A fine review in 'Labour/Le Travail', no. 65, 2010, by Mark Leier

Mark Leier,  review essay 'Under the Black Flag: Anarchist Histories', Labour/ Le Travail, no. 65, 2010, pp. 175-180

The contribution of this book is three-fold: it offers a much-needed corrective to the liberal lifestyle and philosophical trends that have attached themselves to anarchism; it demonstrates and contributes to the diversity,themes, and arguments within anarchism; and it draws our attention to movements that have ... too often been ignored, often for political rather than historical reasons. In lively yet carefully crafted prose, the authors have provided an excellent analysis of anarchism rooted in class struggle, and a proposed second volume will examine the influence of anarchism around the world. The depth and breadth of the research are impressive, the arguments sophisticated, and the call to organize timely. 


... Anarchism is increasingly filling the role that Marxism did in the 1970s and 1980s, providing a new generation of academics and activists with a framework to make links between theory and practice and excavate the history of movements that have been ignored and marginalized. In fields such as philosophy, anthropology, history, and political science, many have been turning to anarchism to hold accountable the oppressive liberalism of the twenty-first century and a Marxism that is often burdened with a sclerotic scholasticism. As a result, anarchism as a theoretical project and as a subject of historical investigation has flourished over the last ten years.

Three recent books demonstrate some of the diversity, sophistication, and energy of anarchist historical studies... Black Flame ... puts politics at the centre of anarchism, and in doing so, stakes out a provocative and important thesis. Many historians, including George Woodcock and Peter Marshall, trace anarchist thought back to antiquity. As Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt argue, creating such a pedigree requires lumping together thinkers from Lao-tze to William Godwin to Leo Tolstoy to anonymous Wobblies to libertarian capitalists, all of whom may have been anti-state but have little else in common. Such a tradition, the authors note, is no tradition at all. It obscures the very real differences between such disparate thinkers; it is ahistorical; and it reinforces the notion that anarchism is essentially an extreme but liberal critique of the state. Instead, Black Flame argues that it is historically more accurate and politically more useful to see anarchism as a reaction to capitalism. It is an ideology that dates from about the mid-nineteenth century, and is fundamentally opposed to capitalist relations; as the authors deine them, all anarchists are socialists, but not all socialists are anarchists.


This insistence on the political and analytical importance of class struggle is welcome, and means this will be a difficult book for the contemporary movement of post-anarchism.This turn, represented by authors such as Todd May and Saul Newman, looks to Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and Lacan for inspiration and harkens back to Max Stirner and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to characterize anarchism, approvingly, as a philosophical position based on idealism and individualism.Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, however, insist Stirner and Proudhon should not be categorized as anarchists. Acknowledging that these philosophers provided useful ideas and critiques, Schmidt and van der Walt make clear that they did not have a radical critique of capitalism and so, however valuable their contributions, they cannot be considered part of the anarchist movement. Instead, they argue that the first theorist of anarchism was Bakunin, followed by Kropotkin.


At the same time, the authors reject the notion that anarchism is largely an intellectual movement that descended from great thinkers. They are more interested in anarchist organizations and the anarchist inluence on labour and peasant movements, and turn their attention to a broader tradition of people and movements that includes syndicalists, the Ukrainian insurgents during the Russian Revolution, Spanish anarchists, Chinese peasants, and many others. In particular, this volume, largely based on secondary sources, outlines the political themes and issues that have united and divided anarchists since the split with Marx in the First International, with detailed attention to the arguments within anarchism over violence, racism, sexism, reform, mass insurrection, syndicalism, and organization.

The contribution of this book is three-fold: it ofers a much-needed corrective to the liberal lifestyle and philosophical trends that have attached themselves to anarchism; it demonstrates and contributes to the diversity,themes, and arguments within anarchism; and it draws our attention to movements that have ... too often been ignored, often for political rather than historical reasons. In lively yet carefully crafted prose, the authors have provided an excellent analysis of anarchism rooted in class struggle, and a proposed second volume will examine the influence of anarchism around the world. The depth and breadth of the research are impressive, the arguments sophisticated, and the call to organize timely.

If there is a potential misstep here, it is in the analysis of Marx. Schmidt and van der Walt acknowledge the crucial contribution Marx's analysis of capitalism made to anarchist thought, especially in delivering it from the idealism that characterized Proudhon's thought. They are careful to delineate Marx from various Marxists, and point out that too often Marx's critics, including those in the anarchist movement, have attacked not Marx but a caricature of him. At times, however, their take on Marx seems to come from a reading of some of his less temperate pronouncements that imply a teleological understanding of history. While they are correct to attack that rigid teleology, it is not so clear how accurate it is to label Marx that way. But this is a relatively small criticism of a book that is impressive in its sweep, its detailed research, its innovative ideas, and its sustained polemic. It may not budge the post-anarchists, but it does suggest why they have had little impact outside the graduate seminar.

* Professor Leier, director of the Centre for Labour Studies at Simon Fraser University (Canada). Author of works like Where the Fraser River Flows: The Industrial Workers of the World in British Columbia, Red Flags and Red Tape: The Making of a Labour Bureaucracy, and Bakunin: The Creative Passion.