-Makhnovists like Makhno. In

1926, Makhno, Arshinov, Ida Mett, and other exiles from the Workers’

Cause (Dielo Truda) group in Paris published a pamphlet entitled

Organizatsionnaia Platforma Vseobshchego Soiuza Anarkhistov: Proekt

(Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists: Draft) or,

more simply, the Platform.[73] Ida Mett (1901–1973) was a Russian

anarchist who escaped Bolshevik detention, becoming a writer in exile in

Paris; her analysis The Kronstadt Commune (1948) remains a devastating

critique of Bolshevism. The text caused big waves in the international

anarchist movement because of its call for tight internal discipline,

mutually agreed upon unity of ideas and tactics, and the formation of a

“general union of anarchists.” By union, the writers of the Platform

meant a united specific organisation of tendency, rather than a trade

union. They supported anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism, but

stressed that it was “only one of the forms of revolutionary class

struggle.” Moreover, countering the notion that anarchist/syndicalist

unions were self-sufficient, they stressed dual organisationism: unions

needed to be united with anarchist political groups, anarchist militias,

and anarchist municipal soviets. The Platform emphasised the class

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

class movement, of both the peasantry and the working class, but one

that was not exclusively focused on either industry or the trade unions.

It called for ideological and tactical unity, collective responsibility,

and a programme of revolutionary action. More controversially, it called

for an “executive committee” to be formed within the general union of

anarchists. By executive committee, the writers of the Platform meant a

working group of activists, whose job it was to carry out tasks mandated

by the union.

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

was arguably derived from an earlier Makhnovist document, the Draft

Declaration of the (Makhnovist) Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the

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

Soviet (VRS), the representative insurgents’ body that linked the RPAU

General Staff (Shtarm), which ran military operations, to the Congresses

of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents. The Declaration called, as the

Kronstadt Soviet would in 1921, for a “third revolution” against

Bolshevik coercive power over the working class, poor, and peasantry,

and stated that the basis of this revolution was the free soviet system,

“libertarian organisation as taken up by significant masses,” freely

self-organised to oppose “the notion of political power.” However, since

the soviets and the RPAU were pluralistic organisations, consisting of

anarchists, Social Revolutionaries, and other tendencies, including

unaffiliated members, the Declaration did not assign the anarchists a

specific social function by name. Instead, it stated that not only all

“political activity” based on privilege, coercion, and enslavement, but

all political organisation, presumably including all genuine socialist

revolutionary factions like the anarchists/syndicalists, would “tend to

wither away of themselves” under revolutionary conditions.

The Declaration further emphasised that the RPAU, while pluralistic,

volunteer, and working class-controlled, did form the “fighting core of

this Ukrainian people’s revolutionary movement, a core whose task

consists everywhere of organising insurgent forces and helping insurgent

toilers in their struggle against all abuse of power and capital.” The

militant minority’s task was clearly pro-organisational, in support of

the popular revolutionary forces. The document, however, stopped short

of calling for a specific organisation of a distinct revolutionary

tendency to carry out that task, a call the Platform later issued.

Unlike the central committee of an authoritarian socialist organisation,

which would typically make all policy decisions, the Declaration stated

that the entire membership would form the decision-making body in a

platformist organisation. Delegates or committees would merely carry out

tasks mandated by that membership. The Platform was a restatement of the

positions held by numerous anarchist political organisations in previous

years, dating back to Bakunin’s Alliance. Yet now, some anarchists

eschewed the classical Bakuninist line, and put forward unfounded claims

that anarchism was traditionally opposed to solid anarchist political

organisations with a clear political line.

The Platform’s critics included veteran anarchist militants such as

Voline of Russia, himself a former Nabat member, Sébastian Faure of

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

Sébastian Faure (1858–1942) was an influential French anarchist writer,

journalist, and radical educator. Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) was a

diminutive mechanic and inveterate organiser, widely seen as the leading

anarchist theorist after Kropotkin. Spending much of his life in exile,

he moved from staging insurrections in Italy to founding

anarcho-syndicalist unions in Argentina. Mistakenly hailed as the

“Italian Lenin” on his return to Italy, he helped establish the Italian

Syndicalist Union (USI) and died under house arrest in the Fascist era.

Critics also accused exiles of trying to “Bolshevise anarchism,”

substituting professional revolutionary elites for the revolutionary

masses. The subsequent and much-derided “conversion” of Arshinov to

Bolshevism—which was merely a tactical move to enable the exhausted

militant to return home—gave the critics lots of ammunition, despite the

fact that he was executed in 1937 during Joseph Stalin’s purges for

allegedly, according to the secret police, “attempting to restore

anarchism in Russia.”

In 1928, Faure published a response to the Platform, La Synthèse

anarchiste (The Anarchist Synthesis), which rejected the arguments of

the Platform in favour of a looser ideological mix, which he contended

was more in keeping with libertarian free thought; it is from his

response that this all-in approach acquired the label “synthesist,” with

the opposing view termed “platformist.” The two tendencies would

continue to divide the anarchist movement ever after. Malatesta later

conceded that there was no substantial difference between his

pro-organisational views, expressed at the 1907 Amsterdam Congress, and

those of the Makhnovists; this change of heart was to have a profound

impact on the development of platformism in Latin America, where it was

termed “specificity” (especifismo). Makhno and his co-authors argued

that it was exactly because of the disorganisation of Russian anarchists

that many of them went on to join the only group with a clear

revolutionary plan—the Bolsheviks. Anarchists, they said, needed to be

just as clear and as organised, but along libertarian, and not

authoritarian, lines and guiding, not dictating revolutionary workers’

aspirations. Most of the anarchist opposition to the Platform has sprung

from misconceptions.

Importantly, its original title as a “Draft” shows that the Platform was

intended as an internal discussion document within the international

anarchist movement, not as a final blueprint for the only possible style

of anarchist organisation. It was neither authoritarian (as we have seen

in discussing the executive committee), nor was it vanguardist, an

attempt to get a tiny group of activists to lead the working class. The

intention of the Platform was not to suggest that all anarchists should

be absorbed into one massive, monolithic “platformist” organisation. It

quite clearly stated that platformist groups would maintain links with

other revolutionary organisations. The platformist method of organising

was applied to all forms of anarchist/syndicalist organisation, whether

economic, political, military, or social. Most importantly, the Platform

was not an innovation, but a clear re-statement of the fundamentals of

mass anarchist/syndicalist organising, dating back to Bakunin’s time. It

spoke to the necessity for commonly agreed upon lines of attack, along

which anarchist organisations had become the primary promoters of

exclusively working class interests worldwide. It was in fact the

Platform’s harshest critics, such as Voline, who tried to revise

anarchism by making a principle of loose organisation without solid

politics, an approach that would have made Bakunin turn in his grave.

The intense debate over the Platform split the Russian and Ukrainian

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

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

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

diaspora likewise split into burevestnikist (organisationist) and

svobodnikist (anti-organisationist) groupings. That year, the

platformist tendency in France founded a short-lived International

Anarchist Communist Federation (IACF), with sections in France and Italy

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

the ideological descendant of Bakunin’s IB and, to a lesser extent, of

the organisational Amsterdam Anarchist International, but it never made

much headway. In Bulgaria, the platformist tendency proved strongest

within the Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB), which

adopted the

document as its constitution. This may account, in part, for the

diversity and resilience of the Bulgarian anarchist movement, which

organised workers, peasants, students, professionals, and intellectuals,

and not only survived, under arms, the 1923 and 1934 fascist putsches,

but also the Second World War, only to be crushed by

Marxist-fascist-agrarian reaction in 1948.[74] It was unfortunate that

the Platform was not translated into Spanish early enough to influence

the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI). The FAI, founded in 1927, was

envisaged as an Iberian Peninsular organisation embracing Spanish and

Portuguese anarchist groups, although the suppression of the anarchists

in Portugal under Salazar made this difficult. It initially rescued the

CNT from reformism, but its lack of internal ideological coherence

allowed it to be hijacked in 1934 by technocrats who took it into the

Catalan regional then Spanish national governments during the Revolution

and were on the verge of transforming it into a conventional political

party when the Revolution was defeated. It has several active

descendants today, all claiming the FAI moniker; they reject reformism,

but remain synthesist.

The debate also influenced those anarchists remaining in Russia itself,

including former militants of the Nabat who had either been driven

underground or jailed. According to a Nabat veteran (unnamed for

security reasons), then in exile in Siberia, who wrote in Dielo Truda in

1928, the Nabat itself, initially a de facto “synthesist” organisation,

had been refining its organisational structure, in the “whirlwind of

revolution,” in what approximated a “platformist” direction. The Nabat

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

it was not a loose, affinity-based organisation, as claimed by Voline.

Rather, they wrote, the organisation was a federation of groups that

rallied “the most determined, the most dynamic militants with an eye to

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

standardised programme.” Nabat members submitted to majority decisions

reached at its congresses, which transcended its different tendencies to

promote a unitary “policy line”—“a single, coherent platform… In short,

it was a well-structured, well-disciplined movement with a leading

echelon appointed and monitored by the rank and file. And let there be

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

‘Secretariat’, echoing the Platform’s ‘executive committee’]: it was not

merely technically executive, as it is commonly regarded. It was also

the movement’s ideological pilot core, looking after publishing

operations, and propaganda activity, utilising the central funds and

above all controlling and deploying the movement’s resources and

militants.”

The Third Wave, 1924–1949: The Anarchist Revolutions Against

Imperialism, Fascism, and Bolshevism

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

greatest challenge, that of two opposing totalitarianisms, Fascism and

Bolshevism, which would crush the autonomous, militant working class in

a deadly vise for decades to come. Bolshevism was in many ways more

insidious than Fascism, establishing a similar style of totalitarianism,

but posing as the liberator of the working class under the “dictatorship

of the proletariat” (an early Marxist idea coined by former Prussian

military officer Joseph Weydemeyer and expanded on by Marx and Engels).

In Russia, the dictatorship’s class structure was cynically revealed

when Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky explicitly demanded the regimentation

of labour. Disoriented by the propagandist success of the Bolshevik

model and silenced in its gulags, anarchism lost ground throughout the

world. It did retain strongholds in Latin America and the Far East,

while in Brazil, China, Egypt, France, Mexico, Portugal, and South

Africa, anarchists helped establish the first “communist” parties, which

were initially noticeably anarchist and syndicalist in orientation or,

at least, deeply influenced by anarchism/syndicalism until they were

Bolshevised on Moscow’s orders. It was, however, an era not solely about

repression: the Second Wave broke against reformism, the new welfare

state sugar-coating that defused militancy in countries as diverse as

Uruguay, Sweden, and the USA. While many anarchist/syndicalist

organisations were forced underground or destroyed in this long slide

into darkness, important struggles against fascism and imperialism were

unfolding in countries such as Bulgaria, Korea, and Poland.

In Poland, the anarchist movement had first consolidated during the

Russian imperialist period in 1907 with the formation of the Federation

of Anarchist-communist Groups of Poland and Lithuania (FAGPL), which

operated clandestinely—yet several of its militants were executed by the

Russian authorities for belonging to the organisation. A new generation

established the Anarchist Federation of Poland (AFP) in 1926 in

independent Poland, and before long, a syndicalist General Workers’

Federation (GFP) of about 40,000 members emerged. But in the same year,

Poland and Lithuania fell under the dictatorship of the socialist

ultra-nationalist Jozef Pilsudski, who in 1930 forcibly merged the GFP

with nationalist, independent, and socialist unions to form the Union of

Trade Unions (ZZZ) as as a yellow union affiliated to his regime—an odd

mix of socialists, liberals, and right-wing ex-soldiers—albeit

structured along the lines of the reformist syndicalist French CGT). But

the ZZZ grew to 170,000 members and became dominated by the syndicalists

who aligned as a tendency to the IWA. When the inevitable clash with

their employers and the state came, the conservative unions in the ZZZ

such as the munitions workers broke away, leaving the remainder to be

radicalised by the anarcho-syndicalists. The ZZZ was forced underground

by the Nazi invasion in 1939 but reformed as the clandestine Polish

Syndicalist Union (ZSP) with perhaps 4,000 members, and was active in

the underground resistance to Nazism, publishing papers, cooperating

with the Home Army, and, though its contribution is seldom recognised

today, participating directly in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising through bodies

like the 104^(th) Syndicalist company.[75]

It is also worth sketching briefly the trajectories of the two movements

who, more than most, would be tested in the fires of fascism: those of

the Italians and of the Germans. The Italian movement was born in the

nationalist Risorgimento, which united the scattered Italian

principalities in 1861, and a section of Bakunin’s Brotherhood was set

up three years later. The movement became involved in localised

insurrections in 1874 and 1877, which failed, and despite the popularity

of the creed, struggled to establish a national organisation: their

efforts in establishing the Italian Workers’ Party (POI) in 1882 and the

Revolutionary Anarchist Socialist Party (PSAR) in 1891 were wasted as

the organisations merged, expelled the anarchists and formed the Italian

Socialist Party (PSI); but the syndicalists came to dominate many of the

regional Chambers of Labour that were combined in 1906 under Marxist PSI

auspices into the General Confederation of Italian Workers (CGIL)—the

syndicalists were later expelled, but had managed to form a

200,000–supporter rank-and-file network within the unions. In 1912, this

network finally formed an anarcho-syndicalist federation, the Italian

Syndicalist Union (USI) with 80,000 members.

Having survived World War I, the syndicalist movement grew dramatically

during the Bienno Rosso, the “two red years” of 1919 and 1920 when

perhaps 600,000 workers occupied their factories, with the USI growing

to a respectable 800,000–member minority (the Marxist CGIL had 2.15

million members by 1919, while the conservative unions collectively

mustered 1.25–million members). In 1919, a hardline Union of Communist

Anarchists of Italy (UCAI) was founded, but was absorbed the following

year into the less ideologically rigorous Italian Anarchist Union (UAI),

which peaked at 20,000 members. In 1921, the UAI urged the creation of a

“United Revolutionary Front,” bringing together all leftist forces to

combat the rising threat of Fascism. But the Marxist PSI had refused to

throw the weight of their CGIL unions behind the factory occupations and

by the time of the Fascist “March on Rome” in 1922, the left was

demoralised and the numbers of organised workers had fallen sharply; by

1927, with Fascism in full swing, veterans of the USI and UAI lived a

twilight life in the resistance—but the once-powerful Marxist CGIL

meekly dissolved itself when ordered to do so by the Fascists.[76]

The patchwork of German states had only united in 1871, and for the

first three decades, the left suffered under severe anti-socialist laws.

So it was only in 1901 that the German syndicalist movement had arisen,

when the “localist” tendency within the dominant Marxist Social

Democratic Party (SPD) unions split from the SPD and organised as the

Free Association of German Trade Unions (FvDG). This soon developed in

an anarcho-syndicalist direction under the influence of the French CGT,

and of indigenous anarchist and anti-party, anti-state socialism. The

membership of the FvDG stood at 18,353 in 1901, compared to the 500,000

members of the Free Trade Unions (FG) linked to the SPD. In 1903, groups

across the country formed the German Anarchist Federation (AFD), which

worked closely with the FvDG; they were the only left-wing revolutionary

organisations in the country on the outbreak of World War I, when the

AFD transformed itself into the underground Federation of Communist

Anarchists of Germany (FKAD).

The FKAD and FvDG emerged from the war with unsullied reputations for

resistance to militarism, and in the heady revolutionary days after the

collapse of the German monarchy in 1918, the FvDG expanded to over

100,000 members, and was renamed the Free Workers Union of Germany

(FAUD), this time concentrated in the industrial Rhineland and

Westphalia and dominated by metalworkers and miners. But the FAUD lost

ground on the Rühr to the nascent Bolshevik party—and there were

significant revolutionary syndicalist movements to contend with too:

even though the FAUD rose to 200,000 members by 1922, it never managed

to merge with the 300,000 members of the IWW-styled General Workers’

Union of Germany (AAUD), nor with the MTWIU’s 10,000 members on the

docks, nor even with the more radical anti-Bolshevik syndicalist

splinter of the AAUD, the General Labour Union—Unity Organisation

(AAU-E) which reached 75,000 members by 1922. This endemic fragmentation

of the German left was to prove fatal when the Nazis rose to power in

1933—by which time the FAUD was a shadow of its former self.[77]

Yet it was also amidst this turmoil that, in 1928 and 1929, two huge

continental anarchist organisations were founded. Firstly, the East

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

Japan, Korea, Formosa (Taiwan), Vietnam, and India, was initiated by the

Korean Anarchist Federation’s Chinese exile section (KAF-C), which also

established the Korean Youth Federation in South China (KYFSC) in

Shanghai in 1930, with delegates from Korea, Manchuria, Japan, and all

over China.[78] Secondly, the American Continental Workingmen’s

Association (ACAT) was born, a Latin American IWA formation with member

organisations in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador,

El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, which held

a founding congress that drew about 100 unions from across the

continent.[79] Such ongoing anarchist resistance lead to the upsurge of

a Third Wave, with the sorely understudied Manchurian Revolution of

1929–1931, the extreme isolation of which limited its impact to Chinese,

Japanese, Manchurian, and especially Korean resistance. The Manchurian

Revolution was unusual in that it was initially inserted from above, but

quickly gained grassroots support because it was based on worker and

community self-organisation.[80] It demonstrated how the uplift of the

working class through economic autonomy and education could combine

seamlessly with a bottom-up system of decision-making and a militant

defensive programme. In 1925, Korean anarchists helped form a “People’s

Government” administration in the Shinmin Prefecture bordering on Korea,

which helped democratise the prefecture. Subsequently, the Korean

Anarchist Federation (KAF) militant Kim Jong-Jin, a close relative of

the anarchist-sympathetic Korean Independence Army general Kim Jao-Jin,

whose forces effectively controlled the Shinmin Prefecture, submitted an

anarchist plan to the military command. It advocated the formation of

voluntary rural co-operatives, self-managed by the peasantry, and a

comprehensive education system for all, including adults. After some

debate, and input from Yu Rim (the alias of Ko Baeck Seong), a founder

of the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF), the general and his

staff accepted the plan, and the anarchists were given the go-ahead for

their plan.

In 1929, anarchist delegates from Hailun, Shihtowotze in the Chang Kwan

Sai Ling Mountains, Sinanchen, Milshen, and other centres, also formed

the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria (KAF-M) at Hailin. The

Shinmin Prefecture was transformed into the Korean People’s Association

in Manchuria, a regional, libertarian socialist administrative

structure, also known as the General League of Koreans (Hanjok

Chongryong Haphoi) or HCH, which embraced a liberated territory of some

two million people. This self-managed structure was comprised of

delegates from each area and district, and organised around departments

dealing with warfare, agriculture, education, finance, propaganda,

youth, social health, and general affairs, the latter including public

relations. Delegates at all levels were ordinary workers and peasants

who earned a minimum wage, had no special privileges, and were subject

to decisions taken by the organs that mandated them, including the

co-operatives. Notwithstanding its bizarre origins from a meeting

between the Kims, Yu, and the Army command, the HCH was based on free

peasant collectives, mutual aid banks, an extensive primary and

secondary schooling system, and a peasant army. The militia was

initially drawn from the Army, but increasingly supplemented by fighters

trained at local guerrilla schools. Again, we see the Bakuninist

strategy of specific organisations, the KAF-M and the KAFC, operating

under the aegis of a delegated civilian mass organisation based on free

communes, the HCH, and defended by armed militia. In echo of the

Zapatistas in the Mexican Revolution, the “Manchurians” operated almost

exclusively in rural areas and relatively small towns. In Fukien

province, southern China, which was under informal Japanese influence,

situated as it is across the Formosa Strait, KAF-C members participated

in the Chuan Yung People’s Training Centre, an initiative aimed at

establishing an autonomous self-rule district in Fukien, emulating

Shinmin. They were subsequently involved in attempts to form a peasant

militia and rural communes in the area. But to the north, the Manchurian

Revolution was destroyed by the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931,

and the KAF-M and KACF were forced to fight a rearguard retreat into

southern China, where they continued the armed struggle against Imperial

Japan alongside their Chinese comrades until Japan’s defeat in 1945.

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

full-throated revolution, taking place when the Fascist-oriented

colonial military staged a coup d’état in 1936, that captured the

attention of the whole world. Seen as a laboratory of virtually every

known competing political tendency from anarchism to Fascism, the

Spanish Revolution was in many ways the most compelling of the century.

Detail on the Spanish Revolution of 1936–1939 is largely unnecessary

because the events are so well known. For my purposes here, suffice it

to say that the loosely-structured Makhnovist model of free communes and

soviets, organically linked to revolutionary/anarcho-syndicalist unions

(IWW, etc.), overseen by a mass class organisation (Congress of

Peasants, Workers, and Insurgents), linked to specific anarchist

organisations (Nabat, GAK, etc), and defended by affiliated or

autonomous militia (RPAU and the Black Guards) was replicated. It was

done in a tighter formation and a more continuous fashion in the cities

of Catalonia, Aragon, and Valencia than had been the case in Ukraine,

where the constantly shifting front-line had meant that Makhnovist urban

administrations had few chances to establish themselves for long. The

Spanish Revolution saw free communes more closely linked to the

two-million-strong, anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour

(CNT), which had declared itself for libertarian communism at its 1936

Zaragoza Congress. The CNT, in turn, was in formal alliance with the

synthesist Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), the Libertarian Youth

Federation of Iberia (FIJL), and its Catalan-language corollary, the

Libertarian Youth (JJLL). The CNT-FAI-FIJL and the free communes were

defended by affiliated Confederal militia, such as the famous Durruti

Column.[81] Sadly, compromises and strategic blunders were made by

reformists and opportunists in the anarchist ranks, who betrayed the

class line by elevating the CNT-FAI to regional and then national office

in the Republican state, accepting minority posts on the Councils of

Aragon and Valencia when they were the overwhelming majority on the

ground, and failing to implement the Zaragoza resolution on establishing

a national Defence Council to federate all worker and peasant communes.

Equally destructive were the technocrats in the FAI who attempted to

turn it into a conventional political party, a seizure of the

organisation made possible precisely because of its synthesist lack of

internal coherence, and undermined the Revolution from within.[82] Along

with the earlier experiences of the handful of leading anarchists in

Czechoslovakia, China, and Korea who tried to use the vehicle of the

nation to achieve anarchist ends, the example of Spain clearly shows

that internationalist anarchism and the interests of the global working

class are totally at odds with nationalist government, however

“revolutionary.” The outside support for the Francoist rebels of the

pro-Fascist imperial powers, the betrayals of the Bolsheviks, and the

extremely fragmented nature of the republican camp all led to Spain

being recalled, incorrectly, as the swan-song of anarchism, a song soon

drowned in the carnage of the Second World War. Still, the worker- and

peasant-run fields and factories of Spain—the socialised tramways of

Barcelona carried eight million passengers annually—provided the

best-studied methods for the successful operation of an egalitarian

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

Although the defeat of the Manchurian and Spanish Revolutions was a

great blow for the class, the Third Wave did not break until the end of

the Second World War, when it peaked with armed anarchist resistance

movements in France, China, Korea, Poland, Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, and

Francoist Spain, movements that were soon echoed in the anti-colonial

struggles to come. Not only that, but numerous anarchist federations

were formed in the closing phases of the World War II period and its

immediate aftermath, as anarchists attempted to rebuild their political

and trade union presence. According to Phillip Ruff, the Nabat was

re-established in the Ukraine and staged an armed uprising in 1943,

being commended by the 4^(th) Guard of the Soviet Army for holding a

bridgehead on the west bank of the Dnieper River. Its leader, school

headmaster V.I. Us, was, however, jailed by the Soviet authorities for

four years, though rehabilitated after Stalin’s death. Ukrainian

anarchist partisans reportedly continued fighting as late as 1945, while

within the Red Army occupying Germany and Austria immediately after the

war, a secret Makhnovist organisation called the Kronstadt Accords (ZK)

apparently operated.

In this period, along the lines of the Amsterdam model,

anarchist-specific organisations suppressed by the war emerged in

parallel to anarcho-/revolutionary syndicalist unions. For example, in

France, the clandestine International Revolutionary Syndicalist

Federation (FISR) emerged in 1943, leading to the establishment of the

National Confederation of Labour (CNT) in 1945, alongside and within

which operated the Francophone Anarchist Federation (FAF), which was

established the same year. It is possible that the 17,500 Senegalese who

defected in 1948 from the French Marxist CGT, joined the

anarcho-syndicalist CNT which had a far more progressive stance towards

national independence for the colonial world—but I am still researching

this. The Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB) and its

unions resurfaced. In Italy, the Federation of Italian Anarchist

Communists (FdCAI) was founded in 1944 and had some influence on the

anarchist tendency in the new General Italian Workers’ Federation

(CGIL). The Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB) was founded in 1945

and worked alongside the new Syndicalist Workers’ Federation (SWF). The

AFB did not survive the Third Wave, and another regional federation was

only rebuilt during the Fourth Wave in 1967, alongside an equally

short-lived Anarchist Communist Federation (ACF) the following year. The

ACF seeded a lineage in the 1970s, however, which resulted in the

refounding of the ACF in 1986.[83]

The Japanese Anarchist Federation (JAF) was founded clandestinely under

US military occupation in 1945 with about 200 members, followed the next

year by the syndicalist Federation of Free Labour Unions (FFLU) and

Conference of Labour Unions (CLU).[84] The JAF split in 1951, with the

“pure” anarchists founding the Japanese Anarchist Club (JAC) and the

anarcho-syndicalists forming the Anarchist Federation which in 1955 was

renamed the JAF again. It affiliated to the IFA but collapsed in 1968,

being replaced by the Black Front Society (KSS) in 1970, followed by a

Libertarian Socialist Council (LSC). In 1983, the anarcho-syndicalist

Workers’ Solidarity Movement (RRU) was established, becoming for a while

the Japanese section of the IWA. In 1988, a new Anarchist Federation was

established in Japan. In 1992, the Workers’ Solidarity (RR)

anarcho-syndicalist network split from the RRU, which turned towards

ultra-left communism and left the IWA.

New formations also emerged in regions where organised anarchism had

been absent for some time: the Federation of Libertarian Socialists

(FFS) was established in Germany in 1947; built by the likes of veteran

anti-militarist, anarcho-syndicalist, and journalist Augustin Souchy

(1892–1984)—who was active in Germany, then in exile in Revolutionary

Spain, jailed in France, then active in Mexico, and who wrote probably

the best first-hand critique of looming authoritarianism in

Revolutionary Cuba in 1960—the FFS survived into the 1950s. In 1977, an

anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers’ Union (FAU) was established in Germany

in echo of the old FAUD; still active today, it is affiliated to the IWA

and is online at www.fau.org. The North African Libertarian Movement

(MLNA), which came to embrace Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, was founded

in 1947.[85] The revolutionary syndicalist Independent League of Trade

Unions (OVB) was founded in the Netherlands in 1948; the OVB, which is

online at www.ovbvakbond.nl, was based among dock-workers and fishermen

at The Hague, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam; it split in 1988 with the

anarcho-syndicalists leaving to form the Free Union (VB), which is

online at www.vrijebond.nl. The collapse of Spain also sent an anarchist

diaspora out into the world, from North Africa to Chile. Its greatest

impact was felt in France, where militants fought in the resistance

against the Nazis, in Cuba, where the movement experienced a dramatic

growth-spurt, coming to dominate both the “official” and the underground

union federations after World War II, and in Mexico and Venezuela where

the exile presence was large enough to form two significant autonomous

anarcho-syndicalist formations: the General Delegation of the CNT

(CNT-DG) in Mexico in 1942, which co-ordinated CNT exile Sub-Delegations

across Latin America, and the Venezuelan Regional Workers’ Federation

(FORV) in 1944.[86]

Another strongpoint of anarcho-syndicalist organising in the immediate

post-war period, usually overlooked, may have existed in China, where

the movement reportedly maintained a minority trade union presence of

only about 10,000–strong in Guangzhou and Shanghai together, under the

difficult conditions of conflict between the nationalists and the

Bolsheviks, but this is hard to verify. In Korea, the defeat of Japan

lead to a rapid reorganisation of anarchist forces, as the KAF-C, its

youth wing, the KYFSC, affiliates in the Eastern Anarchist Federation,

as well as many other “black societies,” combined to create the huge

Federation of Free Society Builders (FFSB).[87] A strong libertarian

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

of the KACF, such as Yu Rim, and of the Korean Revolutionist Federation

(KRF), into the five-party, left-wing Korean Provisional Government

(formed in exile in 1919) from 1940 until about 1946. American and

Russian occupational forces allowed this shadow government no access to

power and supplanted it with their own proxy governments in 1948.

In 1948, at a pan-European anarchist conference in Paris, the Anarchist

International Relations Commission (CRIA) was established with the aim

of maintaining ties between the dispersed, rather battered, but still

vibrant, post-war anarchist movement. CRIA established a sister

organisation in Latin America, the Montevideo-based Continental

Commission of Anarchist Relations (CCRA). The CRIA/CCRA saw itself as

continuing the work of the 1907–1915 Amsterdam International and

maintained a network of correspondence between anarchist organisations,

journals, and individual militants in Algeria, Argentina, Australia,

Bolivia, Brazil, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia,

Cuba, Ecuador, France, Germany, Guatemala, India, Israel, Italy, Japan,

Korea, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Spain,

Switzerland, Tunisia, Uruguay, the United States, Venezuela, and

Yugoslavia. The CRIA/CCRA held its first congress in Paris in 1949, and,

at its congress in London in 1958, it joined with the Provisional

Secretariat on International Relations (SPIRA) and was transformed into

the Anarchist International Commission (CIA), which survived until about

1960.[88]

THE DURRUTIST AND NEO-MAKHNOVIST RESPONSE: THE “REVOLUTIONARY JUNTA”

PUSHES FOR A FRESH REVOLUTION

During the Spanish Revolution, at the height of the Third Wave,

anarchists faced the same question raised in the 1920s by the Platform:

how to organise in a free, yet effective, manner. Aware that the

communists and reformists within the trade unions were selling out the

revolution, a militant group of anarchists formed in 1937 to maintain

the revolutionary hard line. The Friends of Durruti (AD) were named

after the brilliant Spanish anarchist railway worker and guerrilla

fighter, Buenaventura Durruti, who died defending the capital of Madrid

against the Francoist forces in 1936. The AD was founded by

rank-and-file CNT militants, key anarchist hardliners, and anarchist

militia, in particular from the famous Durruti Column and the Iron

Column. They opposed the “revolutionary” state’s order to turn the

militia into an ordinary authoritarian army, with class divisions and a

murderous regime of punishment.

In 1938, encouraged by the Spanish Communist Party, the counter

revolution was in full swing, in the rear of and at the revolutionary

front. The AD published Towards a Fresh Revolution, a strategic document

that critiqued the reformist tendency within the CNT, one which had lead

to confederated collaboration with bourgeois, nationalist, conservative,

and Bolshevik forces in the Republican government. The document called

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

maintain the revolutionary character of the war by means of the

anarchist/syndicalist militia, and for the economy to be placed entirely

in the hands of the syndicates—the revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist

unions which made up the base of the CNT. It was, in effect, a call by

the organised revolutionary working class under arms to dissolve the

bourgeois Republican government and replace it with a decentralised

militant counter-power structure. In the document, the AD also demanded

the seizure of all arms and financial reserves by the workers; the total

socialisation of the economy and food distribution; a refusal to

collaborate with any bourgeois groups; the equalisation of all pay;

working class solidarity; and a refusal to sign for peace with foreign

bourgeois powers.

Like the Makhnovist Platform, the AD manifesto was also labelled

vanguardist and authoritarian, this time because of a misunderstanding,

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

junta. In the AD’s usage, junta did not have the connotations of a

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

be an “anarchist dictatorship,” supplanting the bourgeois government

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

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

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

hands. In 1945, the Bulgarian platformist FAKB, founded in 1919, called

a congress at Knegevo, in the capital city of Sofia, to discuss the

repression of the anarchist/syndicalist movement by the Fatherland Front

government. This government had been installed by the Red Army and

consisted of Communist Party and Agrarian Union members and fascist

Zveno officers, involved in the 1934 fascist putsch. However, all 90

delegates were arrested by Communist militia and put into forced labour

camps. Anarchist locals were forcibly shut down and the revived FAKB

newspaper Rabotnicheska Misal (Workers’ Thought) was forced to suspend

publication after only eight issues. It reappeared briefly during

Fatherland Front-rigged elections, held in 1945 under American and

British pressure, surging from a circulation of 7,000 to 60,000, before

being banned again. More than 1,000 FAKB militants were sent to

concentration camps and the next annual congress of the FAKB had to take

place clandestinely in 1946.

Despite the repression, in 1945, the FAKB was able to issue a key

platformist strategic document. The Platform of the Federation of

Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria argued for an anarchist/libertarian

communist future order. While rejecting the traditional political party

as “sterile and ineffective,” and “unable to respond to the goals and

the immediate tasks and to the interests of the workers,” it advocated

for anarcho-/revolutionary syndicalist unions, cooperatives, and

cultural and special organisations (like those for youth and women), as

well as a specifically anarchist political group along the lines of the

original 1927 Platform:

It is above all necessary for the partisans of anarchist communism to be

organised in an anarchist communist ideological organisation. The tasks

of these organisations are: to develop, realise and spread anarchist

communist ideas; to study the vital present-day questions affecting the

daily lives of the working masses and the problems of the social

reconstruction; the multifaceted struggle for the defence of our social

ideal and the cause of working people; to participate in the creation of

groups of workers on the level of production, profession, exchange and

consumption, culture and education, and all other organisations that can

be useful in the preparation for the social reconstruction; armed

participation in every revolutionary insurrection; the preparation for

and organisation of these events; the use of every means which can bring

on the social revolution. Anarchist communist ideological organisations

are absolutely indispensable in the full realisation of anarchist

communism both before the revolution and after.

According to this neo-Makhnovist manifesto, such anarchist

political/ideological organisations were to be federated across a given

territory, “co-ordinated by the federal secretariat”—similar to the

Durrutist “revolutionary junta”—but the “local organisation” was to

remain the basic policy-making unit, and both local and federal

secretariats to be “merely liaison and executive bodies with no power”

beyond executing the decisions of the locals or federation of locals.

The FAKB Platform emphasised the ideological unity of such

organisations, stating that only committed anarchist communists could be

members, and that decision-making must be by consensus, achieved by both

persuasion and practical demonstration, rather than by majority vote

(the latter being the method applicable to anarcho-/revolutionary

syndicalist and other forms of organisation, with allowances made for

dissenting minorities). Anarchist militants, so organised, would

participate directly in both syndicalist unions and mainstream unions,

arguing their positions, defending the immediate interests of the class,

and learning how to control production in preparation for the social

revolution. Militants would also participate directly in co-operatives,

“bringing to them the spirit of solidarity and of mutual aid against the

spirit of the party and bureaucracy”—and in cultural and

special-interest organisations which support the anarchist communist

idea and the syndicalist organisations. According to the FAKB Platform,

all such organisations would relate to each other on the basis of

“reciprocal dependence” and “ideological communality.”

The Fourth Wave, 1950–1989: Rearguard Actions in the Shadow of the

Cold War and Decolonisation in Africa and Asia

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

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

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

large extent this is true. In 1955, the IWW was at its weakest in 50

years of existence, neo-fascism was still ascending in most of Latin

America and the Mediterranean, Bolshevism was ascending in the Far East,

the revolution in China had largely been lost to “Maoist” Marxist

totalitarianism in 1949, and Korea was permanently carved into red and

white totalitarian camps by 1953, closing the door on both revolutionary

anarchist and libertarian reformist options.

This view, however, ignores the key role played in Cuba by anarchists

within the Second Escambray Front, the Student Revolutionary Directorate

(DRE), the state’s Cuban Labour Confederation (CTC), and even within

Fidel Castro’s 26^(th) of July Movement itself.[89] The anarchists had

their own organised presence, as well. The Federation of Anarchist

Groups of Cuba (FGAC) had been founded in 1924 and reorganised as the

Cuban Libertarian Alliance (ALC) in 1939; reconstituted in 1944, during

the Cuban Revolution, the ALC had sections in all Cuban provinces, with

wide influence in both the cities and in the rural areas, among

industrial workers and plantation workers, miners and craft workers,

fishermen and journalists, dockers and transport workers. The

clandestine anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Labour (CGT)

had been founded in 1931 under the US-backed Gerardo Machado

dictatorship as an underground union federation, taking with it many

sections of the formerly anarcho-syndicalist CNOC (founded in 1925)

which had been transformed under Marxist leadership into the “yellow”

Cuban Labour Confederation (CTC), run by the Batista regime. By a twist

of fate, when Fulgencio Batista had been defeated at the polls in 1944

(before his dictatorial return in 1952) and his Marxist allies were

kicked out of the leadership of the CTC, the vacuum was filled by the

anarcho-syndicalists, meaning that at the time the Revolution erupted,

they ran both the underground CGT and the official CTC.

Given that the Cuban Revolution remains, to this day, the touchstone of

diverse tendencies arising from the New Left, the centrality of the

anarchist movement to the anti-Batista Revolution, and the fraudulent,

counter-revolutionary role played by the Castroites who militarised and

impoverished Cuban society, destroyed free labour, and corporatised the

unions along Fascist lines, building a traditional Latino strong-man

personality cult around Fidel Castro, a close friend of Nazi sympathiser

Juan Perón of Argentina and of Franco’s interior minister Manuel Fraga

Iribarne (whose former bodyguard was the leader of the Argentine

Anti-Communist Alliance, “Triple-A,” death-squad), cannot be

overemphasised—but is beyond the scope of this book to detail.[90]

Suffice to say that from 1961, when Castro established a USSR-backed

populist dictatorship on Perónist/corporatist lines, the CGT was

outlawed and many of its members either jailed or driven into exile

while the CTC was absorbed into the state.

So the common suggestion that the Swedish Workers’ Central Organisation

(SAC)[91] was the sole remaining lighthouse of large-scale

anarcho-syndicalism, until its withdrawal from the IWA in 1959, not only

occludes the experience of the Cuban CGT and CTC, but ignores the fact

that the Chilean IWW, the anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of

Labour (CGT), and the anarcho-syndicalist National Workers’ Unity

Movement (MUNT) of Chile combined to establish the powerful Chilean

Workers’ Central (CUT) in 1953, along with the Marxist and socialist

unions. The CUT’s national leadership included nine socialists, four

anarchists, two Marxists, two Christian democrats, an independent

left-wing Christian, and even a right-wing Phalangist; its statement of

aims and principles was, in fact, drawn up by three anarchists. Within

the CUT, the anarchists controlled the maritime workers, shoemakers, and

printers. The CUT built up membership among students, manual labourers,

peasants, intellectuals, and professionals, and started making demands

that were political and social, as well as economic. As a result, in

1956, the CUT declared a general strike and shut down the entire country

for two days. The Paco Ibáñez regime offered to hand over power to the

CUT, but the Marxist and socialist parties agreed to back down and end

the strike, against the strong objections of the anarchists. The

meddling left-wing politicians had sabotaged the first real chance to

establish workers’ control in Chile and, in fact, Latin America.[92]

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

ignores other evidence of anarchist/syndicalist presence: the massive

six-month strike by the FORA-led Ship-building Workers’ Federation (FTB)

in Argentina in 1956, the country’s largest strike in the 20^(th)

Century; the five-month resistance by some 100,000

syndicalist-influenced workers on the docks, mines, and freezing plants

of New Zealand in 1951;[93] the guerrilla campaigns of the 1940s and

1950s in the southern Yunan province of China, near the border with

Burma and Vietnam, carried out by the anarchist guerrilla Chu Cha-pei

and modelled on those of the Makhnovists and RPAU;[94] the continued

anarchist domination of the FOL’s successor, the Bolivian Regional

Workers’ Confederation (CORB) and its powerful Feminine Workers’

Federation (FOF) under the leadership of Petronila Infantes, which

lasted until 1964;[95] and the survival of the revolutionary

syndicalist-influenced Industrial and Commercial Union of Southern

Rhodesia (ICU yase Rhodesia) into the mid-1950s.[96] Still, it was

largely a period of hibernation, in which much of the syndicalism in

evidence was “spontaneous” and divorced from its anarchist origins.

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

influential Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) in 1956, an

organisation that despite possessing a mere 500 official members built a

10,000–person Worker-Student Resistance (ROE) network and a syndicalist

National Convention of Workers (CNT) that was 400,000 strong by 1972,

and which set the scene for Latin American continental resistance in the

years to come.[97] Despite operating in the most difficult of

conditions, anarchist guerrillas plagued the authorities in “Maoist”

China and Francoist Spain, while there were reformist libertarian

resistance organisations in Allied-occupied South Korea: the clandestine

Autonomous Workers’ League (AWL) and the Autonomous Village Movement

(AVM), both creations of the synthesist FFSB, the latter managing to

maintain a twilight existence into the mid-1970s.[98] Still, anarchism,

and the working class as a whole, with which it has always been closely

associated, was in dire straits. It was only resuscitated on a global

scale by the “jolt” of 1968, which initiated a wave of working class

resistance to the various forms of capitalism, with youth revolts in

Czechoslovakia (bloodily repressed by a Warsaw Pact armed invasion),

France (where 10 million striking workers almost toppled the Charles de

Gaulle regime), Italy, Japan, Mexico (where the Institutional

Revolutionary Party’s forces committed the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico

City against protesters), Pakistan, Poland, Yugoslavia, the US, West

Germany, and in the former French colony of Senegal where the National

Union of Senegalese Workers (UNTS) came close to seizing control of the

state. In the old anarcho-syndicalist stronghold of Hunan province,

China, a group called the Federation of the Provincial Proletariat

(Shengwulian) emerged from the “Red Guards” that broke with both sides

of the Chinese Communist Party, and upheld the grassroots, federalist

traditions of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Petrograd Soviet of

1917. The jolt, spurred on by the neoliberal contraction of capital,

which started dismantling the West’s welfare states and further eroded

working class conditions in the Soviet bloc, unleashed a Fourth Wave of

anarchist organisation and guerrilla warfare, centred primarily in the

southern cone of Latin America, but also in the Middle East, a new field

of anarchist operations.

During this wave, anarchism and the libertarian strains of autonomism

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

fiddle to Maoism and Trotskyism, with many Western anarchists influenced

by the insurgent doctrines of the authoritarian Marxist rural guerrilla

strategist Ché Guevara, rather than by the libertarian communist urban

guerrilla strategist Abraham Guillén, whose ideas dominated in the

Southern Cone of Latin America among the anarchists and

“Trotskyists.”[99] In Chile, the armed Movement of the Revolutionary

Left (MIR) had an anarchist faction which existed from its founding in

1965 until most of them left in 1967, and its military-political line

was laid down by libertarian communist Marcello Ferrada-Noli. Several

former MIR guerrillas were later involved in the post-Pinochet founding

of the Anarcho-Communist Unification Congress (CUAC), later renamed the

Libertarian Communist Organisation (OLC). Explicitly anarchist guerrilla

organisations of this period in the global south included the FAU’s

Revolutionary Popular Organisation 33 (OPR-33) of Uruguay, powerfully

influenced by Guillén’s theories, and which defended the FAU-founded

syndicalist National Convention of Workers (CNT), and other class

formations during the Juan Bordaberry dictatorship; and Libertarian

Resistance (RL) of Argentina, which defended the factories during the

murderous Rafael Videla dictatorship.[100]

In Iraq, in 1973, the 300–strong Workers’ Liberation Group (Shagila)

split from the Iraqi Communist Party because of its rapprochement with

the quasi-fascist ruling Ba’ath Party—adopted a self-described

“anarchist-communism” and waged a bitter campaign against Ba’athist

secret policemen. Shagila’s entire membership illegally crossed into

Iran in 1978 to help the indigenous Iranian anarchist movement, The

Scream of The People (CHK), which had splintered off the “Maoist”

splinter of the leftist Fedayeen, support the autonomous neighbourhood

shorahs and worker’s kommitehs of the genuine Iranian Revolution which

ousted the dictatorial Shah, the most recent revolution in which

anarchist guerrillas played a role. The outstanding Polish journalist

Ryszard Kapuściński—who personally witnessed 27 revolutions and coups in

the “Third World”—was in Tehran in late 1979, and his book on the causes

of the revolution, Shah of Shahs, refers to “opposition combat groups”

including “anarchists” but in contradiction to his evidence, former

Iranian Fedayeen guerrilla turned anarchist exile “Payman Piedar”

claimed in a 2005 interview with me that this description was probably

politically inaccurate. When the Ayatollah Khomeini’s French-backed

counter-revolution rolled forward in mid-1979, most Shagila and CHK

members were massacred, yet both organisations remain important for our

understanding of anarchist praxis in that they developed a form of

anarchism virtually in total isolation from the rest of the anarchist

movement, giving an indication of the universal validity of

revolutionary anarchism.[101]

In the global north, anarchist guerrilla organisations included: the

Angry Brigade (AB) of Britain, which focused exclusively on sabotage;

Direct Action (AD) of France, members of which later took a “Maoist”

Marxist turn; Direct Action (DA) of Canada; the Movement 2 June (M2J) of

Germany, several of whose members later joined the Red Army Faction

(RAF); and the Anti-capitalist Autonomous Commandos (KAA) of the Basque

country. Between 1979 and 1984, eight KAA militants were killed in

action, 14 were jailed and others fled into exile in Latin America.[102]

An important pole of revolt in Europe in this period was a trio of

guerrilla organisations that arose from the Spanish exile MLE’s Interior

Defence (DI) organisation established in 1961 to assassinate Franco: the

First of May Group (GPM) founded in 1965, the Iberian Liberation

Movement—Autonomous Combat Groups (MIL-GAC) founded in 1971, and the

Groups of International Revolutionary Action (GARI) founded in 1974,

which ended its actions only several months before Franco died in

1975.[103]

Other important developments during the Fourth Wave were the

re-establishment of the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) in 1968, initially

to deal with the issue of anarchist political prisoners in Francoist

Spain, especially those condemned to death by garrotte, and the founding

of the synthesist International of Anarchist Federations (IAF) at a

congress in Italy the same year. The IAF built on the international

network of the CIA, which had become moribund in approximately 1960. It

drew in young militants and older groups, and played a key role in

breaking the pro-Castro sentiment of sectors of the anarchist movement,

though it was to lose its own Cuban section over this question. Its key

section at the time was the FAF in France, but the 1968 congress drew in

regional anarchist organisations from Argentina, Australia, Britain,

Bulgaria (the exile Bulgarian Libertarian Union), the Cuban Libertarian

Movement in Exile (MLCE),[104] Italy, Japan, Mexico,[105] Norway, the

Netherlands, Switzerland, and the underground Iberian Anarchist

Federation (FAI) of Spain and Portugal—as well as anarchist groups in

Greece and Germany. In 1971, the IAF held its second congress in Paris

under more difficult circumstances, but reaffirmed its libertarian

communist principles. Later, the Cuban MLCE withdrew in a dispute over

the IFA’s failure to adopt a hard line against the Castroist

counter-revolution. Of particular interest are evidence of links with

groups in regions where an anarchist presence would not normally be

expected: a Neutralist Tribune from Vietnam; and an Anarchist Federation

from China, which was perhaps based in Hong Kong. In the 1970s, in

addition to its member organisations, the IFA had contacts with

anarchist federations in Australia, Chile, Denmark, Baden (Germany),

Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, Québec (Canada), Scotland, Sweden, and the

underground Uruguayan Libertarian Alliance (ALU), the IWA affiliate that

split from the FAU in 1963.

This mushrooming of anarchist organisations across the world was matched

by the resurgence of anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism, as well as

autonomous worker organising that paralleled syndicalism in many ways,

in varied circumstances. For example, there was the establishment of an

IWW Marine Transport Workers’ Industrial Union (MTWIU) section in

Sweden. One of the key spurs to the resurgence of anarchism was the end

of the quasi-fascist regimes in Portugal in 1974, and Spain in 1975,

which saw the dramatic re-emergence of the CNT, with a membership of

200,000. In this period, however, the real harbinger of things to come

was the re-emergence of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism within

the Soviet Empire.[106] This was evidenced by the presence, in 1970, of

an anarchist pirate radio station in Russia; the anarchist Left

Opposition (LO) group in Leningrad between 1976 and 1978; and the

Movement of Revolutionary Communards (MRC) that sprang up in the same

city between 1979–1982 in the wake of the LO’s suppression. In 1979, the

Free General Workers’ Union (SMOT), the first Russian

syndicalist-influenced organisation to emerge in decades, was founded,

and the MRC affiliated to it. Also in 1979, anarchists at the State

University of Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine were arrested for attempting

to establish a Communist League of Anarchists. Meanwhile, changes were

afoot in other Soviet satellite regimes of Eastern Europe with the

foundation of the clandestine Polish Anarchist Federation (FA) in 1988,

and the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation (ASF) in Czechoslovakia in 1989,

just before the Marxist regime there collapsed. This was followed by the

founding in 1991 of the Anarchist Federation (AF) which defiantly

renamed itself the Czech and Slovak Anarchist Federation (CSAF) after

the division of the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Undoubtedly, there were anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist

influences on unions elsewhere in this time. For example, syndicalism

was an influence, although not predominant, on the Federation of South

African Trade Unions (FOSATU), founded in 1979.[107]

THE FONTENIST RESPONSE: THE “VANISHING VANGUARD” ADVANCES

LIBERTARIAN COMMUNISM

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

Friends of Durruti, have maintained the anarchist hard line time and

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

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

disillusioned and a deathly anti-revolutionary liberalism that focused

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

movement. In 1953, just after the anarchists had played a key role in

initiating the Cuban Revolution, the French anarchist-communist militant

George Fontenis wrote the Manifeste du communisme libertaire (Manifesto

of Libertarian Communism) for the platformist Libertarian Communist

Federation (FCL). The FCL’s origins were clandestine, as the platformist

tendency had arisen within the FAF in 1950, as a secret caucus called

the Thought-Battle Organisation (OPB), of which Fontenis was the

secretary. Fontenis later regretted this clandestinity, even though the

synthesists had their own similar network within the FAF. The existence

of the OPB only became known two years after it dramatically captured

and overhauled the FAF at its 1952 Congress, transforming it into the

FCL, with a minority of dissident synthesists leaving to reform the FAF

the following year. The unaccountable secrecy of the OPB faction, which

was apparently designed to attract the left flank of the French

Communist Party, tarnished the debate over the Manifesto.

As with other platformist-style manifestos, the Manifesto caused an

uproar, attacking the “synthesist” form of anarchist organising that

included extreme individualism, alongside anarcho-syndicalism, and a

mish-mash of libertarian ideas. It also rejected the usual Bolshevik

theories of the dictatorship of the proletariat (actually the

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

revolution put on hold forever). It affirmed anarchism as a

class-struggle, revolutionary theory, and practice, and called for a

disciplined “vanguard” to push the revolution forward. By vanguard,

Fontenis did not mean the Marxist-styled, self-appointed “leaders” of

the people, which he said “leads to a pessimistic evaluation of the role

of the masses, to an aristocratic contempt for their political ability,

to concealed direction of revolutionary activity, and so to defeat.”

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

organisation tasked with “developing the direct political responsibility

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

themselves.” As its final aim, this group of activists was “to disappear

in becoming identical with the masses when they reach their highest

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

within established mass organisations like unions, educational groups,

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

basic principles would be ideological and tactical unity, collective

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

structure.

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

Proletarian Action Anarchist Groups (GAAP) within the synthesist Italian

Anarchist Federation (FAI), and were later expelled. The GAAP did not

survive for long on its own, but in its brief existence, the GAAP united

with Fontenis’ FCL and the North African Libertarian Movement (MLNA) of

Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, to form a Libertarian Communist

International (ICL) that was more of a Western Mediterranean

organisation, and which collapsed with the simultaneous suppression of

the FCL in France and the MLNA in Algeria in 1957. Despite the

disappearance of a specific platformist tendency in Italy, veterans of

the GAAP and the memory of its practice formed the backbone of today’s

Federation of Communist Anarchists (FdCA), founded in 1985.

Fontenis is a controversial character in France, but as an obituary

states, he was “one of the leading figures in the postwar revolutionary

movement in France. He played an important role in the reconstruction

and reform of the French anarchist movement, and in supporting those

fighting for Algerian independence in the 1950s and 60s; a prominent

activist in May 68, he would go on to help (re)create a libertarian

communist movement in the 1970s; he was also in later life one of the

pillars of the Libre Pensée (Free Thought) movement; having joined the

Union of Libertarian Communist Workers (UTCL) in 1980, he would

subsequently become a member of Alternative Libertaire, and would remain

a member until his death at the age of 90,” in 2010. While platformism

in France suffered from the suppression of the FCL in 1957—until its

ideas were revived in 1968 with the founding of the Anarchist

Revolutionary Organisation (ORA) tendency that split from the FAF in

1970—it remained a minority tendency within the Western anarchist

movement. Its strong anti-imperialist credentials, which had been proven

in the Algerian Liberation War, meant that it did find a powerful

resonance within the Latin American anarchist movement, where it would

again manage to establish mass organisations.

The ORA called itself “a federation of territorial or trades groups and

not a gathering of individuals” and its Organisational Contract (1970)

stated that “anarchism repudiates all authoritarianism: that of pure

individualism with its repudiation of society, and that of pure

communism which seeks to ignore the individual. Anarchism is not a

synthesis of antagonistic principles, but a juxtaposition of concrete,

living realities, the convergence of which must be sought in an

equilibrium as elastic as life itself.” While hailing the platformist

principles of ideological and tactical unity, collective responsibility,

rank-and-file decision-making, and libertarian federalism, the

Organisational Contract stated that the ORA “has no pretensions to a

rigid ideological unity generating dogmatism [or, what it named ‘stodgy

uniformity’]. But on the other hand, it refuses also to be merely a

motley collection of divergent tendencies, the frictions between which

would inevitably lead to stagnation.”

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

the driving force behind mass movements against authoritarian systems”

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

creation of platformist organisations with the same acronym in Denmark

in 1973 (since dissolved), Britain in the mid-1970s (since dissolved),

and Italy in 1976, the last of which became the FdCA of today in 1985.

The French ORA became today’s French/Belgian Libertarian Communist

Organisation (OCL) and its Libertarian Alternative (AL) splinter. The

longevity of the FdCA and ORA/OCL/AL lines help put paid to the idea

that platformism is a disguised intermediary stage in a rightward

capitulation towards Bolshevism.

In Latin America, as stated, platformism renewed its strength. Known as

especifismo (specifism), in the southern cone of the continent, it

developed the most powerful challenge to state-capitalist revolutionism,

especially after the 1956 founding of the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation

(FAU), which harkened back to an earlier federation of the same name,

between the years 1938 and 1941. In 1972, the FAU produced the seminal

text of especifismo, Huerta Grande (Large Orchard) which stressed the

need to avoid “voluntarism” driven merely by good will, in favour of a

political line informed by a sound analysis of the real conditions in

Uruguay. In rejecting the creation of a new theory of action from

scratch, Huerta Grande automatically rejected bourgeois and

“fashionable” analyses out of hand, in favour of revolutionary socialist

analyses that were directly applicable to the situation in Uruguay.

Those analyses would then be linked to the ideological objectives of the

FAU, in transforming Uruguayan society by its political praxis, although

“only through it [praxis], through its concrete existence, in the tested

conditions of its development, can we elaborate a useful theoretical

framework.”

The Fifth Wave, 1990–Today: The Anarchist Movement’s Resurgence in

the Era of Soviet Collapse and Neoliberal Hegemony

The Fourth Wave of anarchist insurgencies were crushed by neo-fascist

repression in Latin America in the mid-1970s, as the US continued to

fund death squads into the 1980s, and by the increasingly militarised

response of many anarchists in Western Europe and North America, due to

their isolation from the popular classes. This led many to embrace

terrorism, Maoism, Third Worldism, and other deviations, but anarcho-

and revolutionary syndicalism steadily rebuilt, as did anarchist

political organisation. A Fifth Wave, far broader than the Fourth, was

soon unleashed between 1989 and 1991, with the dramatic collapse of the

Soviet Union and the liberation of its Eastern European satellite

colonies, including the Marxist oddity that was Albania and the Titoist

dissident region of Yugoslavia. Immediately, the underground anarchist

movement in those countries surged forth, with the Polish AF and the

Czechoslovakian ASF, and with the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists

(KAS) and Confederation of Revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists (KRAS),

both founded in Russia in 1989, leading the way. The explosion of new

anarchist organisations in the former Soviet empire has been remarkable:

from the Baltic states to the Balkan states, and Belarus to Kazakhstan,

there is barely a region of the ex-USSR and its satellites which has not

seen a newly emergent anarchist and anarcho-/revolutionary syndicalist

movement. Notable is the establishment of organisations like the

2,000–strong Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists, Nestor

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

the emergence of explicitly “Makhnovist” groups in countries like Greece

and Turkey.

Geographically the broadest self-described “anarchist-communist” network

in the world today, outside of the syndicalist union federations, is

Autonomous Action (AD), with branches in 20 Russian cities, as well as

in Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine—although by my definition,

AD is a synthesist organisation.[108] The ongoing development of

underground anarcho-syndicalist networks under Marxist dictatorships,

like that of Cuba, which are rapidly embracing liberal capitalism,

demonstrates that we can expect a further emergence in times to come,

especially as totalitarianism loses its grip in China, Vietnam, and

North Korea. Although no current anarchist underground is known in those

latter regions, in 1997, a Swedish SAC delegation to Cuba discovered

there was an active indigenous anarcho-syndicalist underground. By the

2000s, the exile MLC was rebuilding itself and established the Aid Group

for the Libertarians and Independent Syndicalists in Cuba (GALSIC),

which, as Fidel Castro’s health failed, began to publish the bulletin

Cuba Libertaria (Libertarian Cuba) in 2004. The collapse of right-wing

dictatorships in Latin America, left-wing dictatorships in Eastern

Europe and Central Asia, the reactionary South Korean state, South

African apartheid, and the emergence of militant new social movements,

as capital contracts ever more severely into a neo-corporatist crisis,

has spurred on the revival of especifista organisations in Argentina,

Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru,

Venezuela, and Uruguay, and the emergence of a platformist organisation

in French Guiana. The primary organisation that helped initiate this

spurt of new growth was the revived FAU of Uruguay, which rebuilt in

1985, repudiated its earlier pro-Castroism, and developed an especifist

conception similar to the Platform. The result of its leading role in

regenerating anarchist praxis in the southern cone of Latin America is

that most of the region’s most significant new organisations are

especifista/platformist organisations.[109]

The Zapatista Revolt in Chiapas in southern Mexico in 1994, with its

post-Soviet Makhnovist-like model of libertarian socialist, civilian,

decentralised administration, defended by a militia, and its explicit

references to the anarchist-influenced Zapatista Revolution of the

1910s, helped provide the impetus for the creation of neighbouring

anarchist-indigenist organisations such as the Indigenous Popular

Council of Oaxaca—Ricardo Flores Magón (CIPO-RFM) and its splinter

Magónista-Zapatista Alliance (AMZ). In Africa, the conditions of

neo-colonialism lead to the construction of anarchist organisations,

which often for the same reasons proved ephemeral; these include the

Anarchist Party for Individual Freedoms in the Republic (PALIR) in

Senegal in 1981, the fate of which is unknown to me, the Anarchist

Workers’ and Students’ Group (ASWG) of Zambia in 1998 which did not

survive the death of its founder, librarian Wilstar Choongo (1964–1999),

and the Wiyathi Collective within the Anti-Capitalist Convergence of

Kenya (ACCK) in the early 2000s. But the closing phases of resistance to

militarism and apartheid saw the (re-)emergence of larger or more

durable anarchist organisations where its heritage had been slender: the

3,240–strong IWW section among diamond miners in Sierra Leone in the

early 1990s, which was sadly destroyed in 1997 by the civil war

precipitated by a military coup d’état (the fate of members such as

local delegate Bright Chikezi who were transported to Guinea by US

Marines remaining unknown); the anarcho-syndicalist Awareness League

(AL) of Nigeria, which rose to about 1,000 members in the oil and other

industries during the General Sani Abacha dictatorship; and the

Anarchist Resistance Movement (ARM), and Durban Anarchist Federation

(DAF) of South Africa, the latter two being the forerunners of today’s

Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF), an especifista organisation

founded in 2003 by myself and a multiracial group of anarchists, along

Brazilian lines, which is still active today as a tiny, but prolific,

ideologically influential core.[110]

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

imperialist wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, the organised anarchist

movement in North America—long plagued by individualism, primitivism,

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

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

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

regional organisations across the continent. NEFAC has since subdivided

into three separate anarchist organisations, called the Common Struggle

Libertarian Communist Federation in the US, Common Cause in Ontario,

Canada, and the Libertarian Communist Union (UCL) in Québec,

Canada.[111] The neoliberal crisis has seen the establishment of

anarchist organisations in regions where there was no historical

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

Leone, Costa Rica to Kenya, El Salvador to Zambia, Tunisia to the

Dominican Republic, Jordan to Uganda.

A Fifth Wave of anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism has arisen,

despite the fractious debates that have cost the IWA its Japanese,

Colombian, and factions of its French and Italian sections. This is

apparent not only in the continued existence of the veteran

anarcho-syndicalist organisations of Western Europe, such as the General

Confederation of Labour (CGT) of Spain, which at 60,000 members is now

the largest in the world (and the third-largest union federation in

Spain, representing two million workers through workplace elections),

the 6,000–strong Siberian Confederation of Labour (SKT), and the

National Confederation of Labour—France (CNT-F), which claims 5,000

members. The Swedish Central Workers’ Organisation (SAC) currently

claims a membership of 9,000, a thousand fewer members than in the late

1990s, after it discontinued the practice of including members who had

retired from their employment, but has embarked on an ambitious

programme to re-invigourate the relevance of syndicalism in Sweden. In

addition, there is the rank-and-file factory councilist/syndicalist

tendency within a section of the union “base committee” movement of

Italy (CIB-UNICOBAS), the alternative “struggle syndicalism” unions in

France centred on the trade unions Solidarity Unity Democracy (SUD), and

SUD in Switzerland which explicitly recognise revolutionary syndicalism

as one of their main influences. Equally promising are the growing

contacts being made between such formations, and a wide range of unions

in Africa and Asia, ranging from the Democratic Republic of Congo to

Malaysia, Burkina Faso to Bangladesh, which interact with the

syndicalist movement.

New and old anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist unions are

collaborating continentally by sector (railways, communications,

education etc.), across neoliberal “Fortress Europe,” through the

European Federation of Alternative Syndicalism—Education (FESAL-E)

network of “grassroots syndicalist” teachers’ unions.[112] This

expansive Fifth Wave has seen numerous splinters, arguments, collapses,

and reformations, but this is a sign of rapid growth and the development

of a plethora of different libertarian, communist approaches to the

challenges posed to the working class by turbo-capitalism in the new

millennium.

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

international organising, with the formation of three new networks:

International Libertarian Solidarity (ILS),[113] founded in 2001 (though

defunct within the decade); the holding of a series of international

anarcho-/revolutionary syndicalist conferences, in San Francisco in

1999, in Paris in 2000, in Essen in 2002, and in Paris in 2007—which

have notably drawn in many emergent rank-and-file unions from West

Africa; and perhaps of more significance from a Bakuninist

dual-organisationist perspective, the establishment of the anarkismo.net

news and analysis website in 2003.[114] The anarkismo project currently

represents 33 “anarchist-communist,” especifista, and

platformist-inspired organisations from Argentina, Australia, Brazil,

Canada, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, France/Belgium, Ireland, Italy,

Norway, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the

United States of America, and Uruguay. The project’s name is in the

universalist Esperantist patois and its website publishes in French,

Spanish, English, Portuguese, Turkish, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Arabic,

Chinese, Russian, Polish and other languages, making it probably the

most serious internationalist attempt to provide sound, multilingual

anarchist analysis of social, economic, and political developments

around the world today.

In countries such as France, where mass organisations were the rule,

self-described platformist organisations have remained an important

influence on the specific anarchist movement to the present day. In the

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

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

millennium, the mainstream mass organisational tendency is again in

ascendance. The lead given both by new organisations, such as Common

Struggle and the Workers’ Solidarity Movement (WSM) of Ireland, and

older ones, such as the Uruguayan FAU and the Italian FdCA, have

inspired a tremendous growth-spurt of anarchist-communist organising,

marked by the Bakuninist/platformist/especifista-influenced coherence of

their critiques and practices. The new organisations have mushroomed,

despite the revival by their antagonists of the hoary old claim that the

tendency is crypto-Bolshevik.

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

platformism is primarily an organisational tactic within anarchism,

dating back to the Bakuninist stress on dual organisationism, rather

than an ideological orientation in its own right. But the aforementioned

organisations—networked together loosely as the international editorial

collective of the anarkismo project—work alongside the unaligned (and

where possible, the IWA-aligned) anarcho-syndicalist and specific

anarchist organisations. It is also worth noting the rise of specific

anarchist political organisations in parts of the world where the

anarchist tradition is more slender historically or did not previously

exist: Costa Rica, Estonia, French Guyana, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon,

Iran and the Iranian Diaspora, Turkey, Slovakia, Swaziland (ZACF), and

Zimbabwe. Also, the “Arab Spring” has resulted in the emergence of at

least one new anarchist specific organisation in the Arab world: the

Libertarian Socialist Movement (LSM) in Egypt.[115]

THE ESPECIFISTA RESPONSE: THE ANARCHIST “ENGINE” THAT DRIVES

PEOPLE’S POWER TOWARDS REVOLUTIONARY RUPTURE

In 1991, following the collapse of Soviet state capitalism, the French

platformist Libertarian Alternative (AL) took up the pro-organisational

torch with Manifeste pour une Alternative Libertaire (Manifesto for a

Libertarian Alternative).[116] Its aim was not only to help inject a

hardline perspective into the growing anarchist movement, but to show

other true revolutionaries a way out of the dead end into which state

“socialism” had led the workers. It dealt with the issues faced by the

modern working class under neoliberalism: mass unemployment,

casualisation, neo-colonialism, the enclosure of the people’s “commons”

down to the genetic level, the rise of the new technical middle class

(computer specialists, etc.), and so forth. It emphasised the need for a

worker-driven revolutionary project that would aim to dismantle

capitalism and all forms of oppression, including those directed against

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

that the anarchist organisation might run efficiently and co-ordinate

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

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

all members.

In 1993, five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the FAU, which

had rebuilt itself a decade previously after the collapse of the

dictatorship, adopted the Declaración de Principios de FAU (Declaration

of Principles of the FAU) at its 10^(th) Congress in Montevideo. The

Declaration of the Congress opened by stating, “The vision of anarchism

advocated by the FAU is built around a critique of relations of

domination in all spheres of social activity (political, economic,

legal, military, educational, cultural, etc.).” Despite capitalism

lurching from one crisis to the next, the Declaration stated, anarchism

had proven its resilience, so against a fatalistic doctrine of the

inevitability of capitalist collapse, the anarchists posed a doctrine of

human agency, the “meaning of will, of action, of the individual and

collective consciousness of the oppressed.” The end of the Soviet Empire

and the rise of American hegemony—“the Cold War served both the US and

the USSR to reassert its hegemony in their respective areas of

influence, and internally, to perpetuate a system of privilege and

coercion”—had ushered in an era of volatile financial capital

destabilising entire regions, driving “chronic hunger and social

catastrophes expressed in local wars”—the statist/capitalist responses

to which the writers of the Declaration referred included

a strengthening and automation of instruments of repression and control

are now moving towards what they call ‘low intensity conflicts’, a kind

of preventive repression to prevent the outbreak and spread of

conflicts, usually desperate corollaries of social situations.

Simultaneously, in other areas is the strengthening of authoritarian

forms in response to social instability. Similarly, diffuse conceptions

of society conceived as a vertical structure, ultra-hierarchical and

static. This is the case of some ideological responses that are based on

religious beliefs. Perhaps less tangible, but equally widespread is the

crisis afflicting the world in virtually all political parties, caste

politics and the instruments of political mediation. It is partly this

crisis that has fuelled the resurgence of authoritarian populist

movements… This feeling, perversely fed clearly fascist-inspired groups

and movements. Again flourish anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism, and

the uncertainty of tomorrow takes refuge in an ultra aggressive

nationalism.

The depth and range of the discussion of interpenetrated issues in the

Declaration demonstrates the maturity reached by the FAU—well beyond the

simplicity of the Huerta Grande—after being forged in the fires of

repression that murdered so many of its members. For the purpose of this

essay, I will only focus, however, on their view of their own role. The

Declaration states:

The FAU is intended as a political expression of the class interests of

the dominated, exploited and oppressed, and is located at their service

and aspires to be an engine of social struggles, an engine that neither

represents nor replaces [in other words, does not substitute itself for

the class]… For us, the political organisation is also the area where

the experience of popular struggle accumulates, both domestically and

internationally, an instance that prevents the dilution of the knowledge

that the exploited and oppressed acquire over time.

In other words, the specific organisation is the repository of the

oppressed classes’ experience of struggle, struggle that in and of

itself constitutes the revolutionary gymnasium wherein the class tests

its strength for the overturning of the capitalist world order. The

Declaration averred that “The political organisation… is well placed to

take on the different and complex levels of activity that may require

revolutionary work, the only body able to ensure all technical,

material, political, theoretical, and so on requirements which are sine

qua non of a strategy of rupture.” The rupture spoken of here lies at

the heart of especifismo. The specific organisation’s primary task is to

sever the ideological, political, social, and economic bonds that bind

the oppressed classes to the parasitic classes, and this rupture

constitutes the counter-cultural breach between the opposed forces,

creating the foundation on which revolutionary decentralist

anarchist-communist counter-power can be built. The Declaration

continues:

Our vision of the political organisation is contrary to the various

forms of “modernism” of “depositors of consciousness” in short,

self-appointed groups who feel touched by the finger of god. The

organisation, maintaining and promoting the spirit of revolt, endorsing

all the present and future demands of a revolutionary process, hails

from militant organised labour and can only promote consistently and

with redoubled force the creation, strengthening and consolidation of

grassroots organisations, which form the core of a people’s power

revolution… And finally, in the strict domain of political action… the

FAU aspires to be the tool for realising our libertarian principles.

Going on to speak of “the organisation as a school of life,” “of ethics,

in accordance with the values we espouse,” the Declaration states that

the “FAU is not a finished organisation, it is rather a project. In this

sense, it is also a life-plan that attracts the men and women of our

people willing to find ways of a better and more humane existence [it

is] a constant forge, which is not decreed once and for all, bur that is

produced in a constant revolutionary effort.”

In 2005, the Italian militant schoolteacher Saverio Crapraro, member of

the FdCA, produced Comunisti Anarchici: Una Questione di Classe

(Anarchist-Communists: A Question of Class),[117] which spelled out the

key theoretical bases of the idea, tracing a lineage from Bakunin to

Luigi Fabbri to Camillo Berneri. Luigi Fabbri (1877–1935), a prolific

anarchist writer and long-time associate of Malatesta died during the

Fascist era in exile in Uruguay where his daughter the anarchist writer

and publisher Luce Fabbri (1908–2000) was involved with the synthesist

ALU splinter off the FAU. Camillo Berneri (1897–1937), an anarchist

philosopher, theorist and activist—held by many Italian anarchists to be

Malatesta’s ideological heir—fought in the resistance to the Fascists

until 1926 when he fled Italy. He was murdered by the Bolsheviks during

the Spanish Revolution. Crapraro’s A Question of Class tied this rather

Italianate lineage to the experiments of the Paris Commune, and the

Ukrainian and Spanish Revolutions. It argued for distinctions between

not only Bakuninism and the Left, but between it and other “anarchist”

tendencies, using a method of historical materialism. A Question of

Class argued for organisational dualism of the specific organisation

working within the mass organisation, stating that

The relationship between the masses and their most conscious elements

(the vanguard) is one of the fundamental problems regarding the

formulation of a revolutionary strategy. The absence of a solution to

this problem, or incorrect solutions to it, lie behind every historical

failure of each revolutionary project or else are the basis of the

failures in those countries where revolutions enjoyed some initial

success. No school of Marxism has yet clarified that relationship in its

essence, and while on the part of Anarchists, the rejection a priori of

the concept of a vanguard (a word which evokes an unwarranted idea of

authority) has long impeded any detailed explanation. The only clear

thinking on the matter remains, even after over a century, Bakunin.

The FdCA position paper goes on to state that:

The capitalist system has perfected a series of instruments with which

it can recover what it loses to workers’ demands, so it is perfectly

utopian to claim that the material needs [of the proletariat] and their

satisfaction can automatically provoke the end of capitalism, ruined by

its internal contradictions. The struggle for material needs must also

be the seed for class consciousness and the basis on which a detailed

strategy for attacking the capitalist system can be grounded. It must

also be a revolutionary strategy, which can be a point of reference for

the political growth of the proletariat in the struggle and ensure an

increase in those struggles as part of a strategic process which will

direct them towards the goal of the revolution. An organisation is

therefore required for the development of strategy and this organisation

(the specific organisation) of revolutionary proletarians must be based

on a common theory. This is organisational dualism.

Crapraro goes on to say that the defining features of the mass

organisation, that which “the masses build for their defence of their

interests are: heterogeneity, due to the fact that its goal,

independently of the political ideas of its members, is not to unite

people who are already members of this party or that but to unite all

workers who share the interests to be defended; [and] direct action, by

which we mean the first-hand running of the struggles and agreement on

demands, as a constant practice, in other words by the workers. The

labour union, as a mass organisation, is therefore a tool in the hands

of the working classes for the improvement of their economic conditions

and for their emancipation, through anti-capitalist struggle.” It is

neither the creation nor toy of the specific organisation, or the

exclusive preserve of revolutionaries, but an all-embracing organisation

of class. He goes on to describe the tasks of the specific organisation

“to be the depository for the class memory” and “to elaborate a common

strategy which can ensure the linking of all the struggles and which can

stimulate and guide.” But the specific organisation, for Crapraro and

the FdCA, is neither a Leninist party which sits above the masses, nor a

mere connector of struggles, lacking a strategy of its own; rather the

organisation is a “party-guide” that “establishes a political line which

is then transmitted to the [mass] organisations, like a drive belt.”

Conclusion: The Role of the Anarchist Specific Organisation in a

“Front of Oppressed Classes”

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

world in the shell of the old, and create a dual-power situation as

exists now in Argentina: popular power of the base undermines the

parasitic power of the bourgeoisie. History is not neutral. In school,

we are told that we need governments and bosses. We are told that

history is a struggle between different governments, armies, and ruling

elites. We are told that only the rich and powerful make history. What

we are not told is that ordinary people have fought the bosses and

rulers every step of the way and that this class war is the true engine

of civilisation and progress. We are not told that governments and

capitalism are not only unnecessary, but destructive of all that is

worthwhile. We, as anarchists, know that people, even the bourgeoisie,

are not inherently bad; we all merely conform to our class interests.

Given the right conditions, conditions of true equality and freedom, a

powerful spirit of mutual aid and co-operation has been demonstrated to

come to the fore in the popular masses.

How we act is related to the structure of society. When oppression and

exploitation are forcibly removed by directly-democratic,

horizontally-federated organisations operating under the guidance of the

popular will, then the “goodness” that is in most of us comes through

and flourishes as it did when the workers held the reigns in Argentina,

Macedonia, Ukraine, Spain, Mexico, Manchuria, China, Iran, Cuba, France,

Nicaragua, Bolivia, Algeria, and elsewhere. I hope that I have shown

that what we anarchists are putting forward are not just pretty,

unrealistic ideas. I hope I have indicated with this brief introduction

to the broad anarchist movement’s rich history that these ideas can

work; a new society can be created with the workers, peasants, and the

poor in control.

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

we need revolutionary organisations that draw together all those

fighting for workers’ control of the means of production and

directly-democratic community self-organisation, organisations that give

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

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

passive followers. As Rosa Luxemburg said in Organisational Questions of

the Russian Social Democracy: “Let us put it quite bluntly: the errors

committed by a truly revolutionary workers’ movement are historically

far more fruitful and valuable than the infallibility of even the best

central committee.”[118] We do not need elite political caucuses and

“vanguard parties” dictating to us from on high. What we need are

working class organisations under workers’ directly-democratic control,

with strictly-mandated delegates, subject to rank-and-file

decision-making, mobilising the mass of ordinary people, in the process

of making a truly social, grassroots revolution, with communes/soviets

and syndicalist unions federated horizontally across urban and rural

areas, defended by an armed militia, under the pluralistic civilian

control of mass organisations of the class. These, in turn, are

invigorated by specific organisations of anarchist tendency, on the

grounds laid out by Bakunin and his followers, along the lines of

platformism/especificismo.

A most important point is, however, that anarchists are not, and should

not, be the sole organisers of the working class in preparation for

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

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

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

involved in the global, anti-neoliberal movement and in the practical

day-to-day struggles of the working class, demonstrating mutual aid,

solidarity, responsibility, federalism, and all the other principles of

revolutionary anarchism in action.

This point was made by the anarchist group Rebel Libertarian Socialism

(Auca-SL) of Argentina, in its Declaration of Principles (1998): “the

model of the Single Revolutionary Party is exhausted. It has

demonstrated its lack of flexibility against the different political

manifestations of our class.” In opposition to this traditional,

narrow-minded political idea of the role of the revolutionary

organisation, Auca-SL promoted the idea of a “Front of Oppressed Classes

[FOC] where syndicalist, social and political models which, in general,

struggle for revolutionary change will converge. It is there, in the

heart of the FOC, where a healthy debate of political tendencies and

positions should be engaged in, so that the course the FOC takes is

representative of the existing correlation of popular forces.” The FOC

idea is totally different from the Popular Front idea, common to

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

for solidarity purposes, then insert their leaders to rule this

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

Instead, the anarchist FOC concept represents the progressive, political

plurality, anti-authoritarian solidarity, and innovative diversity of a

united working class, in action against both capital and its Siamese

twin, the state. Auca-SL warned against any bureaucratisation of the

social struggle along Marxist-Leninist lines.

The FdCA’s A Question of Class echoes this point, defining the specific

organisation as “An organisation which is an internal part of the mass

organisation and not external to it means that members of the specific

organisation must be class-struggle militants. It does not substitute

the masses in revolutionary action, but rather stimulates their

political growth, their desire for self-management and

self-organisation, leading to a revolutionary project. It is an

inspiring, energetic force within the mass organisation to which it

brings its strategy. For the very reason that members of the specific

organisation are also members of the mass organisation, as members of

the mass organisation, they bring to it their points of view in order

that the action of the masses can be strategically co-ordinated, with

the aim of reaching the revolutionary objective in the most efficient

way possible.”

Importantly, A Question of Class states: “[w]e defend other progressive

organisations that are involved in struggles from repression. Where

necessary, we will engage in United Front [similar to the FOC concept]

actions alongside them.” However, whilst we anarchists should defend

these groups unconditionally, we should not do so uncritically—we must

maintain our independence and argue for Bakuninist ideas. The natural

skills, intelligence, innovation, and solidarity owned by the working

class are the only things that can produce both the social revolutionary

dynamite needed to destroy the neo-corporatist neoliberal system—and the

fertiliser that will enrich the post-revolutionary soil, so that it

comes up roses: beautiful, but armed with thorns. The renewed energy,

potency, and practicality of the anarchist movement has seen new

organisations spreading like wildfire. As with the New Left of the

Fourth Wave, this is taking place so much more deliberately and clearly

today, through the contemporary Fifth Wave global anti-capitalist

movement.

The working class is re-opening the anarchist/syndicalist toolbox of

federated direct democracy, filled with tools carefully polished and

maintained over the decades by a dedicated militant minority, to

rediscover not only the most effective forms of directly-democratic

resistance, but the cultural forms that sustained a decentralised form

of popular power. Now that millions of people are excluded from the

globally uniform, pay-to-enjoy spectacle of capitalist culture, many are

turning to self-generated counter-culture, in all its locally-specific

diversity, to sustain their new vision of a self-empowered,

counter-power world. The realisability of this vision has become

tangible again, and so its message more commanding of attention. In

1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party

argued that a “new spectre,” the “spectre of communism,” was “haunting”

Europe. Today, to judge from the mainstream press, a “new spectre,” that

of revolutionary anarchism, haunts the halls of power across the world

of neoliberal capitalism—showing its vaunted hegemony to be a lie. As an

issue of the New York Times a decade ago had it, anarchism remains “the

idea that would not die.”

[1] The First International, the informal name of the International

Workingmen’s Association (IWMA) of 1864–1877, was the first significant

international socialist organisation to unite trade unions and militants

across national lines. It split in 1872 into an anarchist majority

organisation and a Marxist minority faction.

[2] Nancy Fraser, Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the

Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, Duke University Press, Durham,

USA, 1990; her ideas are updated in Nancy Fraser, Transnationalizing the

Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a

Post-Westphalian World, 2007, online at

eipcp.net

.

[3] Buenaventura Durruti (1896–1936), interviewed by Pierre van Passen

of the Toronto Star on 5 August 1936.

[4] Steven Hirsch, Anarcho-Syndicalist Roots of a Multi-Class Alliance:

Organized Labor and the Peruvian Aprista Party 1900–1933, PhD thesis,

George Washington University Press, Washington DC, USA, 1997.

[5] On the theory of anarchism as some sort of timeless primordial

spirit of revolt, see Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A

History of Anarchism, HarperCollins, London, UK, 2008. While a very

valuable reference, Marshall’s book uses a broader and more vague

definition of anarchism than I do, drawing in many tendencies that,

while they may be libertarian, antedate the formation of the First

International, are often only linked by their common anti-statism, and

are totally incompatible on innumerable other issues.

[6] This quote is from his essay Statism and Anarchy, 1873, quoted in

Sam Dolgoff (ed), Bakunin on Anarchy, George Allen and Unwin, London,

UK, 1971. The best new study is Mark Leier, Bakunin: The Creative Urge;

A Biography, Publishers Group Canada, Toronto, 2006. Bakunin’s ideas on

anarchist organisation can be found specifically in the Rules and

Programme of the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy (1868),

and the Programme of the International Brotherhood (1869), both

available online at

anarchistplatform.wordpress.com

.

[7] Bakunin, quoted in Dolgoff, Bakunin on Anarchy.

[8] For a groundbreaking series of case studies of anarchist engagements

on the national question in Africa, Asia, colonial Europe (Ireland and

Ukraine), and Latin America, read Lucien van der Walt and Steven J.

Hirsch (eds), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial

World: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism and Social

Revolution, Brill, The Netherlands, 2010. A similarly broad series of

case studies is due to be published shortly on the roots and adaptations

of anarchism across the globe, José Antonio Guttiérez Dantón (ed), Las

Vertiente de la Anarquía, Libros de Anarres, Buenos Aires, Argentina,

(due in 2013).

[9] Giuseppe Fanelli (1827–1877), an Italian anarchist agitator and

member of Bakunin’s International Brotherhood who had fought with

Garibaldi’s forces, and in the Polish Revolt of 1862–1863.

[10] Harmut Rübner, Occupational Culture, Conflict Patterns and

Organizational Behaviour: Perspectives of Syndicalism in 20^(th) Century

Shipping, revised version of paper presented at ‘‘Syndicalism: Swedish

and Historical Experiences,’’ Department of Economic History, Stockholm

University, 13–14 March 1998.

[11]

F. N. Brill, in A Brief History of the IWW outside the US 1905–1999,

IWW, USA, 1999, online at

www.iww.org/en/history/library/misc/FNBrill1999, cites IWW

activities in sites such as Chile, China, Cuba, Ecuador, Fiji,

Germany, Japan, Peru, Siberia, and Sierra Leone. Brill’s list is

far from exhaustive: for a study of seaboard syndicalism in Cape

Town, South Africa, read Lucien van der Walt, Anarchism and

Syndicalism in an African Port City: the Revolutionary

Traditions of Cape Town’s Multiracial Working Class, 1904–1931,

Labour History, Routledge, UK, 2011.

[12] Bert Altena, Analysing Revolutionary Syndicalism: the Importance of

Community, conference paper, Anarchist Studies Network, UK, 1999, since

updated in New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism, David

Berry and Constance Bantam (eds), Cambridge Scholars Publishing,

Newcastle-on-Tyne, UK, 2010.

[13] The Haymarket Martyrs were seven Central Labor Union anarchist

militants framed and executed by the US state in 1887 (an eighth

committed suicide in jail). The international workers’ festival of May

Day commemorates their murders.

[14] The CGT’s Charter of Amiens, a famous position statement of

revolutionary syndicalism, helped spark the Second Wave explosion of

anarcho-syndicalism across Latin America, but had the notable weakness

of being hostile to politicking in the trade unions—even by

anarchists—creating an “apolitical syndicalism” vulnerable to capture by

reformists.

[15] The uprising of the Kronstadt Soviet at the naval base near St.

Petersburg in 1921 is widely seen as the last-ditch attempt to

reinvigourate the proletarian Russian Revolution against the

dictatorship of the Bolsheviks. Its key position statement in favour of

pluralistic direct democracy exercised by free soviets, the

Petropavlovsk Resolution taken by the 1^(st) & 2^(nd) Squadrons of the

Baltic Fleet, is available in Daniel Guérin (ed), No Gods No Masters: An

Anthology of Anarchism, Book 2, AK Press, Oakland, USA, 1998.

[16] The Spanish Revolution is usually misrepresented in the literature

as the only historical example of the anarchist movement exercising

control over large tracts of territory (in particular, the cantons of

Catalonia, Aragon, and Andalucia), but as I shall demonstrate in this

essay, the thesis of “Spanish exceptionalism” is belied by the mass

anarchist territorial control achieved in parts of Mexico, Manchuria,

and the Ukraine in particular. Also, the capitulation of the Spanish

mass movement to the machinations of their statist Republican allies, a

huge strategic error that led directly to the defeat of the Revolution,

remains insufficiently interrogated by anarchists themselves. Still, the

Spanish situation remains the best-studied example of the pragmatic

anarchist “administration of things” in running large industrial cities

such as Barcelona, in the implantation of communal land-ownership in

Aragon, and in the directly-democratic practices of its frontline

militia.

[17] The 1968 Revolt was far from limited to France: in many respects it

was a global uprising that marked the definitive entrance onto the stage

of history of youth as a distinct political force.

[18] The most powerful East European movements were the Bulgarian and

the Polish—more on these later—but the other movements in the region

(and in Scandinavia) were minority tendencies at best, although they

fought an honourable battle against authoritarian regimes in Finland and

the Baltic states, Yugoslavia, Greece and the Balkan states, Austria,

Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. For example, the Swedish Central Workers’

Organisation (SAC), founded in 1910 and still active today, peaked at

only 32,000 members in 1920, while the anarcho-syndicalist faction

within the General Workers’ Confederation of Greece (GSEE) represented

one in eight members in 1918.

[19] On Egypt, read Anthony Gorman, “‘Diverse in race, religion and

nationality… but united in aspirations of civil progress’: the anarchist

movement in Egypt 1860–1940,” and on South Africa, read Lucien van der

Walt, “Revolutionary syndicalism, communism and the national question in

South African socialism, 1886–1928,” both available in Hirsch and van

der Walt, 2010. And for a comparative analysis between North Africa and

Southern Africa, but which covers other parts of the continent too, read

Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, “Roots and Adaptations of

Anarchism and Syndicalism in Africa 1870—the Present,” in Gutiérrez

Dantón (ed), due in 2012.

[20] On the transnational linkages between Central America and the

Caribbean, read Kirk Shaffer, “Tropical Libertarians: anarchist

movements and networks in the Caribbean, Southern United States, and

Mexico, 1890s-1920,” in Hirsch and Van der Walt, 2010.

[21] On Australia and New Zealand, read Verity Burgman, Revolutionary

Industrial Unionism: the Industrial Workers of the World in Australia,

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1995; and Erik Olsen, The Red

Feds: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism and the New Zealand Federation

of Labour 1908–14, Oxford University Press, Auckland, New Zealand, 1988;

and Francis Schor, “Left Labor Agitators in the Pacific Rim of the Early

Twentieth Century,” International Labor and Working Class History, No.

67, USA, Spring 2005.

[22] On Vietnam, the most important work is Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism

and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution, Harvard University Press,

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and London, UK, 1992. On the Philippines

and its environs, read Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism

and the Anti-colonial Imagination, Verso, London, UK, and New York, USA,

2005. On Malaysia, read C.F. Yong, “Origins and Development of the

Malaysian Communist Movement 1919–1930,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol.5,

No.4, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, October 1991.

[23] On South Asia, specifically Hindustan in India, read Maia Ramnath,

Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and

Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire, California World History

Library, USA, 2011; and Maia Ramnath, Decolonizing Anarchism: an

Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle, AK Press and

Institute for Anarchist Studies, USA, 2011.

[24] On the Levant, specifically Lebanon/Syria and Egypt, read the

groundbreaking work of Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Levantine Trajectories: the

Formulation and Dissemination of Radical Ideas in and between Beirut,

Cairo and Alexandria 1860–1914, Harvard University, 2003.

[25] Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt, Black Flame: the

Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, AK Press,

Oakland, USA, 2009. The book’s blog is at

black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com

.

[26] Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Global Fire: 150 Fighting

Years of International Anarchism and Syndicalism, AK Press, Oakland, USA

(forthcoming).

[27] The best online archive of materials by and about Makhno and the

Makhnovists is at www.nestormakhno.info. A selection of Makhno’s

writings is to be found in Alexandre Skirda (ed) and Paul Sharkey

(trans), The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays, 1996, online

at www.ditext.com/makhno/struggle/struggle.html.

[28] On the emergence of a distinctly anarchist mass movement within the

First International read the Robert Graham chapter in Gutiérrez Dantón

(ed), due in 2013. On the claiming of either Proudhon or Bakunin as the

progenitor of the anarchist movement, read the David Berry chapter in

Gutiérrez Dantón (ed)—and compare it to the arguments in Van der Walt

and Schmidt, 2009.

[29] On the birth of the organised anarchist movement in Spain, rooted

in traditions of communalism and associationism, read the Luis Baños

chapter in Gutiérrez Dantón (ed), due in 2013, and on the First Wave

Spanish anarchist movement, read M. Molnár and J. Pekmez, Rural

Anarchism in Spain and the 1873 Cantonalist Revolution, in Henry A

Landsburger (ed), Rural Protest: Peasant Movements and Social Change,

International Institute for Labour Studies, Macmillan, London, UK, 1974.

[30] On the First and Second Wave Mexican anarchist movement, the

premiere text is John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class

1860–1931, University of Texas Press, Austin, USA, 1978, but a good

overview is provided in the early chapters of Norman Caulfield, Mexican

Workers and the State: From the Porfiriato to NAFTA, Texas Christian

University Press, USA, 1998.

[31] On the First Wave Uruguayan anarchist movement, Marshall writes:

“As early as 1875 the Regional Federation of the Eastern Republic of

Uruguay affiliated with the Bakuninist anti-authoritarian International

which emerged from the split at the Hague Conference. From this time

anarchism in Uruguay held sway in the workers’ movement and

revolutionary circles until the end of the 1920s.”

[32] On the First Wave Cuban anarchist movement, read Joan Casanovas

Codina, Labor & Colonialism in Cuba, doctoral dissertation, State

University of New York, USA, 1994; Gerald E Poyo, “The Anarchist

Challenge to the Cuban Independence Movement 1885–1890,” Cuban Studies,

15:1, Winter 1985; and Frank Fernández, Cuban Anarchism: The History of

Movement, See Sharp Press, USA, 2001, online at

libcom.org

.

[33] On the roots and distinct influence of the American movement, read

Kevin Saliger in Gutiérrez Dantón (ed), due in 2013, while on the First,

Second and Third Wave American anarchist movement, read Kenyon Zimmer,

The Whole World Is Our Country: Immigration and Anarchism in the United

States, 1885–1940, University of Pittsburgh, USA, 2005.

[34] Daniel De Leon (1852–1914), a Socialist Labor Party (SLP) leader

and union organiser whose version of revolutionary syndicalism combined

industrial unionist direct action with a socialist party electoral

take-over of political power. Splitting from the IWW in 1908 over its

rejection of political action, he formed what was nicknamed the “Detroit

IWW,” opposed to the majority “Chicago IWW,” and the schism was

replicated in other parts of the IWW world. Although as a person, De

Leon himself was a staunch Marxist, in practice the Detroit IWW was

sufficiently revolutionary syndicalist to fall within van der Walt and

my definition of the “broad anarchist tradition.”

[35] David Footman, Red Prelude—A Biography of Zhelyabov, Barrie &

Rockcliff, The Cresset Press, London, 1968, first published 1944. The

NWU was founded by the joiner Stepan Khalturin (1857–1882). The son of a

peasant, he became involved in subversive activities three years before

founding the union, which was, according to Footman, “the first serious

attempt in Russia to form a trade union. [Khalturin] was a man of

intelligence and energy and secured some sixty members and a number of

sympathisers.” Footman asserts that it had a notable influence on the

attitude of the Narodnaya Volya to organised labour, with narodnik

leader Andrei Zhelyabov declaring that “in Russia, a strike is a

political act.” Khalturin was opposed to terrorism, and the NWU

purchased its own press, but before it could start printing, it was

betrayed by a double-agent and a police raid shut the NWU and its press

down in 1879, arresting all but Khalturin who later became a Narodnaya

Volya militant and was executed as such in 1882. On the transitional

politics of these early Russian initiatives during the First Wave, read

the Frank Mintz chapter in Gutiérrez Dantón (ed), due in 2013.

[36] The narodniks were social revolutionaries whose praxis was to

immerse themselves in the peasantry and to fight the state by terrorism.

The movement, which had many women members including the anarchist and

later Marxist Vera Zasulich (1852–1919), gave birth to Russian

anarchism, nihilism, and Marxism, a process detailed in Footman, 1968.

[37] Followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881), a French

revolutionary whose vision involved a small group of conspirators

seizing power by coup d’etat rather than through the action of the

masses, a strategy ridiculed by Marx but approximated in many respects

by V.I. Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

[38] On the Cantonalist Revolt, read Molnár and Pekmez, 1974.

[39] The standard biography of Kropotkin remains Martin A. Miller,

Kropotkin, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, USA, 1976.

[40] On the Haymarket affair, read Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy,

Princeton University Press, Princeton, USA, 1986; and anonymous, The

Anarchists of Chicago: Haymarket 1886–1986, Freedom centennial pamphlet,

London, UK, 1986. For the radicalising influence of the hangings on

generations of the American labour movement, read the Kevin Saliger

chapter in Gutiérrez Dantón (ed), due in 2013.

[41] The Programme and Object of the Secret Revolutionary Organisation

of the International Brotherhood, is available online at

anarchistplatform.wordpress.com

.

[42] ‘International Revolutionary Society or Brotherhood,” in Daniel

Guérin (ed), No Gods, No Masters, Book One, AK Press, Oakland, USA,1998.

[43] In 1910, the Belgian colonial authorities established a Bourse du

Travail in the eastern Zairean mining province of Katanga in order to

try and control the labour force there, but it is suggested in Aldwin

Roes, The Bourse du Travail de Katanga: A Parastatal Recruitment

Organisation with Monopolistic Powers? State-capital relations in the

Mobilisation of Katanga’s Labour Power. 1910–1914, London School of

Economics, 2007, that this stratagem in fact enabled Kantangan labour to

organise itself against the employers—indicating possible syndicalist

influence.

[44] For a sound explanation of the tragic trajectory of the Second Wave

CGT from revolutionary syndicalism to reformism, read Wayne Thorpe,

“Uneasy Family: Revolutionary Syndicalism in Europe from the Charte de

Amiens to World War I,” in in New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and

Syndicalism: the Individual, the National and the Transnational, Berry

and Bantman (eds), Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 2010, online at:

www.c-s-p.org

. Picking up the story from there into the Third Wave is David Berry, A

History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945, AK Press, Oakland,

USA, 2009.

[45] The standard anarchist history of the Macedonian Revolt is Georges

Balkansky, nom de guerre of Georgi Grigoriev (1906–1996), Liberation

Nationale et Liberation Sociale: l’Example de la Revolution

Macedonienne, Collection Anarchiste, Federation Anarchiste, Paris,

France, undated.

[46] On the anarchists in the Russian Revolt, read Paul Avrich, The

Russian Anarchists, Princeton University Press, USA, 1967.

[47] For a narrative overview of the history of the ABC, read Matthew

Hart, Yelenskys’ Fable: A History of the ABC, Anarchist Black Cross

Federation, Los Angeles, USA, 2002.

[48] For a brief sketch of the Second and Third Wave IWW, read Michael

Hargis, IWW Chronology 1905–1939, IWW, USA, originally titled “95 Years

of Revolutionary Industrial Unionism,” reprinted in Anarcho-Syndicalist

Review #27, Champaign, Illinois, USA, probably 2000. For more detailed

accounts, read Fred W. Thompson and Patrick Murfin, The IWW: its First

70 Years, IWW, Chicago, 1976, and Philip S Foner, The Industrial Workers

of the World, 1905–17, International Publishers, New York, 1965. For a

comparative analysis of the IWW’s engagement with the national question

in the USA and South Africa, read Peter Cole and Lucien van der Walt,

“Crossing the Color Lines, Crossing the Continents: Comparing the Racial

Politics of the IWW in South Africa and the United States, 1905–1925,”

Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, Vol. 12, No.

1, New Haven, USA, January 2011.

[49] On Japan, the key text is John Crump, The Anarchist Movement in

Japan, Anarchist-Communist Federation, London, UK, 1996, while detail is

added by Matthew Turner, Museifushugi: a Brief History of Anarchism in

pre-War Japan, Libertarian Press, New Zealand, undated.

[50] On China, the key text is Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese

Revolution, University of California Press, Berkley, USA, 1991, who

explores the national question in “Anarchism and the Question of Place:

Thoughts from the Chinese experience,” in Hirsch and van der Walt, 2010.

On the cultural roots and disputes of the early Chinese anarchist

movement read Dirlik’s chapter in Gutiérrez Dantón (ed), due in 2013.

Other texts include Robert Scalpino & George T. Yu, The Chinese

Anarchist Movement, Insurgency Culture Collective, Los Angeles, USA,

1999, first published 1961, and Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese

Political Culture, Columbia University Press, New York, USA, 1990.

[51] On Korea, read Dongyoun Hwang, “Korean Anarchism before 1945: A

regional and transnational approach,” in Hirsch and van der Walt, 2010,

while on the influence of the national liberation struggle on Korea,

read the Dongyoun Hwang chapter in Gutiérrez Dantón (ed), due in 2013.

[52] The most detailed account of the key debates of the Amsterdam

Congress is to be found in Nestor McNab (ed), The International

Anarchist Congress, Amsterdam, 1907, online at

www.fdca.it/fdcaen/press/pamphlets/sla-5/sla-5.pdf, a translated

selection of extracts from Maurizio Antonioli, Dibattito sul

Sindicalismo: Atti del Congresso Internazionale Anarchico di Amsterdam

(1907), Italy, 1978.

[53] The current organisation of the FA is online at

www.federation-anarchiste.org, the CGA is online at www.c-g-a.org the

OCL is online at oclibertaire.free.fr and AL is online at

www.alternativelibertaire.org.

[54] On the Second, Third, and Fourth Wave FORA in all its permutations,

read Antonio López, La F.O.R.A. en el Movimiento Obrero, Tupac

Ediciones, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1998, which covers 1903 to about

1968; and Ronaldo Munck, Ricardo Falcon and Bernardo Galitelli,

Argentina: from Anarchism to Perónism—Workers, Unions and Politics

1855–1985, Zed Books, London, UK, 1987. A study of dockyard syndicalism

is Geoffroy de Laforcade, “Straddling the Nation and the Working World:

anarchism and syndicalism on the docks and rivers of Argentina,” in

Hirsch and van der Walt, 2010. The classic work is Diego Abad de

Santillán, La FORA: Ideologíca y Trayectoria del Movimiento Obrero

Revolucionario en la Argentina, Libros de Anarres, Buenos Aires,

Argentina, 2007, first published 1933, which covers 1903–1930. A brief

overview is provided by Peter Yerril and Leo Rosser, Revolutionary

Unionism: the FORA in Argentina, ASP, London, UK, 1987.

[55] On the Second Wave / early Third Wave FORU, read Astrid Wessels,

“From Theatre Groups to Bank Robberies: the Diverse Experience of

Uruguayan Anarchists,” Institute for Anarchist Studies, Canada, 2004,

online at: www.anarchist-studies.org/articleview/82/1/9.

[56] On the Second Wave FORB/COB, read Eric Arthur Gordon, Anarchism in

Brazil: Theory and Practice 1890–1920, doctoral dissertation, Tulane

University, USA, 1978. Brazil is an enormous country and its anarchist

movement was and remains very geographically dispersed and ethnically

diverse, so for the study of one anarchist citadel alone, read Edilene

Toledo and Luigi Biondi, “Constructing Syndicalism and Anarchism

Globally: the transnational making of the syndicalist movement in São

Paulo, Brazil, 1895–1935,” in Hirsch and van der Walt, 2010, and J.

Wolfe, Working Women, Working Men: São Paulo and the rise of Brazil’s

Industrial Working Class, 1900–1955, Duke University Press, Durham, USA,

1993. A brief country overview is given by Edgar Rodrigues, Renato

Ramos, and Alexandre Samis, Against all Tyranny! Essays on Anarchism in

Brazil, translated by Paul Sharkey, Kate Sharpley Library, London, UK,

2003.

[57] On the utopian, popular liberal, and socialist roots of the Chilean

anarchist movement, read the Sergio Grez chapter in Gutiérrez Dantón

(ed), due in 2013, while on the Second Wave FTCh/FORCh, read José

Antonio Gutiérrez Dantón, “Anarchism in Chile 1872–1995,” a synopsis of

Hector Pavelic’s 1994 book Caliche: el Rostro Pampino (Saltpetre: the

Pampas’ Face), published in Black Flag, London, UK, 1995, online at:

www.libcom.org/articles/anarchism-in-chile/index.php while Oscar Ortiz,

Cronica Anarquista de la Subversión Olvidada, Ediciones Espíritu

Libertario, Chile, 2002, covers the Second to Fourth Waves: the 1900s to

the 1960s.

[58] On the Second Wave FORPa/CORP, read the work of Paraguay’s premier

anarcho-syndicalist, the typographer Ciriaco Duarte (1908–1996), Hombres

y Obras del Sindicalismo Libre en Paraguay, Asunción, Paraguay, 1965;

and Rafael Peroni (ed), Ciriaco Duarte, El Sindicalismo Libre en

Paraguay, Asunción, Paraguay, 1987.

[59] On the Second Wave FOH/CTC, read Fernández, 2001; and on their

Second Wave forerunners and their interconnectivity with US anarchists

and the IWW, read Carlos D. Pérez de Alejo, “Beyond the Island: a

Transnational History of Cuban Anarchism, 1880–1914,” MA thesis,

University of Texas, Austin, USA, 2008.

[60] On the roots of the Mexican movement, as a factor of indigenous

resistance in a peripheral country to global capital, read the Brenda

Aguilar chapter in Gutiérrez Dantón (ed), due in 2013; while on the

Second Wave / early Third Wave COM/FORM/CGT, read Hart, 1978.

[61] On the emergence of the Peruvian movement from within the radical

liberal tradition and its adaptation to peasant struggles, read the

Franz García chapter in Gutiérrez Dantón (ed), due in 2013; while on the

Second Wave FORPe/FOL, read Steven J. Hirsch, “Peruvian

Anarcho-Syndicalism: Adapting Transnational Influences and Forging

Counterhegemonic Practices, 1905–1930,” in Hirsch and Van der Walt,

2010.

[62] On the emergence of Colombian anarcho-syndicalism from radical

nationalism, read the Diego Paredes chapter on Colombia in Gutiérrez

Dantón (ed), due in 2013. On the Second Wave FOC, read Luis Alfredo

Burbano, Mauricio Flórez Pinzón and Diego Paredes Goicochea, Presente y

pasado del anarquismo y del anarcosindicalismo en Colombia, Libro de

Anarres, Buenos Aires, Argentina, undated.

[63] The roots of the Bolivian movement will be discussed by Silvia

Rivera Cusicanqui in Las Vertiente de la Anarquía, Libros de Anarres,

Buenos Aires, Argentina, (due in 2013). On the rather unique

feminist-indigenist anarchism of Bolivia, read Marcia Stephenson, Gender

and Modernity in Andean Bolivia, University of Texas Press, Texas, USA,

1999, and listen to “Indigenous Anarchism in Bolivia: An interview with

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,” Rustbelt Radio, Pittsburgh, USA, 2007, online

at:

pittsburgh.indymedia.org

.

[64] On the Second and Third Wave Ecuadoran movement, read Alexei Páez,

El anarquismo en el Ecuador, Corporación Editora Nacional, Quito,

Ecuador, 1986.

[65] On the Second Wave CNT, the leading new account is Angel Smith,

Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labour and the Crisis of the

Spanish State, 1898–1923, International Studies in Social History,

Volume 8, Berghahn Books, Oxford, UK, 2007.

[66] On the Second Wave UON/CGT, the best study is João Freire, Freedom

Fighters: Anarchist Intellectuals, Workers and Soldiers in Portugal’s

History, Black Rose Books, Montreal, Canada, 2001.

[67] His writings can be found in Chaz Bufe and Mitchell Cowen Verter

(eds), Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader, AK Press,

Oakland, USA, 2005. A Spanish-language online archive of Magónista

materials is at www.archivomagon.net/. On his influence, read Salvador

Hernández Padilla, El Magónismo: historia de una passion libertaria

1900–1922, Ediciones Era, Mexico City, 1984.

[68] On the British movement, read Bob Holton, British Syndicalism

1900–1914: Myths and Realities, Pluto Press, London, UK, 1976. On

Ireland, read Emmet O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland 1917–1923, Cork

University Press, Cork, Ireland, 1988. The leading Irish nationalist and

syndicalist, James Connolly, was executed for his role in the 1916

anti-colonial Easter Rising.

[69] Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries, Abacus, London, UK, 1999.

[70] On the RPAU, the best anarchist study is Alexandre Skirda, Nestor

Makhno, Anarchy’s Cossack: the Struggle for Free Soviets in the Ukraine

1917–1921, AK Press, Oakland, USA, 2004. The classic partisan study is

Peter Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement 1918–1921, Freedom

Press, London, UK, 1987, first published 1923. The class nature of the

RPAU is examined in Colin Darch, The Makhnovschina, 1917–1921, Ideology,

Nationalism and Peasant Insurgency in Early 20^(th) Century Ukraine, PhD

thesis, University of Bradford, UK, 1994. Tackling the colonial issue is

Aleksandr Shubin, “The Makhnovist Movement and the National Question in

the Ukraine, 1917–1921,” in Hirsch and van der Walt, 2010. The structure

of the RPAU is best described in Vyacheslov Azerov, Kontrazvedka: The

story of the Makhnovist Intelligence Service, Black Cat Press, Edmonton,

Canada, 2008, Makhno’s own incomplete memoirs (up until only 1918) are

particularly instructive: The Russian Revolution in Ukraine, and Under

the Blows of the Counterrevolution, Black Cat Press, Edmonton, Canada,

2008, first published 1929. The survival of a sporadic Makhnovist

movement in Ukraine into the 1930s is described in Anatoly V. Dubrovik,

D.I. Rublyov, and Szarapow (trans.), After Makhno, Kate Sharpley

Library, London, UK, 2009.

[71] As in Ukraine, Noveselov’s detachments and those of the anarchist

G.F. Rogov were defeated by the Red Army after helping defeat Admiral

Aleksandr Kolchak’s White forces, both partisan leaders being killed in

action. For an account of the anarchist movement in Siberia, read Frank

Mintz’s “A Siberian ‘Maknovschina’,” a review of Anatoli Shtirbul’s

Russian-language study The Anarchist Movement in Siberia in the First

Quarter of the 20^(th) Century: Anti-statist Revolt and Non-statist

Self-organisation of the Workers (1996), Mintz’s English-language review

is online at www.katesharpleylibrary.net/dfn3rg.

[72] The IWA is today much-declined from its glory days, but still

represents sections in Argentina, Brazil, Britain, France, Germany,

Italy, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Spain,

with “Friends of the IWA” branches in Australia, Chile, and Colombia,

and is online at www.iwa-ait.org. For the best overview of Second Wave

international syndicalism, read Wayne Thorpe, “The Workers Themselves”:

Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913–23, Kluwer

Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1989. For an IWA

version of the International’s history, read Vadim Damier and Malcolm

Archibald (trans), Anarcho-syndicalism in the 20^(th) Century, Black Cat

Press, Edmonton, Canada, 2009, online at

libcom.org

.

[73] The Platform is available online in multiple languages, alongside

numerous antecedent proto-platformist documents and especifista texts,

at

anarchistplatform.wordpress.com

.

[74] Michael Schmidt and Jack Grancharoff, Bulgarian Anarchism Armed:

the Anarcho-Communist Mass Line Part 1, Zabalaza Books, Johannesburg,

South Africa, 2008, translated into Portuguese as Anarquismo Búlgaro em

Armas: a Linha de Massas Anarco-Comunista Parte 1, Faísca Publicaçiões

Libertarias, São Paulo, Brazil, 2009.

[75] The best explanation of the often misrepresented Polish movement is

Rafał Chwedoruk’s “Polish Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism in the

20^(th) Century,” in New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and

Syndicalism: the Individual, the National and the Transnational, David

Berry & Constance Bantman (eds), 2010.

[76] On the roots of the Italian anarchist movement—the influence of

which was global—and its debates with republicanism during the

Risorgimento, read the Gino Caraffi chapter in Gutiérrez Dantón (ed),

due in 2013. On the Bienno Rosso, read “Anarchists in the Italian

Factory Occupations,” Ian McKay, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review No.46, USA,

Spring 2007. The Anarchist FAQ at

en.wikibooks.org

has greater detail. The influence of the libertarian Marxist Antonio

Gramsci on this period is vastly overinflated in many accounts: in

reality, his tiny group’s journal L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order) had a

fortnightly circulation of only 5,000 in 1920—compared to the anarchist

UAI newspaper Umanita Nova (New Humanity) which circulated 50,000 copies

daily in 1920 (the leading liberal newspaper Corriere della sera

circulated 450,000 daily).

[77] On this crucial period in Germany, read: Syndicalism and

Anarcho-Syndicalism in Germany, Helge Döhring, FAU, Germany, translated

by John Carroll, Anarcho-Syndicalism 101, USA, 2006; and Wayne Thorpe,

“Keeping the Faith: the German Syndicalists in the First World War,”

Central European History, Vol.33, No.2, undated.

[78] John Crump, Anarchism and Nationalism in East Asia, York University

Press, York, UK, 1995; Dongyoun Hwang, “Reflections on Radicalism in

‘Eastern Asia: Regional Perspective, Transnational Approach, and

‘Eastern Asia’ as a Regional Concept,” The Journal of Korean Studies,

Vol. 145, March 2009, (in Korean).

[79] Strangely, there is no adequate overview of the

anarchist/syndicalist movement in Latin America, its primary stronghold.

The best sources are: Carlos M. Rama and Angel J. Cappelletti, El

Anarquismo en America Latina, Biblioteca Ayachucho, Caracas, Venezuela,

1990 (Spanish language); S. Fanny Simon, “Anarchism and

Anarcho-syndicalism in South America,” The Hispanic American Historical

Review, New York City, USA, 1946; Ian R. Mitchell, “The Anarchist

Tradition in Latin America,” Anarchy, No.79, Express Printers, London,

UK, 1979. Luis Vitale, Contribución a una historia del anarquismo en

America Latina, Editiones, Instituto de Investigación de Movimientos

Sociales “Pedro Vuskovic,” Santiago, Chile, 1998, is available online at

mazinger.sisib.uchile.cl

has a strong focus on Chile.

[80] The only overarching insider account available in English is Ha

Ki-Rak, History of [the] Korean Anarchist Movement, Anarchist Publishing

Committee, Korean Anarchist Federation, Taegu, Korea, 1986, but it

suffers from poor structure and analysis; a more coherent account should

be Michael Schmidt, Korean Anarchism Armed: The Anarcho-communist Mass

Line Part 3 (forthcoming).

[81] The standard CNT history is José Peirats, The Anarchists in the

Spanish Revolution, Freedom Press, London, 1990, first published in

three volumes as La CNT en la revolución española, 1951–1953.

[82] The most detailed and devastating anarchist critique of the

CNT-FAI’s failure is Stuart Christie, We! The Anarchists: A Study of the

Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI)1927–1937, The Meltzer Press & Jura

Media, Hastings, UK & Petersham North, Australia, 2000.

[83] Today it is known today simply as the Anarchist Federation (AF) and

is online at www.afed.org.uk.

[84] A summary of the JAF’s history can be found at

libcom.org/library/wot-organization; on the FFLU and CLU. read Marshall,

2008.

[85] Documentary film by Daniel Goude and Guillaume Lenormant, Une

résistance oubliée (1954–1957), des libertaires dans la guerre

d’Algérie, Alternative Libertaire, Paris, France, 2001, available for

purchase online at

boutique.alternativelibertaire.org/produit.php?ref=DVD_Algerie&id_rubrique=5;

Schmidt and Van der Walt, 2011.

[86] José Peirats, Appendix to his The Anarchists in the Spanish

Revolution, Black & Red, Detroit, Michigan, 1993; Peirats, “Spanish

Anarchism in Exile,” in The Raven Anarchist Quarterly No.23, Freedom

Press, London, UK, 1993.

[87] Ha, 1986.

[88] Archives of the Centre International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme

(CIRA), Lausanne, Switzerland.

[89] Sam Dolgoff, The Cuban Revolution: a Critical Perspective, Black

Rose Books, Montreal, Canada, 1996, online at

dwardmac.pitzer.edu

.

[90] On Castro’s youthful enthusiasm for Benito Mussolini and his adult

fascination for and friendship with Juan Perón, for whom he declared

three days of national mourning on his death, read The Boys from

Dolores: Fidel Castro and His Generation—From Revolution to Exile,

Patrick Symmes, Robinson, London, UK, 2007. For an account of Castro’s

friendship with Manuel Fraga Iribarne, read Ghosts of Spain: Travels

Through a Country’s Hidden Past, Giles Tremlett, Faber & Faber, London,

UK, 2006.

[91] A potted history of the Swedish syndicalist movement can be found

in English here: Ingemar Sjöö, SAC and Syndicalism, Stockholm-Gotland

SAC, Sweden, undated, online at www.sac.se.

[92] Interview in 2010 by Michael Schmidt with Chilean anarchist

historian and activist José Antonio Gutierrez Dantón, author of

Anarchism in Chile 1872–1995, a synopsis of Hector Pavelic’s 1994 book

Caliche: el Rostro Pampino, (Saltpetre: the Pampas’ Face), published in

Black Flag, London, UK, 1995, online at:

www.libcom.org/articles/anarchism-in-chile/index.php.

[93] On Argentina, read Abad de Santillán, 2005. On New Zealand, read

Dick Scott, 151 Days: The Great Waterfront Lockout and Supporting

Strikes, February 15–July 15, 1951, Reed Books, Auckland, New Zealand,

2001.

[94] Interview with Chinese anarchist H.L. Wei, a comrade of Chu

Cha-Pei’s, in Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: an Oral History of

Anarchism in America, AK Press, Oakland, USA, 2005.

[95] Ineke Dibits, Elizabeth Paredo, Ruth Volgger, and Ana Cecilia

Wadsworth, Polleras Libertarias: Federación Obrera Femenina, 1927–1964,

Taller de Historia y Participación de la Mujer, La Paz, Bolivia, 1986.

[96] Lucien van der Walt, “The First Globalisation and Transnational

Labour Activism in Southern Africa: White Labourism, the IWW and the

ICU, 1904–1934,” African Studies, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2007,

online at

abahlali.org

.

[97] Michael Schmidt, “Uruguayan Anarchism Armed: the Anarcho-communist

Mass Line Part 2” (forthcoming); the primary insider account is by

FAU/OPR-33 veteran Juan Carlos Mechoso, Acción Directa Anarquista: Una

Historia de FAU Tomo II La Fundación, 2005; Acción Directa Anarquista:

Una Historia de FAU Tomo III Los Primeros Años, 2006; Acción Directa

Anarquista: Una Historia de FAU, undated but probably 2002; all Recortes

Editorial, Montevideo, Uruguay; I interviewed Mechoso in Porto Alegre,

Brazil, in 2003.

[98] Ha, 1984.

[99] The best introduction to Guillén is Donald C. Hodges (ed & trans),

Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla: The Revolutionary Writings of Abraham

Guillén, William Morrow, New York, USA, 1973, originally published as

Estragegias de la guerrilla urbana, Manuales del Pueblo, Montevideo,

Uruguay, 1966.

[100] On the MIR of Chile, read Ferrada-Noli, Notas Sobre la Historia

del MIR, online in Spanish with an English summary at

ferradanoli.files.wordpress.com

. See also Ortiz, 2002, who draws on Luis Vitale, Contribución a la

Historia del MIR (1965–1970), Ediciones Instituto de Investigaciones de

Movimientes Sociales, Chile, 1999. An interview with the CUAC is online

at www.fdca.it/fdcaen/international/cuac.htm. On the fate of the FAU and

OPR-33 of Uruguay, read Juan Carlos Mechoso, Jaime Prieto, Hugo Cores,

and others, The Federación Anarquista Uruguaya (FAU): Crisis, Armed

Struggle and Dictatorship, 1967–1985, Paul Sharkey (ed & trans), Kate

Sharpley Library, London, UK, 2009; J. Patrice McSherry, “Death Squads

as Parallel Forces: Uruguay, Operation Condor, and the United States,”

Journal of Third World Studies, USA, 2007. On Libertarian Resistance of

Argentina, read Verónica Diz and Fernando López Trujillo, Resistencia

Libertaria, Editorial Madreselva, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2007; their

account is challenged, however, by RL veterans such as Maria Ester

Tello. Also, RL veteran Fernando López interviewed by Chuck Morse,

“Resistencia Libertaria: Anarchist Opposition to the Last Argentine

Dictatorship,” New Formulation, USA, 2003, online at

www.newformulation.org/3morselopez.htm.

[101] In 2004, in Johannesburg, South Africa, I interviewed SB, a

Shagila veteran who fought in the Iranian Revolution, who also spoke

about the Iranian CHK. The true importance of the Iraqi and Iranian

anarchist movements, both of which came into being totally without

outside influence, has yet to be properly estimated.

[102] On the Angry Brigade in the UK, read Jean Weir, The Angry Brigade,

1967–1984: Documents and Chronology, Elephant Editions, London, UK,

1978. On Direct Action of France, the best memoir is Jean-Marc Rouillan,

De Memoria (I) Los comienzos: otoño de 1970 en Toulouse and De Memoria

(II) El duelo de la innocencia: un día de septiembre de 1973 en

Barcelona, Virus Editorial, Barcelona, Spain, undated; while the best

analysis is Michael York Dartnell, Mirror of Violence: The Revolutionary

Terrorism of Action Directe as an Element in the Evolution of French

Political Culture, 1979–1987, PhD thesis, York University, North York,

Canada, 1993. On Direct Action of Canada, the insider account is Ann

Hansen, Direct Action: Memoirs of an Urban Guerrilla, AK Press, Oakland,

USA, 2002; plus Eryk Martin, Burn It Down!: A History of Anarchism,

Activism, and the Politics of “Direct Action,” 1972–1988, dissertation

(forthcoming). On the German M2J, the insider account is Ralf Reinders

and Ronald Fritsch, El Movimiento 2 de Junio: Conversaciones sobre los

Rebeldes del Hachís, el secuestro de Lorenz y la cárcel, Virus

Editorial, Barcelona, Spain, undated; plus Inge Viett, Nie war ich

furchtloser: Autobiographie, Editions Nautilus, Hamburg, Germany, 1997.

On the Basque KAA, read Buzz Burrell, Insurrection in Euskadi: Political

Struggles in the Basque Country, Partisan Press, Glasgow, UK, 1993.

[103] On the pan-European resistance to Franco, the best English sources

include: Antonio Téllez and Stuart Christie, Anarchist International

Action Against Francoism From Genoa 1949 to The First Of May Group, Kate

Sharpley Library, UK, 2010; also Octavio Alberola, Alvaro Milán, and

Juan Zambrana, Revolutionary Activism: The Spanish Resistance in

Context, Kate Sharpley Library, UK, 2000; and André Cortade, 1000:

histoire désordonnée du M.I.L., Barcelone 1967–1974, Dérive 17, Paris,

1985; in 2011, I interviewed sole surviving DI Council member Octavio

Alberola Suriñach, Perpignan, France, for the book The People Armed:

Anarchist Guerrillas Verbatim, AK Press, Oakland, USA (forthcoming).

[104] The MLCE, its name today shortened to MLC, was founded in 1961,

and today has a presence in Mexico, Venezuela, France and Spain, with

underground contacts in Cuba itself. Not to be confused with a

lasses-faire capitalist organisation of the same name founded by Cuban

exile businessmen in Miami, USA, in 1981, its website is at

www.mlc.acultura.org.ve.

[105] On anarchism during the “Dirty War” period in Mexico in the 1960s

and 1970s and how it shaped indigenous struggles for autonomy in Chiapas

and Oaxaca today, read the Brenda Aguilar chapter in Gutiérrez Dantón

(ed), due in 2013.

[106] Phillip Ruff, Anarchy in the USSR: A New Beginning, ASP, London,

UK, 1991; Mikhail Tsovma, “Remembering Natalia Pirumova,” Centre

International de Recherches sur l’Anarchisme, Bulletin 63, Lausanne,

Switzerland, September 2007.

[107] The Polish FA is still operational, and is online at

www.federacja-anarchistyczna.pl. The CSAF is online at www.csaf.cz. In

1997, the Federation of Social Anarchists (FSA) split from the CSAF and

affiliated to the IWA and now appears to be defunct. The ASF split in

1996, into the platformist Organisation of Revolutionary

Anarchists—Solidarity (ORA-S) and the purist Czechoslovak Federation of

Revolutionary Anarchists (SFRA); in 2003, a platformist minority in

ORA-S broke away and founded Anarcho-Communist Alternative (AKA),

aka.anarchokomunismus.org while the remainder of ORA-S turned towards

ultra-leftist Marxism. On FOSATU, read Sian Byrne, “‘Building Tomorrow

Today’: a re-examination of the character of the controversial

‘workerist’ tendency associated with the Federation of South African

Trade Unions (FOSATU) in South Africa, 1979–1985,” MA research report,

University of the Witwatesrrand, Johannesburg, (in process).

[108] Autonomous Action’s English website is online at: avtonom.org/en

[109] For my analysis of the tactics and strategies of especifismo in

Latin America, read Michael Schmidt, “Fire-ants and Flowers:

Revolutionary Anarchism in Latin America,” ZACF, Johannesburg, South

Africa, 2004, online at nefac.net/node/38. The most detailed exposition

of especifismo, however, is “Social Anarchism and Organisation,”

Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janeiro (FARJ), 2008, online in English

at www.anarkismo.net/article/22150.

[110] The founding statement of PALIR of Senegal was given to me

courtesy of Mitch Miller of the Workers’ Solidarity Alliance, USA.

According to a 1981 report in the Vancouver, Canada, libertarian

socialist journal The Open Road, the Senegalese anarchists originally

published their manifesto in the Senegalese journal Le Politicien. A few

brief reports on the IWW Sierra Leone are available at

flag.blackened.net/revolt/africa/sierra/sl_iww_update.html. My obituary

of Choongo is online at: libcom.org/history/choongo-wilstar-1964-1999.

On the Awareness League of Nigeria, read Sam Mbah (b. 1963) & I.E.

Igariwey, African Anarchism: The History of a Movement, See Sharp Press,

Tucson, USA, 1997, online at

www.adnauseam.fr/african-anarchism-the-history-of-a,012.html?lang=fr.

Several documents from the Awareness League are available online at

flag.blackened.net/revolt/africa/aware.html. Mbah is still active and

has a blog at sammbah.wordpress.com/. On the revived Southern African

movement, read the NEFAC interview with myself, online at

zabnew.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/nefac-interviews-the-bmc. The ZACF of

South Africa is online at www.zabalaza.net.

[111] Common Struggle (USA) is online at www.nefac.net, Common Cause

(Ontario) is online at linchpin.ca and UCL (Québec) is online at

www.causecommune.net.

[112] The CGT of Spain is online at www.cgt.es. The SKT of Siberia is

online at syndikalist.narod.ru. The CNT-France is online at

www.cnt-f.org. The SAC of Sweden is online at www.sac.se. The Italian

Confederation of the Base—United Committees of the Base (CIB-UNICOBAS)

Italy is online at www.cib-unicobas.it. The French SUD Education Union’s

website is at www.sudeducation.org. FESAL-E’s Italian website is at

www.fesal.it, but does not seem to have been active since 2009.

[113] The old ILS webpage on its projects in Latin America is mirrored

at www.fdca.it/fdcaen/ILS/ils_projects.htm.

[114] The multilingual anarkismo project is online at www.anarkismo.net.

[115] On the Alternative Libertaire section in French Guyana, read

“Interview with Alternative Libertaire in French Guyana,” online at

www.nefac.net/node/1734. The Eastern Mediterranean Libertarian

Collective (EMLC) of Israel/Palestine is online at

www.shalif.com/anarchy. The Libertarian Communist Alternative (al-Badil

al-Chouyouii al-Taharoui) of Lebanon can be found online at

albadilaltaharrouri.wordpress.com; also read Michael Schmidt,

“Eyewitness Lebanon: In the Land of the Blind: Hezbollah Worship,

Slavish Anti-imperialism and the Need for a Real Alternative,” 2006,

online at www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=3651. On Iran, read

“Interview with an Iranian Anarchist,” interview with “Payman Piedar,”

editor of the No God/State/Master (Nakhdar) Iranian exile network in the

USA 2005, online at www.anarkismo.net/article/584. The Swaziland section

of the ZACF was shut down in 2007, but the Zimbabwean Uhuru Network’s

blog is online at www.toyitoyi.blogspot.com. “Egypt: Birth of the

Libertarian Socialist Movement, Egypt,” 2011, with an analysis of this

minimum-position manifesto by Michael Schmidt, online at

www.anarkismo.net/article/19666.

[116] Manifest pour une Alternative Libertaire is online at

www.alternativelibertaire.org/spip.php?rubrique23.

[117] The English version of Saverio Crapraro’s Anarchist-Communists: A

Question of Class, FdCA, Italy, 2005, is online at

www.fdca.it/fdcaen/organization/theory/acqoc/index.htm. The ZACF of

South Africa later produced a critique, “Tangled Threads of Revolution:

Reflections on A Question of Class,” James Pendlebury, South Africa,

online at

theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/James_Pendlebury__Tangled_Threads_of_Revolution.html.

[118] Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a Polish anti-Bolshevik “left

communist” economist. “Organisational Questions of the Russian Social

Democracy” is online at

www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1904/questions-rsd/index.htm.