tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-39557120879229274672024-02-19T07:53:18.277+02:00Blogging on "Black Flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism"News, views & reviews of Lucien van der Walt & Michael Schmidt's groundbreaking, widely praised book, 'Black Flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism'. First of 2 volumes, 'Black Flame' re-examines anarchism's democratic class politics, vision of a decentralized economy, &1 50 year impact on popular struggles worldwide. Launched in Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden & USA.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.comBlogger63125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-86477462789794546922015-03-20T12:44:00.003+02:002015-03-20T12:44:29.295+02:00Raul Zelik, review for raulzelik.net - (German-language) reviews NO. 3 of German translation ("Schwarze Flamme. Revolutionäre Klassenpolitik des Anarchismus und Syndikalismus") Source: <a href="http://www.raulzelik.net/kritik-literatur-alltag-theorie/430-syndikalistische-klassenpolitik-van-der-walts-schmidts-buch-schwarze-flamme-rezension-wdr-3-woz-november-2013" target="_blank">here</a><br />
<br />
<h2>
"Syndikalistische Klassenpolitik? - Schmidts / van der Walts Buch 'Schwarze Flamme'" (Rezension WDR 3 / WOZ November 2013)</h2>
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<img alt="schwarze flamme" height="218" src="http://www.raulzelik.net/images/rzbilder/schwarze_flamme.jpg" style="float: right; margin: 6px;" width="150" />Beitrag für die Sendung <a href="http://www.wdr3.de/literatur/klassekommunisten100.html">"Klasse Kommunisten" von Ulrich Hufen (Gutenbergs Welt, WDR 3) (zum Nachhören der ganzen Sendung)</a><br />
Seit
dem Ende des Staatssozialismus wird von kritischen Beobachtern immer
mal wieder eine Renaissance des Anarchismus prognostiziert – so zuletzt
etwa bei dem Hype um den US-Ethnologen David Graeber. Schließlich, so
heißt es, hätten anarchistische DenkerInnen die Staats- und
Herrschaftsorientierung des Mainstream-Marxismus schon im 19.
Jahrhundert kritisiert und auf den Widerspruch zwischen politischer
Machtergreifung und sozialer Emanzipation verwiesen.<br />
<br />
Auch Lucien
van der Walts und Michael Schmidts Buch „Schwarze Flamme“ argumentiert
in diese Richtung. Den südafrikanischen Akademikern geht es darum, die
radikaldemokratische und sozialistische Essenz des Anarchismus
herauszuarbeiten und dieser Geltung zu verschaffen. Ihre Ausgangsthese
lautet dabei, dass der Anarchismus-Begriff in der Regel viel zu diffus
verwendet wird. Staatskritik, wie sie etwa von den rechten
US-amerikanischen <i>Libertarians</i> geübt wird, habe – so Van der Walt
und Schmidt – mit Anarchismus wenig zu tun. Erst aus der Verbindung
antikapitalistischer und antistaatlicher Positionen ergebe sich die
spezifische Emanzipationsperspektive des Anarchismus.<br />
<br />
In diesem Sinne handelt es sich bei der <i>broad anarchist tradition, </i>wie sie die plurale anarchistische Theorie bezeichnen,<i> </i>um
eine Strömung der Arbeiterbewegung, <br />
<a name='more'></a>die – und das ist die zweite
Hauptthese der Autoren – schon frühzeitig alternative Organisations- und
Politikformen entwickelte. Die Autoren spielen hier auf die
syndikalistischen Gewerkschaften an, die die Herausbildung von Apparaten
bekämpften, der direkten Aktion (anstelle institutioneller Politik)
Vorrang einräumten und nicht zwischen politischen und sozialen Kämpfen
unterschieden.<br />
<br />
Van der Walt und Schmidt weisen ganz richtig darauf
hin, dass diese Traditionslinie in vielen Ländern der Welt – und nicht
nur im Spanien der 1930er Jahre – eine wichtige Rolle in
gesellschaftlichen Kämpfen spielte. Wem ist heute schon noch bewusst,
dass die CGT, die stärkste französische Gewerkschaft, von
syndikalistischen ArbeiterInnen aufgebaut wurde und dass diese Tradition
die Entwicklung des Mai 1968 maßgeblich beeinflusste? Auch die
Geschichte der neuen Linken Südamerikas – etwa das Entstehen der
uruguayischen Stadtguerilla Mitte der 1960er Jahre – wäre ohne die
syndikalistischen Erfahrungen südeuropäischer EinwandererInnen anders
verlaufen. Selbst in der Geschichte der USA ist der Syndikalismus keine
Randnotiz: Die <i>International Workers of the World, </i>eine 1905 gegründete Basisgewerkschaft, spielte eine zentrale Rolle in den Streiks Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts.<br />
<br />
Die
Sichtbarmachung dieser „anderen Arbeiterbewegung“ wäre also tatsächlich
verdienstvoll. Doch gerade für den an der Geschichte
sozialrevolutionärer Bewegungen interessierten Leser ist „Schwarze
Flamme“ letztlich denn doch eine enttäuschende Lektüre. Van der Walt und
Schmidt sind zu stark darum bemüht, sich der eigenen politischen
Identität zu vergewissern. Positionen werden nicht kritisch entwickelt,
sondern durch mantraartige Wiederholung etabliert. Eine
sozialgeschichtliche Perspektive, wie sie bei der Untersuchung von
Massenorganisationen Prozessen eigentlich zwingend wäre, spielt bei
ihnen keine Rolle. Stattdessen werden Hunderte von AnarchistInnen
namentlich eingeführt und so das Muster individualistischer
Geschichtsschreibungen reproduziert. Und schließlich ist das Buch auch
noch eigenartig fragmentiert: Die Autoren springen so nervös zwischen
Ländern und Kontexten hin und her, dass man über den
Untersuchungsgegenstand am Ende letztlich so wenig weiß wie zuvor.<br />
<br />
Mehr
kritische Fragestellungen an den Anarchismus hätten dem Buch sicher gut
getan. Denn auch wenn die Geschichte der libertären Bewegung
zweifelsohne sympathischer verlief als jene des Staatssozialismus, der
in vielen Ländern eine offene Terrorherrschaft etablierte, ist letztlich
eben auch der Anarchismus als Strategie der Befreiung im 20.
Jahrhundert gescheitert. Die Bewegung mündete fast überall in
Bedeutungslosigkeit. Relevanz ist für ein Emanzipationsprojekt aber
durchaus ein Kriterium: Wenn das gesellschaftskritische Denken des 19.
Jahrhunderts (gegenüber der Aufklärung) eine Erkenntnis ermöglichte,
dann doch die, dass Befreiung weniger mit guten Ideen als mit sozialen,
kollektiven Prozessen zu tun hat.<br />
<br />
Die (anarcho-) syndikalistische
Praxis, für die die Autoren plädieren, besitzt für die Debatte heute
tatsächlich große Bedeutung. Viele der vom Anarchosyndikalismus
aufgeworfenen Fragen sind hochaktuell: Wie kann das Entstehen von
Apparaten und Organisationsoligarchien verhindert werden? Wie lassen
sich Veränderungen durchsetzen, ohne dass die Akteure dabei von den
Institutionen assimiliert werden? Welche alternativen Formen der Politik
in Bewegungen und Organisationen könnten das Neue vorwegnehmen? Doch
genau diesen subversiven Kern stellen die Autoren still.<br />
<br />
<em>Lucien
van der Walt / Michael Schmidt: „Schwarze Flamme. Revolutionäre
Klassenpolitik im Anarchismus und Syndikalismus“, Edition Nautilus, 560
Seiten</em><br />
<br />
<strong>Raul Zelik</strong>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-44949061553686391512015-03-20T12:40:00.004+02:002015-03-20T12:41:21.400+02:00Philipp Schnee, review for Deutschlandradio Kultur - (German-language) reviews NO. 2 of German translation ("Schwarze Flamme. Revolutionäre Klassenpolitik des Anarchismus und Syndikalismus") Source: <a href="http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/ohne-klassenkampf-zaehlt-es-nicht.950.de.html?dram:article_id=266141" target="_blank">here</a><br />
<br />
<div class="drk-tborder">
<h2 class="drk-sitetitle drk-pt15">
Buchkritik / Archiv<span class="drk-sitetitledate"> | Beitrag vom 23.10.2013</span></h2>
</div>
<h1>
Ohne Klassenkampf zählt es nicht</h1>
<div class="subtitle">
Lucien van der Walt/Michael Schmidt: "Schwarze Flamme", Editon Nautilus, Hamburg 2013, 560 Seiten</div>
<dl class="largeImage">
<dt><div class="image">
</div>
</dt>
<dd></dd></dl>
<div class="kicker">
Tief
in der sozialistischen Tradition möchten die Autoren Lucien van der
Walt und Michael Schmidt den Anarchismus verankern. Ihr Versuch, damit
ein neues Standardwerk zur Geschichte des Anarchismus zu schreiben,
scheitert allerdings an einseitigen und oberflächlichen Analysen.</div>
<div class="kicker">
<br /></div>
Dass
Anarchismus kein Synonym für Chaos ist, muss heute zum Glück nur noch
selten erklärt werden. Lucien van der Walt und Michael Schmidt gehen
aber noch viel weiter: Auch "Keine Macht für Niemand" ist in ihren Augen
kein hinreichender Slogan für das, was sie unter Anarchismus verstehen.
Ihr Buch "Schwarze Flamme" wurde vom Verlag vollmundig als
"Standardwerk anarchistischer Geschichtsschreibung" angekündigt. Das
legt die Latte hoch. <br />
<br />
Zumindest in puncto<br />
<a name='more'></a> Originalität können sie
diesen Anspruch einlösen. Von Anfang an wenden sie sich rigoros gegen
den klassischen Kanon des Anarchismus. Die Ablehnung des Staates, von
Staatlichkeit und Staatsmacht, bei gleichzeitiger Betonung der
individuellen Freiheit ergibt für sie keine kongruente Definition des
Anarchismus. Denn dann, so argumentieren sie, müssten viele Theoretiker
mit widersprüchlichsten Ansätzen, ob Wirtschaftsliberale, radikale
Christen oder Taoisten, auch zum Anarchismus gezählt werden. Deshalb
schließen sie Denker, die gemeinhin als Anarchisten kategorisiert
werden, wie William Goodwin, Max Stirner, Benjamin Tucker und Leo
Tolstoi, von vorneherein aus. Sie sind nach Auffassung der beiden
Autoren keine Anarchisten. <br />
<br />
Anti-Etatismus ist nicht der
Grundkonsens. Nur "revolutionärer Anarchismus" ist Anarchismus, so ihre
These. Sie wollen den Anarchismus tief und fest in der sozialistischen
Tradition verankern. Ohne Antikapitalismus kein Anarchismus: In Ihren
eigen Worten klingt das so: "Der Klassenkampfanarchismus … in unseren
Augen ist es der einzige Anarchismus". Und in diesem Duktus sind in
diesem Buch leider viele Seiten geschrieben. Die Autoren sind stets
bemüht zu zeigen, dass das, wofür sie den Begriff "broad anarchist
traditon" erfunden haben, eine theoretisch kohärente und historisch
einheitliche Bewegung ist. Was nicht passt, wird ausgeschlossen. <br />
<br />
<b>Anarchistische Ideenwelten erschließen sich nicht</b><br />
Im
Versuch, diese Beweisführung wasserdicht zu bekommen, erfährt man
leider zu wenig darüber, was die Ideen und Ziele des Anarchismus nach
ihrer Vorstellung konkret bedeuten. Dabei wären diese spannend:
größtmögliche Demokratie, Selbstverwaltung, Ablehnung von Hierarchie,
Gegenmacht, Gleichheit der Geschlechter, Bekenntnis zur individuellen
Freiheit. Oder zusammengefasst, eine egalitäre, nichtstaatliche,
sozialistische Ordnung, in der die individuelle Freiheit das höchste Gut
ist. Sie gebrauchen diese Begriffe allerdings nur als bloße
Schlagworte. Auch die in ihren Augen stilbildenden Anarchisten werden
den Lesern nie nahegebracht, so dass man sich deren Ideenwelt
erschließen könnte. Sie werden nur fürs Argument verwurstet. <br />
<br />
Sozialgeschichtlich
wollen die Autoren zeigen, dass der Anarchismus nicht, wie häufig
behauptet, Randerscheinung der Linken und der Arbeiterbewegung war, dass
dieses Urteil vielmehr einem "eurozentrischen Blick" geschuldet sei.
Sehr plausibel und in beeindruckender Kenntnis der globalen
Anarchiegeschichte verweisen sie auf sozialistische Bewegungen in
Afrika, Asien und Süd- und Mittelamerika, in denen der Anarchismus eine
einflussreiche Rolle spielte. Leider unterfüttern sie diese These nie
mit einer stimmigen historischen Beschreibung. Wie so vieles in diesem
Buch bleibt auch dies nur eine Behauptung. Das Buch ist immer
programmatisch, nie anschaulich. An keiner Stelle gelingt es, die Leser
in die Ideenwelt des Anarchismus eintauchen zu lassen. Oder etwa in die
Realität der anarchistischen Kreise und Bünde in der, wie sie schreiben,
"Blütezeit" des Anarchismus zwischen 1890 und 1920. Wie wurde damals
gelebt, geträumt, gekämpft? Welche Schwierigkeiten und
Auseinandersetzungen gab es? Von all dem erfahren die Leser nichts. <br />
<br />
Überhaupt
der Umgang mit Geschichte: Bakunin und Kropotkin werden fleißig und
kundig zur Analyse herangezogen, ohne zu kontextualisieren, dass ihre
Texte in einem agrarisch geprägten, zaristischen Russland geschrieben
wurden und sich deshalb nicht auf eine Zeit mit Werkverträgen im
Dienstleistungssektor übertragen lassen. Parasiten- und
Krankheitsmetaphern werden völlig unkritisch zitiert und benutzt. <br />
<br />
In
ihrem unbedingten Willen, eine kohärente, einheitliche Tradition
vorzuführen, einen neuen Kanon zu etablieren, mit Klassenkampf- und
Pamphletvokabeln eine "broad anarchist tradition" zu schnitzen, enden
sie eher in einem Anachronismus als beim Anarchismus. <br />
<br />
Sehr
bedauerlich: Es wäre gut, ein aktuelles Standardwerk zur Geschichte des
Anarchismus in die Hand zu bekommen. Aber danach wird man leider weiter
Ausschau halten müssen. <br />
<br />
<i>Besprochen von Philipp Schnee</i><br />
<br />
<b>Lucien van der Walt/Michael Schmidt: Schwarze Flamme. Revolutionäre Klassenpolitik im Anarchismus und Syndikalismus</b><br />
Aus dem Englischen von Andreas Förster und Holger Marcks<br />
Editon Nautilus, Hamburg 2013 <br />
560 Seiten, 39,90 EuroAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-51835156742159820292015-03-20T12:35:00.000+02:002015-03-20T12:37:08.902+02:00Dieter Nelles, review for H-Soz-Kult - (German-language) reviews NO. 1 of German translation ("Schwarze Flamme. Revolutionäre Klassenpolitik des Anarchismus und Syndikalismus") <pre wrap="">Dieter Nelles, review for H-Soz-Kult </pre>
<pre wrap="">(HUMANITIES - SOZIAL- UND KULTURGESCHICHTE / H-SOZ-U-KULT@H-NET.MSU.EDU
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.hsozkult.de/">http://www.hsozkult.de</a>)</pre>
<pre wrap=""> </pre>
<pre wrap="">Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2015 21:05:00 +0100
From: "HSK (Michael Wildt)" <...>
From: Dieter Nelles <...>
Date: 20.03.2015
Subject: Rez. NS: M. Schmidt u. a.: Schwarze Flamme
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Schmidt, Michael; van der Walt, Lucien: Schwarze Flamme. Revolutionäre
Klassenpolitik des Anarchismus und Syndikalismus [Aus dem Englischen
übersetzt und mit einem Nachwort versehen von Andreas Förster und Holger
Marcks]. Hamburg: Edition Nautilus / Verlag Lutz Schulenburg 2013. ISBN
978-3-89401-783-5; Broschur; 557 S.; EUR 39,90.
Rezensiert für H-Soz-Kult von:
Dieter Nelles, Fakultät für Sozialwissenschaft, Ruhr-Universität Bochum
E-Mail: <...>
In einem Artikel über Pierre-Joseph Proudhon schrieb der Journalist
Jakob Schulz kürzlich in der Süddeutschen Zeitung: "Proudhons
Überzeugungen haben letztlich keinen bleibenden Einfluss auf den
Sozialismus. Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts finden anarchistische Ideen
fast nur noch in intellektuellen Kreisen statt."[1] Es sind solche
Fehlurteile, die den Anarchismus fälschlicherweise als gesellschaftliche
Randerscheinung abqualifizieren oder ihn "mit Chaos, Desorganisation und
Zerstörung" (S. 14) gleichsetzen, gegen die sich der Soziologe Lucien
van der Walt und der Journalist Michael Schmidt richten. Das 2009 auf
Englisch erschienene Werk wird sowohl in politischen als auch in
wissenschaftlichen Kreisen kontrovers diskutiert, wobei die Debatte
insgesamt, schreiben die Übersetzer im Nachwort, "vor allem kraft
politischer Überzeugungen geführt" werde "und kaum als wissenschaftliche
Auseinandersetzung" (S. 431).
Das dem so ist, hat aber auch damit zu tun, dass es sich bei Schwarze
Flamme, so die Autoren, "nicht bloß um die archäologische Studie einer
altertümlichen, heute begrabenen Bewegung" handele, sondern um eine
Bewegung, die "inmitten der globalisierungskritischen und<a name='more'></a>
antikapitalistischen Bewegung" stehe (S. 8). Die Autoren verfolgen zwei
zentrale Ziele: Sie liefern eine neue Interpretation der anarchistischen
Tradition und versuchen eine globale Geschichte der anarchistischen
Bewegung zu schreiben, die nicht auf Westeuropa und die USA beschränkt
ist. Sie wenden sich damit ausdrücklich gegen die These des "spanischen
Exzeptionalismus" (S. 349-343), nach der der Anarchismus nur in Spanien
einen Masseneinfluss hatte (S. 204), und erinnern mit dem Historiker
Eric Hobsbawm daran, dass die marxistische Linke in den Jahren 1905-1914
am Rande der revolutionären Bewegung stand, deren Mehrheit sich
anarcho-syndikalistisch orientierte. (S. 204)
Im ersten Teil entwickeln die Autoren ihre Definition der broad
anarchist tradition (die Übersetzer verwenden den Begriff des englischen
Originals), die ihre Wurzeln im anarchistischen Flügel der Ersten
Internationale um Bakunin habe und zur sozialistischen Bewegung gehöre.
Dieser "Klassenkampfanarchismus" ist für sie nicht "etwa eine Variante
des Anarchismus", sondern der "einzige Anarchismus" (S. 34). Denker, die
gemeinhin als Anarchisten bezeichnet werden wie William Godwin, Max
Stirner oder Leo Tolstoi betrachten sie nicht als Bestandteil dieser
Tradition, sondern als libertäre Denker, deren Ideen sie vom Anarchismus
unterscheiden. Bemerkenswert ist, dass sie neben Proudhon auch Marx als
Ideengeber des Anarchismus bezeichnen. Sie diskutieren ausführlich die
Gemeinsamkeiten aber auch die tiefgreifenden Unterschiede zwischen
Anarchismus und Marxismus (S. 112-152). Die Anarchismus-Definition der
Autoren hat erwartungsgemäß die meiste Kritik hervorgerufen. Es ist
sinnvoll, wie die Autoren es tun, zwischen Anarchismus als sozialer
Bewegung und libertären philosophischen Theorien zu unterscheiden. Aber
ihre Definition der broad anarchist tradition ist zu rigide, weil
beispielsweise ein Theoretiker und Aktivist wie Gustav Landauer, der das
Konzept des Klassenkampfs dezidiert ablehnte, aus der anarchistischen
Tradition herausfallen würde.
Im zweiten Teil der Arbeit diskutieren die Autoren strategische und
taktische Debatten innerhalb der broad anarchist tradition. Im Zentum
steht dabei das Verhältnis zwischen Anarchismus und Syndikalismus und
dessen historische Ausprägungen. Die Autoren machen kein Geheimnis aus
ihrer Sympathie für den Syndikalismus, der für sie "die wichtigste
Strömung des Anarchismus" (S. 16) war. Sie benutzen den Begriff des
Syndikalismus in einem weiten Sinne. Zwar unterscheiden sie zwischen
revolutionären Syndikalismus und Anarchosyndikalismus, heben aber deren
Gemeinsamkeiten hervor: "Dass sie die Arbeiterselbstverwaltung der
Produktionsmittel, eine antistaatliche Position sowie die Feindschaft
gegenüber politischen Parteien und dem Parlament betonen und sich zu
einer sozialen Revolution bekennen, in der Gewerkschaften die
maßgebliche Rolle spielen." (S. 185) Sie rekurrieren auf den
anarchistischen Charakter des Syndikalismus, ungeachtet der Frage, "ob
sich die Verfechter seiner anarchistischen Abstammung bewusst waren oder
nicht" (S. 221). Diese Vernachlässigung der ideologischen Ebene wird der
Entwicklung des revolutionären Syndikalismus zum Anarchosyndikalismus in
den 1920er-Jahren nicht gerecht. Denn unter dem Einfluss der Russischen
Revolution schloss sich ein Teil der syndikalistischen Organisationen
der kommunistischen Roten Gewerkschaftsinternationale (RGI) und nicht
der anarchosyndikalistischen Internationale Arbeiter-Assoziation (IAA),
die Ende 1922 in Berlin gegründet wurde, an.[2] Der deutsche
IAA-Sekretär Helmut Rüdiger charakterisiert den revolutionären
Syndikalismus deshalb zu Recht als "Zwitter aus Marxismus und
Anarchismus".[3]
Im dritten Teil diskutieren die Autoren einige zentrale Thesen zur
Geschichte der anarchistischen Tradition, ihren Klassencharakter und
Masseneinfluss sowie den anarchistischen Internationalismus und den
Umgang mit Rassismus, Imperialismus und Geschlechterfragen. Sie zeigen,
dass aus einer globalen Perspektive der Anarchismus keine
Randerscheinung in der Arbeiter- und Bauernbewegung der letzten 150
Jahre war. Ihre Anhänger fand die broad anarchist tradition vor allem
bei städtischen Arbeitern und unter Landarbeitern und sie hatte auch
eine große Anziehungskraft auf die Bauernschaft. Die Autoren legen zwar
überzeugend den Aufstieg der anarchistischen Massenbewegung dar. Aber
wir erfahren nur wenig, warum die "glorreiche Ära" Mitte der
1920er-Jahre zu Ende ging und der Anarchismus und Syndikalismus
gegenüber rivalisierenden Bewegungen wie dem Kommunismus, dem
Nationalismus und dem Faschismus ins Hintertreffen gerieten. Der
Niedergang der syndikalistischen Bewegung hatte auch damit zu tun, dass
sie keine Antwort fand auf die Weltwirtschaftskrise, von der außer in
Spanien politisch vor allem die Kommunisten profitierten. Dass die
Anarchisten in Spanien in die Volksfrontregierung eintraten, hatte
weniger, wie die Autoren schreiben, mit dem "Mangel eines klaren Plans"
(S. 256) zu tun, sondern war vielmehr auch der fehlenden internationalen
Solidarität für die spanischen Anarchisten geschuldet. Die IAA war in
den 1930er-Jahren viel zu schwach, um eine wirksame Solidarität für die
spanischen Genossen zu organisieren. Es ist ein Defizit des Buches, das
die Geschichte IAA nur ganz beiläufig erwähnt wird, denn das steht im
starken Kontrast zu ihrer starken Betonung des internationalen
Charakters der broad anarchist tradition.
An dieser und auch an anderen Stellen argumentieren die Autoren oft
programmatisch und ideologisch statt analytisch. Aber trotz dieser
Kritikpunkte stellt das Werk eine beeindruckende Leistung dar und ist
für alle unverzichtbar, die sich mit der globalen Geschichte des
Anarchismus und Syndikalismus beschäftigen.[4]
Anmerkungen:
[1] Jakob Schulz, Der Staatsfeind, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung,
10./11.01.2015, S. 29.
[2] Zur IAA vgl. Vadim Damier, Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20th century,
Edmonton 2009.
[3] Zitiert nach Dieter Nelles / Hartmut Rübner, Avantgarde einer
egalitären Bewegung: Anarchosyndikalisten in Deutschland in der ersten
Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts, in: Moving the Social 51 (2014), S.
179-212, hier S. 212.
[4] Vgl. auch Steven J. Hirsch / Lucien van der Walt (Hrsg.), Anarchism
and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940: The
praxis of national liberation, internationalism, and social revolution,
Leiden 2010.
Diese Rezension wurde redaktionell betreut von:
Michael Wildt <...>
URL zur Zitation dieses Beitrages
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-84551461345192465392014-05-15T15:36:00.002+02:002014-05-15T15:36:40.641+02:00Global Fire – South African author Michael Schmidt on the Global Impact of Revolutionary Anarchism [2014]<header class="entry-header">
<h1 class="entry-title">
Global Fire – South African author Michael Schmidt on the Global Impact of Revolutionary Anarchism</h1>
<div class="entry-meta">
<span class="sep">From </span><em>The Platform</em>, a new quarterly publication by Anarchist Affinity.<span class="comments-link"> (issue 1), of which more <a href="http://www.anarchistaffinity.org/subscribe/" target="_blank">here.</a></span></div>
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<span class="comments-link"> </span>
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<a href="http://i2.wp.com/www.anarchistaffinity.org/wp-content/uploads/schmidt.jpg"><img alt="schmidt" class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-800" height="199" src="http://i2.wp.com/www.anarchistaffinity.org/wp-content/uploads/schmidt.jpg?resize=300%2C199" width="300" /></a><br />
<br />
<em>Michael Schmidt is an investigative journalist, an anarchist
theorist and a radical historian based in Johannesburg, South Africa. He
has been an active participant in the international anarchist milieu,
including the <a href="http://zabalaza.net/">Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front</a>.
His major works include ‘Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism (2013,
AK Press) and, with Lucien van der Walt, ‘Black Flame: The Revolutionary
Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism’ (2009, AK Press).</em><br />
<br />
<strong>In your recent book, <i>Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism</i>
(AK Press, USA, 2013), you argue that anarchists have often failed to
draw insights from anarchist movements outside of Western Europe. What
lessons does the global history of anarchism have to offer those engaged
in struggle today?</strong><br />
<strong> </strong> <br />
The historical record shows that anarchism’s primary mass-
organisational strategy, syndicalism, is a remarkably coherent and
universalist set of theories and practices, despite the movement’s
grappling with a diverse set of circumstances. From the establishment of
the first non-white unions in South Africa and the first unions in
China, through to the resistance to fascism in Europe and Latin America –
the establishment of practical anarchist control of cities and regions,
sometimes ephemeral, sometimes longer lived in countries as diverse as
Macedonia (1903), Mexico (1911, 1915), Italy (1914, 1920), Portugal
(1918), Brazil (1918), Argentina (1919, 1922), arguably Nicaragua
(1927-1932), Ukraine (1917-1921), Manchuria (1929-1931), Paraguay
(1931), and Spain (1873/4, 1909, 1917, 1932/3, and 1936-1939).<br />
<br />
The results of the historically-revealed universalism are vitally
important to any holistic understanding of anarchism/syndicalism:<br />
<br />
Firstly, that the movement arose in the trade unions of the First
International, simultaneously in Mexico, Spain, Uruguay, and Egypt from
1868-1872 (in other words, it arose internationally, on four continents,
and was explicitly not the imposition of a European ideology); <br />
Secondly, there is no such thing within the movement as “Third
World,” “Global Southern” or “Non-Western” anarchism, that is in any
core sense distinct from that in the “Global North”. Rather that they
are all of a feather; the movement was infinitely more dominant in most
of Latin America than in most of Europe. The movement today is often
more similar in strength to the historical movements in Vietnam,
Lebanon, India, Mozambique, Nigeria, Costa Rica, and Panama – so to look
to these movements as the “centre” of the ideology produces gross
distortions.<br />
<br />
The lessons for anarchists and syndicalist from “the Rest” for “the
West” can actually be summed up by saying that the movement always was
and remains coherent because of its engagements with the abuse of power
at all levels.<br />
<br />
<strong>How is anarchism still relevant in the world today? What do
anarchist ideas about strategy and tactics have to offer people active
in social movements today?</strong><br />
<br />
I’d say there are several ways in which anarchism is relevant today: <br />
1) It provides the most comprehensive intersectoral critique of not
just capital and the state; but all forms of domination and exploitation
relating to class, gender, race, colour, ethnicity, creed, ability,
sexuality and so forth, implacably confronting grand public enemies such
as war-mongering imperialism and intimate ones such as patriarchy. It
is not the only ideology to do this, but is certainly the main
consistently freethinking socialist approach to such matters.<br />
<br />
2) With 15 decades of militant action behind it, it provides a
toolkit of tried-and proven tactics for resistance in the direst of
circumstances, and, has often risen above those circumstances to
decentralise power to the people. These tactics include oppressed class
self-management, direct democracy, equality, mutual aid, and a range of
methods based in the conception that the means we use to resist
determine the nature of our outcomes. The global anti-capitalist
movement of today is heavily indebted to anarchist ethics and tactics
for its internal democracy, flexibility, and its humanity.<br />
<br />
3) Strategically, we see these tactics as rooted in direct democracy,
equality, and horizontal confederalism (today called the “network of
networks”), in particular in the submission of specific
(self-constituted) anarchist organisations to the oversight of their
communities, which then engage in collective decision-making that is
consultative and responsible to those communities. It was the local
District Committees, Cultural Centres, Consumer Co-operatives, Modern
Schools, and Prisoner-support Groups during the Spanish Revolution that
linked the great CNT union confederation and its Iberian Anarchist
Federation (FAI) allies to the communities they worked within: the
militia that fought on the frontlines against fascism, and the unions
that produced all social wealth would have been rudderless and
anchorless without this crucial social layer to give them grounding and
direction. In order to have a social revolution of human scale, we
submit our actions to the real live humans of the society that we work
within: this is our vision of “socialism”.<br />
<br />
In sum, anarchism’s “leaderless resistance” is about the ideas and
practices that offer communities tools for achieving their freedom, and
not about dominating that resistance. Anarchists ideally are fighting
for a free world, not an anarchist world, one in which even
conservatives will be freed of their statist, capitalist and social
bondage to discover new ways of living in community with the rest of us.<br />
<br />
<strong>Is it important to advance anarchism explicitly? Or is it
enough to engage in social movements whose objectives we support without
adopting the anarchist label? </strong><br />
<br />
This is primarily a tactical question, because the approaches adopted
by anarchists have to be suited to the objective conditions of the
oppressed classes in the area in which they are active, and the specific
local cultures, histories, even prejudices of those they work
alongside. The proper meaning of “anarchist” as a democratic practice – a
practical, not utopian, one at that – of the oppressed classes clearly
needs to be rehabilitated in Australia and New Zealand. Just as the
Bulgarian syndicalists who built unions in the rural areas relied upon
ancient peasant traditions of mutual aid to locate syndicalist mutual
aid within an approachable framework, so you too must find a good match
for anarchism within your cultures. We, for example, have relied heavily
on traditional township forms of resistance to explain solidarity,
mutual aid, egalitarianism, and self-management.<br />
<br />
Yet, it is also a
strategic question because in my opinion, where you have the
bourgeois-democratic freedoms to organise openly and without severe
repression, it is important to form an explicitly anarchist organisation
in order to act as:<br />
<br />
a) a pole around which libertarian socialists, broadly speaking, can
orbit and to which they can gravitate organisationally – though it is
important to recognise that there can be more than one such pole; and <br />
b) as a lodestar of clear, directly-democratic practice, offering
those who seek guidance a vibrant toolkit of time-tested practices with
which to defend the autonomy of the oppressed classes from those who
would exploit/oppress them.<br />
<br />
It is the question of responsibility that compels us to nail our colours to the mast. This is for three reasons:<br />
<br />
a) firstly, because we are not terrorists or criminals and we have
nothing to be ashamed about that requires hiding, even from our enemies
(we should be able to openly defend our democratic credentials before
mainstream politicians); <br />
b) secondly, that by forming a formal organisation, people we
interact with are made aware that none of us are loose cannons but are
subject to the mandates of our organisation (with those mandates being
public, fair and explicit); and <br />
c) lastly, but most importantly, that the communities we work within,
whether territorial (townships, cities, etc), or communities of
interest (unions, queer rights bodies, residents’ associations etc) know
that we are responsible to them, that our actions, positions and
strategies are consultative, collaborative, responsive and responsible
to those they may most immediately affect.<br />
<br />
<strong>We’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of <i>Counter Power
</i>Volume 2, <i>Global Fire: 150 Fighting Years of Revolutionary Anarchism</i>,
is there any news on when it will be released? What ground will you be
covering that people might not expect?</strong><br />
<br />
<i>Global Fire </i>is really a monstrous work: in research and writing for
close to 15 years now, it’s really an international organised labour
history over 150 years, tracing the organisational and ideological
lineages of anarchism/syndicalism in all parts of the world. We have a
lot to get right: we need to have a theory, at least, for why the French
syndicalist movement turned reformist during World War I, or why the
German revolutionary movement as a whole, both Marxist and anarchist,
collapsed over 1919-1923, paving the way for the Nazis. These are issues
of intense argument among historians, and we have to be able to back up
with sound argument our stance in every case, from the well-known, like
the Palmer Raids against the IWW in the USA in the wake of World War I,
to the fate of syndicalism in Southern Rhodesia in the 1950s, or of the
near-seizure of power in Chile by the syndicalists in 1956, and their
fate under the red regimes in Cuba, Bulgaria and China, or the white
regimes in Chile, South Korea, or Argentina.<br />
<br />
We need to understand the
vectors of the anarchist idea in a holistic, transnational sense, but
have often been hampered by the narrowness of national(ist)
perspectives. Even within the Anarchist movement, histories have been
more anecdotal and partisan than truly balanced and rigorous
assessments, and have often been very disarticulated by language
differences. With lengthy delays incurred by us trying to make sure that
Global Fire is the best (in fact only) holistic international account
of the movement. You can be assured that Lucien is working on refining
the text, which if published in its current format would weigh in at a
whopping 1,000 pages, and that we have a pencilled-in release date for
2015, though perhaps 2016 is more realisable.<br />
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-4183828946828734032014-05-11T00:11:00.000+02:002014-05-11T00:11:00.459+02:00Stuart Christie's Preface to "Black Flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism" (Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt, AK Press)<b>Stuart Christie's Preface to "Black Flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism" (Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt, AK Press)</b><br /><br />Stuart Christie, former political prisoner and radical publisher --2009<br /><br />To use the metaphor of plant life, the seeds of anarchism have been around since time immemorial, but the plant itself—the ideas and the movement as we understand them today—first germinated in September 1869 during the fourth general congress of the First International in Basel, in Switzerland. They quickly began to spread, take root and bloom in towns, cities and villages across Europe, the Americas and, later, throughout Asia and into Africa. The most immediate manifestations of this were the Lyons uprising of September 1870 and the Paris Commune of March 1871.<br /><br />The subsequent 138 years of the movement’s history have been characterised by egalitarian dreams, the pursuit of justice, and a never-ending propagandistic cultural and educational activity punctuated by violent and nonviolent direct actions, strikes, insurrections, and aborted and frustrated revolutions.<br /><br />This anarchist presence in political and social life has not gone unnoticed. Since that first meeting in Basel, anarchists have acquired a reputation for honesty, integrity, selflessness, sacrifice, and struggle. Anarchism’s enemies, on the right and on the left, highlight, <br />in contrast, the anarchists’ so-called “easy” recourse to assassinations and other dramatic headline-grabbing direct actions, with exaggerated, black-and-white images that have influenced historians, media commentators, and politicians.<br /><br />Since those early days, the red and black flag of anarchism has been—and continues to be—followed by varied and wide sections of the population. <br /><br />Some historians, such as the Marxist Eric Hobsbawm, believe this is something rather abnormal and atypical. “Normality,” in their view, is that the “scientific doctrine” the proletariat needed was Marxist “socialism”; what they found “abnormal” was the extent to which anarchism and its offshoot, syndicalism, had succeeded in putting down roots in some of the most industrial and modern cities in Europe, cities such as Barcelona, and elsewhere, working-class strongholds where Marxist and parliamentary socialism never achieved striking success. In fact, in electoral terms, of all the cities in Western Europe it was only in Germany that an influential mass socialist party managed to consolidate itself [at the time].<br /><br />Anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are by no means “exceptional” or “extraordinary” phenomena in the history of political-social movements; it was only after the First World War with the co-option or seduction of “socialist” trade unionism and “socialist” parties into the parliamentary political system that—with the notable exceptions like Spain, Argentina, and Sweden—the influence of anti-political, anti-statist, and direct-action oriented revolutionary syndicalism began to fade elsewhere in the world.<br /><br />Even though anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism have proved less stable and robust than anarchists could have hoped for—characterised as they have been by both chronological and geographical discontinuity—they nevertheless still bloom when and where least expected. Often disappearing from view and written off by historians such as George Woodcock, they then reappear, unannounced, with explosions of protest.<br /><br />The present work, however, is neither obituary nor panegyric; it is the first of a two-volume critical analysis of the ongoing evolution of anarchist ideas and movements, the social project for freedom and how best to transform and organise a coercion-free future society based on the principles of communitarianism, direct democracy—and consistency between means and ends.<br /><br />Nor is it an anthology of anarchist writings or a history of libertarian movements; it is an attempt to define anarchism within the framework of classical Marxism, economic liberalism, and the ideas of P. J. Proudhon, and assess the impact—or not—of these anarchist and syndicalist ideas, and rethink ways to implement these ideas and practices in the global economy of the twenty-first century.<br /><br />The work is not only an invaluable reference source, it is thought-provoking, insightful and encyclopaedic in scope, synthesizing as it does, a global history of the movement and the ideas which drive it, while at the same time challenging, constructively, many commonly-held views and misconceptions about anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism.<br /><br />** Stuart Christie is a Scottish anarchist journalist, writer, and translator, born in 1946, who has been active in the movement since the age of sixteen. Having hitchhiked into fascist Spain in 1964 with the intention of assassinating dictator Francisco Franco, Christie and accomplice Fernando Carballo Blanco were arrested. Christie was found in possession of explosives and faced grim execution by garrote, but he was freed three years later after an international campaign for his release by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre. Back in Britain, he helped reestablish the Anarchist Black Cross for the support of political prisoners in Spain and elsewhere—one of the movement’s longest-surviving initiatives—and the journal "Black Flag. " In 1972, he was acquitted of involvement in the Angry Brigade’s sabotage campaign after one of the longest criminal trials in British history. He went on to found Cienfuegos Press and later Christie Books, and remains an active militant contributing to the broader anarchist movement.<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-41793090653064206522013-11-04T16:42:00.002+02:002013-11-04T16:42:30.054+02:00Rhodes University, Grahamstown, Oct 2013 launch of "Schwarze Flamme"<i>"Schwarze Flamme,"</i> the German-language translation and revised edition of <i>"Black Flame," </i>was among the books launched at <a href="http://gallery.ru.ac.za/v/EVENTS/Rhodes+Book+Launch+2013_001/?g2_page=4" target="_blank">The Rhodes University Annual Book Launch on Thursday 24 October 2013</a>, in Grahamstown, the Eastern Cape, South Africa.<br />
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Some photos below of co-author Lucien van der Walt at the launch:<br />
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<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-23479469894616079542013-08-29T15:24:00.000+02:002013-08-29T17:51:14.275+02:00German translation of "Black Flame" is now published - AUGUST 2013<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoPlainText">
<a href="http://www.edition-nautilus.de/programm/politik/buch-978-3-89401-783-5.html">http://www.edition-nautilus.de/programm/politik/buch-978-3-89401-783-5.html</a></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<b>Lucien van der Walt / Michael Schmidt</b></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<b><i>Schwarze
FlammeRevolutionäre Klassenpolitik im Anarchismus und Syndikalismus</i></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy_MRZAqkQHfoNgKlIIAwebm4n1_-OCR_6aL3wyQmYZgrPeKfCKDKmtz8zCvLIs0FPpOfpyLD51BwoAXzYFYb6T8wjO67eFJRnR9YOP7i88CcSHXGYMvIkBgNtkUPGDdM9VQdderb0-BM/s1600/CC_Walt_Schmidt_SF1_30x45.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiy_MRZAqkQHfoNgKlIIAwebm4n1_-OCR_6aL3wyQmYZgrPeKfCKDKmtz8zCvLIs0FPpOfpyLD51BwoAXzYFYb6T8wjO67eFJRnR9YOP7i88CcSHXGYMvIkBgNtkUPGDdM9VQdderb0-BM/s400/CC_Walt_Schmidt_SF1_30x45.jpg" width="265" /></a><b>Aus dem Englischen übersetzt von</b></div>
<b>
</b><br />
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<b>Andreas Förster und Holger Marcks</b></div>
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<br /></div>
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Deutsche Erstausgabe</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Großformat, Broschur</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
560 Seiten</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
€ (D) 39,90</div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
€ (A) 41,10</div>
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*</div>
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ISBN 978-3-89401-783-5*</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>*Erscheint Ende August 2013*</b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>Inhalt</b></div>
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<br /></div>
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»Eine wohldurchdachte und nuancierte Studie der
intellektuellen, politischen und Sozialgeschichte des Anarchismus.« *Steven
Hirsch, University of Pittsburgh*</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>Schwarze Flamm</i>e ist eine Geschichte der Gegenmacht: die
Südafrikaner Lucien van der Walt und Michael Schmidt legen eine umfassende
Systematik und internationale Geschichte des Anarchismus und eine
Auseinandersetzung mit dessen Kernfragen wie Organisierung, Strategie und
Taktik vor.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Vom 19. Jahrhundert bis zu heutigen antikapitalistischen
Bewegungen zeichnen sie anarchistische Traditionen und seine zeitgenössischen
Formen nach und untersuchen anarchistische Positionen zu Rasse, Gender, Klasse
und Imperialismus. Durch ihren eigenwilligen Blickwinkel stellen sie die
bisherige Geschichtsschreibung in einen neuen Rahmen. Mit seinem großen Umfang
und der internationalen Dimension der Materialsammlung – auch zu Lateinamerika,
Asien und Afrika gibt es umfassende Informationen – darf das Buch bereits jetzt
als Standardwerk anarchistischer Geschichtsschreibung gelten: systematisch, kontrovers und ausgesprochen gut
lesbar.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Ein Standardwerk zur Theorie und Praxis des weltweiten
Anarchosyndikalismus der letzten 150 Jahre!</div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://www.blogger.com/e%3Chttp://www.edition-nautilus.de/xbilder/xmedia/Schwarze_Flamme_Inhaltsverzeichnis_lang.pdf%3E" target="_blank">Inhaltsverzeichnis<i> Schwarze Flamme</i></a></div>
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<div class="headertext" style="width: 134px;">
<b>Leseprobe</b></div>
<div class="buchtexte" style="width: 550px;">
<div class="txt">
Dieses Buch begann als kurze Einführungsbroschüre in den späten
1990er Jahren, die dann einfach wuchs und wuchs. Wir waren selbst
überrascht von der reichen Geschichte der breiten anarchistischen
Tradition. Während wir damit gerechnet hatten, einige wenige Lücken zu
füllen, öffnete sich vor unseren Augen eine unerwartete Welt: eine
Weltgeschichte, die den meisten Anarchisten und Syndikalisten selbst
unbekannt ist. Es war eine bewegende und faszinierende Geschichte voller
Opfermut, Tragödien, Leiden und manchmal auch Humor und Pathos,
durchsetzt mit Heldenhaftigkeit, Kreativität, Schönheit und
Errungenschaften. Uns wurde auch klar, dass wir nicht einfach einen
Nachruf auf eine Bewegung oder ein Buch von antiquarischem Interesse
schreiben, sondern eine lebendige Tradition diskutieren, die für viele
Leute von Interesse ist, die die Welt verändern wollen.</div>
<div class="txt">
Als solches ist das vorliegende Buch auch ein Werk über die Zukunft,
das wir einer besseren Welt und einem besseren Morgen widmen wollen.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>Zu den Autoren</b>
</div>
<br />
<div style="float: left; height: 202px; margin-left: -5px; width: 145px;">
<span class="bu">© privat</span><img alt="Lucien van der Walt" height="187" src="http://www.edition-nautilus.de/xbilder/xautor/van_der_Walt_2_130_A.jpg" width="130" />
</div>
<div class="autor_text" style="width: 405px;">
<span class="autor">Prof. Lucien van der Walt, Ph.D.</span>, arbeitet an der Rhodes University, Südafrika, und ist (neben Steve Hirsch) Mitherausgeber von <i>Anarchism
and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1880-1940: The
Praxis of Class Struggle, National Liberation and Social Revolution</i>
(2010). Er veröffentlichte umfassend zur Geschichte der
Arbeiterbewegung und der Linken sowie zu politischer Ökonomie, zu
Anarchismus und Syndikalismus. Van der Walt wurde vom Labor History and
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa
(CODESRIA) ausgezeichnet mit den Preisen für die beste internationale
und die beste afrikanische Doktorarbeit. Er engagiert sich in der
gewerkschaftlichen Bildungsarbeit und in der Arbeiterbewegung.</div>
<div class="autor_text" style="width: 405px;">
</div>
<div class="autor_reset">
</div>
<div style="float: left; height: 117px; margin-left: -5px; width: 145px;">
<img alt="Michael Schmidt" height="102" src="http://www.edition-nautilus.de/xbilder/xautor/Schmidt_Michael_130_A.jpg" width="130" /><br />
<span class="bu">© privat</span>
</div>
<div class="autor_text" style="width: 405px;">
<div class="txt">
<b>Michael Schmidt</b> ist
erfahrender Reporter und investigativer Journalist, dessen Reportagen ihn nach
Chiapas, Guatemala, die DR Kongo, Mosambik, Ruanda, Darfur, in den Libanon und
anderswohin führten. Der frühere gewerkschaftliche Vertrauensmann und Gründer
der Professional Journalists’ Association of South Africa nahm 2011 am Clive
Menell Media Fellowship der Duke University teil. Schmidt ist Autor der <i>Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire</i>
(2012) und leitet gegenwärtig das Institute for the Advancement of Journalism
im südafrikanischen Johannesburg. Weiterhin schreibt er sowohl für etablierte
als auch für alternative Medien. </div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-45062558859512509992013-04-03T18:30:00.003+02:002013-04-10T09:44:23.776+02:00A "Black Flame" review that has been circulating on anarchist boards and lists...Stumbled across this, which has been moving through a series of networks and lists:
<b> </b><br />
<br />
<b>Jack Devon:‘Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism’</b><br />
I came across ‘Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism’ quite by chance and I’m so glad I did; it’s one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve read in years.
The authors are a journalist and an academic, a winning combination because they’ve succeeded in combining sound scholarship with accessible prose to launch a bold, unflinching assault on the myth-making, obfuscation, disinformation and downright lies that have served to distort, discredit and obscure the immense contribution anarchism and syndicalism have made to the labour movement globally and to society at large.<br />
<br />
Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt adopt a stance of sympathetic engagement; letting nothing pass without critical appraisal, yet their approach is nonetheless sympathetic to the broad anarchist tradition. The result is nothing short of an exhilerating read. I can’t wait to get my hands on volume two.<br />
<br />
They begin with the demolition of faulty definitions of anarchism.
Paul Elzbacher’s influential ‘Anarchism: Exponents of the Anarchist Philosophy’ (1900) picked seven ‘recognised’ anarchist teachers: Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tucker and Tolstoy. His basic assumption was faulty. Godwin derived an antistatist stance from utilitarian principles of the 1790s, but that didn’t make him an anarchist. Stirner was an extreme individualist of the 1840s . Tolstoy was a Christian mystic and contemplative. Godwin and Tolstoy were ascetics, Stirner a libertine. Proudhon was a utopian, a proponent of mutualism. Tucker was a rationalist and an atheist. In other words, Elzbacher ended up with a selection of people with radically different ideas. No wonder he defined anarchism by the lowest common denominator: opposition to the state.<br />
<br />
Matters were not improved by the self-serving myth-making of anarchists themselves, some of whom tried to establish the idea that anarchism had always existed in mankind, a phrase that even slipped into the 1910 <i>Encyclopaedia Britannica. </i>The anarchist historian Max Nettlau suggested that the anarchist concept and principles could be found in ancient Greece as well as among scientific writers of the 18th century. In his classic <i>‘Anarcho-Syndicalism’</i>, Rudolf Rocker said anarchist ideas were to be found in every period of known history. In 1944 George Woodcock found in Taoism the first anarchistic doctrine. If anarchism can encompass economic liberals, Marxists, radical Christians, Taoism, and more,‘ the authors write, ‘it is hardly surprising that the standard works on anarchism describe it as “incoherent”.’<br />
<br />
Using a deductive method, the authors start from scratch in seeking to construct an accurate picture of anarchism.
‘The basic premise of all the anarchist arguments was a deep and fundamental commitment to individual freedom,’ they write. ‘For the anarchists, however, freedom could only exist, and be exercised, in society; equally, inegalitarian and hierarchical social structures made freedom impossible. It followed that the anarchist ideal was a society based on social and economic equality as well as self-management, in which individual freedom could truly exist.’<br />
<br />
It was simply untrue to claim, as did E.H. Carr in his biography of Bakunin, that the key figure in anarchism was an extreme individualist influenced by Stirner. Bakunin envisaged freedom as a product of society, not a revolt against society by individuals. On the contrary, the struggle against extreme individualism was an essential part of the anarchist project. For the anarchist, duties and freedoms are inextricably linked.
So where does this take us?
Anarchism and syndicalism are born of the European Enlightenment; specifically, anarchism is rooted in the labour movement of the 1860s.<br />
<br />
Anarchism can be said to be rational, anti-authoritarian, egalitarian, and opposed to capitalism and landlordism. For anarchists, the class system has been the fundamental obstacle to true individuality with the state seen as a defender of that class system, a centralised body that concentrates power in the hands of the minority ruling class.
‘The emancipation of the working class and peasantry required a radically different form of social organisation that maximised popular self-activity and self-management – and this was entirely at odds with the state,’ the authors say.<br />
<br />
The early anarchists also rejected the classical Marxist strategy of using the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as a means to destroy class society. That would simply replace one ruling elite with another. ‘I am above all an absolute enemy of revolution by decrees,’ said Bakunin. ‘which derive from the idea of the revolutionary State, i.e., reaction disguised as revolution.’ The new regime would only become a class system as bad as any that preceded it.
Revolutionary ‘socialist’ governments, Bakunin and Kropotkin repeatedly said, would in fact be forms of state capitalism. The state ‘will then become the only banker, capitalist, organiser, and director of all national labour, and the distributor of its products,’ Bakunin said. How right he was!<br />
<br />
For anarchists, the means shaped the ends. The classical Marxist notion that history was a trajectory, a straight line determined by economic production – regardless of what anyone thought, said or did – was crude determinism by anarchist standards. In the anarchist world view, there was a great deal more to life – and history – than productive forces. If history marched anywhere, it did so in fits and starts, and was affected by phenomena such as culture, religion and leisure
Anarchists also saw the struggle of the popular classes – the working class and peasantry – as the engine of change. For classical Marxists, the peasantry was dismissed as a declining class that would be absorbed by the spread of capitalism.<br />
<br />
Opposed to Marxist notions of the ‘aristocracy of labour’, Bakunin maintained that only through the broadest possible class unity could the interests of the popular classes as a whole be defended.
Anarchists were strongly internationalist, seeing war simply as a means for ruling groups to compete with one another globally for raw materials and new markets. From the start the movement also embraced a strong feminist impulse and championed equal rights for women.<br />
<br />
‘It is our view,’ the authors say,’that the term anarchism should be reserved for a particular rationalist and revolutionary form of libertarian socialism that emerged in the second half of the 19the century. Anarchism was against social and economic hierarchy as well as inequality – and specifically, capitalism, landlordism, and the state – and in favour of an international class struggle and revolution from below by a self-organised working class and peasantry in order to create a self-managed, socialist, and stateless social order. In this new order, individual freedom would be harmonised with communal obligations through cooperation, democratic decision making, and social and economic equality, and economic coordination would take place through federal forms…’ Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-20994465240001559352013-03-29T12:30:00.001+02:002013-03-29T12:32:23.985+02:00Youtube summary of "Black Flame"Came across this by accident:<br />
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/tqmXut2n-M0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-18936526743041596892013-03-28T13:31:00.004+02:002013-03-28T15:05:06.681+02:00REVIEW (+ short response by Lucien): Alex Zukas in 'Labor History'<br />
<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/clah20/2013/clah20.v054.i01/clah20.v054.i01/20130322-01/clah20.v054.i01.cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Labor History" border="0" height="320" src="http://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/clah20/2013/clah20.v054.i01/clah20.v054.i01/20130322-01/clah20.v054.i01.cover.jpg" width="228" /></a>Alex Zukas, (2013), "<i>Black Flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism</i>," <b><i>Labor History</i></b>, volume 54, number 1, pp. 113-115<br />
<br />
Just published, Alex Zukas's positive (but at times critical: see below) review praises <i>Black Flame</i> as a <b>"a rich, provocative, and important study of anarchist history, theory, and practice." </b>It is a <b>"wide-ranging intellectual and political history that will surely stimulate debates about anarchist theory and practice." </b>The authors "synthesize a vast amount of primary and secondary source material on anarchism, their points are easy to follow, their arguments are clearly stated, they address key debates within anarchist politics and anarchist scholarship, and they take clear positions on those debates which are likely to generate even more debate." It also fosters new work by raising a "host of issues for future research starting with most of its main arguments" <br />
<br />
<br />
Zukas also provides a succinct summary of those "main arguments" which is worth reproducing for its clarity: "The main arguments of the book, all of which challenge widely held views about anarchist history, theory, and practice are <b>(1) </b>the anarchist tradition begins in the 1860s as a response to the rise of capitalism and the modern state and emerged with, and was part of, modern socialist and proletarian movements; <b>(2) </b>not all philosophies that are hostile to the state or promote individual freedom are anarchist because anarchism is the libertarian wing of socialism which seeks to collectivize and self-manage production and replace the modern state with international self-management; <b>(3) </b>historians need a global perspective to counter the pervasive idea of ‘Spanish exceptionalism’ because major mass anarchist movements developed outside Spain in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, France, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, and Uruguay and often constituted the majority of organized workers in those nations from 1895 to 1925; <b>(4) </b>anarchist ideas have internal coherence; <b>(5) </b>the politics of class struggle, counterpower, and counterculture are integral to anarchism and syndicalism; <b>(6) </b>anarchism has always been predominantly a modern urban working-class movement rather than a rural peasant movement; and<b> (7) </b>anarchist and syndicalist trends are central to comprehending the history of labor and the Left in much of the world."<br />
<br />
While Zukas does not dispute any of these major claims, he <i>does </i>suggest that there is a tension in <i>Black Flame </i>between its "scholarly or academic agenda" and "polemics of a more partisan agenda that involves building a cohesive anarchist movement today." This (he claims) can lead the latter to sometimes "undermine" or "overshadow" the former, leading the book to have "mixed" results. His main examples of this apparent flaw are that <b>1) </b><i>Black Flame </i>does not pay adequate attention to overlaps within the "broad revolutionary Left" and its "permeable boundaries" (his main example here are the De Leonists) <b>2) </b>it "exhibits a tendency toward a caricatured, tendentious, reified, and reductive view of Marxist politics by means of selective quotation and by reducing Marxism to Leninism (Stalinism, really)" <b>3) </b><i>Black Flame </i>
is critical of classical Marxism yet fails to provide much "critical
assessment of Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s key ideas."<br />
<br />
<b>Short response:</b> <br />
As with all reviews, there is much food for thought in the criticisms
provided; critique is not a threat to scholarship, but central to its
progress, and so, always welcome.<br />
<br />
It is in the same spirit of engagement, then, that I will post this short (I was going to say "brief," but it grew in the telling) response.<br />
<br />
I would suggest that Zukas's general claim that "partisan" concerns undermine "academic" claims is a bit overstated. As he points out, the mixed mode of scholarship and advocacy is in the best "tradition of a great deal of labor scholarship" and is "laudable"; it is only a problem if the "partisan" position weakens the "scholarly" quality.<br />
<br />
But has Zukas shown this? Yes and no, no, and, last,yes but no... <br />
<br />
<b>1)</b> <u>Yes and no:</u> <i>Black Flame</i> focuses on the core of the anarchist and syndicalist tradition, and not on the overlaps and syntheses that emerged at its boundaries. So, yes, the issue of fuzzy boundaries is not central to its project and while it certainly merits more discussion, it is a matter for another project. This focus is not an example of partisanship undermining scholarship, but simply an issue of coverage. <br />
<br />
It should also be noted that, within this necessary limitation, <i>Black Flame</i> does in fact discuss a number of examples of such overlaps and syntheses, among them the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa, the 1920s-1930s Sandino movement, and the impact of nationalism upon a wing of the Korean and Chinese anarchists.<br />
<br />
<br />
The issue of De Leonism is quite separate, however, from this matter. <i>Black Flame</i> specifically, and at some length, rejects the view that De Leonism is an example of a synthesis or overlap. The <i>correctness </i>of that argument can be disputed, but it is a separate matter to the question of the importance of examining "permeable boundaries," since the case for De Leonism being an expression of blending at the boundaries must first be made.<br />
<br />
Last on this point: as the points about Sandino <i>etal</i> underline, there have always been "permeable boundaries" on the "broad revolutionary Left," and indeed, between that Left and a range of other forces - not all revolutionary, and not all Left. That some permeability exists is undeniable, but this it is at the <i>boundaries </i>that exist <i>between </i>traditions; the fact of permeability does <i>not </i>efface very real, fundamental differences, and to identify those differences is not partisan, but a necessary part of scholarly analysis. <br />
<br />
<br />
Nor should permeability on the "broad revolutionary Left" be overstated. Such matters such as the 1872 split in the First International, the systematic drive to purge anarchists and syndicalists from the Second and Third Internationals, the repression that was meted out by Marxists against anarchists and syndicalists in Russia, Korea, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Cuba and elsewhere is certainly <i>not </i>the whole history of the "broad revolutionary Left," but they <i>are </i>an enormous part of that history.<br />
<br />
That said, the issue of overlaps and syntheses is an important one, deserving of more attention in its own right. So, with the reservations expressed above, that point is taken.<br />
<br />
2) <u>No:</u> <i>Black Flame</i> does not provide a "caricatured, tendentious, reified, and
reductive view of Marxist politics" by "selective quotation" and
"reducing Marxism to Leninism (Stalinism, really)."<br />
<br />
As we have argued in <i>Black Flame </i>and elsewhere, Marxism is not homogenous; it includes, indeed, a libertarian wing closely akin to anarchism.<br />
<br />
Zukas notes this nuanced approach, but then wishes to suggest that <i>Black Flame </i>caricatures Marxism with a <br />
"reductive view" based on "selective quotation" and stressing "Leninism (Stalinism, really)."<br />
<br />
The problem with Zukas's point is that the dominant tradition in Marxism has always been statist; the history of countries like the Soviet Union etc., and of the big parties of the Second and Third Internationals (and the smaller but sometimes pretty substantial parties of the Fourth) is not just a minor moment in Marxism, but the bulk of its history. That is the Marxist tradition that most Marxists have always embraced, and that is <i>why</i> that tradition (explicit) forms the focus of <i>Black Flame </i>in discussing Marxism.<br />
<br />
Therefore, quoting Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and Guevara is not really being "reductive" or "selective," but instead, being <i>representative </i>and <i>reasonable</i>; the same applies to linking "Marxism to Leninism (Stalinism, really)." One may not like "Stalinism," after all, but it would be a caricature of Marxism as a mode of thought stressing material realities, if one was to discuss Marxist politics as if the Soviet Union or "Stalinism" never existed.<br />
<br />
<br />
3) <u>Yes, but no:</u> it is quite true that <i>Black Flame</i> does not provide a detailed criticism of Bakunin's and Kropotkin's "key ideas," but that was <u><i>not </i></u>its aim; the aim was, first and foremost, <i>recovery </i>of those core ideas, and of their expression in a revolutionary <i>praxis </i>internationally.<br />
<br />
The critical discussion of classical Marxism presented in <i>Black Flame </i>is, by the same token, primarily about recovering the <i>anarchist </i>and <i>syndicalist </i>critique of classical Marxism and its analytical and political alternative to classical Marxism. Likewise, <i>Black Flame </i>provides a critical evaluation of many of the major debates and disputes within the broad anarchist tradition,<i> in order to better understand </i>that tradition's ideas and historical record.<br />
<br />
To put this another way: revisiting the anarchist/ Marxist debate, and recapitulating, in all its force, the anarchist and syndicalist critique of many fundamental Marxist positions is a necessary <i>method </i>for examining real, fundamental
differences; it is not partisan, so long as the account is fair. And as suggested above, <i>Black Flame </i>provides a fair account of the dominant Marxist positions.<br />
<br />
A critical assessment of the "key ideas" of Bakunin and Kropotkin on their own terms, and in place of the caricatures that bedevil the literature, is long overdue, and <i>welcome.</i> However, that task, too, falls beyond the scope of <i>Black Flame.</i><br />
<br />
In closing here, again the point is taken - as indicating an issue deserving of more attention in its own right - but with with reservations.<br />
<br />
LucienAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-46984770379709013132013-03-28T12:08:00.002+02:002013-03-28T15:00:29.050+02:00REVIEW ARTICLE: Featherstone in the 'Journal of Global History'David Featherstone, 2012, "<i>Black flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and and syndicalism </i>(<i>Counterpower </i>volume 1), by Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt (Edinburgh and Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009, Pp. 500 and <i>Anarchism and syndicalism in the colonial and postcolonial world, 1870–1940: the praxis of national liberation, internationalism, and social revolution, </i>by Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (Amsterdam: Brill , 2010, pp. lxxiv+434), <b>Journal of Global History, </b> volume 7 , number 3, pp. 535-538.<br />
<br />
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<br />
Featherstone's glowing review is available online <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8719796" target="_blank">here</a>, and variously describes <i>Black Flame</i> as a " a major contribution," with various arguments described as<b> "a
very significant and valuable achievement," </b> "a
significant and creative challenge," and as bound to "stimulate a significant revision of existing understandings of
leftist political cultures." Set apart by its global scope, unique in the literature, it presents "powerful challenges to existing accounts of
leftist internationalisms," asserts "the importance of diverse forms of
political agency and activity constituted through trans-local anarchist organizing," and provides <b>"a major contribution to refiguring understandings of political cultures
of the Left."</b><br />
<br />
Featherstone also raises a few issues bearing reflection, primarily centred around the issue of overlaps between anarchism and other political traditions (for instance, in the IWW and in Irish syndicalism), and how anarchism spread globally, articulating with diverse traditions as it did so (for instance, in the 1920s-1930s Sandinista movement in Nicaragua). <br />
<br />
These are valuable points, to which we can only respond: thanks!<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-79196282584650881292012-09-27T15:37:00.001+02:002012-09-27T15:38:26.393+02:00REPORT: van der Walt, 2012, "Anarchism’s historical role: a global view" <i>Freedom </i>• February 2012 • pp.12-14<br />
<br />
<b>FEATURE</b> <br />
<b>Anarchism’s historical role: a global view</b><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvqeNn7edayEF3R0Qx7jGygWe7go-fJjClalcLVZdOXyUqXvcJsPMR8RAReSz8kHVoaUEPYvzoy6oCfdIk5fuzQ9LbjOGbeJ-M28zuoONm35x7Sfp5cYwJDGhU-b-OR858F2GlIzryRMA/s1600/flame.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvqeNn7edayEF3R0Qx7jGygWe7go-fJjClalcLVZdOXyUqXvcJsPMR8RAReSz8kHVoaUEPYvzoy6oCfdIk5fuzQ9LbjOGbeJ-M28zuoONm35x7Sfp5cYwJDGhU-b-OR858F2GlIzryRMA/s320/flame.jpg" width="211" /></a><br />
<b>Lucien van der Walt,</b> co-author of <i>Black Flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism</i><br />
<br />
Freedom bookshop was proud to host a talk by Lucien van der Walt, coauthor of the groundbreaking <i>Black Flame</i> who spoke at length about all aspects of anarchist history and movements. <br />
<br />
<b>A flicker </b><br />
Me and Michael Schmidt, who is the coauthor and a friend and a comrade
going back many years, we were trying to understand something about the
history of anarchism and of syndicalism, to understand what that history
meant in the past and what it meant for movements today. Perhaps
because we were in South Africa, where there had not really been a
movement in the anarchist or syndicalist tradition since the early
1920s, there was no continuity and I suppose that also meant there were
no preconceptions, we didn’t have any assumptions. <br />
<br />
<b>Beginnings </b><br />
Volume one, of <i>Black Flame</i>, is meant to be looking at historical
themes in the anarchist movement, issues, like what were the big
anarchist organisations? Who were the people who joined these movements?
Where was it globally? We wanted to look at it at a world scale and not
just look at the north Atlantic. Why did anarchist peasant movements
take off in some countries? How did it spread into third world
countries? and so on. <br />
<br />
The other thing we also wanted to look at was theoretical issues in the movement. That’s the [second] part – what is anarchism? <br />
<br />
The [key] thing in the book was to make the argument that it’s important
to have a global view of the anarchist and syndicalist movement.<br />
<br />
Very often the way we understand the history of anarchism is constructed
around the idea of ‘Spanish exceptionalism’ – that, for some reason,
anarchism [only] really took off in Spain. [Guiseppe] Fanelli was sent
there by [Mikhail] Bakunin – he had a huge impact and the legend goes he
couldn’t even speak Spanish, but through his articulate gestures
everybody thought 'hey, this is great stuff,' and decided to spend the
next 70 years fighting for it in their millions. <br />
<br />
<b>Spanish exceptionalism </b><br />
There’s a whole range of literature on this – ‘why were the anarchists
big in Spain’? There’s a range of arguments. The "good" Marxist argument
is Spain had a backward economy, anarchists reflect a backward society,
put the two together and you have the CNT. You get the national
character argument: well, these Latin chaps are quite lively,
anarchism’s quite lively, put them together and you get the CNT. <br />
<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCaZGi8uexoRu_KN-eojbssTgJ0-2vm7aUeddwdOvyrh6p64xyDFD5TMf-AaeaVNYeMO8IK_Us6f45b4QEAHkf0zZrBE38vO2rUEzbZNmpfjIU69ABekc97l3XwZLZMAZa5lPCb0Zp_TA/s1600/spain.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCaZGi8uexoRu_KN-eojbssTgJ0-2vm7aUeddwdOvyrh6p64xyDFD5TMf-AaeaVNYeMO8IK_Us6f45b4QEAHkf0zZrBE38vO2rUEzbZNmpfjIU69ABekc97l3XwZLZMAZa5lPCb0Zp_TA/s320/spain.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Spanish anarchism/ syndicalism: mighty, but not unique</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The problem with the backwardness argument is that Spain wasn’t all that much a backward economy.<br />
<br />
Where were the anarchists based? They were based in the huge
industrialising cities, that was one of their big strongholds; they had a
base in the countryside, and very often where in the countryside? In
the huge commercial farms. Barcelona in the 1920s was one of the fastest
growing cities in Europe so the backwardness thing just doesn’t work.
It’s one of these Marxist arguments that as the working class matures it
all becomes naturally Marxist. <br />
<br />
The thing about Spanish character doesn’t work either. Spain also
produced General Franco. To say there’s some natural Spanish inclination
towards anarchism leaves out small things like the Spanish Civil War
which was between two different types of Spain, two different types of
Spaniard, and two different ideologies in Spain. <br />
<br />
<b>Case against </b><br />
We would argue that, in any case, the notion that Spain was exceptional
is incorrect. If we want to look at Spain, of course it had a huge
anarchist movement, a huge syndicalist union movement, and of course
that movement went back to the 1870s, and of course that movement made a
revolution in the late ’30s. <br />
<br />
However if we want to look internationally we can actually find movements that were at least as big as Spain.<br />
<br />
If we use as a small index the size of anarchist trade unions relative
to the overall labour movement, in other words, how much of the
organised labour movement was under anarchist or syndicalist influence
or control ... we look at Spain and we find the anarchists actually only
had half of the trade unions, the CNT of Spain represented roughly half
of the industrial unions, in some areas more; but there was large
social democratic rival, the UGT. So they had about 50%. <br />
<br />
<b>Looking globally </b><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaEhbvkMoXWxNEe1RPhWpHJw0hDLsx3QQhkpJeR0quOhkzoCrvT7mILWd9IVjacZEZs-jXJfbtiensEzTGG02lTEzNf1XDGDO25I2D3Ci69Tz9mMhyphenhyphenkrhZXbo0ufCEin8IS6x5PDP0wjU/s1600/Petronila.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaEhbvkMoXWxNEe1RPhWpHJw0hDLsx3QQhkpJeR0quOhkzoCrvT7mILWd9IVjacZEZs-jXJfbtiensEzTGG02lTEzNf1XDGDO25I2D3Ci69Tz9mMhyphenhyphenkrhZXbo0ufCEin8IS6x5PDP0wjU/s1600/Petronila.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Bolivia 1935: the anarcho-syndicalist Sindicato de Culinaria </b></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
If we look at countries like Peru, Mexico, Argentina, for a short time
the Netherlands, if we look at France, if we look at Portugal, if we
look at Chile, if we look at Uruguay, if we look for a time at Brazil,
these were all movements where the anarchists were the <i>predominant </i>force in the trade unions. <br />
<br />
Cuba is [an]other one. And in the Cuban case for example, ... from the
1880s anarchists and syndicalists led [the] trade union movement until
the 1930s. And even in the ’50s when Castro comes in, a lot of the trade
unions are actually led by the anarchists, and one of Che Guevara’s
actions is essentially to clear the anarchists out of the trade unions,
and set up a good government trade union that makes sure workers do what
the government wants. Which is not quite an anarchist approach I think!
<br />
<br />
Why do people treat Spain as exceptional? They only treat Spain as
exceptional by comparing Spain to other countries in the north Atlantic.
What they say is – if you look at Spain it had a lot bigger anarchist
movement than in the UK or than Sweden or Norway or Germany. And bigger
than the US. <br />
<br />
Okay, that’s fair enough but when we look internationally, when we look
beyond the north Atlantic, there are a lot of movements that, even
measured simply by how big were the anarchists in the trade unions, were
bigger movements. <br />
<br />
<b>Internationally speaking </b><br />
So when we look globally and we look at this international level, we find anarchist movements are very big.<br />
<br />
I only used the trade union [index] as a quick way to do the comparison. <br />
<br />
If we want to look at things like running daily newspapers, having vast
networks of schools, forming workers armies, if we want to look at
revolutionary uprisings, if we want to look at the impact on the culture
of the popular classes, if we want to look at a role in the
countryside, if we want to look at a role in anticolonial struggles, <i>in all of these ways we can make the same argument </i>–
that anarchism and syndicalism were very big in Spain, but Spain was
not exceptional, and that we have to understand anarchism and
syndicalism globally and as a global movement to understand its
historical role. <br />
<br />
<b>Poor cousin </b><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwvnVSKPuLGOZXZX77F35ExjXqVc-v4LhTccL1YpPM62lYsjLfWdGbTgVZJRqX7V1FbMVw3QauIbTfwPGQEO7m-BgCrZZFHdtGpiHBt9bAQNQT3foF4EVD1WM7Ve07gtgIrCoZ6k_007c/s1600/FORA.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwvnVSKPuLGOZXZX77F35ExjXqVc-v4LhTccL1YpPM62lYsjLfWdGbTgVZJRqX7V1FbMVw3QauIbTfwPGQEO7m-BgCrZZFHdtGpiHBt9bAQNQT3foF4EVD1WM7Ve07gtgIrCoZ6k_007c/s320/FORA.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Mass anarchist union, Federación Obrera Regional Argentina</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
And from that, we can start to make the argument that anarchism and
syndicalism were not, as people often assume, always the poor cousin of
classical Marxism or of social democracy. <br />
<br />
For example, classical Marxism had no real presence outside of west
Europe [before Lenin's rise]. And its offshoots, with the interesting
exception of Indonesia, had no real presence elsewhere.<br />
<br />
Classical Marxism before Lenin said ‘look, no capitalism equals no
socialism’ and this meant, for people who were keen on Marxism in say,
Argentina: ‘hold on don’t do anything, wait a bit for a bit more
capitalism’.<br />
It’s not a line the working class always likes. <br />
<br />
You had these vast, poor working classes and the Argentine Socialist
Party would say ‘vote for more reforms’ and the working class said
‘well, first we can’t vote. This is a problem, most of us immigrants
can’t vote. Secondly, we are not seeing any reforms, this thing is
controlled by an oligarchy. Third we’ve got all the capitalism that we
want. So we don’t really want to join’. <br />
<br />
<b>Poor marxism </b><br />
If we look right across South America, anarchists and syndicalists predominated on the left and the radical movement.<br />
<br />
If you look in southern Africa in the 1910s, anarchism and syndicalism predominate.<br />
<br />
If we look [at] a case like Egypt, where there was an anarchist movement
from the 1870s, anarchism had a key role there even into the early
1920s. In fact the Egyptian Communist Party, when it was originally set
up, was known in Arabic as ‘the party of the anarchists’. When they
joined the Communist International, one of the conditions was: kick the
anarchists out of the Egyptian Communist Party. <br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW5YPH2Ab9rdrJnB4JxkBH8qAnGkxn8GHyl23-vkYORD-EYrTLYfwyor3_TSaD9ZiE7Al9LVZVFyTLeUiA7_sYtEKpFWvKkxVMqq7HmhSjz6n10Bhyphenhyphen4kVz-zyS_QT3ZAFQR35VPB12PuM/s1600/mexican+anarchists+today.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW5YPH2Ab9rdrJnB4JxkBH8qAnGkxn8GHyl23-vkYORD-EYrTLYfwyor3_TSaD9ZiE7Al9LVZVFyTLeUiA7_sYtEKpFWvKkxVMqq7HmhSjz6n10Bhyphenhyphen4kVz-zyS_QT3ZAFQR35VPB12PuM/s320/mexican+anarchists+today.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Mexican anarchists today: an important force </b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The first Communist parties set up in Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and
elsewhere, were actually set up by anarchists [and syndicalists] and
they were essentially anarchist parties. So anarchism was not the poor
cousin of the movement. <br />
<br />
It is a very important thing for us to understand about anarchism: it was a very important movement.<br />
<br />
Predominance of Marxism as a movement of the left and a movement in the
labour circles in many countries is only something that’s achieved <i>in the 1940s</i>;
it’s really in World War Two that Communist parties grow into mass
parties in many countries. And it’s not like the anarchist and
syndicalist movements just die out in 1939 or 1945; in many countries it
remains a very powerful influence despite these rivals. <br />
<br />
<b>Trade unions </b><br />
One thing in the anarchist movement’s history that we can appreciate is
its pioneering role in founding trade unions [from the 1870s]. <br />
<br />
One example is the Regional Workers Federation of Spain, set up in
1870s; this was the one inspired by Bakunin’s delegate Fanelli. The
second is the General Congress of Mexican Workers, the second of the
biggest [earliest] syndicalist unions, 1876. <br />
<br />
The next big one was in the United States, the Central Labour Union in
Chicago: this is where the Haymarket Martyrs came from. This was the key
trade union in Chicago; it was part of an anarchist movement that could
pull a hundred thousand people onto the streets – at the funeral of the
Haymarket martyrs 250,000 people. And of course Mayday commemorates
that. It’s one of anarchism’s little gifts to the international working
class. <br />
<br />
[The] Workers Circle in Cuba was the next important one. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5PttfC19t28o0B5VLbP92SZwDThXJreYy5QydQf0hs2bq9rj1IamTazX_Q9ruvmubF4DL-8uzC-KujKhowcWJ3KzpxHiPDw9I3s6zHD9tyI9txqOO3_qXb5J2TlfKaAVkZHby1i4pBO0/s1600/Isabelo_de_los_Reyes,_Sr..jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5PttfC19t28o0B5VLbP92SZwDThXJreYy5QydQf0hs2bq9rj1IamTazX_Q9ruvmubF4DL-8uzC-KujKhowcWJ3KzpxHiPDw9I3s6zHD9tyI9txqOO3_qXb5J2TlfKaAVkZHby1i4pBO0/s320/Isabelo_de_los_Reyes,_Sr..jpg" width="249" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Isabelo de los Reyes, influenced by anarchism</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Second thing, in many cases the anarchists and syndicalists pioneered
trade unions in what I’m calling colonial or postcolonial countries –
either under direct colonialism or were in some way maybe less formally
subject to [the] Great Powers.<br />
<br />
Again, when we look here we can see a pattern of an important early role
and a long-term presence by anarchists in the mass movements. <br />
<br />
Isabelo de los Reyes in the Philippines was a Filipino independence
fighter – as the Spanish empire starts collapsing in the 1890s the
United States moves in and starts to ... take over Puerto Rico, Cuba and
the Philippines. He’s locked up in Barcelona with Spanish anarchists,
he reads a lot of this stuff, he thinks this is pretty good, and he
comes back and he sets up a trade union in Manila in about 1904, modeled
on the Spanish anarchist trade unions. <br />
<br />
<b>Other voices </b>[points here were linked to images]<br />
Liu Shifu in China – his group, the Anarchist Communist Society, set up
the first trade unions in China in the 1910s; into the early 1920s,
especially in areas of Yunnan, anarchists led the trade unions. Shifu
unfortunately died young – he had TB – but his movement was very
important. And for a less glorious legacy of anarchism there a young
librarian called Mao Tsetung was in 1919/1920 an anarchist and
identified with the anarchist movement. <br />
<br />
In the early 1920s you could get most of Kropotkin’s key writings in China; there wasn’t an official copy of the<i> Communist Manifesto </i>available. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ2k1CtOhnIrb9EEO2mWtVsuXr__HLufkZxKaGpgImuwHJdvh2KAjw2I7cMx_ayPG7NQnMt0KtexZZTUh5zaHmzkmuxQ2VDevF_6q_Wihk1miWwQ_ho192D2YrhKiU2-O3ZyFLALYagGs/s1600/Thibedi+from+Allen.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ2k1CtOhnIrb9EEO2mWtVsuXr__HLufkZxKaGpgImuwHJdvh2KAjw2I7cMx_ayPG7NQnMt0KtexZZTUh5zaHmzkmuxQ2VDevF_6q_Wihk1miWwQ_ho192D2YrhKiU2-O3ZyFLALYagGs/s200/Thibedi+from+Allen.jpg" title="" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>T.W. Thibedi, African revolutionary</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<b>T.W. Thibedi in South Africa.</b> His father was a minister, he
studied at a church school and he taught in a church school. 1915, he
was in a meeting in Johannesburg, of the International Socialist League
which was a revolutionary syndicalist group, thought 'this is damn good
stuff' and he joined.<br />
<br />
And he was the first of a whole wide layer of African, coloured and
Indian cadre in South Africa of the anarchist [and syndicalist]
movement, and he was a key figure in a syndicalist union there called
the Industrial Workers of Africa, which was the first trade union in
British southern Africa for black African workers. <br />
<br />
<b>Shanghai 1927</b>: Korean and Chinese anarchists, they’re involved in
a number of joint projects. Korea was under Japanese colonial rule and a
hell of a lot of the Korean anarchist movement is actually outside of
Korea.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQyeM3jyKXRcHm1FZZRHERh69jA9FVrTBxCKW9dd5fYAeKQFahv61enGSX1RjgvwG7gTSNvlCLIRY-7Ps3rVPDU7Q0SCJ9GreX_LzMCJadeJ2J8QyH6qQvI9nFR93ccCFPkv1Os9KyOBU/s1600/korea001.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQyeM3jyKXRcHm1FZZRHERh69jA9FVrTBxCKW9dd5fYAeKQFahv61enGSX1RjgvwG7gTSNvlCLIRY-7Ps3rVPDU7Q0SCJ9GreX_LzMCJadeJ2J8QyH6qQvI9nFR93ccCFPkv1Os9KyOBU/s1600/korea001.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>China 1927: Korean and Chinese anarchist militants</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Very often they were in China or in Japan, and this particular wing was
involved in the National Labour University and subsequently in something
called the Leader College. These were essentially universities under
anarchist control, although sponsored by a wing of the Guomindang, which
trained people in classes like Esperanto and gardening and anarchist
theory. They were also involved in training militias; there was a
Movement for Village Self-defence, they were involved in that. <br />
<br />
<b>Anarchist revolutions </b><br />
In terms of revolutions there are three that, I think, we could reasonably characterise as anarchist revolutions. <br />
<br />
First is the movement of the Makhnovists in the Ukraine in 1918 until 1921 (when it gets suppressed). <br />
<br />
Next important one is Manchuria 1929.1932. This is one that’s not well
documented in English, [the] key figure here Kim Jwajin: he was a
general in the Korean Independence army. <br />
<br />
Why were Koreans in Manchuria? Well, Japanese colonial rule in the
Korean peninsula was extremely repressive, extremely thorough; in the
1930s for example they instructed all Koreans to change their names to
Japanese names.<br />
<br />
So a lot of the resistance took place in the borderlands of Manchuria. The Korean Independence Army had several strongholds. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-ajkYTlcMVfqUueRGN9hMHUvzZwOWSdy8NLxL_Ml83SMBo2cAOqyqdof-ZriTsyIdhZWyAgoghsVJJfE2f4ni5qO7h_cuan6VuNt-aIIzXpGjRp4GmElY0fSAuo36_7KL7OiFrg_6TYM/s1600/kim+statue.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-ajkYTlcMVfqUueRGN9hMHUvzZwOWSdy8NLxL_Ml83SMBo2cAOqyqdof-ZriTsyIdhZWyAgoghsVJJfE2f4ni5qO7h_cuan6VuNt-aIIzXpGjRp4GmElY0fSAuo36_7KL7OiFrg_6TYM/s320/kim+statue.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Kim Jwajin memorial, South Korea</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Kim Jwajin was very famous for winning a number of major victories
against the Japanese. Himself an anarchist, he devised a plan along with
the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria to set up the Korean
Anarchist People’s Movement. This was an area run along the same lines
as the Makhnovist area with council systems, a degree of political
pluralism; they had cooperatives and a militia defending it. <br />
<br />
Kim Jwajin was assassinated in 1931 by a Communist, and soon after that
Japanese forces came up from the south and crushed this [zone].<br />
<br />
This was an important case.<br />
<br />
He’s called the 'Korean Makhno', but I suppose you could just as well call Makhno the 'Ukrainian Kim Jwajin'. <br />
<br />
In Korea these are not small facts. All of these major figures are
recognised, they’ll tell you about them in school text books, but
usually with the anarchism removed. Kim Jwajin’s house is a national
monument; there’s a statue of him, they have sometimes Kim Jwajin Days;
a number of important anarchists have been labelled ‘Independence
activist of the month’, [have] even been on stamps, but the anarchism is
usually elided in that. <br />
<br />
And of course Spain 1936. <br />
<br />
<b>Anticolonial </b><br />
<i>Now the important thing is two of these revolutions happened in the context of anticolonial struggles. </i><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMHdatXf-7MzKueYbOcbTMo34YWgcVOuWSaaHOGiHNI7gpOBL0K7_Ux17ASXJG3L4FediBi3cz8O6XzKhq2wZuhUXkB33K6WQVcGX26PFi5UfmjigjkoEIDkLDz1IMPsyafaZ8uNvQX4o/s1600/Makhno.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMHdatXf-7MzKueYbOcbTMo34YWgcVOuWSaaHOGiHNI7gpOBL0K7_Ux17ASXJG3L4FediBi3cz8O6XzKhq2wZuhUXkB33K6WQVcGX26PFi5UfmjigjkoEIDkLDz1IMPsyafaZ8uNvQX4o/s320/Makhno.jpg" width="211" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Nestor Makhno statue, Ukraine</b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Very often when we look at the Makhnovist movement, we look [at it]
mainly in the context of an aspect of the Russian revolution, but I
think you also have to understand that Ukraine was one of the key
Russian territories. It was the most commercialised farmland in Russia,
it was one of the big export earners for the Russians, exported a hell
of a lot of pasta, it’s a huge wheat growing area which they exported in
the form of pasta – the Ukrainian pasta proletarian was an important
revolutionary force! <br />
<br />
Nestor Makhno himself had, after he came out of jail, been involved in union activity there.<br />
<br />
This was a very developed area, and this was an area where the
independence movement was strong. If you look at who the Makhnovists
were competing with, on the one hand they were competing with the
Bolshevik forces; on the other they were competing with the
nationalist[s] of Symon Petlitra and the Central Rada.<br />
<br />
If you reread, with this in mind, the history of the Makhnovist movement, part of what they are trying to do is find <i>an
anarchist road to independence – how to have independence for a
country, that does not simply transfer power from a foreign to a local
power elite, how do you do this? </i><br />
<br />
What they were trying to do was find a different road to <b>decolonisation. </b><br />
<br />
<br />
***This is just part of the two hour talk Lucien gave; he also spoke of
anarchist theory and organisation featured in the book and gave potted
histories of several key anarchist figures. These will feature in <i>Freedom </i>at a later date.<br />
<br />
<i>Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism"</i>, CounterPower Vol.1, by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, published by AK Press at £18. Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-79308049672808339162012-06-14T11:42:00.001+02:002012-06-14T11:42:18.907+02:00Sverige: 2012 'Arbetaren': Michael Schmidt, 'Black Flame' <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN6110HcGBWdQyqQvDbYRRLp0ChiZNAEkjlJLbaxYOtO0b-G1Pm6WgbpKEW8YD58qnF7ZFMiwz4jm7pmW7qR6MfDPylc9hdCmT0q31ZS2vjldQLdHi3h1iGpcPh_HI0ZXrqryGNndvhHk/s1600/1_Schmidt-b-730x486.jpg" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN6110HcGBWdQyqQvDbYRRLp0ChiZNAEkjlJLbaxYOtO0b-G1Pm6WgbpKEW8YD58qnF7ZFMiwz4jm7pmW7qR6MfDPylc9hdCmT0q31ZS2vjldQLdHi3h1iGpcPh_HI0ZXrqryGNndvhHk/s320/1_Schmidt-b-730x486.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong>Michael Schmidt på Sergels torg i Stockholm. <br />Schmidt var i Sverige för att delta i en konferens arrangerad av <br />det globala nätverket Icorn </strong><em><span class="credit image-credit image-credit-37241">Foto: Olle Eriksson</span> </em></figcaption></figure></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<br />
<em>Arbetaren</em> 24-30 May 2012: <a href="http://arbetaren.se/artiklar/vill-ge-ny-syn-pa-anarkismen">http://arbetaren.se/artiklar/vill-ge-ny-syn-pa-anarkismen</a><br /><br /><br /><strong>Han vill ge ny syn på anarkismen </strong><br /><span class="credit image-credit image-credit-37241">Olle Eriksson</span> </figcaption></figure><br /><br />Sydafrika har en lång historia av anarkism och syndikalism, men denna har haft liten eller ingen plats i den västliga anarkistiska historieskrivningen. Michael Schmidt, anarkist, journalist och författare från Sydafrika, vill ändra på det. <br />
<br />
För <em>Arbetaren</em> berättar han om kommande bokprojekt, rörelser i södra Afrika och sitt arbete med nätverket Icorn. <br /><br />Michael Schmidt, som är en av författarna bakom den omtalade boken <em>Black Flame</em>, besökte under förra veckan Sverige för att i egenskap av observatör delta i en konferens arrangerad av det globala nätverket Icorn, The International Cities of Refuge Network, som arbetar med yttrandefrihetsfrågor och att skydda hotade och utsatta författare och journalister runt om i världen.<br /><br />– Det är ett viktigt projekt där personer som flytt från exempelvis Iran, Gambia, Vitryssland och Kenya ges möjligheten att i ett annat land få uppehälle och pengar och på så sätt kunna fortsätta sitt skrivande, säger Michael Schmidt.<br /><br />Annars arbetar han och författarkollegan Lucien van der Walt just nu febrilt med bokserien <em>Counterpower </em>som består av två delar. Del ett, <em>Black Flame</em>, kom 2009 och del två, <em>Global Fire</em>, väntas bli färdig inom ett till två år. Han berättar att de arbetat med böckerna under tio års tid. Idén med<em> Black Flame</em>, som är en av de mest omtalade böckerna på den anarkistiska litteraturscenen de senaste åren, var att presentera en sammanhållen anarkistisk teoribildning. <br /><br />Rent allmänt tycker Michael att anarkister har misslyckats med att definiera vad anarkism är för något vilket bidrar till en bild av den som kaotisk, den reduceras till att vara enbart anti-stat och någonting som allt möjligt kan samlas in under.<br /><br />– Det har alltid funnits en frihetlig sida i mänsklighetens historia men det betyder inte att det alltid funnits en anarkistisk rörelse, säger Michael Schmidt som daterar anarkismens födelse till 1860-talet då Michael Bakunin och hans kamrater levde och verkade. <br /><br />Förutom teori tar <em>Black Flame </em>även upp en mängd personer, grupper och organisationer som man anser har arbetat anarkistiskt genom historien. Kritiken mot boken har handlat om att dess definitioner varit alldeles för snäva och att författarna å ena sidan inkluderar personer och grupper som inte så självklart uppfattas av andra – eller ens definierat sig själva – som anarkistiska och å andra sidan exkluderar de många aktivister och grupper som själva kallar sig anarkistiska.<br /><br />I kommande <em>Global Fire</em> är ambitionen att teckna en sammanhängande historia av anarkistisk organisering över hela världen från 1860-talet fram till i dag.<br /><br />– Vi måste korrigera bilden av att anarkismens historia uteslutande handlar om Europa och USA. Mycket har faktiskt hänt i Latinamerika och andra delar av världen. De första fackföreningarna som bildades i Kina och Egypten var anarkistiska och den första fackföreningen för färgade i Sydafrika var anarkistisk. I arbetet med boken har vi bland annat studerat rörelser i Vietnam, Filipinerna, Uruguay, Algeriet, Kenya och Afghanistan. Många länder där man kanske inte tror att det funnits anarkistisk organisering, säger Michael Schmidt som med sitt författarskap fått ledarna för Cosatu, ett sydafrikanskt fackförbund med nästan två miljoner medlemmar, att börja läsa Bakunin.<br /><br />– På en kongress för något år sedan citerade Cosatus ordförande ur <em>Black Flame</em> och menade att man måste börja ta intryck från anarkismens och syndikalismens idéer, säger Michael Schmidt.<br /><br />Anledningen till denna nydaning tror han beror på att de mest öppensinnade inom förbundet förstått att det gamla Sovjetparadigmet är dött. De alternativ som tidigare presenterats har kommit från landets kommunistiska parti som följer en kinesisk modell av nyliberalism och fascistisk korporativism.<br /><br />– Sedan måste man komma ihåg Sydafrikas speciella historia med apartheidsystemets fall på 1990-talet. Dagens politiska elit har en ganska färsk illegal och revolutionär bakgrund, vilket antagligen gör dem något öppnare för sådana här idéer, säger Michael Schmidt.<br /><br />Under 1900-talet har det funnits ett flertal anarkistiska och syndikalistiska organisationer i Sydafrika. I dag finns det organiserade syndikalister i Cape Town som arbetar med vinplantagearbetare, där man bland annat samarbetat med svenska SAC Syndikalisterna när det gäller Systembolagets affärer med sydafrikanska vinproducenter. <br /><br />Michael Schmidt, som varit med att bilda den anarkistiska kamporganisationen <em>Zabalaza</em>, berättar att man har bra samarbeten med anarkister i bland annat Zwaziland och Zimbabwe. Genom informationsspridning försöker man stödja respektive länders kamp för demokrati.<br /><br />De senaste årens händelser i Nordafrika ger skäl att vara optimistisk och kanske hoppas på en anarkistisk massrörelse där, tror Michael Schmidt.<br /><br />– Den dagen då vi kommit dithän att anarkister dödas och fängslas och vi upptäcker att vissa av våra kamrater är polisspioner, då vet vi att vi är på rätt väg för då utmanar vi verkligen makten.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Fakta</strong><br /><br /><strong>Icorn</strong><br /><br />Icorn är en global sammanslutning av städer runt om i världen som under två års tid ger husrum och pengar till en person, vanligtvis en författare eller journalist, som på något vis hotas av våld eller fängelsestraff på grund av sitt skrivande. Över 100 delegater, gästskribenter och observatörer från hela världen samlades i Stockholm under förra veckan för att diskutera yttrandefrihet och organisatoriska frågor. Det här var det andra stora Icorn-kongressen sedan bildandet 2008.<br />Läs mer på www.icorn.org.<br /><br /><br /><strong>Michael Schmidt</strong>Michael Schmidt är 45 år och bor i Johannesburg, Sydafrika. Han arbetar som journalist och författare och har varit med och grundat Professional Journalists’ Association of South Africa. <br /><br />Han är författare till boken <em>Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism</em>, utgiven av AK Press 2009.<br />
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</h1>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-79310382463930394142012-06-14T11:25:00.002+02:002012-06-14T11:45:33.667+02:00English: 2012 'Arbetaren'/ SAC interview with Michael Schmidt on 'Black Flame' <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong><span style="font-size: x-small;">Michael Schmidt in Stockhom. Photo: Olle Eriksson </span></strong></td></tr>
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<span style="color: #1f497d;"></span><strong>2012 <em>Arbetaren </em>interview with Michael Schmidt on <em>Black Flame</em><br /></strong><em>Arbetaren </em>24-30 May 2012. Online in Swedish at <a href="http://arbetaren.se/artiklar/vill-ge-ny-syn-pa-anarkismen">http://arbetaren.se/artiklar/vill-ge-ny-syn-pa-anarkismen</a><br />
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<strong>He wants to give a new vision of anarchism</strong><br />
By Olle Eriksson, <em>Arbetaren</em>, Sveriges Arbetaren Centralorganisation, Sweden, 24 May 2012<br />
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<strong>South Africa has a long history of anarchism and syndicalism, but this has had little or no place in the Western anarchist historiography. Michael Schmidt, an anarchist, journalist and writer from South Africa, wants to change that. For <em>Arbetaren</em>, he talks about upcoming book projects, movements in southern Africa and his work with the network Icorn.</strong><br />
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Michael Schmidt, who is one of the authors of the famous book <em>Black Flame</em>, visited Sweden last week as an observer to attend a conference organized by the global Icorn, the International Cities of Refuge Network, which works with freedom of speech issues and to protect threatened and vulnerable writers and journalists around the world.<br />
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“It is an important project in which people who have fled from countries like Iran, Gambia, Kenya, Belarus, are given the opportunity in another country to subsist… and thus be able to continue their writing,’ said Michael Schmidt.<br />
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Otherwise, he and fellow author Lucien van der Walt are right now feverishly working on their <em>Counter Power </em>book series that consists of two parts. Part one, <em>Black Flame</em>, was introduced in 2009 and part two, <em>Global Fire</em>, is expected to be completed within one to two years. He says that they worked on the books for ten years. The idea of <em>Black Flame</em>, which is one of the most talked-about books on the anarchist literary scene in recent years, was to present a coherent anarchist theory.<br />
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In general, Michael thinks that anarchists have failed to define what anarchism is all about, by reducing it to being merely anti-state and something into which everything possible can be gathered, contributing to a chaotic picture.<br />
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“There has always been a libertarian page in human history, but that does not mean there has always been an anarchist movement,” said Michael Schmidt, dating anarchism’s birth to the 1860s when Michael Bakunin and his comrades lived and worked.<br />
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Besides theory, <em>Black Flame</em> also raised a host of individuals, groups and organisations that they believe worked as anarchists in history. The criticism of the book has focused on its definitions being too narrow and that the writers on the one hand, include individuals and groups who are not so obviously perceived by others – or even defined themselves – as anarchistic, and on the other hand, exclude many activists and groups that call themselves anarchists.<br />
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The aim of the upcoming <em>Global Fire</em> is to conclude a coherent history of anarchist organising worldwide from the 1860s until today.<br />
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“We must correct the impression that the history of anarchism deals exclusively with the U.S. and [Western] Europe. A lot has actually happened in Latin America and other parts of the world. The first unions formed in China and Egypt were by anarchists, and the first trade union for people of colour in South Africa was anarchic. In the work on the book, we have studied movements in Vietnam, the Philippines, Uruguay, Algeria, Kenya and Afghanistan, many countries where people may not believe that anarchist organisations existed,” said Michael Schmidt, who with his writing, [inspired] the leaders of Cosatu, a South African trade union with nearly two million members, to start reading Bakunin.<br />
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“At a conference some years ago, Cosatu’s general secretary [cited] <em>Black Flame</em> and said that we must begin to take inspiration from anarchist and syndicalist ideas,” said Michael Schmidt.<br />
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The reason for this regeneration, he believes is due to the most open-minded people within the union who understood that the old Soviet paradigm was dead. The options previously presented came from the country's Communist Party who follow a Chinese model of neo-liberalism and fascist corporatism.<br />
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“Then you have to remember South Africa's particular history of apartheid… Today's political elite has a fairly fresh illegal and revolutionary background, which probably makes them somewhat more open to these kinds of ideas,” said Michael Schmidt.<br />
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During the 1900s, there were a number of anarchist and syndicalist organisations in South Africa. Today there are organised syndicalists in Cape Town working with wine farm labourers, who among other things worked with the Swedish SAC syndicalists in the system’s [fair trade] business with South African wine producers.<br />
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Michael Schmidt, who helped to form the anarchist <em>Zabalaza</em> struggle organisation, says that they have good relationships with anarchists in particular in Swaziland and Zimbabwe, and through the dissemination of information, seek to support these respective countries' struggle for democracy.<br />
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The events of recent years in North Africa gives reason to be optimistic and perhaps hope for a mass anarchist movement, Michael Schmidt believes.<br />
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“When the day comes that anarchists are killed and imprisoned and we find that some of our comrades are police spies, then we will know that we are on track, that we really challenge power.”<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-37410500249663052202012-01-28T16:21:00.003+02:002012-01-28T16:29:18.433+02:00A Useful Debate: Notes on Martin Thomas' "Solidarity"/Alliance for Workers' Liberty critique of "Black Flame"The British Trotskyist group, Alliance for Workers' Liberty (AWL), in 2011 published a 3 part review/ critique/ discussion of <em>Black Flame </em>in their paperSolidarity. Written by Martin Thomas, it appeared in three parts:<br />
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Part 1 <a href="http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/05/10/all-feathered-new-defence-anarchism" target="_blank">here</a><br />
Part 2 <a href="http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/05/17/how-anarchism-parted-ways-marxism" target="_blank">here</a><br />
Part 3 <a href="http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/05/24/anarchism-and-commune" target="_blank">here</a><br />
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There are <em>many </em>points with which to disagree, but let us stress first that the AWL was absolutely comradely and non-sectarian throughout. The <em>Black Flame </em>authors, several times offered a platform in <em>Solidarity </em>to reply, and engagement in the "Comments" sections was also friendly. Regrettably time commitments made the formal reply impossible, although some responses were posted online by Lucien (see below).<br />
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Meanwhile, Iain McKay, author of the <em>Anarchist FAQ </em>(vol. 1 book edition <a href="http://www.revolutionbythebook.akpress.org/an-anarchist-faq-the-book/" target="_blank">here</a> and online edition <a href="http://www.anarchistfaq.org.uk/" target="_blank">here</a>), also participated extensively in the debate, with systematic responses in the "Comments" section of each part - detailed responses that by-and-large refute much of the 3-part review. <br />
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Thomas then invited McKay to debate the issues at the AWL's annual "Ideas for Freedom" event, which in 2011 ran from 8-10 July. The AWL agreed to McKay's terms that the event be free and that an anarchist stall be permitted. <br />
<a name='more'></a>You can read McKay's statement for the "Ideas for Freedom" event in PDF <a href="http://www.workersliberty.org/system/files/iainmckay-awlversusanarchism.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>. However, his many interventions in the "Comments" (under his well-known internet name Anarcho) are an even richer and more comprehensive point-by-point refutation of many of the claims by Thomas. They can be found from <a href="http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/05/10/all-feathered-new-defence-anarchism#comment-28387" target="_blank">here</a> down, from <a href="http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/05/17/how-anarchism-parted-ways-marxism#comment-28388" target="_blank">here</a> down, and from <a href="http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/05/24/anarchism-and-commune#comment-28414" target="_blank">here</a> down.<br />
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<span style="color: red;">Meanwhile here are two posts by Lucien, which are rather modest efforts compared to McKay's detailed work. </span><br />
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<strong>Here is Lucien's first of two posts in "Comments" , from </strong><a href="http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/05/10/all-feathered-new-defence-anarchism#comment-28398"><strong>here</strong></a><strong> (scroll below for the second post): </strong><br />
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Martin Thomas writes that ‘Trotsky fought Stalinism to the death. But Schmidt and van der Walt claim he "envisaged socialism as 'authoritarian leadership... centralised distribution of the labour force... the workers' state... entitled to send any worker wherever his labour may be needed', with "dissenters sent to labour camps if necessary" … The words put in quote marks <em>are culled not from Trotsky himself</em> but from "pages 128, 132" of a book by one Wayne Thorpe … None of the words was ever written by Trotsky as a statement of his vision of socialism. <em>The quoted string of words was never written as a whole connected passage by Trotsky anywhere.</em>’<br />
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Actually, this is passage is from Leon Trotsky, <i>Terrorisme et communisme</i> (Paris, 1963; 1st edn in Russia, July 1920), p. 215. <br />
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It draws on his remarks at the 9th Party Congress 1920, where he added that "the working masses cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers," and "Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps". This is from Leon Trotsky, <i>Sochineniya</i> (Works), vol. XV, p. 126, quoted in Maurice Brinton, <i>The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, 1917-1921: The State and Counter-Revolution</i> (London: Solidarity, 1970), p. 61.<br />
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The fact that it was in a "polemic" - in fact, as Thomas notes, part of a larger "proposal" to militarise labour - merely underlines the point in <i>Black Flame</i> that "The differences between [Stalinism and Trotskyism] should not be overstated."<br />
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<strong>Here is Lucien's second of two posts in the "Comments" sections, from </strong><a href="http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2011/05/10/all-feathered-new-defence-anarchism#comment-28761"><strong>here</strong></a><strong>:</strong><br />
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Many of the misconceptions that Martin outlined are dealt with in-depth by Lucien van der Walt in a recent piece for <em>International Socialism</em>. There is also an extended version of the paper, available online. Both articles are linked below.<br />
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Before outlining some of the key points in these, let me just mention that Martin proceeds from the assumption that van der Walt and Schmidt are somehow revising anarchism, or breaking with traditional anarchism. This is mistaken. <br />
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<i>Black Flame</i> is simply a description of the views of mainstream historical anarchism and syndicalism, made through a discussion of standard texts and a world of historical experiences. That the conclusions do not fit the AWL vision of what anarchism "really" is, is simply testament to the fact that the comrades at the AWL seem to be trying to fit anarchism and syndicalism into a set of flawed Marxist stereotypes - rather than seriously engage with actual anarchist and syndicalist writings or the actual history of anarchism and syndicalism, they are relying instead on clichés, assertions and reiterations of certain Marxist myths. <br />
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The point is simply that a constructive discussion between Marxism and anarchism/ syndicalism, from which both can learn, is frustrated by such an approach.<br />
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<i>Now, the misconceptions regarding anarchism (and syndicalism) dealt with in van der Walt's two papers include:</i> <br />
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<strong>1.</strong><em><strong> </strong>the role of anarchists in the Paris Commune and their views on the Commune</em>. Many of the ideas of the Commune were first expressed by the anarchists, who, unlike the Marxists, played a key role in the Commune, and who were also involved in the other communalist revolts of the time in Spain, France and Italy; to assert a contradiction between anarchism and the Commune, or to present the anarchists as anti-Commune, is simply wrong.<br />
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<strong>2. </strong><em>the notion that Bakunin and Kropotkin either rejected class struggle, or rejected the modern working class</em>. Both anarchist luminaries saw class struggle and trade unions as central to the anarchist project - this is precisely why syndicalism arose in the anarchist wing of the First International, as both Marx and Engels themselves recognised. <br />
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<strong>3. </strong><em>the myth that the Spanish anarchists and syndicalists (and anarchists and syndicalists elsewhere) lacked any programme for "coordinated authority for the war against the fascists" and other reactionaries. </em>The need for coordinated military defence of revolution - in the context of a multi-tendency system of working class and peasant rule - was a staple of anarchist thought and was, for instance, the official programme of the Spanish CNT and FAI - joining the Spanish government <i>violated</i> anarchist policy, and did not flow from it; the need for armed and coordinated military defence was central to anarchism, and this is clear from a vast range of primary texts, not to mention the fact of numerous anarchist and syndicalist militias and armies historically. Contrary to Martin's suggestions, these issues are also discussed at length in <i>Black Flame</i>, which comes down in favour of this approach. <br />
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<strong>4. </strong><em>the myth that (to use Martin's words) anarchists reject the need for a "disciplined revolutionary socialist party with a definite programme and a press."</em> If by "party" we mean a specific political organisation, based on theoretical and tactical unity, with some collective discipline, then this was precisely the view of key anarchists and syndicalists worldwide, ranging from Bakunin and Kropotkin to Ricardo Flores Magón, José Oiticica, Shifu, T.W. Thibedi etc. Notable organisations on these lines include the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, Spain’s FAI, Mexico’s <i>La Social</i>, China’s Society of Anarchist-Communist Comrades, the postwar Uruguayan Anarchist Federation, etc. The prevalence of this approach is clearly shown in <i>Black Flame</i>, although Martin does not mention it. <br />
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Of course some anarchists rejected this approach, but then again, you get Marxists who reject the Marxist party e.g. autonomists; it does not follow from the fact of Marxist autonomism that the mainstream of Marxism rejected the need for vanguard parties, and it equally does not follow from the fact that a few anarchists and syndicalists rejected political organisation that the mainstream of anarchism and syndicalism did so - the issue was, for the mainstream, not <i>whether</i> to form specific anarchist groups, but <i>how</i> they should be structured, and how they should operate in relation to the masses and the revolution; in those debates, Bakunin etc. came down firmly for specific political organisation, based on theoretical and tactical unity, with some collective discipline. These issues are also discussed at length by van der Walt’s two papers and by <i>Black Flame</i>.<br />
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<strong>5. </strong><em>the misleading claim that Bolshevism (and mainstream historical Marxism) was more democratic than anarchism and syndicalism. </em>The Russian Revolution was (precisely as Bakunin and Kropotkin predicted years before), strangled by the Marxist "vanguard", which from the start operated a party-run secret police, crushed strikes, murdered left opponents, destroyed soviet democracy and workers self-management etc. - to assert a sharp break between "Marxism" and "Stalinism" and the whole Soviet/ East bloc experience is not just historically flawed, but is at odds with the views of the great majority of <i>Marxists</i>; it is mistaken to write about Marxism as if Communism never happened, and as if Lenin and Trotsky did not create a one-party state, complete with the apparatus of forced labour camps, secret police, peasant extortions etc. later developed further by Stalin. <br />
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<strong>SHORT VERSION</strong><br />
Lucien van der Walt, 2011, "Counterpower, Participatory Democracy, Revolutionary Defence: debating 'Black Flame,' revolutionary anarchism and historical Marxism," <em>International Socialism: a quarterly journal of socialist theory</em>, no. 130 (2011), pp. 193-207, online <a href="http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=729&issue=130">here</a><br />
<br />
<i>Description</i>: This article is, in part, a response to criticisms of the broad anarchist tradition in 'International Socialism' (ISJ), an International Socialist Tendency (IST) journal. However, it is also an examination of issues like the use of sources in Marxist/ anarchist debates, the historical/ current impact of anarchism/ syndicalism, anarchism and the question of defending revolutions, revolutions and pluralism, anarchism and political struggles and bodies, the Spanish anarchists' debates on taking power, anarchism's relationship to democracy, the historical role of Marxism, the role of Bolshevism in the fate of the Russian Revolution, Lenin and Stalin, and the tasks of the 21st century left.<br />
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<strong>EXTENDED VERSION</strong><br />
Lucien van der Walt, 7 April 2011, "Detailed reply to 'International Socialism': debating power and revolution in anarchism, 'Black Flame' and historical Marxism," 62 pp., online <a href="http://lucienvanderwalt.blogspot.com/2011/02/anarchism-black-flame-marxism-and-ist.html">here</a><br />
<br />
<i>Description</i>: This paper develops the themes in the short paper at length, with far more extensive data and references.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-64061704108992590572012-01-21T18:25:00.012+02:002012-01-24T13:10:57.083+02:00Michael Schmidt talk at DIRA, Montréal, 18 March '10: "The Relevance of Anarchist and Syndicalist History for Today’s Struggles"<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>Michael Schmidt (co-author with Lucien van der Walt of the book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, </i>AK Press, USA, 2009)</strong></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>Talk at DIRA bookstore, Montréal, 18 March 2010, part of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Flame </i>tour, Canada</strong></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>Thanks to Marie-Eve Lamy of Lux Éditeur, Montréal, for the transcription</em></span><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt;"><strong>"The Relevance of Anarchist and Syndicalist History for Today’s Struggles" </strong></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQVJEtkJBYaY1HGWbUvAZYmcFbjhojhFfmf8xt5lbJu_OjdbeZCAdW6UXv3CbL4lqGwBAa6hGHMqxFZWpF0mTMXQlJS6D-GZRhyZKVFr6fsHlaEeQ0Wegxt29pkN-plwVovTdWOKXv2Gw/s1600/Mots.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="250" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQVJEtkJBYaY1HGWbUvAZYmcFbjhojhFfmf8xt5lbJu_OjdbeZCAdW6UXv3CbL4lqGwBAa6hGHMqxFZWpF0mTMXQlJS6D-GZRhyZKVFr6fsHlaEeQ0Wegxt29pkN-plwVovTdWOKXv2Gw/s400/Mots.bmp" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Thank you so much, especially to the Union Comuniste Libertaire [UCL], Common Cause, AK Press and everyone else who has made it possible for me to come out. I think it's very important for militants who live in different parts of the world to compare ideas and practice. Hopefully that's what we're all about – putting ideas into practice, and being very pragmatic about the way we exercise our politics. I come from a very strange country, and it's nice to see one of my countrymen here. One of my comrades from </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">South Africa</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> has just moved to Montréal, temporarily, but nevertheless. And hopefully you'll make him feel at home as you have made me feel at home.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">It's been really fantastic over the last couple of days to have been speaking to people who come from many different walks of life, many of whom are working class but have a very clear understanding of politics, and a very clear class line. And certainly after the collapse of the Berlin Wall 20 year ago, I think we are really starting to see the necessity around the world for class-line politics. Politics which draw a line in the sand and say we will not adopt bourgeois culture or bourgeois values or a bourgeois way of living, and says in fact we will establish a new way. A new method of politics – which in fact isn't that new, but it's new to a lot of people – in the here and now, in order to construct a physical and real future.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">I've been going around and doing a variety of different talks depending on the type of audience. My audience last night was quite mixed, maybe not as experienced as some of you are. Hopefully I'm judging things right, and not talking beyond what you know. But some of what I will talk about hopefully <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">will</i> be beyond what you know, because of all the political philosophies in the world, all of the big practices of the working class, the excluded, the poor, the peasantry, anarchism has been the most misrepresented. I believe this is largely because it has conformed very closely to proletarian practice.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">The book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism</i>, which I wrote with Lucien van der Walt, did not start out as a book; the book started out as a pamphlet that somebody else had written, that I read and realised very quickly suffered from the main errors of our understanding of the world, and that is it was very much derived from a North-Atlanticist way of seeing things; to call it Eurocentric would be too kind to it! The standard anarchist histories written by anarchists themselves are notoriously centred on </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Western Europe</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> and portions of </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">North America</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">There is a bogus theory, but very current amongst academics and even militants, of “Spanish exceptionalism,” that is, that it was only in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Spain</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> that anarchism achieved anything of a mass working-class presence. A Marxist historian like Eric Hobsbawm, who has quite a nice eye for the colour and detail and texture of class struggles – in many respects I actually like him as a writer – is sadly very crude on such matters, simply because it doesn't conform to his politics. And he ascribes what he thinks of as this “Spanish exceptionalism” to some weird deviation in the Spanish character, which if anything is a bit of an unfortunately chauvinistic attitude. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Z232l_J54_ceYtldKDWOyVmpqh3kZY_LzNNF1ambd3RQcTrUGOUIXmB_02ufogkRYIDjbwOU5gXKppCvW9XjrXUVOZfbQUUB8w9b-gWUPctDrvSAbjsmsjzweujGjUKagyBB8bV-H7U/s1600/anarchist-flags.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7Z232l_J54_ceYtldKDWOyVmpqh3kZY_LzNNF1ambd3RQcTrUGOUIXmB_02ufogkRYIDjbwOU5gXKppCvW9XjrXUVOZfbQUUB8w9b-gWUPctDrvSAbjsmsjzweujGjUKagyBB8bV-H7U/s320/anarchist-flags.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">What I want to talk about is a different kind of practice to that of which some of you are accustomed to – I know a lot of you are accustomed to it – a practice which has largely been “disappeared” from the historical record, but is still traceable certainly in the police record, and in the records of all the authorities who have oppressed us over the last 150 years.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">I like to joke that the book was a little monster living in my basement that ate scraps that I threw from my table from time to time, and eventually became this huge thing that outgrew the house. </span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">So today it is two volumes, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Flame </i>is the first, and the forthcoming volume is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Global Fire</i>. The reason that it is two volumes is that as the re-writing of this history to try to reorient it towards the massive Latin American in particular and East Asian anarchist movements got underway, it became very apparent that we – my co-author Lucien and I – as anarchists needed to define what the hell anarchism <i>was</i>, because there is a heck of a lot of confusion on this topic. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">This confusion is generated in part because many of us as anarchists have accepted bourgeois definitions of who we are. And there is one very specific bourgeois definition – we will leave aside the obvious calumny of anarchism equals chaos, an immature response of the declining artisanal classes as it is usually painted by most, but not all Marxists... We'll leave aside that, but the primary way in which anarchism is misrepresented is as something that was a brief spark, that was essentially disconnected from daily struggle, that it was born in some philosopher's head, and died in some foolhardy experiment in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Spain</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> in 1939.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">The anarchist movement has currency primarily because it was, and remains, a proletarian practice. We do not corner the market on reality; anarchists don't have the final word on, for instance, the key question which faces all revolutionaries, which is how do you transmit communist ideas – the ideas of a free society – from a militant minority to the mass in a way that the mass makes those ideas their own and in fact moves beyond the origins of those ideas. To be honest, we all face that idea whether you're a Maoist or a Trotskyist or whatever – we all have to grapple with that issue. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">So I think it is worthwhile to take a look to see what anarchism had to say about that. Because based on the historical record, anarchism was quite different to the way it has been represented in the bourgeois press. It is ironic that many anarchists conceive of themselves – outside of certain movements, and within that I include my own, your own, and our comrades in several places in the world, Chile, Argentina, Italy, Ireland and elsewhere, people who are clear about who we are – most anarchists’ idea of themselves is in fact derived from a German judge. It was a judge named Paul Eltzbacher who 1900 wrote a book in the period in which anarchism was a global movement that was challenging the order of the day. He said anarchism was solely anti-state: but its not, its anti-capitalist, class-struggle-based, anti-authoritarian, and it comes from the oppressed classes. But Eltzbacher’s view remains influential, and that’s a problem, as it distorts our history and our praxis.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">If you take a look at the origins of Interpol, you will see that before Interpol itself was established, there were two conferences, the first one in </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Rome</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, and the second one in St-Petersburg in the 1890s, that laid the groundwork for what would become Interpol. And these conferences were specifically aimed at crushing these specific anarchist movements. This was in a period that was remarkably similar to our own. I mean, it was very different in many ways, and very similar. It's very different in that today we live in a world of nano-technology, space tourism, and other nonsense. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Our movement today lives in a world which is very different to the gas-lit origins of the movement, and yet we find remarkable similarities. In the period of what you might call the “short twentieth century” – the century between the First World War and the collapse of the Berlin Wall – we find that the state form actually locks its populations down quite significantly, both mentally and physically. The nation-state and nationalism become the dominant ideology throughout much of the world – even in the welfare states – and this dramatic movement of working-class people around the world that you see in the period of the 1880s and 1890s to the 1920s is largely absent. But now, since the fall of the Wall, we've seen that start to open up again.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"> <br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbIDKqMR3AjpoRk9Z4wb1LLLRltVTCEcek6tcuQdemM1AL7S14LsFks10CsxdHyH9WBhZhYUPO9grpKM82x_Lr0xqlIZLRzqEQpg4sPnnSQLqHcag05BYWuIKM00_7R0PQo5hdLY7bfvY/s1600/bakunin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="161" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbIDKqMR3AjpoRk9Z4wb1LLLRltVTCEcek6tcuQdemM1AL7S14LsFks10CsxdHyH9WBhZhYUPO9grpKM82x_Lr0xqlIZLRzqEQpg4sPnnSQLqHcag05BYWuIKM00_7R0PQo5hdLY7bfvY/s200/bakunin.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><strong>Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) at</strong><br />
<strong> the the First International</strong></td></tr>
</tbody></table> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">So the origins of the anarchist movement was not in some philosopher's head, but in the international revolutionary socialist trade unions and workers’ groups of the First International who were banding together on very pragmatic grounds; the grounds of solidarity, to try to stop French workers being undercut by British scabs and vice versa, and it grew out from there. It was a world in which the telegraph had started connecting people across the world at the very same time that barbed wire had just been invented and was being rolled out across the world and being used to cut them off from their own resources. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">In this world, there was the consolidation of financial capital, and this massive push into </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Africa</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> and </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Asia</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> by the imperialist powers. Imperial wars were being fought (and this sounds familiar) in the Middle-East and </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Central Asia</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. The working class, which was all of a sudden very mobile in this environment – part-time sharecroppers coming from repressed and depressed southern Italy going off to Argentina for a season, where they had no vote, coming back to Italy where again they had no vote, this great cycle, this great global movement of workers – responded in several different ways in this period to the pain that they were feeling. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">This was a really globally mobile, but very excluded and flexibilised labour force. They responded, some of them, by turning to religious fundamentalism and fanaticism. Others started to consolidate ideas around revolutionary class struggle. So I think you might agree with me that there are some remarkable similarities between today's section of flexibilised, precarious, continually moving, and excluded labour – people who are cut off from any means of real participation in the political process in their own countries, or in the countries into which they are drafted to be the underpaid subject class of labour.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">What was remarkable about the early anarchist movement was that despite its militancy, it was deliberately building a lot of educational institutions along the way. It was building popular universities in </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Cairo</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Cuba</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Peru</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Argentina</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, and in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">China</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. The reason for this is the same as the reason why we had the Black Consciousness Movement in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">South Africa</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">: it was necessary to cut the mental bonds that attached the rape victim to the rapist, the oppressed to the oppressor. And the anarchists shocked bourgeois sensibility by educating not only freed slaves alongside white people, but of all things, educating women alongside men, and girls alongside boys. This kind of stuff just wasn't done back then. I mean, who knows what kind of ideas they might get when you get them out of the kitchen. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">On that note, I would like to say that gives us a little hint that the direction in which we need to be organising needs to be determined by our real conditions. In </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Brazil</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> in 1930, there was an industrial working class of 1-million, but there was a maidservant class of 3-million. Perhaps the anarchists should have been organising among the maids. We need to be connected to where our people are at.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">One of the reasons that the anarchist movement spread so dramatically around the world, establishing trade unions, what we call syndicalist unions (in other words, directly democratic and overtly revolutionary rank-and-file unions, anarchist trade unions) in Cuba, Mexico, the USA, Uruguay, Spain, and arguably (although the record is a little slim) in Russia, in the period of the 1870s and early 1880s – the reason this kind of thing spreads into Egypt and Uruguay and Cuba – these places which are under colonial or imperial control (Uruguay was free of the Spaniards, but not free of their own comprador capital) – is because in this period I think, if we are to be honest, up until Lenin in Marxism, in classic Marxism, you don't really find a serious Marxist engagement with the peasantry and the colonial world. By contrast, Bakunin was asking “What happens when 800 million Asiatics wake up from their sleep?” </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">The anarchist focus, right from the beginning, is saying you don't need to jump through a series of stages, like a poodle in a circus going through flaming hoops to get to the right time to stage your revolt. What you really need is to realise that you're at the stage <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">now</i> where you need to start fighting back. That doesn't mean that revolution is going to happen on Tuesday, starting at </span><time hour="21" minute="0"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">9pm</span></time><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> sharp. We all know that revolutions require a massive confluence of historical circumstances.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">But it's because of this very early and very radical challenge to gender, race, colonialism, and imperialism that the anarchist movement made some incredible penetrations into parts of the world that Marxism doesn't even reach until much later, in the 1920s in fact. The Profintern (the communists' Red International of Trade Unions) then had to come knocking at the doors of the syndicalist trade unions, saying “Please, may we have a few workers? We don't really have any of our own. We need a couple to pretend that we have an International”. Sorry, I'm being rude.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-5_o5tXutf8sT_ouamQkWzr6dgjSpdFr_m9oWkv7giccgxWNNUW3fDYUzhTMvG6igbbXTEexaA3HljIY7vcPIkXIjE_oJkFzVAaTUtkEb1T5-r81OkLNoS7D4izcbOwcWX5OR1Klu40s/s1600/Masotsha+Ndhlovu%252C+general+secretary+of+the+syndicalist+influenced+ICU+yase+Rhodesia%252C+at+Bulawayo+in+1930.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-5_o5tXutf8sT_ouamQkWzr6dgjSpdFr_m9oWkv7giccgxWNNUW3fDYUzhTMvG6igbbXTEexaA3HljIY7vcPIkXIjE_oJkFzVAaTUtkEb1T5-r81OkLNoS7D4izcbOwcWX5OR1Klu40s/s200/Masotsha+Ndhlovu%252C+general+secretary+of+the+syndicalist+influenced+ICU+yase+Rhodesia%252C+at+Bulawayo+in+1930.jpg" width="176" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">It's probably unknown that there was a syndicalist survival in </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Southern Rhodesia</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, what is now </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Zimbabwe</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, up into the 1950s. <strong>That, pictured in </strong></span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>Bulawayo</strong></span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>, 1930 is Masotsha Ndhlovu, who in the 1920s was a ader of the Industrial and Commercial Union of Rhodesia</strong>. This union had suffered defeat in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">South Africa</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> in the 1920s, but in what became </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Zimbabwe</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, it continued into the 1950s. It had been founded roughly on IWW or ndustrial Workers of the World principles, even if it wasn’t a pure syndicalist union, and I'm hoping that many of you know who the IWW are because it is a significant part of Canadian labour history. It's an incredibly powerful model that spread around the world.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghWkKSyC2aXOiU6FDb3GpK3qE7l8l2z18oHoxNWwnqkrbBdCTj2r_2n-DgxlV6Xfm1JrpC4T3Xj3oWw-J-J_5_079Va7b0VM24BA00dz67yZYjfQyTCT-ZpEBn5_WHVMhGaX5Bpx9Vxq0/s1600/korea001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="208" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghWkKSyC2aXOiU6FDb3GpK3qE7l8l2z18oHoxNWwnqkrbBdCTj2r_2n-DgxlV6Xfm1JrpC4T3Xj3oWw-J-J_5_079Va7b0VM24BA00dz67yZYjfQyTCT-ZpEBn5_WHVMhGaX5Bpx9Vxq0/s320/korea001.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">The Korean movement - pictured: members of the Korean Anarchist Federation and Chinese comrades</span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, 1928 - is generated primarily by the invasion of </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Japan</span></place></country-region></strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong> in 1910. </strong>This generates a whole range of different responses, including syndicalist trade unions in port cities like </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Wonsan</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. But eventually a lot of the militants are forced out into exile, and they consolidate just across the border in this broad river valley, ringed by mountains, called the </span><place><placename><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Shinmin</span></placename><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><placetype><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Prefecture</span></placetype></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">And in Shinmin, during the period of 1929 to 1932, they establish this autonomous zone in which peasants, workers, and revolutionaries essentially run their own lives. This is the rather unknown anarchist Manchurian Revolution, driven by the response to Japanese imperialist aggression. It was destroyed in that place, that particular geographical experience, by the Japanese invasion proper, which happened a couple of years later. The curious thing about the Korean movement is that its finest hours really occurred outside of its own national territory, in defence, originally, of their own national freedom, but eventually in defence of Chinese freedom as well. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">But also, the East Asian movement is barely disrupted by the Second World War, because these guys had been fighting since 1910. For a lot of Western movements, and you could even look at your conventional trade unions, the rise of the Nazis and of Fascism in </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Europe</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> was quite a breaking point. But in the </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Far East</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> you find this continuous arc of struggle which is completely uninterrupted by the War because these guys had been fighting their war since 1910. And this movement continues with significant power right into the 1950s. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje3YwGOHIgja-juhJv_shqhyphenhyphenrqdk8eAILVs1o6Gsk4b9-qgrVM4fFVHHJtms-xU0qu3fXvoO_xHbHlwECFPgyYPZTa_oAipIPv8CzT1Qy6fXvM9H3lTGhJiRirjUXqVlNX_seveBlrOUU/s1600/South+Africa.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="148" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje3YwGOHIgja-juhJv_shqhyphenhyphenrqdk8eAILVs1o6Gsk4b9-qgrVM4fFVHHJtms-xU0qu3fXvoO_xHbHlwECFPgyYPZTa_oAipIPv8CzT1Qy6fXvM9H3lTGhJiRirjUXqVlNX_seveBlrOUU/s320/South+Africa.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Johannesburg</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, my hometown: <strong>pictured is Industrial Workers of Africa in a strike movement, </strong></span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>Johannesburg</strong></span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>, 1918</strong>.The Industrial Workers of </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Africa</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">: established in 1917 on IWW lines – very explicitly industrial, revolutionary trade union lines was part of this strike movement. </span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">What happened in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">South Africa</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> is that the IWW had gone in there and established itself in 1910 in an environment that was kind of similar to </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Canada</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> at that time in that so-called “white labourism” dominated. This was essentially white working class people saying “we're protecting our own asses”, against capital and against other workers, without seeing the obvious: that an injury to one is an injury to all, right? </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">The IWW came in with an entirely different program that was anti-racist. They organised on the trams in </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Johannesburg</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, and railways in </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Pretoria</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, and in the port city of </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Durban</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. At first they failed to break through the colour bar, but they established a generation of militancy that was further radicalized by the anti-war movement during the First World War, and eventually in 1917 established the Industrial Workers of Africa. And in fact they adopted the IWW constitution, lock stock and barrel. They based themselves squarely on the IWW. That's the irony – the Transvaal Native Congress – the movement was so significant in that period that several leading members of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">highveld </i>[inland high plateau] branch of what is today the ruling party of the country, what became the African National Congress, were very influenced by syndicalism in this period. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIq84FpHnoNjvbj0TnnAIofV72CmgiczfKacyoA2IKZvZ-OTiMPD59r2MiwhW_ObWYmzI1nhUuvv3bvbQ6DE6EvWP5zMjgQWySbs514en9NAgPx9Cu1ED79dCvcqMYa_w9f4LvoVaKE7A/s1600/CGT.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIq84FpHnoNjvbj0TnnAIofV72CmgiczfKacyoA2IKZvZ-OTiMPD59r2MiwhW_ObWYmzI1nhUuvv3bvbQ6DE6EvWP5zMjgQWySbs514en9NAgPx9Cu1ED79dCvcqMYa_w9f4LvoVaKE7A/s200/CGT.jpg" width="179" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>And just to show that we're not all talking about history: pictured is a poster of the Spanish Confederación General del Trabajo, 1999.</strong> Here are the descendents of the historic Spanish CNT who fought the Spanish Revolution (there are several factions, as some of you no doubt know, and this is the largest faction), they are currently representing 2 million workers. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif3HC2CDHqtzF92X9NlM4gwhFuYMdYIDwQVqDwxWfOTgxU_msHRrB3VpDVeZ-lJ1FaRykbXPYPz1JHIBkOfMTnNd037TeubAPWlbbuzretzGOg9U9edS6IAozLuo1mhopqElYUnOLiz10/s1600/Osugi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="147" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif3HC2CDHqtzF92X9NlM4gwhFuYMdYIDwQVqDwxWfOTgxU_msHRrB3VpDVeZ-lJ1FaRykbXPYPz1JHIBkOfMTnNd037TeubAPWlbbuzretzGOg9U9edS6IAozLuo1mhopqElYUnOLiz10/s320/Osugi.jpg" width="320" /></a><strong><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Ōsugi Sakae</span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, pictured here with </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Itō Noe and the editors of <i>Rōdō Undō, </i></span><city><place><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Tokyo</span></place></city><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">, </span></i></strong><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><strong>1921: </strong>t</span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">he Japanese labour movement, a small movement in a country that certainly in the period between the wars, didn't develop much of an industrial base. Many of the shops and plants were very small. But a very significant, radical, egalitarian trade union movement developed there. </span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">It was anarcho-syndicalist, and included (again, shocking the bourgeois sensibility) very strong women leaders, many of whom would be murdered for their opposition to the state. The Japanese trade unions, worked alongside Korean trade unions, who again were working within the heart of the beast which was the developing Japanese Empire, sliding into militarism.</span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZqlXcWNDMPe4cZk5qc4-XwGm_a8KCKySyc_NVYwMa_wJK_nQdU13j3c08vwzrfB3HQYk6_ho41NMH4piMvhnKS9cti1abkjrVNIxEbTemeuFkNpTLBu5BznD9gAhAXC8wnD202QZDFjk/s1600/shin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZqlXcWNDMPe4cZk5qc4-XwGm_a8KCKySyc_NVYwMa_wJK_nQdU13j3c08vwzrfB3HQYk6_ho41NMH4piMvhnKS9cti1abkjrVNIxEbTemeuFkNpTLBu5BznD9gAhAXC8wnD202QZDFjk/s200/shin.jpg" width="140" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><strong>Shin Ch’aeho</strong></span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>, pictured, was a leading Korean anarchist theorist and militant</strong>. His <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Korean Revolution Manifesto</i> of 1923 really united all of the disparate anti-Japanese revolutionary forces, some of them within the Korean Anarchist Federation, some of them within the Korean Anarchist-Communist Federation, some of them within the Revolutionist Federation, basically all of them anarchist, but working alongside nationalists and communists to try to beat back the Japanese. He died in a Japanese jail in fact in '36.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWolV16Mj6AN0jIdmCl6vH0pnz5s5cVQmAAm3hMtEOTiP-VDwBM0CTl-reIa1ZJuu3yC0l463pXvOeIM3RezSnf4_lWnn9W2lPNljmpLn6XMzXZ8vTDrwKIWoUDdafEvwSYidSWEdPtCM/s1600/Lala.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWolV16Mj6AN0jIdmCl6vH0pnz5s5cVQmAAm3hMtEOTiP-VDwBM0CTl-reIa1ZJuu3yC0l463pXvOeIM3RezSnf4_lWnn9W2lPNljmpLn6XMzXZ8vTDrwKIWoUDdafEvwSYidSWEdPtCM/s200/Lala.jpg" width="140" /></a><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>Lala Har Dayal pictured here, the primary Indian revolutionary of his age</strong>. You guys probably know about Mohandas Gandhi. Why the hell do you know about Mohandas Gandhi, and not about Lala Har Dayal? The reason is because you're learning your history from the bourgeoisie. You're being fed this shit; you're being fed this pacifism, right? You're being fed all of this lame stuff. What this guy did (and he was also influenced by the IWW), he was a worker, an Indian chap working in </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">San Francisco</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. </span></div></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
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<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">He became the secretary of the </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">San Francisco</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> branch of the IWW. He became a convinced anarchist, a hardliner, a Bakuninist. He believed that you needed a specific organisation to maintain clarity, but that organisation has to live, eat, sleep, and breathe within the class – within mass class organisations – and acts as that organisation's historical memory, tactical toolbox, and first line of defence. In other words, they will put their bodies on the line. </span></div></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">This guy's party, the Ghadar (“Mutiny”) Party, established in 1913, established branches in the United States, Canada, British-occupied East Africa, and many other parts of the world where Indian exiles and migrants found themselves. Crucially they establish bases within </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">India</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> itself, in </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Punjab</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> and </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Hindustan</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, and launch an armed uprising in 1915. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">What is interesting is the social base of the Ghadar Party in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">India</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> is primarily made up of peasants and of returning British army veterans who know how to fight, but suddenly realised, “What the heck! We fought for this </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">British Empire</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, but we've been treated like second class citizens in our own country!” </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">The last traces of this movement that we've managed to discover (and of course, the records are not entirely complete) are in </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">East Africa</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> in the 1940s and in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Afghanistan</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> in the 1930s. What is interesting for those of you in the room who might be communists is that those particular regions in which the Ghadar Party was organised in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">India</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, were the most trenchant regions of peasant resistance, and the seed-beds of the later radical grassroots communist parties of the 1940s and ’50s. So we are kind of cousins after all, right?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Also, crucially, we need to bear in mind that this idea (and not only the idea, but the mass organisational practice of anarchism) did not die on the barricades of </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Barcelona</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> in 1939 [when the Spanish Revolution fell]. I believe, based on what I've studied (and the book has taken us ten years to write so far), that if there is a “dark ages” of the anarchist movement, which to a degree means if there is a dark ages of working class knowledge and understanding of the class's own fighting history (not that the anarchist movement represents the entire fighting history, that is false; but I think the anarchist movement has been a key repository of those fighting techniques), that dark ages is in fact the late 1970s and early 1980s. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">This is when a lot of the organisational memory that had been transmitted for decades since the 1860s, by generation after generation of militants – many of whom who died on the barricades, died on the gallows, succumbed to tuberculosis, gone down into the grave early because of the strain of their fight – was lost. There is a reason that a lot of North American movements don't have the faintest clue what happened in their own countries in the 1970s, and don't even know what their own ideological antecedents were as little as three decades ago. Instead we're all looking back to the 1920s and saying “It must have been great back then!” </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">The period of the 1940s and 1950s poses a huge set of challenges to the proletariat as a whole, and to the anarchist movement that works within that proletariat. Quite clearly, the history of the Second World War and Fascism is well known, as is the rise of nationalism, which as I said earlier had locked down so many people's minds in so many countries into a very narrow paradigm of what it meant to be free. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">But when you look at, for example, a year like 1956, you have the Cuban Revolution underway (I mean the real one); the syndicalist dockworkers in Argentina embark on what is still to this day the largest ever general strike; in Chile, the dictator, Paco Iba</span><span class="uistorymessage"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: Arial; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">ñ</span></span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">ez, is forced into a position where he basically hands over the power to the syndicalist and communist unions. He says “Enough already! Just take the country! You've won!” Sadly, in one of the dumbest moves ever, the communists break ranks and that collapses. But what I'm saying is that we have these mass working class movements, these peaks of struggle occurring in </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Latin America</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, in a period when, if you read the standard histories, it's all McCarthyism, grim and grey, Stalinism, the Cold War, and nothing is happening – everyone is defeated. But it's not so. I think maybe it's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my </i>generation, or maybe the people slightly before me who were defeated, and we've forgotten our own history.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2l08i41_OmRXGSSlinT1ZtVrznPhL8TXduUZE-3tgL9Laurf9D1j_oHZchol78Zv7lZlPlQESfVMNDgf8jqC7CqeQIuLU9-kn3UyQwUHTzg46m85PJEnS8km23H4cMrgJI_ZpV9FZqBg/s1600/Mikhail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2l08i41_OmRXGSSlinT1ZtVrznPhL8TXduUZE-3tgL9Laurf9D1j_oHZchol78Zv7lZlPlQESfVMNDgf8jqC7CqeQIuLU9-kn3UyQwUHTzg46m85PJEnS8km23H4cMrgJI_ZpV9FZqBg/s200/Mikhail.jpg" width="150" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Mikhail Gerdzhikov, pictured, of </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Bulgaria .. </span></place></country-region></strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>one of the leading lights in the Bulgarian Anarchist-Communist Federation, established in 1919. </strong>What's interesting about them is that they're very pluralistic. They are a very diverse organisation. They have an industrial base, a very strong syndicalist industrial base. To be fair, they are the third-largest force on the left, after the agrarians and the communists in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Bulgaria</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> in the 1920s. But they are strong and coherent – they have their issues, like everybody else – but they have this really interesting and diverse movement. They organise amongst students, intellectual workers. They have their armed detachments. </span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">They learnt through this guy, Gerdzhikov, that you've got to defend your gains, physically, by force, in an organised fashion. He earned his chops fighting against the Ottoman Turkish empire in the 1903 Macedonian Uprising. A huge section of the Bulgarian anarchist movement basically learned how to fight by fighting on behalf of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">someone else's</i> freedom in 1903: this is principled internationalist anti-imperialism, from below!. About 60 of these Bulgarian anarchists lost their lives in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Macedonia</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> – a relatively small skirmish in the bigger picture of things. But in that period they established free communes that replicated the Cantonalist Communes – the cities which the anarchists had run in 1873 in Spain – plus Lyon, Paris, those sort of examples, from a few years earlier as well. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">The fact that this movement was so diverse, but at the same time coherent, enabled them to fight off two fascist coups d'etat, one in 1923 and one in 1934. Eventually, they had to fight the Red Army itself in 1948, because the Red Army had allied with the indigenous fascists to form the so-called Fatherland Front, to try to impose a disciplined dictatorship – no doubt “of the proletariat”! – on the Bulgarian people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it's remarkable that Bulgaria, almost alone of all nations, did not allow a single train to go to the death camps – despite the fact that they were a Nazi ally, on the bourgeois level.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioafQOiY4frZkjsYWJSFjj-EnXBx6xM1UCuCUl3kQ3EQ90KRt__-ltSU_HlT9c-vKZEfE0s8LpHG4dyFwHCskL8qHfyKfWJd4Ce3oBwnO7p4wZUOJMqclqKs_keGpFzauIRYK0Adm_TgI/s1600/zambia.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="194" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioafQOiY4frZkjsYWJSFjj-EnXBx6xM1UCuCUl3kQ3EQ90KRt__-ltSU_HlT9c-vKZEfE0s8LpHG4dyFwHCskL8qHfyKfWJd4Ce3oBwnO7p4wZUOJMqclqKs_keGpFzauIRYK0Adm_TgI/s200/zambia.bmp" width="200" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Moving a little bit forward in time, the late Wilstar Choongo is pictured at left with members of the Socialist Caucus, </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Lusaka</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, 1998, who I befriended a little while ago, in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Zambia</span></place></country-region></strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. These movements are often, particularly in my part of the world in </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Africa</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, ephemeral. They rise up, and then they die. Very difficult circumstances in </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Africa</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, and yet when you look at the history of the anarchist movement, the anarchist movement was built by bitterly poor people in extreme conditions of poverty, oppression, and prejudice, and yet they were able to build mass movements. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">When you take a look at </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Argentina</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, which in 1900 was actually, based on its meat exports – certainly for the bourgeoisie, they were smiling – it was the fourth wealthiest nation by some measures in the world at that stage, but everybody who produced that wealth was excluded. It was very tiny elite that even had the bourgeois vote. If you look at that world, the anarchist movement that develops in those conditions becomes so strong that eventually the two main labour federations in the country by 1919 are two slightly tactically, slightly ideologically different <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anarchist</i> trade union federations. The debate within the organised labour movement is a tactical and strategic debate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">between</i> anarchists – in rather significant numbers; mass organisations built across race lines, and certainly across gender lines, at a time of incredible duress. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And the women who come out of these movements are a force to be reckoned with. In Latin America alone, we can look at people like Juana Belém Gutiérrez de Mendoza in Mexico. She manages to establish a feminist newspaper called <em>Vespa</em>. This paper survives and publishes for 36 years, despite the fact that she's continually in and out of jail. She wasn't a pushover. </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzNrMP2TAutgPSobb3uroMbxDhozddtCW5FExJ-EsV2nXCw8WaCTueIPEoTEaSXCnMB6QarZIjpqEWqfEI3k2v8PU2VbVs20DIV3A3Mf34Mz40TbVUGCyK5DiEJ68d1ihB1AcJY4LaCkk/s1600/kanno.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzNrMP2TAutgPSobb3uroMbxDhozddtCW5FExJ-EsV2nXCw8WaCTueIPEoTEaSXCnMB6QarZIjpqEWqfEI3k2v8PU2VbVs20DIV3A3Mf34Mz40TbVUGCyK5DiEJ68d1ihB1AcJY4LaCkk/s200/kanno.bmp" width="157" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Kanno Sugako, pictured, in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Japan ... </span></place></country-region></strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">There were lots of manufactured plots against the Emperor but she really <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> guilty; she really did plan to take out the Emperor, to prove that he wasn't a living god; to prove that the god in our heads could in fact be killed; to sever that mental link that the oppressed majority had with their oppressors. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Juana Rouco Buela of </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Argentina</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, and Virginia Bolten of </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Uruguay</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> – they set up probably one of the earliest feminist journals in the world in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Argentina</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. They get quite a bit of flack originally from the men. The men say “You're dividing the movement!”. </span></div><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">But they hold out, and they establish a line of thought that is still transmitted today in the Latin American movement. I'm really glad to see you have Maria Lacerda de Moura on your wall over there. This is one of the ways in which Francophone and Hispanophone movements are superior to English-speaking movements – there is a much deeper appreciation of history and theory. She was Brazilian, and she was the premier labour educator of her age. She would go on speaking tours right across </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Latin America</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, as far up as </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Mexico</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. She preached rationalist education – reason against an education system dominated by the Church that taught mysticism and respect for one's abusers. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglNIfUgzZXUlXwRPUBgHEXUP0ufnNIJspy4en-xcWn6DxuWDvkx00sU3a5L7r355usjn_NdGVRzDhY9FFF_1cNi40OOHIB-zHrYjNEWXYu2TOaZdPFcWTVWpa17DBHyolst4MW0LVVxN8/s1600/Petronila.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglNIfUgzZXUlXwRPUBgHEXUP0ufnNIJspy4en-xcWn6DxuWDvkx00sU3a5L7r355usjn_NdGVRzDhY9FFF_1cNi40OOHIB-zHrYjNEWXYu2TOaZdPFcWTVWpa17DBHyolst4MW0LVVxN8/s320/Petronila.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Petronilla Infantes is pictured, third from the left in front, with the Sindicato de Culinaria, </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">La Paz</span></place></city></strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>, 1935. </strong>Here's a young woman heading up the anarcho-syndicalist culinary workers’ syndicate in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Bolivia</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> in 1935. She becomes the leading labour leader in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Bolivia</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> right into the 1950s. If you go into the streets in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Bolivia</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> right until today, they will know her name. And we can go on. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">We can look at Luisa Capetillo in </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Puerto Rico</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, who dared to wear pants. And boy did she ever wear them, in defiance! She led the trade union movement in </span><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Puerto Rico</span></place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. We can look at Maroussia Nikiforova leading the Makhnovist detachments fighting the White armies in the </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Ukraine</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> during the Ukrainian Revolution, eventually being executed in 1919 in </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Sevastopol</span></place></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. The list goes on and on.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiH-JoMXnEzk_DjBBLQ2NUWdwU6hX3izFzc6s2aLIwvpsLesr4p3tQXrEm-o6GSt8K390x11-nBar2CS90ETHCYAfdO7VJcCUxGNjfxioKFfQGGBicRhDnrOPW5OGndcrejIzbNisEyqk/s1600/tram.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="189" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiH-JoMXnEzk_DjBBLQ2NUWdwU6hX3izFzc6s2aLIwvpsLesr4p3tQXrEm-o6GSt8K390x11-nBar2CS90ETHCYAfdO7VJcCUxGNjfxioKFfQGGBicRhDnrOPW5OGndcrejIzbNisEyqk/s320/tram.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">There was </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Spain</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, which had a revolution: pictured is CNT-FAI collectivised tram, </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Barcelona</span></place></city></strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>, 1936.</strong> Its movement wasn't exactly all that insignificant! But really in context, proportionately, by head of population, the anarchist movement in nearby </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Portugal</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> was much more powerful than in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Spain</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. It was much more integrated into daily life generally across the country than in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Spain</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, where it was more located in certain regions, such as </span><state><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Catalonia</span></place></state><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">The Iberian anarchists ran daily newspapers which were as large in circulation as your city newspapers today. Certainly as large as the mainstream newspapers that I as a journalist have worked for. I can only wish that we had radical newspapers of that kind of reach, but maybe we'll build that again.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEginpfFdrdgEIcjIERQXPH3x_t7TKHQqekjYBq5bDc8Kp0HVo_xA0Ali7s3tq7qKRmW_OWHJmURmj2Lls3TR2DXyV94asojCfiJyYcUy1RYNnMrihWR-MLuFgN_AveYEg601EGHw9ycCGw/s1600/massacre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEginpfFdrdgEIcjIERQXPH3x_t7TKHQqekjYBq5bDc8Kp0HVo_xA0Ali7s3tq7qKRmW_OWHJmURmj2Lls3TR2DXyV94asojCfiJyYcUy1RYNnMrihWR-MLuFgN_AveYEg601EGHw9ycCGw/s320/massacre.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><strong><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Mexico</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> in '68: here, pictured is a mass demonstration shortly before the </span><place><city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Ttatelolco Massacre</span></city><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">, </span><country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Mexico</span></country-region></place></strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong> City... </strong>again jumping forward in time. You're probably aware that my country is about to host the FIFA Soccer World Cup, and there are massive contradictions in our being able to spend billions building beautiful gleaming football stadiums when we supposedly cannot build houses for the poor. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">This massacre occurred just prior to the World Cup in </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Mexico</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> in 1968. And what the student leaders were asking, many, many decades after the Mexican Revolution, was “Was the anarchist revolutionary leader Ricardo Flores M<span style="color: black;">agón</span> wrong? Did he misunderstand what we were all about? Did he misunderstand the solution?” And 50,000 voices shouted back, “No! He was not wrong. He understood. We understand”. And then the troops opened fire.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQVJEtkJBYaY1HGWbUvAZYmcFbjhojhFfmf8xt5lbJu_OjdbeZCAdW6UXv3CbL4lqGwBAa6hGHMqxFZWpF0mTMXQlJS6D-GZRhyZKVFr6fsHlaEeQ0Wegxt29pkN-plwVovTdWOKXv2Gw/s1600/Mots.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" nfa="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQVJEtkJBYaY1HGWbUvAZYmcFbjhojhFfmf8xt5lbJu_OjdbeZCAdW6UXv3CbL4lqGwBAa6hGHMqxFZWpF0mTMXQlJS6D-GZRhyZKVFr6fsHlaEeQ0Wegxt29pkN-plwVovTdWOKXv2Gw/s320/Mots.bmp" width="320" /></a></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Our own small little effort is pictured: the anarchist-founded Phambili Motsoaledi Community Library, </span><city><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">Soweto</span></place></city></strong><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"><strong>, in 2005. </strong>We're part of a much bigger story, and </span><country-region><place><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">South Africa</span></place></country-region><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> is not an easy environment to work within. The working class is lured by all sorts of promises of pie-in-the-sky from all sorts of religious and political elites.</span></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> And this is what we can do to walk alongside the masses, and help keep connected, help them keep their eye on the prize. This is developing class consciousness, solidarity, and building popular organisations of counter-power. We build that counter-power, by which I mean structures, directly democratic structures, organisations. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">But those organisations become impossible if you don't have a counter-culture that goes along with them. And what I mean by counter-culture, I don't mean a particularly weird shade of green in your hair, or a piercing on a part of your body. By counter-culture, I mean a fundamental oppositional <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">working-class </i>culture, which means when you're walking downtown and you need to purchase something urgently at the chain store and there's a picket there, you know – it’s in your bone marrow and blood – that you would never cross a picket line. You've got that working class culture engraved in your skin. It is a part of you. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">That</span></i><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;"> is our biggest challenge. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That</i> is where we need to start to rebuild, by changing consciousness in order to create the mental space in which to build counter-hegemonic institutions; by building organisations that are of the class, by the class, and for the class. And I think I'll just stop there and leave it open for questions.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: Arial;">[ENDS]</span><span lang="EN-CA"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-32634665608623549802012-01-20T17:45:00.007+02:002012-01-23T19:46:16.321+02:00Graham Purchase's review in "Anarcho-syndicalist Review"An interesting review of <em>Black Flame </em>appeared in <em>ASR/ Anarcho-syndicalist Review </em>no. 53, 2010, by Graham Purchase. Purchase is an Australian writer on anarchism (especially on its relation to ecology), and his ideas had an important impact (among others) on the (South African) Workers Solidarity Federation (WSF), as a look at their Position Papers on environmental and other issues shows (see <a href="http://struggle.ws/africa/wsfpp/envir.html" target="_blank">here</a>). <br />
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Given Purchase's important contributions to anarchism, such as <em>Anarchism & Environmental Survival </em>(1994/ 2011), his review was naturally of particular interest. Therefore it is pleasing to see Purchase commend the book for its "extensive" sources, its global coverage, its stress on the working class roots and project of anarchism and syndicalism, its examination of issues of race and gender, and its critique of crude identity politics. <br />
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Purchase does note that the book pretty much ignores environmental issues, which is perfectly true, but it should be stressed that this not due to disinterest on the authors' part. The absence was keenly felt, but it is mainly the result of the absence of a decent examination of this thread in anarchist and syndicalist history in most sources - with Purchase's work an important exception - and we are reliant on our sources. In any case, no book can be entirely comprehensive.<br />
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Purchase adds that the book accepts, rather than supersedes, some of the "sectarian" divisions in anarchism/ syndicalism (p. 39). True again, but is this a problem? The book does not aim to artificially synthesise anarchism into a unified movement, nor to sidestep its rich debates, but to <em>survey </em>and analyse the debates <em>within </em>the movement. This is necessary for any real history - and also useful for current discussions of tactics, analysis etc. <br />
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Such differences arise mainly from very real and sincere disagreements on tactics and strategy, and differing contexts, and <em>not </em>from sectarianism. Whether it is <em>useful</em> to supersede differences in the first place - as opposed to allowing success or failure to measure which approach is better - is <em>itself </em>an issue of some debate. <em>Black Flame</em> certainly leans towards some positions, but it also presents the rival positions and criticisms at some length: the book is an overview, not a manifesto.<br />
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Naturally, some of Purchase's comments are more political in nature, and to be welcomed as such. For example, he disagrees with the Bakuninist / Platformist / <em>especifist </em>/ Malatestian approach of building specific anarchist political organisations, in addition to mass formations like unions etc. Since he notes that <em>Black Flame </em>demonstrates a "long historic precedent" for the centrality of dual organisationalism in anarchism/ syndicalism (including Bakunin's Alliance and the Spanish FAI), and since he fails to dispute the historic fact of such bodies, let alone their critical historic achievements, its unclear on what basis he then sweepingly confidently asserts that this approach is "certainly unachievable and probably undesirable" (p. 40). <br />
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Perhaps it is the assumption that this approach seeks to meld all anarchists into one unified group, with a common political position? However, the aim of the Alliance, the FAI etc. was something else: to form strong, specific, anarchist/ syndicalist political organisations, based on theoretical and tactical unity and collective responsibility, with a real influence (a leadership of ideas) in mass organisations of the popular classes. Naturally, the larger such a formation, the bigger its impact, but since the strength itself lies in political and organisational unity, it would be rare indeed that formations <em>could </em>include everybody who identified with anarchism or syndicalism - and so, such all-inclusiveness was never an aim.<br />
<br />
Purchase is also less convincing where he claims <em>Black Flame </em>neglects "the Commune" i.e. the anarchist commitment to the "self-governing suburb, quarter or region" (p. 39). This is rather a misrepresentation - or perhaps, we misunderstand Purchase? -as <em>Black Flame </em>stresses that syndicalist unions immersed themselves in community struggles (e.g. p. 21, 185), shows that anarchists / syndicalists favoured community activism and took various approaches to such activism (pp. 124, 190 onwards, 330 onwards), and that the movement generally envisaged "<span lang="JA" style="font-family: MinionPro-Regular; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="JA" style="font-family: MinionPro-Regular; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Democratic local groups at the workplace and in the neighbourhood" as "the nucleus of the social movement that would create libertarian socialism" (p. 68). </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span lang="JA" style="font-family: MinionPro-Regular; font-size: x-small;"><span lang="JA" style="font-family: MinionPro-Regular; font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">This supposed neglect of the community is, for Purchase, caused by <em>Black Flame </em>apparently </span></span></span>treating anarchism and syndicalism as identical. This claim, too, is simply wrong, as the book explicitly differentiates anarchism and syndicalism, and treats syndicalism as an anarchist <em>strategy, </em>not accepted by all. This position is made upfront in chapter 1 (p. 21) and at great length elsewhere. It is surely not too different to Purchase's view that anarchism is the "tree", syndicalism a "branch" (p. 39)? <br />
<br />
Overall, a stimulating review, with much food for thought, but with some room for engagement!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-38138172051315890292012-01-20T11:14:00.001+02:002012-01-24T11:28:15.067+02:00'Black Flame' and the Marxist tradition/s: Comments on Wayne Price's review of "Black Flame"These are reproduced from the discussion at anarkismo, <a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/article/18919#comments" target="_blank">here</a><br />
<br />
<strong>Comment 1: </strong><strong><span style="color: #cc0000;">Some responses from an author</span></strong><br />
<div class="comment">Hi Wayne </div>Thanks for all the positive comments, and for what I think is a fair summary of the book. In the same spirit of comradely engagement, I'd like to perhaps mention two areas where I disagree with your assessment. Again, I stress that I do this in an open spirit; like you, I despise petty squabbling, in favour of clear (and clarifying) debate. <br />
<br />
<em>a) on labels and 'sectarian' issues: </em>I agree labels can be a bit tricky, but I don't really agree that insisting that anarchism = class struggle anarchism 'seems' 'pointless,' raises 'a terminological dispute which makes us look sectarian.' <br />
<br />
We defined anarchism historically, and as accurately as possible. Without doing this, it is simply impossible to do a general history and analysis of anarchism (and syndicalism); this is why works like that of Peter Marshall tend to ramble, to have huge gaps and peculiar choices (in his case, including both Thatcher and Che in his history of anarchism...). To change the definition would radically change the book (and the book to follow). <br />
I agree, of course, that the approach will offend some people, but I'd also insist that accuracy and terminology cannot (and should not) be shaped by current day political considerations (or by the confusion in the ‘anarchist’ milieu). That, I think that is tending a bit towards unprincipled opportunism. That is obviously not your intention, but I think it’s the logical consequence of your suggestion. <br />
<br />
Conversely, I really don't think using the ‘anarchist’ label in a particular way prevents a discussion and a serious debate with people with whom anarchists disagree. In the English-speaking milieu, levels of debate are often extremely poor (I mean debate, not rants, labeling, etc.) and this is partly due to the fuzziness of many concepts deployed. It is difficult to debate if there is no clarity on what is being debated in the first place. <br />
<br />
<em>b) on Marxism: </em>as the book states, there are tensions in Marx's own thought, and there are radically democratic elements, and there are also radically democratic traditions of Marxism e.g. Councilism. <br />
However, to claim, as bluntly as you do, that 'Marx did not believe in a specific “strategy of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (p. 99) to create a state ruled by a centralized party,' as he merely meant 'the rule of the working class as a class, such as in the radically-democratic Paris Commune' is not accurate. <br />
<br />
That is a very one-sided reading of Marx but its a-historical and misleading; it relies on a single text as the definitive statement of Marx's views and praxis, and ignores a host of materials that say something quite different. Many of these are cited in <em>Black Flame</em>, which does not rely on Lenin et al to paint the picture of Marxism. <br />
<br />
On numerous occasions, Marx specifically called for precisely a 'state ruled by a centralized party' (<em>Black Flame</em>, p. 99), not least in the resolutions he forced through the rigged Hague Congress of the IWMA in 1872 after trying to 'expel' the anarchists. That is, the very year after he wrote <em>The Civil War</em>, he insisted that 'the proletariat can only act as a class by turning itself into a political party', aimed at the 'conquest of state power', with a 'proletarian dictatorship' based upon ‘centralisation' and 'force' (Hans Gerth, ed., <em>The First International: Minutes of the Hague Conference of 1872</em>, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958, pp. 216-17, 285-86). <br />
<br />
This was quite in line with the <em>Communist Manifesto</em> – which no one would dispute is the canonical Marxist document – which proposes as ‘generally applicable’ the following measures: ‘abolition of private property in land’, a ‘heavy progressive or graduated income tax’, ‘centralisation of credit in the hands of the state’, ‘centralisation of all means of communication and transport in the hands of the state’, ‘factories and instruments of production owned by the state’, ‘industrial armies, especially for agriculture.’ Moreover, the Marxists ‘always and everywhere represent the interests’ of the working class, because they ‘understand the line of march’ better than ‘the great mass’ (see Marx and Engels, <i>The Communist Manifesto</i>, 1954, Henry Regnery, pp. 40, 55-56). <br />
<br />
The overall outline of socialism in <em>The Civil War </em>was, moreover, never seriously proposed or implemented by the groups that Marx set up, going back to the Communist League, and carrying through to the German SDP, nor the Labour and Socialist International (after the anarchists were expelled) nor the Communist International. Nor was it the policy of any mass Marxist party or formation in the 19th, 20th or 21st centuries. <br />
<br />
As you say, 'Despite his defects, Marx did not at all aim for the murderous totalitarian state capitalism of Soviet Russia or Communist China': we agree, and in fact say pretty much this on p. 24: 'The creation of the gulag system in the USSR, which placed tens of millions into concentration camps based on forced labour, was an integral part of the Soviet system, but was probably not part of Marx’s plan. The harsh circumstances under which the Russian Revolution and the establishment of the USSR took place obviously also left a profound imprint. The features of the USSR and the later Marxist regimes cannot, then, simply be reduced to Marxist politics.' <br />
<br />
That does not, however, exonerate Marx himself, because the predominant element in his thought, his movement and (though we do not go into this third part in <em>Black Flame</em>), his personal political behaviour (e.g. the struggle against Weitling, Proudhon, Bakunin, his role on the IWMA etc.) was centralist and authoritarian. Just as we need to discuss anarchism (and syndicalism) historically, we need to discuss Marxism historically; just as we cannot reduce a history of Christianity to a study of the original gospels, but must look at its history, and which interpretations mattered historically, we must judge Marxism historically. <br />
<br />
In no sense can the history of Marxism be delinked from, say, Communism, and in no way can Marx and the Marxist mainstream's stress on 'a highly centralized state, headed by a communist party, controlling labour and the other forces of production and claiming to be the sole repository of “scientific” truth,’ be sharply divorced from the ‘evolution of Marxism in the twentieth century into an ideology of dictatorship after dictatorship' (<em>Black Flame</em>, pp. 24-25). <br />
<br />
The fact is that 'The history of Marxism in the third of the world once ruled by Marxist regimes is a part—the major part—of the history of Marxism' (p. 25). When we are discussing Marxism, we are not discussing hypothetical Marxisms that could have been, but an actual movement. <br />
<br />
I agree with your insistence on breaking with the crude understanding of Marxism so common in the anarchist milieu, but equally, I cannot that Marx is basically radical-democrat maligned by the misreadings of posterity. <br />
Comradely<br />
Lucien <br />
<br />
PS. you insist that 'Marx did not think that commodity prices were directly due to the labor-time invested in the commodity (its value)' because he purportedly 'thought that the relation between labor-time values and prices was indirect and complicated (what has been called the ‘transformation problem.’).’ <br />
<br />
<em>Black Flame's</em> formulations are rather more qualified: that 'Marx, like Proudhon, used a labour theory of value; he argued that only living labour created new value, and that value underpinned prices. All things being equal, and given the operation of a competitive market system that equalised prices for given commodities, the price of a commodity must correspond closely to the “socially necessary” or average labour time used to produce it... Marx spoke of the exchange values of commodities, set in production by labour time, as determining prices' (p. 86). Moreover, 'Marx admitted that prices could vary somewhat according to supply and demand ...' (p. 89). <br />
<br />
I think this is a fair summary of Marx. In <em>Value, Price and Profit</em> chapter 2 Marx states that, in a situation of market equilibrium, market prices correspond to 'natural prices,' which are 'determined by the respective quantities of labor required for their production.' In <em>Capital</em> III, chapter 9, Marx insists that prices are still obtained from values, but this 'general law' only applies at the level of combined capital in given spheres of production (as alluded to <em>Black Flame</em> p. 88).<br />
<br />
<strong>Comment 2: </strong><strong><span style="color: #cc0000;">Marx and the DOP</span></strong><br />
Wayne, as always, I appreciate your thoughtful comments and comradely style. But I do not agree with your claims regarding Marx and the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (DOP). <br />
<br />
There is a direct link between the Marxist regimes, and the thought of Marx. <br />
<br />
Admittedly, there are "many tensions and ambiguities in Marx’s thought," including democratic elements, but, equally, there is a very clear, central "authoritarian and statist" thrust as well (<em>Black Flame</em>, p. 24). <br />
<br />
Draper placed the most democratic, feel-good spin on Marx's authoritarian and statist elements, but that does not make them vanish; they can't be vanished by waving Draper. And whatever Draper may have thought, the fact is that 99% of Marxists did not (and do not) agree with him, and there are libraries of Marxist literature to this effect. These views - this reading of Marx's work - is by the way very much in line with what Bakunin viewed as the core project of Marxism (admittedly Bakunin did not read Draper, but he knew and directly debated, both formally and informally, with Marx and Engels).<br />
<br />
Nor is Draper's scholarship unimpeachable, as his calumnies against Bakunin, his mispresentation of the Commune, his presentation of Lenin as a radical democrat, his defence of Trotsky's terrorism against the popular classes etc., all attest. <br />
<br />
Why exactly we should take Draper's views on the real meaning of "every goddamned incidence" of Marx's views on the DOP as more accurate than, for example, Lenin's views on the exact same matter? Or frankly, than the views on the matter of the historic anarchist tradition, which competed with and debated Marxist mass movements for well over a century?<br />
<br />
Draper, then, simply cannot be taken as the authoritative source on all things regarding Marx and the DOP; he does not have that status or recognition among most Marxists.<br />
<br />
Secondly, in a world where the history of Marxism rested on Draper's idiosyncratic views, that history would perhaps be very different to what it was; however, we are not dealing in hypotheticals. <br />
<br />
Every single Marxist regime, ever, has been a dictatorship; every single major Marxist party, ever, either renounced Marxism for social democracy, or, remaining revolutionary, acted as apologists for dictatorships (that includes all Communists and Trotskyists, including the ISO, which still exonerates the Lenin-Trotsky period - on the same lines as Draper), or actually headed brutal dictatorships. <br />
<br />
Debating what Marx "really meant” is vastly less important than what Marxism was (and is) (although of course it fits very well with the almost theological culture of Marx studies, where Marx is always assumed to be right, and where debates are settled by quote swapping). But as I said before, you don't judge Christianity on the basis of the gospels alone. <br />
<br />
Marxism, too, must be judged by history; that requires an assessment of its record, rather than on the basis of Draper's opinions.<br />
<br />
Thirdly, Wayne, as your own analysis admits, there are elements in Marx's writings that played a role in the Marxist regimes: "there are useful and nonuseful (for anarchists) aspects of Marx's Marxism, and that the nonuseful aspects (determinism, centralism, etc.) played a role in the eventual development of Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism." <br />
<br />
I agree: there is direct link between "Marx's Marxism," and "Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism." Therefore we cannot "exonerate classical Marxism from a good deal of responsibility for the oppression and inequities of the old East bloc" (<em>Black Flame</em>, p. 24)<br />
<br />
At the same time, you downplay this link, claiming that (for instance) Marx's resolutions in the IWMA were really about "advocating that the proletariat should act as a class and turn itself into a party to conquer power for the working class. That is, the whole class should organize itself into a class-wide party so that the whole class can take over the state." Also, you state the DOP meant would "mean the democratic rule of the whole working class--Marx's original meaning." <br />
<br />
Those are two very different claims. A "party" with mass "class-wide" support acting to "take over the state" is very common (PT in Brazil, ANC in South Africa, SDP in Germany ..) , but that is something quite different to "the democratic rule of the whole working class". Even the Bolsheviks, arch-vanguardists as they were, actively sought mass support, despite the fact that they had no interest in "the democratic rule of the whole working class." <br />
<br />
The only way you can reconcile these two propositions - a mass party, democratic rule - is to assume that Marx collapses class and party, and that he envisaged a state form in which there is literal "democratic rule" by the "whole" working class.<br />
<br />
Do we find either position in Marx? <br />
<br />
On the first (collapse of class and party): Marx and Engels clearly reject such a collapse. The "Manifesto" distinguishes "proletarians and communists", with the latter happily understanding "the line of march" better than "the great mass". This is not a "class-wide party," but merely "the most advanced and resolute section" of the many "working class parties" to be found in "every country" (Marx and Engels, <em>The Communist Manifesto</em>, 1954, Henry Regnery, p. 40). <br />
<br />
The party is only identical to the class in the indirect (and vanguardist) sense that it somehow will "always and everywhere represent the interests" of the working class (no matter what "the great mass" may think) (p. 40). The corollary is that all other socialists are non-proletarian: as explained at length in chapter III, they are variously "feudal," "reactionary," "petty bourgeois," and "bourgeois" (pp. 58-78). <br />
<br />
This is a clear example of the reasoning later identified with Leninist regimes: Mensheviks, anarchists, syndicalists etc. are by definition ‘bourgeois’ (Lenin, ‘Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,’ in <em>Selected Works in Three Volumes</em>, p. 599), and party dictatorship is by definition ‘the dictatorship of the class’ (Trotsky, <em>Challenge of the Left Opposition, 1923-1925</em>, Pathfinder, 1975, p. 161).<br />
<br />
Only the second (a state form enabling actual "democratic rule" by the "whole" working class): Marx and Engels do not argue this. The communist party's aim is "the same as that of all the other proletarian parties … conquest of political power by the proletariat" (<em>ibid</em>). The aim is "the same" i.e. the party winning state power for the class, not the literal "democratic rule of the whole working class." <br />
<br />
And what would the state form be? It would be a centralized under party control, where only one party will "always and everywhere" represent the class. <br />
<br />
Wayne suggests that Marx advocated "centralism" only as measure for "overthrowing the feudal divisions of Europe and creating large nations run from central cities by single parliaments." On the contrary: Marx and Engels insisted that economic centralization, including of labour control through "industrial armies," would be "generally applicable" in precisely "the most advanced countries’ as part of the socialist (not the bourgeois-democratic) project (Marx and Engels, <em>The Communist Manifesto</em>, 1954, Henry Regnery, p. 55). (Wayne suggests that <em>Black Flame</em> makes it case "with quotes from Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao--not Marx." Not at all: the views by Marx and Engels mentioned here may all be found in the book (e.g. pp. 24, 98, 101).<br />
<br />
A ruling party that knows alone knows the true interests of the "great mass"; the claim that all rivals are anti-proletarian; the stress on the centralised state, including nationalisation and "industrial armies": these are the elements of "Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism," and they are all easily found in the <em>Manifesto</em>. <br />
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<strong>Comment 3: </strong><strong><span style="color: #cc0000;">The transformation problem</span></strong><br />
<div class="comment">Wayne says: "Lucien defends his interpretation of Marx's derivation of commodity prices from values (socially-necessary labor time)" but his account relies "too much on <em>Value Price and Profit</em>, Marx's little pamphlet. It is not as authoritative as is vol. III of <em>Capital</em>."<br />
<br />
I did quote vol III in my response, but to be quite clear: chapter 9 of <em>Capital </em>III is not a retreat from the basic approach that natural prices reflect average labour time: "If the labor time required for the production of these commodities is reduced, prices fall; if it is increased, prices rise, other circumstances remaining the same" (<em>Capital </em>III, chp 9). The "assumption that the commodities of the various spheres of production are sold at their value implies, of course, only that their value is the center of gravity around which prices fluctuate, and around which their rise and fall tends to an equilibrium" (ditto). The problem Marx tackles here is that while prices correspond to values, market prices for given commodities are average prices, rather than prices set by the specific amount of labour time embodied into commodities by different capitals. If such a proposition was granted, the least efficient capitals would be the most profitable, and there would no tendency for a rising organic composition of capital etc. <br />
<br />
Wayne adds: Marx "knew that commodity values were greatly distorted by many factors when they appeared as prices, such as the average rate of profit."<br />
<br />
Of course, but that is not a refutation of <em>Black Flame</em>. It merely means there is a true price that is "distorted" in some situations. Thus, vol III: "... their value is the center of gravity around which prices fluctuate" , and around which their rise and fall tends to an equilibrium." What is the true price? Labour time is materialised in commodities as the basis of their exchange value and money-price (meaning average prices). Which is pretty much what <em>Black Flame</em> states, "All things being equal, and given the operation of a competitive market system that equalised prices for given commodities, the price of a commodity must correspond closely to the 'socially necessary' or average labour time used to produce it" (p. 86).<br />
<br />
Wayne continues: “If their interpretation was correct, then why did so many Marxist economists spend so much time on the 'transformation problem' (of values into prices)?"<br />
<br />
The fact that there is a "transformation problem" that preoccupies these economists is not a refutation of the arguments made in <em>Black Flame</em>. It is simply that there is supposedly a "problem" of finding a general rule to transform the "values" of commodities (based on labour according to his labour theory of value) into the "competitive prices" of the marketplace. Marx's explanation has been subject to various empirical and theoretical critiques. Hence later work by Itoh, Shaik, Cockshot etc. which tries to fix it (or defend it).</div><div class="comment">PS. I just wanted to close my responses by reiterating that I appreciate the opportunity to debate with you, and that I, too, have learned a great deal from you. <br />
<br />
Comradely yours<br />
Lucien</div><div class="comment"><br />
</div><div class="comment"><strong>Comment 4: </strong><strong><span style="color: #cc0000;">Marx and the DOP #2 - last words</span></strong></div><div class="comment">Sorry Wayne, it’s not that simple.<br />
<br />
You have not shown any reason why Draper (or Mattick) should be taken more seriously than the views and readings on these issues of the entire mainstream tradition of Marxism. (Not to mention the views and readings of the entire mainstream tradition of anarchism on these issues). <br />
<br />
Nor have you really addressed any of the Marx-Engels textual material Iain and I provide that refutes Draper's claims, nor refuted it. <br />
<br />
Rather, on both counts, your position rests on argument-by-authority. <br />
<br />
Insistence on Draper also effectively sidesteps the whole historical aspect of the issues, ignoring how Marx-Engels actually operated politically, the parties and formations they formed and/ or led, and what those show about their views. There is a history of Marxism before Leninism, that shows something rather different to what Draper claims (and in any case, the history of Marxism with Leninism is still part - the major part - of the history of Marxism, and has definite continuities with the earlier history).<br />
<br />
Even if Draper's exegeses were correct (which they are not), this effectively means debating in a historical vacuum where the truth of what Marx-Engels meant is all a matter of interpretation, settled by quotation and exegeses, rather like debating theology. <br />
<br />
Understanding Marx-Engels and Marxism historically means, on the contrary, that we can easily settle which interpretation is correct by the simple expedient of seeing which one corresponds to the programmes and positions of C19 (and C20) Marxist movements - not least those that Marx-Engels founded. <br />
<br />
Thus, the Marx-Weitling class, Marx-Proudhon clash, the Communist League, Marx-Bakunin clash, the expulsion of the anarchists from the Labour and Socialist international, the debates against the Jungen in the old German SDP, also provide a rich field for settling these issues. <br />
<br />
Anyway, I will leave matters there. <br />
<br />
Lucien<br />
<br />
PS. So Mattick meant the DOP in the most literal sense. Good for him. That does not prove its the mainstream Marxist view, nor Marx's own view. We can find plenty of anarchists saying the exact same thing, but we don't assume this means anything about Marx's views. In 1919,. Eusebio Cardo of the Spanish CNT also stated (meaning DOP in this sense) that "We justify the dictatorship, we admire the dictatorship, we long that the dictatorship come, and we long for it," (Thorpe, <em>Workers Themselves</em>, p. 112). And Malatesta stated that year, too, taht if "the expression ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to mean simply the revolutionary action of the workers in taking possession of the land and the instruments of labour,” then “the discrepancy between us would be nothing more than a question of semantics" (<em>No Gods, No Masters</em>, vol. 2, pp. 38-9). <br />
</div><div class="comment"><div class="comment-title"><strong>Comment 5: </strong><strong><span style="color: #cc0000;">Addendums</span></strong></div><div class="comment-title">1. I should have added that the "Marx-Weitling class, Marx-Proudhon clash, the Communist League, Marx-Bakunin clash, the expulsion of the anarchists from the Labour and Socialist international, the debates against the Jungen in the old German SDP" all provide plenty of context for what Marx wrote and what it meant. None of these contexts show a particularly democratic or libertarian bent to Marx-Engels. Draper's bias against anarchism - which you claim is "not the topic in dispute" - is revelant precisely because <em>because</em> Draper, in "discussing" the "context " of Marx-Engels statements, misrepresents the context by misrepresenting the actors and issues.<br />
<br />
2. My criticism of your position on Marx-Engels certainly does not make the mistake to which Iain refers i.e. "someone who criticized Stirner or Proudhon after reading Marx's critique of themt, without personally reading either one's actual writings." We are debating Marx-Engels, and my positions all rest on primary texts, not citations of secondary sources (like Draper), although I use a number of secondary texts as well (e.g. Gouldner). Of course Draper comes in, but how can Draper be criticised if NOT by primary materials? <br />
<br />
3. I admit that p. 99 does not provide a direct Marx quote. My point (in citing other pages) is simply that you are incorrect to cite this as evidence of misresentation of Marx on these issues. <br />
<br />
<strong>Comment 6: </strong><strong><span style="color: #cc0000;">Draper right, Bakunin and everyone else wrong? Then why anarchism? And why Marxism, for that matter?</span></strong><span class="article-details"><span class="article-detail"><strong> </strong></span></span></div><div class="comment-title"></div><div class="comment">Wayne, one last note to a discussion that has tailed off.<br />
<br />
If Draper was right, then a whole lot follows; I don't think you have fully considered the implications for anarchism itself of Draper's claims.<br />
<br />
- IF Draper was right, and Marx's DOP merely meant the whole working class ruling, directly, then there was no need whatsoever for the emergence of anarchism in the first place. As Malatesta said, that's the sort of DOP anarchists would support. <br />
<br />
- IF Draper was right, then all the major anarchists were either fools or liars, because they failed to understand Marxism in the days of Marx, or simply lied. What reason, then, is there why any of us should bother with such a lame and inept tradition? <br />
<br />
- IF Draper was right, then Marx was right, and Bakunin wrong, on the central issues in the Marx/ Bakunin debate. If so, by rights, we should side with Marx. But if we side with Marx, then we side against Bakunin/ the Alliance/ the FORE / the anarchist majority in the IWMA and have no place in the anarchist tradition. What then are we doing on anarkismo? <br />
<br />
This doesn't imply we should move to Marxism, though:<br />
<br />
- IF Draper was right, of course, then Marxism itself is pretty much a movement of fools and liars as well. Draper's claims would render pretty much every Marxist after Marx - including notables like Kautsky, Bebel, Plekhanov, Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Castro, Ho, Machel- as fools or liars, and their movements as movements based on idiocy or ill-intent. Draper does not do Marxism any favours.<br />
<br />
- IF Draper was right, too, then there is pretty much no Marxist tradition to speak of, because Draper's claims would render pretty much all of Marxism after Marx a monument to futility. Just as Draper's claims would make of anarchism a lame and inept tradition, it would make of Marxism another. <br />
<br />
- IF Draper is right, then Marx himself was a monumental fool, unable to convey his basic ideas in a language understandable to men of real brilliance like Lenin. But this point, like the two that precede it, would make of Marxism (at most) a great historical failure, and of Draper's masterwork an exercise in scholastic futility for the simple reason that Marx and Marxism would evidently have very little to offer anyone. His supposed recovery of Marx would necessarily also imply the necessity of repudiating Marxism. <br />
<br />
Lucien</div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-2473131706560162292011-12-12T19:21:00.013+02:002012-01-24T10:56:06.372+02:00SWEDEN: Black Flame events: Gävle (17 December) / Stockhom (18 December)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><strong><span style="color: red;">Gävle</span></strong><br />
<br />
<strong>Black Flame: Anarkismens och Syndikalismens Revolutionära Klasspolitik</strong><br />
Föredrag<br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><strong>Lördag 17 december 2011 kl 16</strong><br />
Lucien van der Walt från Sydafrika presenterar sin bok <strong>Black Flame: Anarkismens och Syndikalismens Revolutionära Klasspolitik ("Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndikalism")</strong></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><strong>Plats: </strong>Joe Hillgården, Nedre Bergsgatan 28, Gamla Gefle</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><strong>Arr: </strong>Gävle LS</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Fri entré. Föredraget hålls på engelska</div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB4t7MKRTMv1Mgl7VCNfK7GMIa65OiehU4gWIncybfV170XAyvNFh6T5XwOwytnrjk1GZKrUxIsP9Y3vIy50PbFmuhz6IYWHVC5H8S4G7K5RF2QFV_WD_EKYpN-v375ILhJMEuFTs4izc/s1600/hillmon.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="cssfloat: right; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" oda="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhB4t7MKRTMv1Mgl7VCNfK7GMIa65OiehU4gWIncybfV170XAyvNFh6T5XwOwytnrjk1GZKrUxIsP9Y3vIy50PbFmuhz6IYWHVC5H8S4G7K5RF2QFV_WD_EKYpN-v375ILhJMEuFTs4izc/s400/hillmon.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Joe Hill monument in Gävle</td></tr>
</tbody></table><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a name='more'></a><strong>IN ENGLISH:</strong>Gävle:</div>Lucien van der Walt, one of the authors of <em>"Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism"</em> will visit Joe Hill-gården, Nedre Bergsgatan 28 for a lecture in English.<br />
Saturday December 17th. Time: 4-6 p.m.<br />
Arranged by Gävle LS of SAC<br />
<br />
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<strong><span style="color: red;">Stockholm</span></strong><br />
<br />
Rödsvart Afton- <em>Black Flame </em>- författarbesök från Sydafrika<br />
Lucien van der Walt, en av författarna till <em>"Black Flame: Anarkismens och Syndikalismens Revolutionära Klasspolitik"</em> ("<em>Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism</em>" kommer på Sverigebesök i mitten av december.<br />
Därför passar vi på att bjuda in honom, alla LS-medlemmar och andra intresserade till ett extra Rödvart Afton på ämnet revolutionär syndikalism.<br />
<strong>Datum: Söndag 18 december<br />
Tid: </strong>14.00-16.00<br />
<strong>Plats: </strong>ABF-huset Stockholm, Sveavägen 41 (Per Albinrummet, våning 1)<br />
<strong>Arrangör: </strong>Stockholms LS Studiekommitté i samarbete med ABF<br />
<br />
<strong>IN ENGLISH:</strong>Stockholm:<br />
Lucien van der Walt, one of the authors of "<em>Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism</em>" will visit ABF-huset, Sveavägen 41 for a lecture in English.<br />
Sunday December 18th. Time: 2-4 p.m.<br />
Arranged by Stockholm LS of SAC<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv06miXTqYUJ1IsVAaKLftC6Jj9FMWUXtvaeTWmiDj0GIhGzVOnHh2tRI9-WggQ5-R-G7pKMIi4OUAYblKw_YDDefKr1qV04wxcL_DOcyjMfynwOB-sr3lvhtt45PIsOY8TB-Rtq22Vxc/s1600/Gavle+poster+-+small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" gda="true" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv06miXTqYUJ1IsVAaKLftC6Jj9FMWUXtvaeTWmiDj0GIhGzVOnHh2tRI9-WggQ5-R-G7pKMIi4OUAYblKw_YDDefKr1qV04wxcL_DOcyjMfynwOB-sr3lvhtt45PIsOY8TB-Rtq22Vxc/s400/Gavle+poster+-+small.jpg" width="280" /></a></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-60562715840718352902011-12-05T19:03:00.009+02:002012-01-24T10:55:35.095+02:00UK: London Book event, 10th December, "BLACK FLAME: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism"<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm1PMYmHEaXJfxM-zkutwHdGQA_k8b2StXr8WLlylVldUdLTg3-vONLzzrS0jLrhCr3tJ0hkO_-6AxT4xMK3URxhF0bCu8A__gURdFoSywt-zR7s3iAfY5afCgxs0Y7Dq9SY6Mkxmrdpk/s1600/Freedom-Bookshop21.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm1PMYmHEaXJfxM-zkutwHdGQA_k8b2StXr8WLlylVldUdLTg3-vONLzzrS0jLrhCr3tJ0hkO_-6AxT4xMK3URxhF0bCu8A__gURdFoSywt-zR7s3iAfY5afCgxs0Y7Dq9SY6Mkxmrdpk/s400/Freedom-Bookshop21.jpg" width="300" /></a><strong></strong></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><strong>UK: London Book event, 10th December 2011, "<em>BLACK FLAME: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism"</em></strong></div></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Lucien van der Walt, of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, will speak on <em>"Black Flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism,"</em> at Freedom Bookshop, London, on Saturday 10th December.<br />
<br />
Co-authored with Michael Schmidt, also of Johannesburg, <em>"Black Flame" </em>examines the anti-authoritarian class politics of the anarchist/syndicalist movement, and its 150 years of popular struggle on five continents. <br />
<br />
This groundbreaking volume has been praised by reviewers as "deeply impressive", "fascinating, revealing and often startling", "a grand work of synthesis", "remarkable" "outstanding", "inspired" and "a welcome antidote to Eurocentric accounts".<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">An indispensable conceptual and historical roadmap of anarchism/ syndicalism, with close attention to Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, <em>"Black Flame" </em>looks at its:</div></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">· <strong>Opposition</strong> to hierarchy, capitalism and the state</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">· <strong>Strategy</strong>: building revolutionary counter-power<br />
· <strong>History</strong>: labour, community, anti-imperialism<br />
· <strong>Agenda</strong>: participatory, cooperative economics<br />
· <strong>Revolutions</strong>: Mexico, Spain, Ukraine, Korea<br />
· <strong>Revival</strong>: today's struggles<br />
<br />
<strong>DATE: 2pm, Saturday 10th of December</strong><br />
<strong>PLACE: Freedom Bookshop</strong><br />
Angel Alley<br />
84b Whitechapel High Street<br />
London E1 7QX<br />
Directions at link <a href="http://www.freedompress.org.uk/news/wp-content/uploads/Freedom-map11.gif">here</a> and after text.<br />
<br />
MORE @ <a href="http://black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com/">http://black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com/</a><br />
<br />
<strong>REVIEWERS SAY</strong><br />
· "one of its distinctive contributions is its global scope... their book is brilliant and thought-provoking ... a valuable study for activists, students and academics alike..." (Mandisi Majavu, Africa Project for Participatory Society, <em>'ZNET'</em>)<br />
· "deserves to be read by all those on the Left seeking to understand anarchism's diverse contributions to democratic socialist thinking and practice ..." (Devan Pillay, <em>'Amandla'</em>)<br />
· "illustrates the universality of anarchism, which until now, other literature has not done ... countless examples of large movements globally from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Cuba and the United States, to South Africa, Egypt, Korea and Japan ... Spain, Italy, Russia, the UK and Ireland ..." (Mandy Moussouris, <em>'South African Labour Bulletin'</em>)<br />
· "extraordinary ... succeeds in bringing anarchist ideas into vivid relief in their historical contexts ... shows the increasing relevance of an anarchist critique for our own time" (Martin Miller, Duke University, author of<br />
<em>'The Russian Revolution'</em>, <em>'Kropotkin'</em>)<br />
· "a fascinating account of the often obscured history of anarchists, their organisations and history. There is much to commend in the book ..." (Leo Zeilig, <em>'International Socialism'</em>)<br />
· "the depth and breadth of the research are impressive, the arguments sophisticated, and the call to organize timely ..." (Mark Leier, <em>'Labour/Le Travail'</em>)<br />
· "If you have a passing interest in radical politics, get this book. If you have an interest in anarchism, get this book ..." (Deric Shannon, <em>'Interface: a journal for and about social movements'</em>)<br />
· "fascinating, revealing and often startling ..."(Alan Lipman, anti-apartheid exile, author of <em>'On the Outside Looking In: colliding with apartheid and other authorities'</em>)<br />
· "useful and insightful ... a grand work of synthesis ... an excellent starting point..." (Greg Hall, <em>'WorkingUSA'</em>)<br />
· "Brilliant ... outstanding ... Do yourself a favour and buy it now!" (Iain McKay, author of <em>'The Anarchist FAQ'</em>, volume 1)<br />
· "considerable scholarship and deep reflection ... remarkable ... powerful and lucidly written ..." (Jon Hyslop, University of Witwatersrand, author of <em>'The Notorious Syndicalist: JT Bain, a Scottish<br />
rebel in colonial South Africa'</em>)<br />
· "an outstanding contribution ... unique in examining anarchism from a worldwide perspective instead of only a west European angle ..." (Wayne Price, author of <em>'The Abolition of the State: anarchist and Marxist perspectives'</em>)<br />
· "a must for everybody interested in nonauthoritarian social movements ... " (Bert Altena, Rotterdam University, author of <em>'Piet Honig, Herinneringen van een Rotterdamse revolutionair'</em>)<br />
<br />
-----------------<br />
<strong>Michael Schmidt </strong>is a Johannesburg-based investigative journalist/ journalism trainer and activist, with experience in Chiapas, civil war Guatemala,the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Rwanda, Darfur, and Lebanon.<br />
<br />
<strong>Lucien van der Walt </strong>teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand. Winner of the 2008 international <em>'Labor History' </em>dissertation and the 2008/2009 CODESRIA Africa thesis awards, his extensive publications include (with Steve Hirsch) <em>'Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1880-1940'</em> (Brill 2010).<br />
-----------------<br />
<br />
</div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi51GnM9owLxBvInyDIauHn1hqUfoHtlfIxUWETrUlcgOfdam-DhvUIDHSQL-1BuNt3sxi1gx5xxzhHwmgT8yev5LlkWsz3ysvm5S7LXGLXPUDLwByrTssy428ZnUHYurKsGcKMGkqwkF4/s1600/Freedom-map11.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi51GnM9owLxBvInyDIauHn1hqUfoHtlfIxUWETrUlcgOfdam-DhvUIDHSQL-1BuNt3sxi1gx5xxzhHwmgT8yev5LlkWsz3ysvm5S7LXGLXPUDLwByrTssy428ZnUHYurKsGcKMGkqwkF4/s640/Freedom-map11.gif" width="640" /></a></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-7536543156588650422011-12-04T18:00:00.004+02:002012-01-24T10:57:41.909+02:00UPDATE - "Black Flame" study groups: now in South Africa, Canada, Denmark, US, Australia, New Zealand ..."Black Flame" is being used in reading groups by activists in a number of countries. The book is, of course, primarily a schoalrly one, but it interfaces with the left and labour milieu in interesting ways.<br />
<br />
<strong>There are various groups in South Africa, Canada, Denmark, US, Australia, New Zealand ...</strong><br />
<a name='more'></a><b>Some examples: </b><br />
The announcement for the Hamilton, <strong>Canada</strong>, group is <a href="http://linchpin.ca/events/Hamilton-Black-Flame-Reading-Group">here</a>.<br />
Also groups were/ are planned by Common Cause in Toronto and Ottawa, <strong>Canada</strong>.<br />
The book is regularly used in anarchist study circles at Wits University, Johannesburg, <strong>South Africa</strong>.<br />
There is a reading group in Soweto, <strong>South Africa</strong>. <br />
The "Libertarian Socialists" in <strong>Denmark's</strong> Aalborg local ran/ run a "Black Flame" reading group.<br />
There is a discussion circle in Miami, <strong>United States</strong>, on the book.<br />
Used by the Fantin Reading Group, Melbourne, <strong>Australia.</strong><br />
Used in Pittsburgh, <strong>United States</strong>.<br />
A recent group in Seattle, <strong>United States</strong>, <a href="http://seattleanarchiststudygroup.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/summer-reading-group-black-flame-the-revolutionary-class-politics-of-anarchism">here</a><br />
<br />
Let us know of any others!<br />
<br />
For your enjoyment, here is a poster produced by the "Libertarian Socialists" in Denmark for their Aalborg local's "Black Flame" reading group:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidNpVy-3QMUPsl8I4cAmu2uP8v67nggBhBoUBivl5Rw6vjCnQtPR86ESgLf_xLS3uS6VnUKbmdtzvhAGJ-XV_qRTrDGJ422zCq5mEWpaunfcfm2MPpfcI7BuLwlTc_fO6j0bMuM9MDzCM/s1600/BlackFlamestudy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" ilo-full-src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidNpVy-3QMUPsl8I4cAmu2uP8v67nggBhBoUBivl5Rw6vjCnQtPR86ESgLf_xLS3uS6VnUKbmdtzvhAGJ-XV_qRTrDGJ422zCq5mEWpaunfcfm2MPpfcI7BuLwlTc_fO6j0bMuM9MDzCM/s400/BlackFlamestudy.jpg" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidNpVy-3QMUPsl8I4cAmu2uP8v67nggBhBoUBivl5Rw6vjCnQtPR86ESgLf_xLS3uS6VnUKbmdtzvhAGJ-XV_qRTrDGJ422zCq5mEWpaunfcfm2MPpfcI7BuLwlTc_fO6j0bMuM9MDzCM/s400/BlackFlamestudy.jpg" width="282" /></a></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-16209189090003751792011-11-13T15:04:00.023+02:002012-01-24T10:56:40.242+02:00"Black Flame" events in Germany: Kassel (21 November), Berlin (30 November)<div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
<strong>"Black Flame" events in Germany: Kassel (21 November), Berlin (30 November)</strong></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">"Black Flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism": </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Buchvorstellung zur Geschichte des Anarchismus weltweit mit einem der Autoren: Lucien van der Walt, Sozialwissenschaftler aus Johannesburg/ Südafrika (Uni Witwatersrand).</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><b>Uni Kassel: </b>Montag, 21.11.2011 um 20 Uhr in der Agathe, Tannenheckerweg 5</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><b>FAU Lokal Berlin: 30.11.2011 um 20 Uhr, </b>Lottumstr. 11, 10119 Berlin (U2 Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz/ U8 Rosenthaler Platz).</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">"Black Flame" untersucht die antiautoritäre Klassenpolitik der anarchistischen/syndikalistischen Bewegung und ihre 150 Jahre des Kampfes auf fünf Kontinenten. Eine unverzichtbarer gedanklicher und historischer Leitfaden, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Bewegungen in Afrika, Asien, der Karibik und Lateinamerika. </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><a name='more'></a>In dem Buch "Black Flame" wird ein Überblick anarchistischen Denkens von den Anfängen im 19. Jahrhundert bis zu heutigen antikapitalistischen Kämpfen auf 5 Kontinenten gegeben. Die Autoren betrachten den Syndikalismus als wichtigsten Zweig des Anarchismus und setzten sich mit Fragen nach Organisierung, Strategie und Taktik ebenso wie mit Geschlechterverhältnissen und Rassismus auseinander. </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><b>Das Buch blickt auf deren:</b></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">* Widerstand: Gegen Hierarchien, Kapitalismus und den Staat</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">* Strategie: Aufbau revolutionärer Gegenmacht</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">* Geschichte: Arbeit, Soziales, Antiimperialismus</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">* Agenda: Partizipatorische, kooperative Ökonomien</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">* Revolutionen: Mexiko, Spanien, Ukraine, Korea</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">* Revival: Heutige Kämpfe</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><b>Die Veranstaltung findet auf Englisch statt und wird ins Deutsche übersetzt. </b></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">Sie versuchen eine Kategorisierung verschiedener anarchistischer Strömungen und gegenwärtiger Klassenkämpfe in verschiedenen Teilen der Welt. Auf der Veranstaltung werden zunächst die zentralen Thesen des Buchs vorgestellt und dann soll auf Wunsch von Lucien van der Walt viel Raum zur Diskussion gegeben werden.</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
<b>Eintritt frei!</b><br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8vT3FHxT-lV6WvHh1C7uXL1enRyYopeck9-ZAHyWFjpFJrmOk2ubhvShluDiEjk5pmwLRFTXZ6iqB1eVSxu-aZFp1gkBXsWUxAHzSmQ-B-K5e72V7lK0LtRQeIwKgTQoCQbipHekchCg/s1600/Kassel+3.jpg" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8vT3FHxT-lV6WvHh1C7uXL1enRyYopeck9-ZAHyWFjpFJrmOk2ubhvShluDiEjk5pmwLRFTXZ6iqB1eVSxu-aZFp1gkBXsWUxAHzSmQ-B-K5e72V7lK0LtRQeIwKgTQoCQbipHekchCg/s400/Kassel+3.jpg" width="286" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZgQ8_LU5OnTZEN-aG__2APYrZ7rrTKKmBaqIvhuds2qeUOuWTFWKkhlkdCZiTSFU5C-Gs2dhHw2a2yv7IZA3gXaW-xV4i1HolGYjuK0Y4bWSsCsUNfv5-EACYVykeVdK9FwASzadqPGM/s1600/Kassel2.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZgQ8_LU5OnTZEN-aG__2APYrZ7rrTKKmBaqIvhuds2qeUOuWTFWKkhlkdCZiTSFU5C-Gs2dhHw2a2yv7IZA3gXaW-xV4i1HolGYjuK0Y4bWSsCsUNfv5-EACYVykeVdK9FwASzadqPGM/s400/Kassel2.JPG" width="292" /></a><b> </b><br />
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<b>MORE: </b><a href="http://black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com/"><b>http://black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com/</b></a><br />
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</div><b>Kritiker sagen:</b><br />
<div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">· "... deeply impressive ... a very important and much-needed work… " (Mark Leier, 'Bakunin: the creative passion') </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">· "... useful and insightful ... a grand work of synthesis ... an excellent starting point..." (Greg Hall, 'Harvest Wobblies: the Industrial Workers of the World and agricultural laborers in the American West, 1905–1930') </div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">· "Brilliant ... outstanding ... Do yourself a favour and buy it now!" (Iain McKay, 'The Anarchist FAQ', volume 1) </div>· " ... an outstanding contribution ... unique in examining anarchism from a worldwide erspective instead of only … a west European angle ..." (Wayne Price, 'The Abolition of the State: anarchist and Marxist perspectives')</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><br />
</div></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3jLkv9tApaa9jUdusQdn19iHpfSmby0WbSLGB_FOJZRRP9EJdY6VGGxZ6VneXc3pqiNHUXRJ_VMt5-I_TeRDmNpHdm3NlWqIsU8HR34-AUUqGcy8Gc9iE6T4A6ay_wXM_WQcbTPJ8cfM/s1600/DSC06768.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" dda="true" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3jLkv9tApaa9jUdusQdn19iHpfSmby0WbSLGB_FOJZRRP9EJdY6VGGxZ6VneXc3pqiNHUXRJ_VMt5-I_TeRDmNpHdm3NlWqIsU8HR34-AUUqGcy8Gc9iE6T4A6ay_wXM_WQcbTPJ8cfM/s320/DSC06768.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8vT3FHxT-lV6WvHh1C7uXL1enRyYopeck9-ZAHyWFjpFJrmOk2ubhvShluDiEjk5pmwLRFTXZ6iqB1eVSxu-aZFp1gkBXsWUxAHzSmQ-B-K5e72V7lK0LtRQeIwKgTQoCQbipHekchCg/s1600/Kassel+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZgQ8_LU5OnTZEN-aG__2APYrZ7rrTKKmBaqIvhuds2qeUOuWTFWKkhlkdCZiTSFU5C-Gs2dhHw2a2yv7IZA3gXaW-xV4i1HolGYjuK0Y4bWSsCsUNfv5-EACYVykeVdK9FwASzadqPGM/s1600/Kassel2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4NMQ0yfaWMukqq9MnjmTg97uj9bEj3Wpzv8uoM0_WLnt0meSHMPqnP-Fq5Q-SGwk4WM0qNqB3vqUyDd32c7JvagBSURXaxq7ZMGDuGQw3WTOoWTP1jTNQu9G9h4a48htQq4_dBlfLeRA/s1600/Flame+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: right; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTwWcGaHcOIB7RBARigS8YuNj6NYigZbflUfCtcgp9cnZnT-wwsmOQzO2xtc3qSgQK60rZkl2vylOU8432E5jF5wrDw8HgEkhdM89BRNy25HD5v0osJx9SjbmhKklCdIt93WGqx3nZ-ZA/s1600/Kassel2.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; cssfloat: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-20395995794990654262011-10-25T16:47:00.001+02:002011-12-06T19:23:35.047+02:00Videos from Michael's 'Black Flame' Canada tour of 2010 ...Here's some videos from Michael's March 2010 discussions of <i>Black Flame </i>in Ontario, Canada. Sponsored by <a href="http://www.linchpin.ca/">Common Cause, </a>Michael spoke in Waterloo, London, Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto, from March 15 to 20, 2010.<br />
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First up, here's the<b> tour promotion video</b>:<br />
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<b>Now, Michael at the SkyDragon, Ontario,on March 17, 2010</b><br />
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<b>Part 1 </b><br />
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<b>Part 2 </b><br />
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and <b>Part 3 </b><br />
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There <i>is</i> a <b>Part 4</b>, which will be included once its uploaded.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-19910742679096585562011-08-25T18:42:00.002+02:002012-01-24T10:59:21.820+02:00Reviewer's praise: Colin Darch in the'South African Historical Journal' (vol.63, no.2, 2011)<div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
Colin Darch, who is well-known for his work on the Makhnovist anarchist revolution in the Ukraine (1918-1921), published this positive review in the latest <i>South African Historical Journal</i> (vol.63, no.2, 2011, pp. 356-358). He describes the book as "a sympathetic, interesting and wide-ranging account of the anarchist tradition,"and an "enormous advance on the existing handful of feeble attempts by anarchists to construct an African anarchist tradition." </span><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism</i>. By LUCIEN VAN DER WALT and MICHAEL SCHMIDT. Oakland, California and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009. 395 pp. ISBN 978-1-904859-16-1.</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><b>Colin Darch</b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">p. 356</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It’s noticeable that reviews of books on anarchism often try to answer two questions that are not self-evidently related: first, is anarchism a coherent or practical ideological position, and second, is the book any good? In many cases, the answer to the second question is entirely determined by the answer to the first; if authors and reviewers agree on question one, then all is well. If not, the debate rapidly descends into polemic, oft</span>en fierce. The truth, however, is that anarchists have indeed been important historical actors from time to time - notably but by no means exclusively in Spain and Ukraine- and that anarchism is a significant tendency within revolutionary socialist thought. The analysis of anarchist history cannot be abandoned by the rest of us as the exclusive preserve of libertarians.<br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This book is a sympathetic, interesting and wide-ranging account of the anarchist tradition, written by two South Africans, one an investigative journalist and the other an academic social scientist. It is the first of two instalments of an ambitious larger project, in which the authors’ threefold intention is to challenge ‘commonly held views about anarchism and syndicalism’, </span><span style="font-size: small;">and synthesise the ‘global history of the movement’ (8).</span></div><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Schmidt (the journalist) and van der Walt (the academic) are not the first to attempt a broad general account of libertarian ideas and activism, but their work is distinguished by two key features. The first is their serious attempt to derive a defendable definition of what the ‘anarchist tradition’ actually is, one that moves beyond the cliche´ of extreme individualism and opposition to the state, to relocate the roots of that tradition firmly in nineteenth-century European revolutionary socialism, and most specifically in the First International. The second key feature is one that (I hope) justifies the inclusion of this review in a journal dedicated to South African history. Schmidt and van der Walt emphasise from the start that ‘<i>the broad anarchist tradition was an international movement that cannot be adequately understood through the focus on Western anarchism that typifies most existing accounts</i>’ (8; emphasis added). It is clear that, despite its origins, the idea that anarchism has been mainly a European and North American rather than a global phenomenon is one of the ‘commonly held views’ that this work sets out to challenge. The question, therefore, is to what extent Schmidt and van der Walt succeed in making a case for a significant anarchist tradition in the global south.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The whole of the second chapter is devoted to arguing for a coherent and narrow definition of anarchism as essentially modern, revolutionary and socialist in character. If anarchism is stripped of its revolutionary and socialist ambitions, and reduced to a mere opposition to constraints on the individual’s freedom by the </span>state, two consequences follow. First, class politics disappears in the present, egalitarian social organisation vanishes from the future, and we can make no informed prediction about what a future anarchist society might look like; second, all kinds of right-wing and new-age anti-statism and individualism get thrown into the mixture. Indeed, the authors argue that ‘the apparently ahistorical and incoherent character of anarchism is an artefact of the way in</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">p. 357</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">which anarchism has been studied, rather than inherent in anarchism itself ’ (44). In summary, then, their position is based on several ‘core theses’: </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>that the global anarchist movement emerged in the First International, that syndicalism is an integral part of the broad anarchist tradition, that this tradition centres on rationalism, socialism and anti-authoritarianism, that the writings of Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Kropotkin are representative of its core ideas, and that this ‘narrow’ definition is both empirically defensible and analytically useful.</i>[1]</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Arriving at their definition, the authors then claim that anarchist doctrine is both strong (i.e. sound) and lucid as ideology. Although at least one reviewer has attacked Schmidt and van der Walt for taking this particular line, it has the significant virtue of lending structure and contour to the narrative sections that follow, and one assumes will also shape the promised world history of anarchism in the forthcoming second volume.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">What about anarchism as a genuinely global tradition? Schmidt and van der Walt are to be commended for digging up accounts of largely forgotten anarchist moments around the world, as well as for their dismissal of ‘Spanish exceptionalism’ (273-275) but overall their argument so far is not entirely convincing - unproven rather than actually wrong. They freely admit that ‘large and sustained anarchist peasant movements or revolts are . . . rare’ (283), but there are obviously theoretical difficulties in arguing that anarchism is an essentially modern and proletarian movement while simultaneously hoping to find signs of libertarian activity in pre-capitalist societies.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">South Africa is perhaps a special case, but as far as other African countries are concerned, much of the evidence that the authors manage to muster falls into two general categories, namely broad claims of anarcho-syndicalist influence in trade unions, and anticolonial activism by anarchists and anarchist groups in metropolitan countries. Thus the authors mention in passing the ‘syndicalist-influenced ICU [that] was revived by Charles Mzingeli in the 1940s’ in Southern Rhodesia (347_348); they also write that the ‘Industrial and Commercial Workers Union of Africa (ICU) spread across southern Africa in the 1920s and 1930s: its ideology was influenced by the IWW. . .’ (272). They cite Tragic Week in Spain in 1909, when Catalan reservists refused mobilisation to fight in Morocco; the 1911 anarchist resistance to the brutal Italian occupation of Libya; or anarchist opposition to the introduction of compulsory military service in South Africa’s 1912 Defence Bill.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">South Africa’s proletariat formed early, and European immigrants brought socialist ideas with them; the local anarchist tradition can therefore be traced as far back as Henry Glasse in the 1880s, and a local syndicalist m</span>ovement was active by the 1910s. It seems likely that syndicalism and communism were closely intertwined and even heterodox tendencies at this time, with such figures as T.W. Thibedi and Andrew B. Dunbar playing key roles in the foundation of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), from which they were both later expelled. The authors do not hesitate, nevertheless, to claim both for the anarchist tradition.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This is all fascinating, but there seems to be little direct evidence of anarchist activity <i>per se </i>in (rather than about) colonial sub-Saharan Africa. To be fair, however, these concrete references constitute an enormous advance on the existing handful of feeble attempts by</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">p. 358 </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">anarchists to construct an African anarchist tradition. For example, the Nigerian Henry Dowa attempted in 1962 to claim the novelist Es’kia Mphahlele (1919_2008) as an anarchist on the basis of some vague expressions of individualism in his writings.[2] Maurice Goldman, who studied at Wits and at Cape Town, was able to write sweepingly in the same issue that ‘the structure of African society . . . did not know boundaries . . .’.[3] Wisely, Schmidt and van der Walt pass by this type of contribution in silence. It must also be noted that we are promised more detailed accounts of anarchist and syndicalist movements in Africa, Asia and the Americas in the forthcoming second volume. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I should disclose that the authors mention me by name in the acknowledgements (3) and in several places reference is made to my work of the 1980s and early 1990s on the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, work that is accurately described as ‘fairly hostile’ (266) to the anarchist project. Much of that work was devoted to demonstrating the fragility of any assertions at all about the class character of the Makhno revolt, a fragility that I suspect is also characteristic of much of the evidence about similar movements around the world.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Finally, it may be worth noting that the word ‘anarchist’, like ‘communist’ is currently widely used in the mass media as a term of abuse, a mere synonym for nihilist or even terrorist. During student demonstrations in London in December 2010 against the British government’s raising of fees for higher education, incidents of violence were pretty much uniformly attributed to ‘anarchists’. Schmidt and van der Walt’s book shows us that the real historical - and indeed contemporary- picture is much more complicated and much more interesting than a bunch of students throwing bricks at policemen. So, returning to the first two questions: anarchism? Probably not. This book? Definitely yes.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Notes</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">1. L. van der Walt, ‘<i>Black Flame </i>and the broad anarchist tradition: a reply to Spencer Sunshine’, <i>Anarchist</i><i> </i><i>Studies</i><i>,</i> 18, 1 (2010), 116. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">2. H. Dowa, ‘Africans and Anarchism’, <i>Anarchy</i>, 16 (June 1962), 183_186.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">3. M. Goldman, ‘Anarchism and the African’, <i>Anarchy</i>, 16 (June 1962), 179.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><br />
</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">COLIN DARCH</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">University of Cape Town</span></b></div><div style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11237869152024889747noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3955712087922927467.post-58834111225438412862011-05-17T19:25:00.004+02:002011-12-01T16:41:45.587+02:00Review of Black Flame by Zolile Bam, in 'Miyela' by the Miyela Collective<b><i>Black Flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism</i> by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt: a book review by Zolile Bam, in <i>Miyela </i>journal.</b> <br />
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<i>Miyela </i>is a fantastic Soweto-based project, a "collective for positive social interaction", aiming at empowering people to question authority, fight oppression, and change. It says "the revolution is not an instant, it is not election day or the day the masses storm the streets. revolution is a slow process of changing the face in the mirror, of learning to read and right, of men learning to play with their children and laugh till they cry. the breaking down of old corrupt states starts with the slow building up of the people. freedom comes slowly but once there can not be taken away because it does not sit in parliament but rests squarely in the heart and soul of a man." More about Miyela <a href="http://miyela.wordpress.com/what-drives-us/why/">here.</a><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl_67HqXSO3de03K1h6p57fpQWHrxqt4d8J1oupMtzG6YsULb-YtUwlYa2Mlva88OC3aE9IEZ2k87JzEeyUtQMOIh2PT7NcfhI9Ef0wb223Qc7VL_KjDloeSvWTd5hJXWV0UiAcpV3iqg/s1600/miyela.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="120" j8="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjl_67HqXSO3de03K1h6p57fpQWHrxqt4d8J1oupMtzG6YsULb-YtUwlYa2Mlva88OC3aE9IEZ2k87JzEeyUtQMOIh2PT7NcfhI9Ef0wb223Qc7VL_KjDloeSvWTd5hJXWV0UiAcpV3iqg/s640/miyela.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br />
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</div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;"><b>Review of Black Flame, by Zolile Bam, <i>Miyela</i>, 2010 </b></div><div style="border-bottom: medium none; border-left: medium none; border-right: medium none; border-top: medium none;">I`ve got to comment, this book is one of the most compelling non-fiction books I`ve read in my lifetime.</div><br />
This book is a chronicle description of anarchy from the 1860s to the 1930s. Anarchy as explained by the authors is very broad and it must not be narrowed down to some linear explanation as advocated by the pop media. Anarchy is not strictly an economic or political theory it is a bit of both, anarchist believe that the only way to truly emancipate the people is by abolishing the class system. This is a very tremendous task that is where the syndicalism comes in. Syndicalism is similar to anarchy in a number of ways. The biggest difference is that syndicalist want to emancipate the people from economic slavery through the unions and the working class, this does not mean that syndicalism is exclusive to the working class.<br />
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The broad anarchist tradition has its roots in Kropotkin and Bakunin from the First International founded in the mid 1800s, this is contradictory to the held perception that anarchy is as old as human civilization. The purpose of the First international I shall narrowly explain was to unite workers from all over the globe in an effort to combat the ruling class. <br />
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The First international was the first of its kind; for starters it wanted to put an end to patriotism. The First International believed that patriotism widened the gap between the working class who were being oppressed by essentially the same ruling class. <br />
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It is a concern to the authors that when most people think about anarchists they think of a group of people who generally hate the government. That can be attributed to the widely read books by people who knew almost nothing about anarchy such as Eltzblacher who concluded that anyone who was anti-state was an anarchist. <br />
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Through very dedicated individuals and groups anarchy grew into a formidable and practical force it was not just an ideology, take for instance the Spanish revolution of 1936 where anarchist and syndicalist ran the city of Barcelona for 3 months before being defeated by "counter revolutionary" measures.<br />
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The purpose of this book other than to define the broad anarchist tradition, its revolutionary beginning, is to give as an alternative. Truth is when we think about what theory we want to follow in terms of how society should be managed we almost always fall in to two categories mainly Communism or Capitalism. It must be said communism and capitalism are like two sides of the same coin. Communism as put by the authors is `State capitalism` anarchy is gives us an alternative to the hierarchical structure of any state. <br />
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This book describes how anarchist and syndicalist have fought for the emancipation of the biggest class the world has ever seen, the popular class, this includes but not limited to, the employed, the unemployed and the peasants. <br />
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How do they hope to achieve this? Through the solidarity of the popular class. The anarchist and syndicalist believe "When we have but the will to do it, that very moment shall justice be done: that very instant shall the tyrants of the earth bite the dust." Workers must stop deluding themselves into believing that some of them a better than others because they have better jobs. We all face the same tyranny from the same system.<br />
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The two movements were not just for the intellectuals they also had programs to educate the community about anarchy, democracy, life science amongst other things. The syndicalist and anarchist believed that they should not limit the popular class to their agenda and ideologies. It must also be included that anarchist were not only men. Some women activist fathomed the movements’ popularity.<br />
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Anarchist believe that the class system is what causes discrimination against race, gender, nationality amongst others, they believe if the class system is abolished so will most of the worlds problems.<br />
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The book was a good read but it had a few glitches, for instance it is a difficult read if you are not an academic. The other thing, the number of quotations makes it difficult for the reader to keep track of the authors` opinions and that of their references, the best advice I could give is to ignore them and only pay attention to the ones that interest you. <br />
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<i>This book was an eye opener it radicalized my thinking I would recommend it to anyone from those people on the extreme right to the people on the extreme left and anyone in between.</i><br />
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Anxious for volume two when they authors discuss anarchy from the 1940s onwards!<br />
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