tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-47728074401225671572024-03-18T22:05:08.258-07:00Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism / Cartographie de l'anarchisme révolutionnaire Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-81727783761615804662015-09-15T05:19:00.001-07:002015-09-15T05:24:20.887-07:00Cartography: 3rd Edition<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I am finalising the text of a 3rd edition for Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism which I hope I can get translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Farsi, and Kurmanji (Northern Kurdish). I've updated the text to include:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1) Fresh new theories including Felipe Correa's <i>Bandeira Negra, rediscutindo o anarqhismo (Black Flag: revisiting anarchism)</i> Editoria Prismas, Curitiba, Brazil, 2015, and the <i>Platforma Internacional del Anarquismo Revolucionario (International Platform of Revolutionary Anarchism)</i>, by the Revolutionary Anarchist Popular Organisation (OPAR) of Mexico and the Anarchist Popular Union (UniPA) of Brazil, 2011;</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2) New material on the resistance over 1956-1973 of the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) and its armed wing OPR-33, derived from Ricardo Ramos Rugai's excellent new book <i>Um partido anarquista: o anarquismo uruguaio a trajectoria de FAU (An Anarchist Party: Uruguayan anarchism and the trajectory of the FAU)</i>, Ascaso, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2015;</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3) New material on the Manchurian Revolution derived from Emilio Crisi's groundbreaking new study <span style="font-style: italic;">Revoluci</span><span lang="ES" style="font-style: italic;">ó</span><i>n Anarquista en Manchuria,1929-1932 (Anarchist Revolution in Manchuria, 1929-1932), </i>Editorial Libros de Anarres, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2015;</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">4) New material on forgotten anarchist communes such as those of western Georgia over 1904-1906, and in Croatia over 1909-1910; and</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">5) New footnotes on the anarchist movement in places such as Serbia, Croatia, Jamaica, India, Rojava, Tunisia, Uganda, and Jordan.</span>Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-31534293722111222502015-01-21T02:35:00.002-08:002015-01-21T02:35:39.739-08:00Lectures: Cartographie de l'anarchisme revolutionnaireMichael Schmidt, journaliste sud-africain et militant anarchiste, remet en cause l’historiographie traditionnelle anarchiste. Trop souvent, à son goût, les anarchistes se contentent de faire référence à cinq moments forts de la mémoire collective anarchiste : les martyrs anarchistes de Haymarket exécutés en 1887 aux États-Unis, la Charte d’Amiens de la CGT en 1906, texte fondateur du syndicalisme révolutionnaire, la révolte des marins de Cronstadt en 1921 contre la dictature des bolcheviks, la révolution espagnole de 1936-1939 et enfin mai 68 en France. L’auteur critique cette martyrologie du mouvement anarchiste qui laisse de côté certaines participations beaucoup plus actives des anarchistes : à la révolution mexicaine de Basse-Californie en 1910-1920, à la révolution de Mandchourie en 1929-1931, à l’implantation des syndicats clandestins à Cuba entre 1952 et 1959… Il critique cet ethnocentrisme fixé sur l’Atlantique Nord, qui oublie les mouvements d’Europe de l’Est, d’Amérique du Sud, du Japon, de la Chine, de la Corée ou encore du Vietnam. Michael Schmidt propose un récit plus large de l’histoire du mouvement anarchiste.<br />
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<ul class="sidenotes">
<li><span class="num">1</span> Irène Pereira, L'anarchisme dans les textes. Anthologie libertaire, Textuel, coll. « Petite encycl <a href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#ftn1">(...)</a></li>
<li><span class="num">2</span> AK Press, Oakland, 2009.</li>
<li><span class="num">3</span> « L’anarchisme classiste, parfois appelé révolutionnaire ou anarchisme communiste, n’est pas un si <a href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#ftn3">(...)</a></li>
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<span class="paranumber">2</span>Le livre de l’auteur se réfère à la « grammaire communiste libertaire »<a class="footnotecall" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#ftn1" id="bodyftn1">1</a>, à l’anarchisme classiste, celui qui fait de la reconnaissance de la lutte des classes et de l’existence des classes sociales, et non de l’humanité ou des individus, la base de l’action anarchiste. Dans leur livre, « <em>Black Flame : The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Counter-Power vol. 1)</em> »<a class="footnotecall" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#ftn2" id="bodyftn2">2</a>, Lucien van der Walt et Michael Schmidt affirment d’ailleurs que : « <em>the class struggle anarchism, sometimes called revolutionary or communist anarchism, is not a type of anarchism… it is the only anarchism</em> ».<a class="footnotecall" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#ftn3" id="bodyftn3">3</a>On comprend dès lors, pourquoi l’auteur fait démarrer l’origine de l’anarchisme à la Première Internationale en 1864, et plus particulièrement à la scission de 1868 entre la majorité anarchiste et la minorité marxiste.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">3</span>Michael Schmidt distingue cinq vagues de militantisme anarchiste ‑ distinction qui s’apparente plus à des repères historiques qu’à une véritable loi immuable historique. Il différencie par ailleurs deux approches de la stratégie de la grande tradition anarchiste : l’anarchisme de masse d’une part, qui considère que seuls les mouvements de masse peuvent provoquer des changements révolutionnaires dans la société et qui donne un rôle prépondérant aux organisations comme les syndicats révolutionnaires ; l’anarchisme insurrectionnel d’autre part, qui s’appuie sur la lutte armée, voire le terrorisme.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">4</span>La première vague, relevée par l’auteur, débute en 1868 avec la Fraternité internationale, créée par Mikhaïl Bakounine, à la suite de la publication de son <em>Programme </em>(abolition de l’État-Nation, des forces armées, des tribunaux, du clergé et de la propriété privée). L’anarchisme de masse se constitue notamment au sein de fédérations en Espagne, au Mexique, en Uruguay, à Cuba et aux États-Unis, puis plus tardivement en Allemagne. Cette première vague est une réponse aux insuffisances du marxisme et aux dangers du terrorisme populiste des narodnik. Cette vague se termine en 1894, suite à la dissolution de l’Internationale noire en 1893, et au développement de l’anarchisme insurrectionnel.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">5</span>La deuxième vague, 1895-1923, est une période durant laquelle, selon M. Schmidt, il y a une consolidation du syndicalisme anarchiste et révolutionnaire. Deux événements participent à cette expansion au début du XX<sup>e</sup> siècle : d’une part les guérillas anarchistes et la constitution de communes en Macédoine en 1903 et d’autre part l’apparition des premiers soviets, d’inspiration anarchiste, à Moscou et à Saint-Pétersbourg en 1905-1907. On peut aussi signaler la création de la Croix noire anarchiste au cours de cette période. Dans le prolongement de ces événements, des syndicats révolutionnaires sont créés aux États-Unis (IWW) puis en Australie, au Canada, en Grande-Bretagne, en Afrique du Sud… Par ailleurs, à l’issue de la révolte russe, de nombreux anarchistes (comme Pierre Kropotkine) vont s’exiler à Londres et diffuser la nécessité d’une action collective, par opposition aux anarchistes individualistes. De fait, les fédérations anarchistes vont travailler de concert avec les syndicats anarchistes révolutionnaires dans de nombreux pays d’Amérique latine, en Espagne, au Portugal… Et en 1922, une nouvelle Internationale des travailleurs est créée à Berlin. Pendant cette vague, on assiste également à l’éclosion de différents mouvements révolutionnaires : de 1910 à 1920, il y a une révolution d’influence anarchiste au Mexique, qui s’éteindra en raison de la fragmentation des groupes révolutionnaires ; en 1919, l’Armée insurrectionnelle révolutionnaire d’Ukraine, liée aux groupes anarcho-communistes, libère un territoire de 7 millions d’habitants. En Russie également des mouvements anarchistes se développent (en Sibérie, à Cronstadt…). Mais dans les deux cas, ces mouvements seront étouffés par les bolcheviks. Si on ajoute l’échec de la révolution de 1918-1923 en Allemagne, se termine une période qui verra monter les nationalismes et également le découragement de nombreux anarchistes.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">6</span>La troisième vague, 1923-1949, se fait dans un contexte de mise en place des deux totalitarismes que sont le fascisme et le bolchevisme. Durant cette période, il y a un reflux des mouvements anarchistes, expliqué notamment par la domination soviétique, mais aussi par le développement de la social-démocratie et des premiers éléments de l’État-Providence. Il y a, malgré tout, de nouveaux mouvements anarchistes avec la création en 1928 de la Fédération anarchiste orientale, regroupant le Japon, la Chine, la Corée, le Vietnam, l’Inde, et au cours de la même année de l’Association continentale américaine de travailleurs en Amérique latine. Il y a une révolution en Mandchourie entre 1929 et 1931, dans la préfecture de Shinmin, qui créée une structure administrative régionale socialiste libertaire. Cette révolution mandchoue sera écrasée par l’invasion japonaise de 1931. En Europe, c’est en Espagne que naît et se développe une révolution, à la suite du putsch de l’armée coloniale, entre 1936 et 1939. Des communes libres apparaîtront en Catalogne, Aragon, à Valence. Les différentes fédérations anarchistes et la Confédération nationale du travail vont s’allier, sans toutefois permettre une cohésion efficace. À la suite des différents échecs révolutionnaires, le mouvement anarchiste va perdurer au sein de la résistance aux totalitarismes. Par ailleurs des fédérations vont apparaître en Afrique. En 1948, des Commissions internationales anarchistes sont créées afin de faciliter les relations entre les différents mouvements dans le monde, et se réunissent conjointement en 1949 à Paris.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">7</span>La quatrième vague, 1950-1989, se caractérise par l’affaiblissement du mouvement anarchiste. Ce déclin temporaire se fait dans un contexte de guerre froide, d’apparition de dictatures en Amérique latine, du bolchevisme en Extrême-Orient, du totalitarisme en Chine, en Corée. Toutefois, l’anarchisme reste présent dans le syndicalisme, notamment lors des grèves de 1956 au Chili et en Argentine, dans la création de nouvelles fédérations comme en Uruguay ou bien dans des mouvements de guérilla en Chine et en Espagne. C’est surtout à partir de 1968 que l’anarchisme va connaître un renouveau avec les mouvements sociaux qui secouent de nombreux pays : France, États-Unis, Sénégal, Allemagne, Japon, Mexique… En Amérique latine, les anarchistes s’opposent aux dictatures, au Chili, puis en Argentine, mais sont écrasés par la répression. Au Moyen-Orient de nouveaux mouvements apparaissent, en Irak, en Iran. Certains mouvements dans l’hémisphère nord s’orientent vers une lutte plus violente : sabotages en Grande-Bretagne, premiers membres d’Action directe en France, mouvement du 2 juin en Allemagne, groupes révolutionnaires au Pays Basque… mais qui, pour la plupart, se perdront dans un terrorisme déconnecté des thèses anarchistes. Par ailleurs, on assiste à une prolifération d’organisations anarchistes à travers le monde, notamment dans les pays de l’Est et en Russie.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">8</span>La cinquième vague commence en 1990 et se poursuit aujourd’hui. Elle est portée par l’effondrement du bloc soviétique, de la Yougoslavie. Les mouvements anarchistes souterrains peuvent donc se constituer en fédérations. La fédération la plus importante dans le monde aujourd’hui étant Action autonome qui possède des sections dans de nombreuses villes de Russie, d’Arménie, au Bélarus, en Ukraine… Des mouvements se développent à nouveau depuis les années 2000 à Cuba, en Amérique du Sud, en Afrique, aux États-Unis, au Canada. Par ailleurs, l’anarcho-syndicalisme reste présent, ainsi la CGT espagnole compte 60 000 adhérents.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">9</span>Autre intérêt du livre, Michael Schmidt met en relation chaque vague à l’évolution de la théorie et de la stratégie anarchistes. Ainsi, dans la première vague, c’est le programme de Bakounine qui domine, avec le rejet de toute solution étatiste, le rôle d’intermédiaire de l’organisation révolutionnaire anarchiste. Dans la seconde vague, les exilés russes à Paris (dont Makhno) publient <em>La Plate-Forme</em>, qui préconise une discipline interne stricte et une unité théorique et tactique au sein des différentes organisations anarchistes et le projet d’une société révolutionnaire fondée sur les soviets. Les anarchistes traditionnels s’opposeront à cette orientation en accusant les plate-formistes de bolcheviser l’anarchisme, et proposeront <em>la synthèse anarchiste</em>, avec une idéologie plus souple, d’où le nom de synthétistes. Lors de la troisième vague, en Espagne, les durrutistes publient un document stratégique prônant la création d’une junte (un soviet) révolutionnaire, et sont également accusés d’autoritarisme. Dans la plupart des pays, la plate-forme reste dominante. Lors de la quatrième vague se développe le fontenisme (de Georges Fontenis, militant français) à la suite de la publication du <em>Manifeste du communisme libertaire</em>. Ce manifeste s’oppose aussi bien à l’extrémisme individualiste qu’au bolchevisme, et prône la constitution d’une avant-garde implantée au sein des syndicats et autres organisations de masse. Enfin, lors de la cinquième vague, les plate-formistes s’imposent dans un mouvement anarchiste en pleine croissance, et notamment en Amérique du Sud où la <em>Plate-Forme</em> est connue sous le nom d’<em>especifismo</em>.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">10</span>Le livre de Michael Schmidt est un ouvrage militant, écrit par un militant anarchiste. La conclusion est de ce point de vue explicite et appelle à la lutte quotidienne. Il ne s’agit donc pas d’une présentation historique objective des mouvements anarchistes. Mais ce n’était pas le propos revendiqué de l’auteur. On y trouvera toutefois des informations intéressantes sur des mouvements et des organisations oubliées, ou en tout cas, trop peu étudiées par les historiens ou les anarchistes eux-mêmes.</div>
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<span class="text">Notes</span></h2>
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<a class="FootnoteSymbol" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#bodyftn1" id="ftn1">1</a> Irène Pereira, L'anarchisme dans les textes. Anthologie libertaire, Textuel, coll. « Petite encyclopédie critique », 2011. <a href="http://lectures.revues.org/1314">http://lectures.revues.org/1314</a></div>
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<a class="FootnoteSymbol" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#bodyftn2" id="ftn2">2</a> AK Press, Oakland, 2009.</div>
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<a class="FootnoteSymbol" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#bodyftn3" id="ftn3">3</a> « L’anarchisme classiste, parfois appelé révolutionnaire ou anarchisme communiste, n’est pas un simple type d’anarchisme… c’est le seul anarchisme. »</div>
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<span class="text">Pour citer cet article</span></h2>
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Référence électronique</h3>
<strong>Jacques <span class="familyName">Ghiloni</span></strong>, « Michael Schmidt, <em>Cartographie de l'anarchisme révolutionnaire</em> », <em>Lectures</em> [En ligne], Les comptes rendus, 2012, mis en ligne le 12 novembre 2012, consulté le 21 janvier 2015. URL : http://lectures.revues.org/9806</div>
Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-70612926810982375402015-01-21T00:46:00.000-08:002015-01-21T00:56:08.067-08:00Claude Guillon, Lignes de Force, Mars 2014En voilà assez, changeons-nous les idées avec le second livre de cette chronique : Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire, de Michael Schmidt.<br />
L’auteur tient une gageure de même dimension que celle des Déri, résumer en moins de deux cent pages l’histoire d’un mouvement. Cependant, notez l’adjectif « révolutionnaire » dans le titre ! Si les anarchistes dont il est ici question sont abstinents, du cul ou de la bouteille, ils n’en font pas le <span class="text_exposed_hide">...</span><span class="text_exposed_show">ressort de leur action. C’est reposant.</span><br />
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Schmidt adopte, pour réécrire l’histoire de l’anarchisme la métaphore des « vagues » successives, la première vague de 1868 à 1894, la cinquième de 1990 à nos jours. Je ne suis pas complètement convaincu de la pertinence de cette métaphore, devenue un lieu commun à propos du féminisme par exemple, mais reconnaissons qu’elle permet de situer des périodes historiques sans être obligé de s’en justifier de manière trop rigoureuse.<br />
On peut faire la même remarque à propos de ce livre qu’à propos du précédent : la nécessité de la concision entraîne des choix, par nature discutables. Mais l’ensemble est tenu et cohérent.<br />
De plus, le choix de déplacer le regard, depuis l’Europe occidentale vers d’autres régions de la planète, Amérique latine, Antilles, Asie, Afrique, etc. est assez rare pour être signalé. Les pistes vers des documents en ligne sont nombreuses et permettent de prolonger utilement la lecture.</div>
Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-80369580839496840612015-01-05T03:05:00.000-08:002015-01-05T03:05:01.429-08:00Southern African Anarchist & Syndicalist History Archive online!SAASHA is a great resource for researchers into the anarchist & syndicalist movement in the past (syndicalists built the first trade unions for people of colour in Southern Africa as far north as Northern Rhodesia/Zambia in 1919-1931, a remnant of which survived in Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe into the 1950s) and the revived post-Cold War anarchist movement of 1992-today: <a href="http://saasha.net/">http://saasha.net/</a>Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-46576038582074844682014-09-19T01:15:00.000-07:002014-09-19T01:15:32.664-07:00<a href="http://forum.anarchiste-revolutionnaire.org/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=6320">http://forum.anarchiste-revolutionnaire.org/viewtopic.php?f=68&t=6320</a>Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-62485847167340026232014-09-19T01:14:00.001-07:002014-09-19T01:14:34.955-07:00The collapse of an overbuilt residency in a cult compound in Nigeria recalls the Jonestown Massacre of 1978: <a href="http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2014-09-17-nigerian-tragedy-should-prophet-be-indicted-for-mass-murder/">http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2014-09-17-nigerian-tragedy-should-prophet-be-indicted-for-mass-murder/</a>Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-31521583997331296212014-07-03T06:14:00.001-07:002014-07-03T06:14:17.880-07:00Les anachists et républicains Espagnol dont les forces libéré Paris en 1944: <a href="http://vimeo.com/16471657">http://vimeo.com/16471657</a>Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-71145581499937317272014-05-30T03:49:00.002-07:002014-05-30T03:49:50.367-07:00<h1>
From demonic terrorist to sainted icon: The transfiguration of Nelson Mandela</h1>
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By Michael Schmidt</h1>
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<a href="http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/section/south-africa/">South Africa</a></h1>
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12 Dec 2013 09:57 (South Africa)</h1>
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By far the most interesting part of the trajectory of the late Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela is his inexorable transition in the minds of many white and black reactionaries from the demonic figure of a feared terrorist to the sainted figure of a beloved icon, though one might, post-demise, call him rather a sacred zombie – because we don’t want to let him truly die and prefer him maintained in a metaphorical limbo between life and death. Referring to film, philosophy, linguistics, modern art and, not least, religion, I construct a forensic meditation on this profound transfiguration.</div>
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On Friday night, a day after Nelson Mandela died, friends and I were at dinner, discussing his legacy, as no doubt many South Africans were that night. One of my friends told me of her first impression of the man as a young girl of 10, living in the lower middle-class suburb of Mayfair West on Brixton Ridge in Johannesburg.<br />
“When Mandela was released, I saw it on television and I asked my father who that man was. My dad said to me: ‘That’s the Devil.’ And for years afterwards, I had trouble sleeping because I knew the Devil had been released from some sort of prison and was on the loose, right here in South Africa. Years later, I started to realise that Mandela wasn’t so bad and I started to love him - and today consider him a saint.”<br />
Out of the mouths of babes: she encapsulated in her anecdote the transmogrification of this terrifying Devil into someone chummy and likeable. What does this mean for the psyche of South Africans in mourning? The Star’s headline on Friday was “The World Weeps,” and beyond tiny enclaves of white and black extremists, his memory <em>is</em> universally venerated. Long before his demise, T-shirts bearing a design of Mandela’s face with the ring of a glowing halo overhead were sold on the streets of Johannesburg. It is almost impossible – especially during this period of state-sponsored mourning – to find any traces at all, in word or image, of Mandela’s “demonic” origins. True, the giant mosaic mural of his face in Liberation Café in Melville does make him look like a Marvel villain, but this is surely accidental.<br />
Either way, it is clear from all the documentaries, retrospectives, polemics, recollections, and especially in imagery, that Mandela had already ascended to the status of demigod well before his death, so in reflecting on this fundamental change, one has to resort, I feel, to the philosophy at the heart of religious iconography, and especially to modern artists’ re-conceptions of the (usually) unacknowledged links between the profane and the sacred. <br />
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<em>Travails of the Messiah: Madiba as Muad’Dib</em><br />
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Underlying this representational shift must be a narrative, an alchemical story of transmutation from the base lead of the political polecat into the pure gold of the “father of the nation.” But to remove the tale from the realm of the conventional religions to give readers some arms-length perspective, I will rather use as my quasi-religious allegory, the science-fiction story <em>Dune</em>, by Frank Herbert, powerfully realised as a screenplay by that master of the weird intersections of reality and psychology, David Lynch.<br />
Our protagonist the young Nelson Mandela is born both at the centre of privilege – and on the periphery: as the scion of the Thembu royal house, he can be expected to lead a comfortable life ensconced in the fastnesses of the Transkei – and yet his privilege is rural, separated by race and space far from the national centres of power. In Dune, our protagonist the young Paul Atreides is the scion of the Atreides royal house and expects a life of privilege, yet his homeworld of Caladan sits on the edge of the galaxy, separated by politics and space far from the imperial centre. Their destinies lie elsewhere: for Paul, the red-dune mining planet of Arrakis; for Nelson, the neon-lit mining town of Johannesburg.<br />
And so, like all metaphysical tales of transformation, the two young heroes must first embark on a dangerous voyage. Along the way, guided by ethics rooted in the Orange Catholic Bible in Paul’s case and the Bible in Nelson’s and yet increasingly shaped by the harsher disciplines of the Bene Gesserit and Communist orders respectively, wait physical hardship, emotional loss, betrayal, and exile from polite society. These demanding processes will refine them in the fires of perdition, and prepare them to lead armed insurrections by pre-existing forces not of their own creation – the Fremen and the ANC and – from within the very wastes of exile against powerful, callous, militarised settler enemies who avariciously desire to monopolise the economy by controlling the indigenous majorities.<br />
And it is here that the real transformation begins. For, to be an outcast, is to be demonised, rejected by one’s prior privilege, cast into the wilderness: for both young men, a clandestine life. The external imagery has to change at this point, not only for pragmatic reasons of survival, but to indicate internal processes of self-abnegation for the cause – a critical stage in all canonisations: Paul has to adopt the stillsuit of the Fremen, Nelson, the overalls of a gardener. In these commoner’s clothes, the exiled royals then have to master something larger than themselves: for Paul, the loyalty of the Fremen and command of the sandworm, <em>Shai’hulud</em>; for Nelson, the loyalty of the black majority and command of the ANC’s armed wing, <em>uMkhonto we Sizwe</em>.<br />
Once the journeyman has become the master, the nomenclature and the imagery abruptly shifts to a higher plane: Paul becomes <em>Muad’Dib</em> and the spice-saturated blue of his eyes shows he has transcended his human self, becoming first among Fremen, the <em>Kwisatz Haderach</em>; Nelson becomes Madiba, his and the intense gold of his casual shirts shows he has transcended his humanity, becoming first among free men, the Father of the Nation. But this can only occur at the moment of a transcendent, yet physical victory: for Paul, his ascent to leader of Arrakis, installed in grandeur in the Arrakeen Palace; for Nelson, his ascent as leader of South Africa, invested with pomp in the Union Buildings. From this point on, while their achievements remain driven by temporal and political forces, neither remain mere men, mortality is subsumed by symbolism, and, in their own triumph over travails, they approach divinity.<br />
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<em>The Common Root of the Profane and the Sacred</em><br />
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But still, a demon, an outsider, howling in the wastes, does not easily transmute into a saint hallowed at the centre. Surely merely experiencing suffering is insufficient – or the majority of South Africans would likewise be sainted; and surely merely mastering the masses is insufficient – or every skilled politician would be treated likewise. Here, it is instructive to remember the point at which <em>Muad’Dib</em> sees the Fremen warriors practising using his name through their weirding module weapons to destroy enemies: “My own name is a killing word now,” Paul thought grimly. “Will it be a healing word as well?” Madiba’s name was once on the lips of many necklace mob murderers; and yet today it is a healing word. How are we to reconcile this incompatibility, between an <em>uMkhonto we Sizwe</em> that without any doubt drifted into outright terrorism against innocent civilians, and the way the man responsible for initiating its uncivil war is venerated today?<br />
It helps to reach into the realm of philosophy and the arts: a series of penetrating essays collected by Demetrio Paparoni who teaches at the University of Catania, <em>Eretica: The Transcendent and the Profane in Contemporary Art</em>, Skira, Milan, Italy, 2007 is illuminating. In particular, I draw from the essay <em>Sanctity and Depravity</em> by Roger Caillios in which he notes that many societies see the profane and the sacred as identical, at least at their core or roots: “More primitive civilisations do not linguistically distinguish the prohibitions rooted in respect for sanctity from those inspired by fear of depravity. The same term evokes all the supernatural powers from which it is best, regardless of the reason, to keep a distance. The Polynesian word <em>tapu</em> [taboo] and the Malaysian word <em>pamali</em> designate without distinction that which, blessed or cursed, is subtracted from shared use…” So, the demon that was Mandela and the saint that is Madiba have the same root, and are the same at their core; as a dual entity, he is removed from the shared uses of the common (wo)man.<br />
Lest the reader think I’m making a primitivist argument for Mandela’s metamorphosis into Madiba, Caillios also cites Greco-Roman civilisation, the mother culture of the advanced West, as having a similar profane/sacred binary: “The Greek word <em>hágo</em>s, ‘filth’ or ‘depravity’, also means ‘the sacrifice that cancels depravity’. The distinction was effectuated later with the help of two symmetrical words, <em>hághes</em>, or ‘pure’ and <em>enaghés</em>, or ‘cursed’, the transparent composition of which denotes the ambiguity of the original word. The Greek <em>hosioún</em> and the Latin <em>espiare</em>, or ‘expiate’, are etymologically interpreted as ‘causing to exit (from oneself) the sacred element (<em>hósios, pius</em>) that contracted depravity had introduced’. Expiation is the act that allows the criminal [or terrorist] to resume his normal activity and his place in the profane community, shedding his sacred character, deconsecrating himself…”<br />
The Madiba cult has all the hallmarks of an emergent religion, no matter that it is technically “secular” because it is state endorsed, so here we have a mystery: on the one hand, we have the process whereby to be cursed contains the seeds of purity, this becoming sacred (or to be the outlaw implies knowledge of the lawmaker); while on the other hand, <em>in parallel,</em> the pious sheds his piety, which restores to him his profane humanity (he remakes himself in <em>our</em> image). This binary nature lies, Caillios states, at the heart of all religion, and is never entirely shed, no matter what side one chooses: “This rift of the sacred produces good and bad spirits, the priest and the warlock, Ormazd and Ahriman, God and the Devil, but the attitude of the faithful towards every one of these separations of the sacred reveals the same ambivalence as when they are confronted with its conjoined forms.”<br />
Thus, despite Mandela’s transcendence, if we are to be true to history, he remains at root both demonic terrorist and sainted icon, for to deny either is to produce an impossibility (and be untrue to his dualistic essence).<br />
Caillios goes on to muse on the experience of the presence of Godhood: “When St Augustine confronted the divine, he was overcome by a shiver of horror along with a surge of love: ‘<em>Et inhorresco</em>’, he writes, ‘<em>et inardesc</em>o’. I shudder and I burn. He explains that his horror comes from recognising the difference that separates his being from the sacred, while his ardour comes, on the other hand, from seeing their profound sameness.”<br />
Madiba’s ability to dispense death as commander-in-chief and judgment as elder statesman were terrible to behold, but all the more welcoming for those faithful who drew close enough to shelter from his storm, and in doing so encountered his essential humanity.<br />
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<em>An alternate sainthood?</em><br />
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Gianni Mercurio’s essay, <em>Perfection and Perdition,</em> takes us further in weighing up the demonic/saintly duality of Mandela/Madiba. Noting that demon and devil are Greek words, Mercurio charts the transformation of the Devil himself, from his original lowly-ranked Greek status, to his elevated Mediaeval role as anti-Christ, seducer of the faithful, inducing them to fall into perdition, to his Renaissance role as “the one who had dared, the great rebel who had challenged the Father in an act of immense courage” via Giambattista Marino and his student John Milton, of “Satan ‘majestic though in ruin’… Satan alone and abandoned. Satan beautiful and cursed” – a clear foreshadowing of Caillos’ accursed purity thesis.<br />
But Mercurio goes further to show the modern transition of the Devil from romantic outcast to our closest friend: “‘O you, the most knowing and loveliest of Angels’, victim of God’s jealousy, is how Baudelaire addressed Satan, appealing to him to ‘take pity on my long misery’. For only he who has been vanquished [as Mandela in prison] feels compassion for the defeated. His heart beats for human beings. God’s heart less so. The fact is, that by living with them, Lucifer has learned to understand them. He knew everything about their nature, sensed their needs and their desires. And being familiar with suffering on this earth, he sympathised with them.” Recognising Mandela’s intimacy and sympathy with our suffering during his exiled wanderings both draws him closer to us, and raises him above us.<br />
Perhaps the transition is not that incongruous; perhaps the discomfort of the intimate change experienced by my friend derives not from her perceptual shift of his being from demon to nice guy, but the change was rather from outcast devil to Promethean hero, from the original fallen serpent to Luciferian light-bearer? That’s, however, an easier intellectual and emotional transition to make than Caillios’s cloven sacred profanity – but will probably be harder for the demigod’s acolytes in this predominantly Judeo-Christian country to swallow because it does not sit well with their rigorously sanitised iconography. Nevertheless, whatever one’s perspective, the horror and the love remained indivisible in the man himself. <strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">DM</span></strong><br />
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<em>Initial edits by Jo Davies; further edits by The Daily Maverick. Michael Schmidt, who hails from a family of artists, is an iconoclastic investigative journalist and published non-fiction author who met Mandela on several occasions during his career. He writes in his personal capacity.</em></div>
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Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-38313821078098953572014-05-30T03:29:00.001-07:002014-05-30T03:30:32.578-07:00Wellington Anarchist Bookfair 2014: I spoke on How Anarchists Build Counter-power<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-12463241477485441462014-05-30T03:26:00.001-07:002014-05-30T03:26:42.282-07:00<h1 class="title">
Reflections on Sydney's first-ever Anarchist Bookfair</h1>
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<span class="submitted-node"><span content="2014-04-23T18:22:28+10:00" datatype="xsd:dateTime" property="dc:date dc:created" rel="sioc:has_creator">Submitted by <span about="/users/jay" class="username" datatype="" property="foaf:name" typeof="sioc:UserAccount" xml:lang="">Jay</span> on Wed, 23/04/2014 - 6:22pm</span></span><div class="content clearfix">
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<em>This article was originally written for <a href="http://syndicalist.us/" target="_blank">Anarcho-Syndicalist Review</a>. By Jay Kerr & Sid Parissi.</em><br />
<em>A collective of anarchists organised a significant political event in March 2014 in Sydney, Australia. Although initiated by the Jura Collective that operates a long running bookshop, events and organising centre, it quickly grew into an autonomous collective of various groups and individuals. Previous bookfairs had been held in Melbourne, a city some 900km to the south, but none had been held elsewhere in the country. This article is an account of the preparation for the event by Jay, one of the organising collective and impressions of the day by Sid, a member of the Jura Collective.</em><br />
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<strong>The Making of an Anarchist Bookfair</strong><br />
In the <em>Conquest of Bread</em>, Kropotkin discussed the notion that everything we enjoy in the present is because of the combined efforts of people in the past and people in the present; these words ring true in organising the first Sydney Anarchist Bookfair.<br />
Over six months of preparation boiled down to a one day event that took place in March this year at Addison Road Community Centre, building on the work of anarchists around the world who have been organising anarchist bookfairs for decades and the encompassing the efforts of a dynamic anarchist movement in Sydney. <br />
From the early days in London some thirty years ago, when the first Anarchist Bookfair was launched, the idea has spread across the globe. It was with that in mind that a few members of Jura Books got to thinking that Sydney, being the largest city in Australia, really should have its own. <br />
A call out was made to anarchists across the city and before too long a collective was formed comprising of members from Jura and the Black Rose Social Centre in Newtown as well as independent, non-aligned anarchists. True to Australia’s composition as a ‘nation of immigrants’, several of the collective members were migrant workers from Europe; anarchists passing through or long term residents, working collectively alongside Australian born anarchists in establishing the parameters of this new addition to the tapestry of global anarchist bookfairs.<br />
From the first collective meeting important decisions were made on the structure of the group, the desired limits in the size of the collective, and the inclusion of other groups. The collective aimed at being a nucleus, making consensus-based decisions with input and support from the wider anarchist community. Practicalities of the event were debated and discussed ranging from who should be invited to hold a stall or give a talk; should the collective define themes for the Bookfair talks or invite topic suggestions from potential speakers; should there be childcare and how should it be run, where is the best space to hold such an event? Some tough choices had to be made.<br />
Acknowledging the past work of comrades around the globe, emails were sent to London and Dublin for their advice. A range of suggestions were given, practical advice that stood us in good stead, indicating the importance of setting deadlines, defining the parameters and highlighting some issues that have arisen for them over the years. Who knew that the decline in fist fights at the London Bookfair over the years corresponds directly with the decline of alcohol sales?<br />
Organising an event of this size and trying to satisfy all requests and desires of anarchists and activists in the movement is a tough job. Stress hit hard at times and in the collective tensions became frayed, while at other times consensus decision making itself was put to the test as divisions on what and, more importantly, who the Bookfair should include brought differences over anarchist politics to the fore. Where no consensus was viable the default fell to the negative with no action taken, a situation that can (and did) hit proactive organising hard and raises issues for organising on a wider scale.<br />
But, in general, the experience of organising the Sydney Anarchist Bookfair was positive as cool heads tended to prevail. Sydney’s anarchist community rallied to support the event with positive suggestions and contributions, promoting far and wide, from emails and online posts to flyering and poster distribution across the city; a vital part of the success of any event, especially an anarchist bookfair.<br />
Our combined efforts were duly rewarded when between 500 and 700 people turned out to Addison Road Community Centre, browsing the stalls inside Gumbramorra Hall, and attending talks and discussions in the Latin American hut next door or over at Speakers Corner on the lawn. Anarchist Bookfairs promote anarchist ideas through attraction, offering a relaxed, non-partisan atmosphere for people to engage with others in discussing new ideas. The success of the Sydney Anarchist Bookfair, a collective effort built on the work of people from around the world, on the work of years past, offers hope for the future. Anarchist Bookfairs are worth spreading.<br />
... <br />
<strong>Impressions of the day.</strong><br />
Anarchists take over a former military base! Well, not quite but we did manage to fill out a large and smaller hall and a large grassed area of a former military base that had been handed over for community use. The place is now a busy community-use area and the site of a weekly market and two reuse/recycle outfits in addition to many of its other functions. Think of a mini Christiania, but not squatted. We had a great start to the day with an ‘Acknowledgement of Country’ that was given by Aboriginal Elder Ray Jackson.<br />
Wow, what a day! Everyone smiling, talking, laughing, discussing.... 30 different stalls in the big hall, anarchist, Wobbly, union, and the largest number from community groups who each paid $50 for a table – and everyone I talked to thought it was well worth it, in fact, excited about the opportunity. It was an opportunity to spread knowledge about their group, network with other groups and generally have an anti-authoritarian festival. So, Jura ran a number of tables, including ones for PM Press and AK Press, and general anarchist books. In addition, other stalls were organised by Black Rose, Melbourne anarchists, Wobblies from Sydney and Melbourne, anti-nuclear, vegan, leftist T-shirts for sale... and many more.<br />
Besides the stalls there was vegan food and drink, and free apples and water available from the information centre, music from individual troubadours and also from the anarchist Riff Raff Marching Band, physical stuff like yoga and women’s self defence, a join-in singing group, an open ‘DIY’ area and a ‘tune-up-your-bike’ space. One of the organisers sorted out the child care, with a certified child care worker on site – They were dressed as pirates! Then there were the discussion meetings on a variety of topics. These included: Oppression of Australia’s Indigenous People, a discussion on a university strike, on Bakunin’s 200th Birthday, the Spanish Revolution, two on feminist and anarcha-feminist topics, environmental issues, and one by Michael Schmidt on ‘Global Fire: The lmpact of Revolutionary Anarchism’. <br />
It was great to see such a variety of people attending, from babies to an anarchist elder Jack Granchoff in his ‘80s. Most were younger, in their 20’s and 30’s, with, at a guess, a good gender balance, and perhaps even more women than men. The young children running around having fun and the range of participants demonstrated that, in many ways, this was an evolving, maturing and culturally-richer anarchist and near-anarchist milieu than in the past. From a book-sales point of view, it was really encouraging to get so many books, pamphlets and other material out to people who don’t often get to the shop. So, yes, it was a bookfair, but it was much more than just that.<br />
This writer didn’t get to the after party, but those who went said it was a blast. And everyone’s keen to build on this year’s strengths and lessons learned, and have another next year.</div>
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Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-18171997019024464082014-05-30T01:54:00.001-07:002014-05-30T01:54:51.455-07:00<h2 class="title">
Politični seminar: Anarhizem in proti-moč</h2>
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<span>16 May 2014</span></div>
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Sreda, 21. maj 2014, ob 17h</h3>
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<strong>Filozofska fakulteta UL, predavalnica R1B (Rimska)</strong></h4>
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<strong>Predavanje Michaela Schmidta o pomenu anarhizma nekoč in danes</strong><br />
Vprašanje, kako anarhisti gradijo kritično maso, ki je potrebna, da padajo hierarhične buržoazne vlade, bo v središču predavanja južnoafriškega raziskovalca Michaela Schmidta. Na podlagi zgodovinskih primerov horizontalne delavske moči, ki je ljudem omogočila samoupravne sisteme v Španiji, Ukrajini in na Kitajskem, se bomo spraševali o tem, kakšen pomen je imel anarhizem nekoč, na kakšne načine je bil del množičnega delavskega gibanja, in kaj iz svojega nabora idej, strategij in taktik lahko ponudi ljudem, ki s(m)o danes vpleteni v progresivna družbena gibanja, da bi zgradili alternative onkraj parlamentarne demokracije in kapitalizma.<br />
<img alt="Politični seminar: Anarhizem in proti-moč" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-3137" height="407" src="http://www.a-federacija.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/PoliticniSeminar-e1400242603389.jpg" width="576" /><br />
<strong>Michael Schmidt</strong> deluje znotraj <a href="http://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Inštituta za anarhistično teorijo in zgodovino</a> iz Brazilije, sicer pa je dolgoletni raziskovalni novinar v Južni Afriki ter aktivist v različnih anarhističnih in delavskih gibanjih. Skupaj z Lucienom van der Waltom je objavil razvpito knjigo <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Flame:_The_Revolutionary_Class_Politics_of_Anarchism_and_Syndicalism_%28Counter-Power_vol._1%29" target="_blank">Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism</a>, ki na novo preizprašuje temeljne ideje in politike anarhizma. Lani je pri založbi AK Press izšla njegova najnovejša knjiga <a href="http://www.akpress.org/cartography-of-revolutionary-anarchism.html" target="_blank">Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism</a>, v kateri popisuje zgodovino in pomen anarhizma v množičnih družbenih gibanjih od njegovega rojstva v delavskem gibanju 19. stoletja do proti-kapitalističnih uporov v kontekstu sedanje krize.<br />
<strong>Politični seminar, v soorganizaciji <a href="http://studentska-iskra.org/" target="_blank">Študentskega društva Iskra</a> in Anarhistične pobude Ljubljana, bo potekal v angleškem jeziku.</strong><br />
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<strong>Več o predavatelju in njegovih delih:</strong><br />
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<li><a href="http://www.anarchistaffinity.org/2014/03/global-fire-south-african-author-michael-schmidt-on-the-global-impact-of-revolutionary-anarchism/" target="_blank">Pogovor z avtorjem ob izidu njegove zadnje knjige Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.a-federacija.org/2014/05/16/politicni-seminar-anarhizem-in-proti-moc/black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com" target="_blank">Blog o knjigi Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism</a></li>
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Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-67847876449959721912014-05-30T01:50:00.002-07:002014-05-30T01:50:24.712-07:00<h2>
Lost Conversations: Questioning the legacy of anarchosyndicalism</h2>
<header><em>By <a href="http://snappalos.wordpress.com/author/safestaffingsouthflorida/" rel="author" title="View all posts by Scott Nappalos">Scott Nappalos</a></em></header><div>
<a href="http://snappalos.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/voz-de-mujer.jpg"><img alt="voz de mujer" height="300" src="http://snappalos.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/voz-de-mujer.jpg?w=205&h=300" width="205" /></a>There is more interest than ever in anarchosyndicalist unions, their history, and lessons for doing organizing in today’s context. During its peak, anarchosyndicalism engaged millions of workers on every continent except Antarctica. Though the Spanish experience through the CNT and 1936 revolution stands out, anarchosyndicalism was perhaps stronger in Latin America and Asia than in Europe. Despite the depth of those experiments and today’s interests, our knowledge of anarchosyndicalism is still poor.<br />
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Anarchosyndicalism is usually characterized by about being about principles and form of the anarchosyndicalist union. Emphasis is frequently placed on democracy, solidarity, and other values. Formal aspects of the union like direct democracy, autonomous locals, federations, the use of direct action, etc., are seen to carry inherent power to guarantee the desired future society. The problem partially lies with the anarchosyndicalists we find readily available in English. For instance Rudolph Rocker, the German anarchosyndicalist who in many way popularized the term, writes:<br />
“For the Anarcho-Syndicalists the labour syndicates are the most fruitful germs of a future society, the elementary school of Socialism in general. Every new social structure creates organs for itself in the body of the old organism; without this prerequisite every social evolution is unthinkable. To them Socialist education does not mean participation in the power policy of the national state, but the effort to make clear to the workers the intrinsic connections among social problems by technical instruction and the development of their administrative capacities, to prepare them for their role of re-shapers of economic life and give them the moral assurance required for the performance of their task. No social body is better fitted for this purpose than the economic fighting organisation of the workers; it gives a definite direction to their social activities and toughens their resistance in the immediate struggle for the necessities of life and the defense of their human rights.”<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_0_1442" id="identifier_0_1442" title="Rocker, R. Anarchism and Anarcho-syndicalism. http://libcom.org/library/anarchism-and-anarcho-syndicalism-rudolf-rocker">1</a></sup><a href="http://snappalos.wordpress.com/2013/09/27/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#_edn1" title=""><br /></a><br />
If you read Rudolph Rocker’s classic text on the issue <i>Anarcho-syndicalism</i>, he largely focuses on those issues and encourages thinking about it that way.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_1_1442" id="identifier_1_1442" title="Rocker, R. Anarcho-syndicalism. http://libcom.org/library/anarcho-syndicalism-rudolf-rocker">2</a></sup> Anarcho-syndicalism’s friendly opponents likewise frame the debate around that conception, for example: Malatesta’s critique of syndicalism<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_2_1442" id="identifier_2_1442" title="Malatesta, E. (1925). Syndicalism and Anarchism. http://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1925/04/syndic1.htm">3</a></sup> and with him anarchist’s right wing who propose to only work within the largest established institutions, and the anti-union sections of the Marxist ultraleft. Is ideology relevant or not? Is only focusing on form enough? How much form makes it syndicalist or not? Today’s anarchosyndicalists often encourage this reading. Many anarchosyndicalist publications frequently put their agitation in terms of setting up certain structures or promoting libertarian ideas.<br />
One of the main problems in evaluating this is that the history of anarchosyndicalism is nearly lost. With the experiences of the CNT in the Spanish Revolution of 1936 being for most purposes the height of anarchism, still very little has been translated or even studied.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_3_1442" id="identifier_3_1442" title="The work of Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt in Black Flame and Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism both available from AK Press shed some much needed light on challenging a Spain and euro-centric view of anarchism.">4</a></sup> Even just looking at Spain, key texts from the Spanish experience have never made it into English. Consider that we have none of the works of the Libertarian Youth Federation (FIJL), who took similar positions to the Friends of Durruti, none of the original texts of the Mujeres Libres, none of the publications or discussions of the Friends of Durruti, or even the largest and best histories of the revolt. Worse still are other experiences. In South America anarchism was dominant in the labor movement for key periods, yet we have essentially none of the original texts or even histories translated. Taking the Argentinian FORA, even in Spanish most of the texts are out of print with few studies in the original language. The texts of Lopez Arango, Santillan, Gilimon, and other key theorists of the FORA are not in present print in Spanish and to our knowledge were never translated despite having been at the center of one of the largest and most significant anarchist milieus in the world. In many cases, even in Spanish original texts are out of print, and there is no online archive comparable to what is available in English through resources like libcom.org. Still less is known of or translated of other historically important anarchosyndicalist movements such as the Italian USI during the Red Years, the Korean and Japanese anarcho-syndicalists, the South African syndicalists, or even within the United States the foreign language sections of the IWW (of which many were ideologically anarchist).<br />
Beyond the issues of language who the anarchosyndicalists were created problems for passing on their history. Most anarchosyndicalists where not wealthy or formally educated, coming from the global proletariat to a degree dissimilar to many other movements of their era. Like other parts of the broader ultraleft, anarchosyndicalist movements lacked institutional support (either by Moscow or academia) to reproduce their works, relying instead on the donations and voluntary labor of anarchist workers. It’s treasures often lie still hidden in part by the proletarian nature of the movement, lack of professional theorists to catalogue and popularize its perspectives, and a dearth of resources to publish and distribute their works. With these factors in mind, when we take a textual and historical approach to anarchosyndicalism it is often based on fragments, semi-random pieces that have made it into English, and more frequently the biases of hostile commentators from the official left who were in opposition to the syndicalist currents.<br />
Taking a few small cases, it will become clear how this is a limited perspective. Consider that anarchosyndicalism is typically charged with having been only focused on the workplace and on men. This is largely true in that there were clear issues in the movement of unquestioned patriarchy failing to build a powerful movement of women’s workers, and a core focus on workplace struggles. Even a brief look at the history complicates the picture though. Mujeres Libres, an organization of women members of the CNT aimed at addressing patriarchy and developing its own militants, stands out as one of the most advanced feminist movements in the history of the left as a whole, and one that emerged within anarchosyndicalism as an attempt to expand upon its practices.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_4_1442" id="identifier_4_1442" title="Acklesburg, M. (2004). Free Women of Spain. AK Press.">5</a></sup> Despite the interest in popular education, how little has been done to look at the practices of capacitation raised by the Mujeres Libres? Their concept of capacitation was that of increasing the abilities of women militants to intervene within struggles rather than as instruction or simply changing formal aspects of anarchosyndicalist organizations to address patriarchy. Capacitation offers an alternative view of education taken away from its elitist and intellectualist practices, and one based off key moments in struggle.<br />
Capacitation was also raised in the writings of the FORA and debates within the Argentinian anarchist movement of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century, though I have been unable to find any in-depth discussion of it. Likewise in Argentina and Chile, a significant women’s movement emerged that produced it’s own interventions such as anarchist communist women’s publications, Resistance Societies specifically for women and women’s struggles, and fights led by women. Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil all had experiences with attempts to grapple with patriarchy and build movements both within the workplace and community led by anarchosyndicalist women.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_5_1442" id="identifier_5_1442" title="Maxine Molyneux’s 1997 Ni Dios, Ni Patrón, Ni Maridos: Feminismo anarquista en la Argentina del Siglo XIX. http://www.cnm.gov.ar/generarigualdad/attachments/article/199/Ni_Dios_ni_patron_ni_marido.pdf; Bellucci, Mabel. (1989). Anarquismo y Feminismo. El Movimiento de Mujeres Anarquistas con sus logros y desafíos hacia principios de siglo. Buenos Aires.; Valle Ferrer, Norma. (2004). Anarquismo y feminismo. La ideología de cuatro mujeres latinoamericanas de principios del siglo XX. Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Nº 9, junio. San Juan.">6</a></sup> In Germany, the FAU-D attempted to construct women’s leagues for self-education.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_6_1442" id="identifier_6_1442" title="Solidarity Federation. (2012). Fighting for Ourselves: Anarchosyndicalism and class struggle.Black Cat Press.">7</a></sup> There is next to nothing in English on these struggles and the material is difficult to find in Spanish, let alone Portuguese or German. Anarchosyndicalists were grappling with the dominant patriarchy of their time, and in key instances were creative in trying to address it and build proletarian women’s organization. Little of this history is acknowledged, known even within the anarchist movement, or studied.<br />
The same is true of struggles outside the workplace organized by anarchosyndicalist unions. The Buenos Aires Tenant’s Strike of 1907 was led by some of the women’s Resistance Societies and women leadership within the FORA. Involving perhaps tens of thousands or so tenants, it was led primarily by the FORA and represented the intervention of the organization into social life beyond the factory walls as rents were climbing excessively in Buenos Aires.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_7_1442" id="identifier_7_1442" title="On the Tenant’s Strike in Buenos Aires see Juan Suriano’s 1983 La huelga de inquilinos de 1907. CEAL.">8</a></sup> In 1931, the CNT pushed a similar mass rent strike against unsafe and increasingly expensive housing in Barcelona.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_8_1442" id="identifier_8_1442" title="Worker’s Solidarity Alliance. The Barcelona Mass Rent Strike of 1931.http://workersolidarity.org/archive/rentstrike1931.htm">9</a></sup> Today’s anarchosyndicalist organizations participate in struggles inside and outside the workplace from housing struggles to transportation and struggles around social benefits. Groups like Seattle Solidarity and the UK’s Solidarity Federation take inspiration from anarchosyndicalism in doing organizing within a broader sphere of working class life, not limited to the walls of the shop floor. Far from an aberration, the anarchosyndicalist movement did not have a position on the centrality of the workplace as cleanly as some would place on it.<br />
Anarchosyndicalism is often charged with overemphasizing unions and inheriting defects that all unions allegedly have. The history is a bit fuzzy here as some of the groups that are called anarchosyndicalist were equivocal or even rejected the label of union. Some writers and speakers of the FORA critiqued the title anarchosyndicalism preferring to call it an anarchist communist workers organization, if a union at all.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_9_1442" id="identifier_9_1442" title="Lopez Arango, E. (1925). Syndicalism and Anarchism. http://libcom.org/library/syndicalism-anarchism">10</a></sup> In Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina the anarchist workers organization were built out of Resistance Societies or locality based organization of workers.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_10_1442" id="identifier_10_1442" title="De Laforcade, Geoffroy. (2011). Federative Future: Resistance Societies, and the Subversion of Nationalism in the Early 20th-Century Anarchism of the Río de la Plata Region. E.I.A.L Vol. 22 (2).http://www1.tau.ac.il/eial/images/vn22n2/laforcade-v22n2.pdf">11</a></sup> There were distinct organizations of trades apart from the mixed Resistance Societies. Even the French CGT arose first out of a federation of the <i>bourses du Travail</i>, local workers societies that combined culture, education, and mutual aid. The FORA itself went so far as to reject the industrial divisions of capitalist society altogether, and indeed ANY role for unions after the revolution.<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#footnote_11_1442" id="identifier_11_1442" title="Federación Obrera Regional Argentina. (1923). Memoria presentada por la F.O.R.A al Congreso de Berlin de la Asociación Internacional del Trabajadores A.I.T. http://fora-ait.com.ar/ait/index.php?text=presentacionFORA1923; Damier, Vadim. (2011). Anarcho-syndicalism in the 20th Century. Chapter 8.http://libcom.org/library/chapter-8-ideological-theoretical-discussions-anarcho-syndicalism-1920’s-1930’s">12</a></sup> The clean picture of unionist workers trying to build the future cells of society becomes problematized when one goes beneath the surface.<br />
If we think about it, it is logical. Any movement that encompasses millions will have within it a wealth of experiences and conflicting perspectives that make pinning narrow frameworks on it difficult. This history and debate within the anarchosyndicalist movement has largely been lost and ignored, reducing its breadth to caricature and a naïve workerist economism by its enemies. Though these examples themselves are limited, they offer a chance to rethink what we believe about anarchosyndicalism, these movements, and our own practices in social movements, political ideology, and the path towards liberation. The real advances and lessons of anarchosyndicalism are yet to be fully tapped. Specifically very little has been done to look at the contribution anarchosyndicalists made to understanding how workers become radicalized, the relationship between ideas and activity, and struggling against the totality of working class life. We would be better served by viewing anarchosyndicalism as a global experience without trying to reduce it to narrow formulas, structures, or merely specific moments. Our own challenge today is to find our way through the maze of a changing world. Within these struggles there continues to be echoes of the experiences of the anarchosyndicalists.</div>
<ol class="footnotes">
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_0_1442">Rocker, R. Anarchism and Anarcho-syndicalism. <a href="http://libcom.org/library/anarchism-and-anarcho-syndicalism-rudolf-rocker" rel="nofollow">http://libcom.org/library/anarchism-and-anarcho-syndicalism-rudolf-rocker</a> [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_0_1442">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_1_1442">Rocker, R. Anarcho-syndicalism. <a href="http://libcom.org/library/anarcho-syndicalism-rudolf-rocker" rel="nofollow">http://libcom.org/library/anarcho-syndicalism-rudolf-rocker</a> [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_1_1442">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_2_1442">Malatesta, E. (1925). Syndicalism and Anarchism. <a href="http://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1925/04/syndic1.htm">http://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1925/04/syndic1.htm</a> [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_2_1442">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_3_1442">The work of Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt in <i>Black Flame</i> and <i>Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism</i> both available from AK Press shed some much needed light on challenging a Spain and euro-centric view of anarchism. [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_3_1442">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_4_1442">Acklesburg, M. (2004). <i>Free Women of Spain</i>. AK Press. [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_4_1442">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_5_1442">Maxine Molyneux’s 1997 Ni Dios, Ni Patrón, Ni Maridos: Feminismo anarquista en la Argentina del Siglo XIX. <a href="http://www.cnm.gov.ar/generarigualdad/attachments/article/199/Ni_Dios_ni_patron_ni_marido.pdf">http://www.cnm.gov.ar/generarigualdad/attachments/article/199/Ni_Dios_ni_patron_ni_marido.pdf</a>; Bellucci, Mabel. (1989). <i>Anarquismo y Feminismo. El Movimiento de Mujeres Anarquistas con sus logros y desafíos hacia principios de siglo.</i> Buenos Aires.; Valle Ferrer, Norma. (2004). <i>Anarquismo y feminismo. La ideología de cuatro mujeres latinoamericanas de principios del siglo XX.</i> Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Nº 9, junio. San Juan. [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_5_1442">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_6_1442">Solidarity Federation. (2012). <i>Fighting for Ourselves: Anarchosyndicalism and class struggle.</i>Black Cat Press. [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_6_1442">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_7_1442">On the Tenant’s Strike in Buenos Aires see Juan Suriano’s 1983 <i>La huelga de inquilinos de 1907</i>. CEAL. [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_7_1442">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_8_1442">Worker’s Solidarity Alliance. <i>The Barcelona Mass Rent Strike of 1931.</i><a href="http://workersolidarity.org/archive/rentstrike1931.htm" rel="nofollow">http://workersolidarity.org/archive/rentstrike1931.htm</a> [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_8_1442">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_9_1442">Lopez Arango, E. (1925). Syndicalism and Anarchism. <a href="http://libcom.org/library/syndicalism-anarchism" rel="nofollow">http://libcom.org/library/syndicalism-anarchism</a> [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_9_1442">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_10_1442">De Laforcade, Geoffroy. (2011). <i>Federative Future: Resistance Societies, and the Subversion of Nationalism in the Early 20<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup>-Century Anarchism of the Río de la Plata Region. </i>E.I.A.L Vol. 22 (2).<a href="http://www1.tau.ac.il/eial/images/vn22n2/laforcade-v22n2.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www1.tau.ac.il/eial/images/vn22n2/laforcade-v22n2.pdf</a> [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_10_1442">↩</a>]</li>
<li class="footnote" id="footnote_11_1442">Federación Obrera Regional Argentina. (1923). <i>Memoria presentada por la F.O.R.A al Congreso de Berlin de la Asociación Internacional del Trabajadores A.I.T. </i><a href="http://fora-ait.com.ar/ait/index.php?text=presentacionFORA1923" rel="nofollow">http://fora-ait.com.ar/ait/index.php?text=presentacionFORA1923</a>; Damier, Vadim. (2011). <i>Anarcho-syndicalism in the 20<sup><span style="font-size: x-small;">th</span></sup> Century. </i>Chapter 8.<a href="http://libcom.org/library/chapter-8-ideological-theoretical-discussions-anarcho-syndicalism-1920%E2%80%99s-1930%E2%80%99s" rel="nofollow">http://libcom.org/library/chapter-8-ideological-theoretical-discussions-anarcho-syndicalism-1920’s-1930’s</a> [<a class="footnote-link footnote-back-link" href="http://ideasandaction.info/2013/09/lost-conversations-questioning-the-legacy-of-anarchosyndicalism/#identifier_11_1442">↩</a>]</li>
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Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-19944908553852318082014-05-30T01:45:00.002-07:002014-05-30T01:45:11.730-07:00<h1 class="title">
Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire</h1>
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<em>«L’histoire n’est pas neutre. À l’école, on nous fait croire que nous avons besoin de patrons et de gouvernements. On nous raconte que l’histoire est le récit de luttes entre gouvernements, entre armées, entres élites. On nous dit que ce ne sont que les riches et les puissantes qui font l’histoire, mais ce qu’on ne nous dit pas, c’est qu’il y a toujours eu des gens ordinaires pour lutter contre les patrons et les dirigeants, et que cette lutte des classes est le véritable moteur de la civilisation et du progrès.»</em><br />
- Michael Schmidt<br />
Avec Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire, publié chez LUX en mai dernier, Michael Schmidt participe à réhabiliter l’impact historique des mouvements anarchistes. L’intérêt de cette précieuse - et trop courte - publication est triple.<br />
<strong>Des mouvements de masse au niveau international</strong><br />
Elle sort tout d’abord l’histoire anarchiste des ornières dans lesquelles plusieurs - dont quelques anarchistes! - l’enfoncent : celles d’un mouvement surtout européen qui aurait eu pour principal déploiement l’épisode espagnol de 1936-1939. Michael Schmidt déconstruit avec brio ce mythe commode en survolant en cinq vagues (voir plus bas) la riche histoire des mouvements anarchistes à l’échelle internationale.<br />
Des syndicats anarchistes rassemblant des dizaines - parfois des centaines - de milliers de personnes ont ainsi été les principaux moteurs de changement social dans plusieurs régions du monde : en Argentine, en Uruguay, à Cuba, en Afrique du Sud et aux Philippines. Leur présence s’est également fait sentir au Maghreb, en Afrique du Sud et en Asie du Sud-Est. De 1868 à 2012, Schmidt fait la récension non exhaustive - disponible en glossaire - de près de 200 organisations anarchistes révolutionnaires dans une centaine de pays et de régions. L’âge d’or de l’anarchisme est située entre les années 1880 et 1920, bien que certaines régions - notamment l’Asie - aient connu leur plus importante activité dans les années 1920 et 1930.<br />
L’anarchisme était ainsi bien davantage qu’une affaire de barbus révolutionnaires européens, mais un ensemble d’outils et de pratiques vivantes mises de l’avant par des gens «ordinaires». Et ces personnes, lorsque confrontées aux répressions et défis de leur époque, ont offert des réponses variées et contextualisées que Schmidt prend le temps d’examiner. Chaque fin de chapitre se conclue ainsi par des réponses s’articulant grosso modo autour de la même «question complexe qui gît au coeur de toute révolution sociale et qui a donné tant de fil à retordre à tous les révolutionnaires de gauche : celle de la relation entre une organisation révolutionnaire et l’ensemble des exploité-e-s et des opprimé-e-s».<br />
<strong>Des principes : une définition limpide et cohérente de l’anarchisme</strong><br />
Un second intérêt de l’ouvrage est qu’il offre une définition plus exigeante - et selon moi plus cohérente - de l’anarchisme. Dans les premières pages de son ouvrage, Schmidt dégage ce qu’il nomme la «grande tradition anarchiste» à travers de grands principes. Il écarte à cette étape quelques penseurs qui ont eu une influence sur les mouvements anarchistes, mais dont certaines dimensions de la pensée les excluent de la famille anarchiste. Pour différents motifs, Proudhon, Marx, Stirner et Tolstoi font ainsi partie du lot!<br />
<strong>Des stratégies : le syndicalisme comme moyen privilégié des anarchistes</strong><br />
Au sein de cette famille anarchiste qu’il a balisée, Schmidt distingue deux approches stratégiques : l’anarchisme insurrectionnel et l’anarchisme de masse. Si le premier postule que les réformes sont illusoires et met l’emphase sur les actions armées, le second considère que les mouvements sociaux et syndicaux peuvent créer un changement révolutionnaire, et met l’emphase sur des gains au quotidien. Chacune des approches stratégiques a ses forces et ses limites, mais Schmidt privilégie de couvrir la seconde. Il souligne alors que le syndicalisme révolutionnaire - non pas celui des grandes centrales complaisantes du Québec - a constituté le principal moteur de l’anarchisme.<br />
Il aurait été bien sûr intéressant d’avoir une histoire de l’anarchisme un peu plus généreuse. Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire est d’ailleurs, à bien des égards, un succédané de Black Flame : The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, un ouvrage plus complet paru en 2009. Mais en attendant d’avoir une traduction complète de cet ouvrage, il faut saluer cette parution en français!<br />
<hr />
<strong>LES CINQ VAGUES DE L’ANARCHISME</strong><br />
Ensemble de repères historiques indiquant les hauts et les bas du mouvement anarchiste.<br />
1ère vague (1868-1894) : L’essor du grand mouvement anarchiste à l’ère de l’expansion étatique capitaliste.<br />
2e vague (1895-1923) : Consolidation du syndicalisme anarchiste et révolutionnaire et des organisations spécifiques anarchistes en temps de guerre et d’assauts de la réaction.<br />
3e vague (1923-1949) : Les révolutions anarchistes contre l’impérialisme, le fascisme et le bolchévisme.<br />
4e vague (1950-1989) : Actions d’arrière-garde sur fond de guerre froide et de décolonisation des continents africain et asiatique.<br />
5e vague (1990 à nos jours) : Résurgence du mouvement anarchiste à l’ère de l’effondrement du bloc soviétique et de l’hégémonie néolibérale.<br />
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<strong>SYNDICALISME</strong><br />
<em>«Par syndicalisme, nous entendons une stratégie syndicaliste anarchiste révolutionnaire dans laquelle les syndicats - qui appliquent la démocratie participative et ont une vision révolutionnaire du communisme libertaire - sont considérés comme étant le moyen principal et immédiat de résistance aux classes dirigeantes et comme le noyau d’un nouvel ordre social basé sur l’autogestion, la planification économique démocratique et l’universalité de la communauté humaine.»</em><br />
- Michael Schmidt</div>
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Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-20866351755742030912014-05-30T01:44:00.002-07:002014-05-30T01:44:23.491-07:00<div class="cover">
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<strong> <strong><a href="http://lectures.revues.org/9135">Michael <span class="familyName">Schmidt</span></a></strong>, <em>Cartographie de l'anarchisme révolutionnaire</em></strong>, Lux, coll. « Instinct de liberté », 2012, 196 p., ISBN : 978-2-89596-136-9.</div>
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Michael Schmidt, journaliste sud-africain et militant anarchiste, remet en cause l’historiographie traditionnelle anarchiste. Trop souvent, à son goût, les anarchistes se contentent de faire référence à cinq moments forts de la mémoire collective anarchiste : les martyrs anarchistes de Haymarket exécutés en 1887 aux États-Unis, la Charte d’Amiens de la CGT en 1906, texte fondateur du syndicalisme révolutionnaire, la révolte des marins de Cronstadt en 1921 contre la dictature des bolcheviks, la révolution espagnole de 1936-1939 et enfin mai 68 en France. L’auteur critique cette martyrologie du mouvement anarchiste qui laisse de côté certaines participations beaucoup plus actives des anarchistes : à la révolution mexicaine de Basse-Californie en 1910-1920, à la révolution de Mandchourie en 1929-1931, à l’implantation des syndicats clandestins à Cuba entre 1952 et 1959… Il critique cet ethnocentrisme fixé sur l’Atlantique Nord, qui oublie les mouvements d’Europe de l’Est, d’Amérique du Sud, du Japon, de la Chine, de la Corée ou encore du Vietnam. Michael Schmidt propose un récit plus large de l’histoire du mouvement anarchiste.</div>
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<li><span class="num">1</span> Irène Pereira, L'anarchisme dans les textes. Anthologie libertaire, Textuel, coll. « Petite encycl <a href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#ftn1">(...)</a></li>
<li><span class="num">2</span> AK Press, Oakland, 2009.</li>
<li><span class="num">3</span> « L’anarchisme classiste, parfois appelé révolutionnaire ou anarchisme communiste, n’est pas un si <a href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#ftn3">(...)</a></li>
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<span class="paranumber">2</span>Le livre de l’auteur se réfère à la « grammaire communiste libertaire »<a class="footnotecall" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#ftn1" id="bodyftn1">1</a>, à l’anarchisme classiste, celui qui fait de la reconnaissance de la lutte des classes et de l’existence des classes sociales, et non de l’humanité ou des individus, la base de l’action anarchiste. Dans leur livre, « <em>Black Flame : The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Counter-Power vol. 1)</em> »<a class="footnotecall" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#ftn2" id="bodyftn2">2</a>, Lucien van der Walt et Michael Schmidt affirment d’ailleurs que : « <em>the class struggle anarchism, sometimes called revolutionary or communist anarchism, is not a type of anarchism… it is the only anarchism</em> ».<a class="footnotecall" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#ftn3" id="bodyftn3">3</a>On comprend dès lors, pourquoi l’auteur fait démarrer l’origine de l’anarchisme à la Première Internationale en 1864, et plus particulièrement à la scission de 1868 entre la majorité anarchiste et la minorité marxiste.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">3</span>Michael Schmidt distingue cinq vagues de militantisme anarchiste ‑ distinction qui s’apparente plus à des repères historiques qu’à une véritable loi immuable historique. Il différencie par ailleurs deux approches de la stratégie de la grande tradition anarchiste : l’anarchisme de masse d’une part, qui considère que seuls les mouvements de masse peuvent provoquer des changements révolutionnaires dans la société et qui donne un rôle prépondérant aux organisations comme les syndicats révolutionnaires ; l’anarchisme insurrectionnel d’autre part, qui s’appuie sur la lutte armée, voire le terrorisme.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">4</span>La première vague, relevée par l’auteur, débute en 1868 avec la Fraternité internationale, créée par Mikhaïl Bakounine, à la suite de la publication de son <em>Programme </em>(abolition de l’État-Nation, des forces armées, des tribunaux, du clergé et de la propriété privée). L’anarchisme de masse se constitue notamment au sein de fédérations en Espagne, au Mexique, en Uruguay, à Cuba et aux États-Unis, puis plus tardivement en Allemagne. Cette première vague est une réponse aux insuffisances du marxisme et aux dangers du terrorisme populiste des narodnik. Cette vague se termine en 1894, suite à la dissolution de l’Internationale noire en 1893, et au développement de l’anarchisme insurrectionnel.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">5</span>La deuxième vague, 1895-1923, est une période durant laquelle, selon M. Schmidt, il y a une consolidation du syndicalisme anarchiste et révolutionnaire. Deux événements participent à cette expansion au début du XX<sup>e</sup> siècle : d’une part les guérillas anarchistes et la constitution de communes en Macédoine en 1903 et d’autre part l’apparition des premiers soviets, d’inspiration anarchiste, à Moscou et à Saint-Pétersbourg en 1905-1907. On peut aussi signaler la création de la Croix noire anarchiste au cours de cette période. Dans le prolongement de ces événements, des syndicats révolutionnaires sont créés aux États-Unis (IWW) puis en Australie, au Canada, en Grande-Bretagne, en Afrique du Sud… Par ailleurs, à l’issue de la révolte russe, de nombreux anarchistes (comme Pierre Kropotkine) vont s’exiler à Londres et diffuser la nécessité d’une action collective, par opposition aux anarchistes individualistes. De fait, les fédérations anarchistes vont travailler de concert avec les syndicats anarchistes révolutionnaires dans de nombreux pays d’Amérique latine, en Espagne, au Portugal… Et en 1922, une nouvelle Internationale des travailleurs est créée à Berlin. Pendant cette vague, on assiste également à l’éclosion de différents mouvements révolutionnaires : de 1910 à 1920, il y a une révolution d’influence anarchiste au Mexique, qui s’éteindra en raison de la fragmentation des groupes révolutionnaires ; en 1919, l’Armée insurrectionnelle révolutionnaire d’Ukraine, liée aux groupes anarcho-communistes, libère un territoire de 7 millions d’habitants. En Russie également des mouvements anarchistes se développent (en Sibérie, à Cronstadt…). Mais dans les deux cas, ces mouvements seront étouffés par les bolcheviks. Si on ajoute l’échec de la révolution de 1918-1923 en Allemagne, se termine une période qui verra monter les nationalismes et également le découragement de nombreux anarchistes.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">6</span>La troisième vague, 1923-1949, se fait dans un contexte de mise en place des deux totalitarismes que sont le fascisme et le bolchevisme. Durant cette période, il y a un reflux des mouvements anarchistes, expliqué notamment par la domination soviétique, mais aussi par le développement de la social-démocratie et des premiers éléments de l’État-Providence. Il y a, malgré tout, de nouveaux mouvements anarchistes avec la création en 1928 de la Fédération anarchiste orientale, regroupant le Japon, la Chine, la Corée, le Vietnam, l’Inde, et au cours de la même année de l’Association continentale américaine de travailleurs en Amérique latine. Il y a une révolution en Mandchourie entre 1929 et 1931, dans la préfecture de Shinmin, qui créée une structure administrative régionale socialiste libertaire. Cette révolution mandchoue sera écrasée par l’invasion japonaise de 1931. En Europe, c’est en Espagne que naît et se développe une révolution, à la suite du putsch de l’armée coloniale, entre 1936 et 1939. Des communes libres apparaîtront en Catalogne, Aragon, à Valence. Les différentes fédérations anarchistes et la Confédération nationale du travail vont s’allier, sans toutefois permettre une cohésion efficace. À la suite des différents échecs révolutionnaires, le mouvement anarchiste va perdurer au sein de la résistance aux totalitarismes. Par ailleurs des fédérations vont apparaître en Afrique. En 1948, des Commissions internationales anarchistes sont créées afin de faciliter les relations entre les différents mouvements dans le monde, et se réunissent conjointement en 1949 à Paris.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">7</span>La quatrième vague, 1950-1989, se caractérise par l’affaiblissement du mouvement anarchiste. Ce déclin temporaire se fait dans un contexte de guerre froide, d’apparition de dictatures en Amérique latine, du bolchevisme en Extrême-Orient, du totalitarisme en Chine, en Corée. Toutefois, l’anarchisme reste présent dans le syndicalisme, notamment lors des grèves de 1956 au Chili et en Argentine, dans la création de nouvelles fédérations comme en Uruguay ou bien dans des mouvements de guérilla en Chine et en Espagne. C’est surtout à partir de 1968 que l’anarchisme va connaître un renouveau avec les mouvements sociaux qui secouent de nombreux pays : France, États-Unis, Sénégal, Allemagne, Japon, Mexique… En Amérique latine, les anarchistes s’opposent aux dictatures, au Chili, puis en Argentine, mais sont écrasés par la répression. Au Moyen-Orient de nouveaux mouvements apparaissent, en Irak, en Iran. Certains mouvements dans l’hémisphère nord s’orientent vers une lutte plus violente : sabotages en Grande-Bretagne, premiers membres d’Action directe en France, mouvement du 2 juin en Allemagne, groupes révolutionnaires au Pays Basque… mais qui, pour la plupart, se perdront dans un terrorisme déconnecté des thèses anarchistes. Par ailleurs, on assiste à une prolifération d’organisations anarchistes à travers le monde, notamment dans les pays de l’Est et en Russie.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">8</span>La cinquième vague commence en 1990 et se poursuit aujourd’hui. Elle est portée par l’effondrement du bloc soviétique, de la Yougoslavie. Les mouvements anarchistes souterrains peuvent donc se constituer en fédérations. La fédération la plus importante dans le monde aujourd’hui étant Action autonome qui possède des sections dans de nombreuses villes de Russie, d’Arménie, au Bélarus, en Ukraine… Des mouvements se développent à nouveau depuis les années 2000 à Cuba, en Amérique du Sud, en Afrique, aux États-Unis, au Canada. Par ailleurs, l’anarcho-syndicalisme reste présent, ainsi la CGT espagnole compte 60 000 adhérents.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">9</span>Autre intérêt du livre, Michael Schmidt met en relation chaque vague à l’évolution de la théorie et de la stratégie anarchistes. Ainsi, dans la première vague, c’est le programme de Bakounine qui domine, avec le rejet de toute solution étatiste, le rôle d’intermédiaire de l’organisation révolutionnaire anarchiste. Dans la seconde vague, les exilés russes à Paris (dont Makhno) publient <em>La Plate-Forme</em>, qui préconise une discipline interne stricte et une unité théorique et tactique au sein des différentes organisations anarchistes et le projet d’une société révolutionnaire fondée sur les soviets. Les anarchistes traditionnels s’opposeront à cette orientation en accusant les plate-formistes de bolcheviser l’anarchisme, et proposeront <em>la synthèse anarchiste</em>, avec une idéologie plus souple, d’où le nom de synthétistes. Lors de la troisième vague, en Espagne, les durrutistes publient un document stratégique prônant la création d’une junte (un soviet) révolutionnaire, et sont également accusés d’autoritarisme. Dans la plupart des pays, la plate-forme reste dominante. Lors de la quatrième vague se développe le fontenisme (de Georges Fontenis, militant français) à la suite de la publication du <em>Manifeste du communisme libertaire</em>. Ce manifeste s’oppose aussi bien à l’extrémisme individualiste qu’au bolchevisme, et prône la constitution d’une avant-garde implantée au sein des syndicats et autres organisations de masse. Enfin, lors de la cinquième vague, les plate-formistes s’imposent dans un mouvement anarchiste en pleine croissance, et notamment en Amérique du Sud où la <em>Plate-Forme</em> est connue sous le nom d’<em>especifismo</em>.</div>
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<span class="paranumber">10</span>Le livre de Michael Schmidt est un ouvrage militant, écrit par un militant anarchiste. La conclusion est de ce point de vue explicite et appelle à la lutte quotidienne. Il ne s’agit donc pas d’une présentation historique objective des mouvements anarchistes. Mais ce n’était pas le propos revendiqué de l’auteur. On y trouvera toutefois des informations intéressantes sur des mouvements et des organisations oubliées, ou en tout cas, trop peu étudiées par les historiens ou les anarchistes eux-mêmes.</div>
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<a class="FootnoteSymbol" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#bodyftn1" id="ftn1">1</a> Irène Pereira, L'anarchisme dans les textes. Anthologie libertaire, Textuel, coll. « Petite encyclopédie critique », 2011. <a href="http://lectures.revues.org/1314">http://lectures.revues.org/1314</a></div>
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<a class="FootnoteSymbol" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#bodyftn2" id="ftn2">2</a> AK Press, Oakland, 2009.</div>
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<a class="FootnoteSymbol" href="http://lectures.revues.org/9806#bodyftn3" id="ftn3">3</a> « L’anarchisme classiste, parfois appelé révolutionnaire ou anarchisme communiste, n’est pas un simple type d’anarchisme… c’est le seul anarchisme. »</div>
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<span class="text">Pour citer cet article</span></h2>
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Référence électronique</h3>
<strong>Jacques <span class="familyName">Ghiloni</span></strong>, « Michael Schmidt, <em>Cartographie de l'anarchisme révolutionnaire</em> », <em>Lectures</em> [En ligne], Les comptes rendus</div>
Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-86163093425664025102014-04-23T05:29:00.001-07:002014-04-23T05:31:03.471-07:00<h1 class="entry-title">
Global Fire – South African author Michael Schmidt on the Global Impact of Revolutionary Anarchism</h1>
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<span class="sep">Posted on </span><a href="http://www.anarchistaffinity.org/2014/03/global-fire-south-african-author-michael-schmidt-on-the-global-impact-of-revolutionary-anarchism/" rel="bookmark" title="9:00 PM"><time class="entry-date updated" datetime="2014-03-17T21:00:41+00:00" pubdate="">17 March 2014</time></a><span class="by-author"> <span class="sep"> by </span> <span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="http://www.anarchistaffinity.org/author/anarchist-affinity/" rel="author" title="View all posts by Anarchist Affinity">Anarchist Affinity</a></span></span><span class="sep sep-comment"> — </span><span class="comments-link"><a href="http://www.anarchistaffinity.org/2014/03/global-fire-south-african-author-michael-schmidt-on-the-global-impact-of-revolutionary-anarchism/#respond" title="Comment on Global Fire – South African author Michael Schmidt on the Global Impact of Revolutionary Anarchism">No Comments ↓</a></span></div>
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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 />
<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 />
<strong>In your recent book, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism (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 />
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 />
The results of the historically-revealed universalism are vitally important to any holistic understanding of anarchism/syndicalism: <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 />
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 />
<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 />
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 />
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 />
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 />
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 />
<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 />
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. 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 />
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 />
It is the question of responsibility that compels us to nail our colours to the mast. This is for three reasons: <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 />
<strong>We’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of Counter Power Volume 2, Global Fire: 150 Fighting Years of Revolutionary Anarchism, is there any news on when it will be released? What ground will you be covering that people might not expect?</strong><br />
Global Fire 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. 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.</div>
Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-33244871275411584072014-02-17T03:15:00.002-08:002014-02-17T03:15:46.485-08:00<h1 class="article-title">
Anarchism's Global Proletarian Praxis</h1>
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<span class="article-details"><span class="article-detail"><img alt="category" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/star.gif" /><a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/international">international</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/historyofanarchism">history of anarchism</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/opinionanalysis">opinion / analysis</a></span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/date.gif" /> Friday March 09, 2012 21:14</span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/person.gif" /> by Michael Schmidt - ex-ZACF</span></span><a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/report_posts?subject=Reported Post: Story 22206 with title: Anarchism's Global Proletarian Praxis&message=Reported Post: Story 22206 with title: Anarchism's Global Proletarian Praxis%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.anarkismo.net%2Findex.php%3Fobj_id%3D53%26story_id%3D22206%26%0A%0AEnter+your+reason+here+-+please+do+not+remove+the+above+link+as+it+will+allow+an+editor+to+easily+remove+the+offending+content"><img alt="Report this post to the editors" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/report.gif" title="Report this post to the editors" /></a></div>
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This is the text of a talk given by Michael Schmidt, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of the book Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (AK Press, USA, 2009), at the DIRA bookstore in Montréal, Canada, on 18 March 2010, as part of his Black Flame tour of Canada. Thanks to Aaron Lakoff of Lux Éditeur, Montréal, for the transcription.</blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="attachment9458"></a><img alt="Korean Anarchist Federation militants with some Chinese comrades, 1929. The KAF established the Manchurian Revolution of 1929-1931, then fought in the anti-Japanese resistance until 1945." class="summary-image" height="209" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/mar2012/kaf__chinese_1928.jpg" title="Click on image to see full-sized version" width="320" /><br />Korean Anarchist Federation militants with some Chinese comrades, 1929. The KAF established the Manchurian Revolution of 1929-1931, then fought in the anti-Japanese resistance until 1945.</div>
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Anarchism's Global Proletarian Praxis</h1>
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<br /><i>This is the text of a talk given by Michael Schmidt, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of the book Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (AK Press, USA, 2009), at the DIRA bookstore in Montréal, Canada, on 18 March 2010, as part of his Black Flame tour of Canada. Thanks to Marie-Eve Lamy of Lux Éditeur, Montréal, for the transcription.</i><br />
<br />Thank you so much, especially to UCL [Union Comuniste Libertaire], 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 South Africa 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 will 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.<br /><br />The book [Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, 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 Western Europe and portions of North America. <br /><br />There is a bogus theory, but very current amongst academics and even militants, of “Spanish exceptionalism,” that is, that it was only in Spain 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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. So today it is two volumes [Black Flame is the first, and the forthcoming volume is Global Fire]. 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 was, because there is a heck of a lot of confusion on this topic. <br /><br />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 Spain in 1939.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.]<br /><br />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 Rome, 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. 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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />In this world, there was the consolidation of financial capital, and this massive push into Africa and Asia by the imperialist powers. Imperial wars were being fought (and this sounds familiar) in the Middle-East and Central Asia. 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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 Cairo, in Cuba, in Peru, in Argentina, and in China. The reason for this is the same as the reason why we had the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa: 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. <br /><br />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 Brazil 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.<br /><br />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 saying “What happens when 800 million Asiatics wake up from their sleep?” <br /><br />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 now where you need to start fighting back. That doesn't mean that revolution is going to happen on Tuesday, starting at 9pm sharp. We all know that revolutions require a massive confluence of historical circumstances.<br /><br />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 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.<br /><br />It's probably unknown that there was a syndicalist survival in Southern Rhodesia, what is now Zimbabwe, up into the 1950s. That [pictured in Bulawayo, 1930] is Masotsha Ndhlovu, who in the 1930s was the leader of the Industrial and Commercial Union of Rhodesia. This union had suffered defeat in South Africa in the 1920s, but in what became Zimbabwe, it continued into the 1950s. It had been founded roughly on IWW [Industrial 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.<br /><br />The Korean movement [pictured: members of the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria, 1929] is generated primarily by the invasion of Japan in 1910. This generates a whole range of different responses, including syndicalist trade unions in port cities like Wonsan. 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 Shinmin Prefecture. <br /><br />And in Shinmin, during the period of 1929 to 1931, 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. <br /><br />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 Europe was quite a breaking point. But in the Far East 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. <br /><br />Johannesburg, my hometown [pictured: Industrial Workers of Africa strike, Johannesburg, 1918]. The Industrial Workers of Africa: established in 1917 on IWW lines – very explicitly industrial, revolutionary trade union lines. What happened in South Africa is that the IWW had gone in there and established itself in 1910 in an environment that was kind of similar to Canada 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? <br /><br />The IWW came in with an entirely different program that was anti-racist. They organised on the trams in Johannesburg, and railways in Pretoria, and in the port city of Durban. 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 highveld [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. <br /><br />And just to show that we're not all talking about history, [pictured: poster of the Spanish Confederación General del Trabajo, 1999]. 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. <br /><br />Osugi Sakae, [pictured with Ito Noe and the editors of Rodo Undo, Tokyo, 1921]. The 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. 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.<br /><br />Shin Ch’aeho, [pictured] a leading Korean anarchist theorist. His Korean Revolution Manifesto 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.<br /><br />Lala Har Dayal [pictured], the primary Indian revolutionary of his age. 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 San Francisco. He became the secretary of the San Francisco 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. <br /><br />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 India itself, in Punjab and Hindustan, and launch an armed uprising in 1915. What is interesting is the social base of the Ghadar Party in India 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 British Empire, but we've been treated like second class citizens in our own country!” <br /><br />The last traces of this movement that we've managed to discover (and of course, the records are not entirely complete) are in East Africa [in the 1940s] and in Afghanistan in 1938. 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 India, 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?<br /><br />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 Barcelona 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. 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!” <br /><br />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. 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 Ibañez, 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 Latin America, 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 my generation, or maybe the people slightly before me who were defeated, and we've forgotten our own history.<br /><br />Mikhail Gerdzhikov [pictured], Bulgaria. He becomes one of the leading lights in the Bulgarian Anarchist-Communist Federation, established in 1919. 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 Bulgaria 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. <br /><br />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 Turks in the 1903 Macedonian Uprising. A huge section of the Bulgarian anarchist movement basically learned how to fight by fighting on behalf of someone else's freedom in 1903 [this is principled internationalist anti-imperialism, from below!]. About 60 of these Bulgarian anarchists lost their lives in Macedonia – 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. <br /><br />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. 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.<br /><br />Moving a little bit forward in time, the late Wilstar Choongo [pictured at left with members of the Socialist Caucus, Lusaka, 1998], who I befriended a little while ago, in Zambia. These movements are often, particularly in my part of the world in Africa, ephemeral. They rise up, and then they die. Very difficult circumstances in Africa, 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. <br /><br />When you take a look at Argentina, 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 anarchist trade union federations. The debate within the organised labour movement is a tactical and strategic debate between anarchists – in rather significant numbers; mass organisations built across race lines, and certainly across gender lines, at a time of incredible duress. <br /><br />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 Vespa. 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. <br /><br />Kanno Sugako [pictured] in Japan. There were lots of manufactured plots against the Emperor but she really was 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. <br /><br />Juana Rouco Buela of Argentina, and Virginia Bolten of Uruguay – they set up probably one of the earliest feminist journals in the world in Argentina. They get quite a bit of flack originally from the men. The men say “You're dividing the movement!”. 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 Latin America, as far up as Mexico. She preached rationalist education – reason against an education system [dominated by the Catholic Church] that taught mysticism and respect for one's abusers. <br /><br />Petronilla Infantes [pictured, third from the left in front, with the Sindicato de Culinaria, La Paz, 1935]. Here's a young woman heading up the [anarcho-syndicalist] culinary workers’ syndicate in Bolivia in 1935. She becomes the leading labour leader in Bolivia right into the 1950s. If you go into the streets in Bolivia right until today, they will know her name. And we can go on. We can look at Luisa Capetillo in Puerto Rico, who dared to wear pants. And boy did she ever wear them! She led the trade union movement in Puerto Rico. We can look at Maroussia Nikiforova leading the Makhnovist detachments fighting the White armies in the Ukraine during the Ukrainian Revolution, eventually being executed in 1919 in Sevastopol. The list goes on and on.<br /><br />There was Spain [pictured: CNT-FAI collectivised tram, Barcelona, 1936], which wasn't exactly all that insignificant, but really in context, proportionately, by head of population, the anarchist movement in nearby Portugal was much more powerful than in Spain. It was much more integrated into daily life generally across the country than in Spain, where it was more located in certain regions, such as Catalonia. 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.<br /><br />Mexico in '68, [pictured: mass demonstration shortly before the Ttatelolco Massacre, Mexico City, 1968] 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. This massacre occurred just prior to the World Cup in Mexico in 1968. And what the student leaders were asking, many, many decades after the Mexican Revolution, was “Was the anarchist revolutionary leader Ricardo Flores Magón 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.<br /><br />Our own small little effort [pictured: the anarchist-founded Phambili Motsoaledi Community Library, Soweto, 2005]. We're part of a much bigger story, and South Africa 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. And this is what we can do to walk alongside them and help them 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. <br /><br />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 working-class 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. <br /><br />That is our biggest challenge. That 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.<br /><br /><b>Michael Schmidt</b><br /><br /> <br />
<div class="article-related-link-relatedlink">
Related Link: <a href="http://black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com/" title="http://black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com">http://black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="attachment9459"></a><img alt="Indian revolutionary anarchist Lala Har Dayal of the Ghadar Party, which staged an uprising against Britain in 1915, survived in Afghanistan into at least 1938 and East Africa into the 1940s." class="standard-image" height="200" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/mar2012/lala_har_dayal.jpg" title="Click on image to see full-sized version" width="140" /><br />Indian revolutionary anarchist Lala Har Dayal of the Ghadar Party, which staged an uprising against Britain in 1915, survived in Afghanistan into at least 1938 and East Africa into the 1940s.</div>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="attachment9460"></a><img alt="Masotsha Ndhlovu, general secretary of the Marcus Garveyite/quasi-syndicalist Industrial and Commercial Union in Rhodesia, 1930. The ICU-R lasted into the 1950s." class="standard-image" height="200" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/mar2012/masotsha_ndhlovu_icu_yase_rhodesia_bulawayo_in_1930.jpg" title="Click on image to see full-sized version" width="176" /><br />Masotsha Ndhlovu, general secretary of the Marcus Garveyite/quasi-syndicalist Industrial and Commercial Union in Rhodesia, 1930. The ICU-R lasted into the 1950s.</div>
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Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-32584681520735390472014-02-17T03:13:00.001-08:002014-02-17T03:13:25.376-08:00<h1 class="article-title">
Africa's Purchase of the French Presidency</h1>
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<span class="article-details"><span class="article-detail"><img alt="category" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/star.gif" /><a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/westafrica">west africa</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/imperialismwar">imperialism / war</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/opinionanalysis">opinion / analysis</a></span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/date.gif" /> Friday April 20, 2012 17:55</span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/person.gif" /> by Michael Schmidt - ex-ZACF</span></span><a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/report_posts?subject=Reported Post: Story 22573 with title: Africa's Purchase of the French Presidency&message=Reported Post: Story 22573 with title: Africa's Purchase of the French Presidency%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.anarkismo.net%2Findex.php%3Fobj_id%3D53%26story_id%3D22573%26%0A%0AEnter+your+reason+here+-+please+do+not+remove+the+above+link+as+it+will+allow+an+editor+to+easily+remove+the+offending+content"><img alt="Report this post to the editors" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/report.gif" title="Report this post to the editors" /></a></div>
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<blockquote class="article-intro">
The first round of French presidential elections will take place on 22 April. Socialist candidate François Hollande is expected to have the edge on incumbent Gaullist President Nicolas Sarkozy, but will likely not earn a majority, which would then set the scene for a run-off in May. But behind the scenes, few French voters are aware of the half-century-long secret system of la valise, “the suitcase” system whereby African dictators send millions of francs to corrupt the European political process - by literally buying the French Presidency. [<a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/article/22601">Français</a>]</blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="attachment9768"></a><a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/apr2012/la_valise.jpg"><img alt="la_valise.jpg" class="summary-image" height="595" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/cache/imagecache/local/attachments/apr2012/460_0___30_0_0_0_0_0_la_valise.jpg" title="Click on image to see full-sized version" width="460" /></a><br /></div>
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<h3>
Introduction<br /></h3>
We have seen several curious reversals of the usual pecking order in world affairs regarding Africa’s status of late, not least of which have been the spectacle of Portugal begging for aid from its former colony Angola, and of European citizens relocating back to their former colonies, fleeing economic crisis in Europe for poorly-paid jobs in the African hinterland (1).<br /><br />But there is a longer-lived and more secret relationship between Africa and Europe that overturns the conventional view of African presidents being corrupted by European aid-with-strings-attached; this is the phenomenon of la valise, “the suitcase” system of millions of francs sent over decades by African dictators to corrupt the European political process. <br /><br />The first round of French presidential elections will take place on 22 April. Socialist candidate François Hollande is expected to have the edge on incumbent Gaullist President Nicolas Sarkozy, but will likely not earn a majority, which would then set the scene for a run-off in May. Seeing as how language differences divide common understanding between Francophone Africa and Anglophone Africa, the two largest colonial-language blocs, it is worth us here in the English-speaking part of the continent to examine this phenomenon so entrenched in Francophone African affairs – and now apparently spreading. The Center for French and Francophone Studies at Duke University in North Carolina hosted a debate on la valise on 5 October 2011 called “The Colonies Pay Back: Culture and Corruption in Franco-African Relations,” and this article comprises extracts from that debate.<br /><br />
<h3>
Post-Colonial France, the “Suitcase Republic”<br /></h3>
Philippe Bernard, the outgoing Le Monde correspondent for Africa, initiated the debate by noting that Robert Bourgi (2), Sarkozy’s unofficial advisor, had in September 2011 accused former socialist President Jacques Chirac and his Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, who were in power from 1995-2007, of having received enormous bribes in the form of suitcases stuffed with cash, from five West and Central African states – the Congo, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ivory Coast, and Gabon – to fund Chirac’s campaign. In a later interview with Canal+, Bourgi claimed that the 1988 campaign of far-right candidate Jean-Marie le Pen of the National Front, had also been partly funded by the valise. Chirac and de Villepin have denied Bourgi’s claims.<br /><br />According to the Telegraph’s retelling of the tale (3), Bourgi claimed in an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche that he had personally “transported ‘tens of millions of francs’ each year, with the amounts going up in the run-up to French presidential elections – an intimation the cash was used to fund Mr Chirac's political campaigns. ‘I saw Chirac and Villepin count the money in front of me,’ he said. He alleged he regularly passed on bank notes from five African presidents: Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal [in power 2000-2012]; Blaise Campaoré of Burkina Faso [1987-today]; Laurent Gbagbo of Ivory Coast [2000-2011]; Denis Sassou Nguesso of the Congo [1997-today] and Omar Bongo of Gabon [1967-2009], whom Mr Bourgi called ‘Papa’. Together, he alleged they contributed £6.2-million to Mr Chirac's successful 2002 presidential campaign. A sixth leader, President Obiang N’Guema of Equatorial Guinea [1979-today] allegedly was the last member to join the cash donor club,” until, Bourgi claimed, a nervous de Villepin brought the system to a halt in 2005. Bourgi claimed he had personally run the valise system for 25 years and in exchange, the African dictators were granted huge reductions in their debt to France once their sponsored candidate attained office in the Elysée.<br /><br />Bernard said he believed the system had arisen out of the notion of “France-Afrique, the confusion of French and African interests. It has been a public secret since [African] liberation in the 1960s: in 1960/61, deals were signed that France will use its power to defend the [African] regimes and France will have exclusive access to African raw materials and the right of France to intervene militarily in case of threats to African national security. In the 1980s, the Gaullists [then in opposition against François Mitterand’s Socialist government] were similarly accused – that a percentage of Gabonese oil revenues were allegedly used to finance their campaigns – but proof and public testimony was lacking.”<br /><br />Professor Stephen Smith, former Africa editor of Libération, and Bernard’s predecessor at Le Monde, recalled rumours that “money smuggled in by Africans to the French Prime Minister’s office in djembe drums. The office has no air-conditioning, so the thought of him standing there with his sleeves rolled up counting it all is amusing.” On a serious note, however, Smith recalled that in 1971, at the very start of a reign that only ended in 1993, it was said that the first President of Ivory Coast, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, had donated “bags of money” to the conservative Georges Pompidou government. There was, Smith said, “a long contuinuity of the practice from the Gaullists [Charles de Gaulle was in power 1959-1969] to [the rightist Republican Valéry] Giscard d’Estaing [1974-1981], a continuity of conservative governments,” who had been propped up by la valise: “This amounts to a post-colonial ‘informal state,’ not on paper, but in practice.” <br /><br />Remember that this period – the Fifth French Republic – was brought into being in 1958 by the crisis in France precipitated by the Algerian Liberation War. So we have half a century of African dictators, installed and propped up by French military power, who in turn propped up with African oil and other revenue, a string of conservative sister regimes in France – although Smith said that the valise system in the six countries also worked via French companies working in parallel in the former colonies: one paid the French conservative Gaullists; the other paid the French socialists and communists. Given France’s strategic position within Europe, its influence only matched by Germany and Britain, anyone able to buy the French Presidency in effect purchases huge influence in Europe itself – so progressive politics on both continents appear to have been bedeviled by these secret transactions.<br /><br />Smith said that his first newspaper scoop on the secret practice regarding the shadowy character of Bourgi, was in 1995 for Libération when he wrote about the unprocedural write-off of Zaïrean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s debts: Mobutu “raised his little staff and I was afraid he would hit me! Robert Bourgi earned €600,000 from Mobuto to put out the fire – and he earned €1-million to stop a book that I was writing.”<br /><br />Bourgi’s “accounting is pristine; he deals only in cash, so there is little to prove.” The bribe money was later deposited in South African or Lebanese bank accounts, Smith claimed. The reach of Bourgi’s unofficial power was considerable: Smith claimed that when Sarkozy wanted a rare photo-opportunity with South Africa’s now-reclusive and elderly Nelson Mandela, Bourgi simply phoned up “Papa,” Gabonese President Omar Bongo, who persuaded the old man to agree to fly to Paris for the meeting in 2007.<br /><br />
<h3>
The Suitcase System Expands<br /></h3>
Prof Achille Membe, a specialist in post-colonial Africa, responded that the valise system was one of “mutual corruption” that has “shackled France and Africa for decades”: “The relationship is not only corrupt in terms of money… It’s a deeper form of cultural corruption that has emasculated somewhat African civil societies. In terms of the future, France still has military bases in Africa and can kick out a Gbagbo. But when France has to pay a heavy price [for intervention], it will think twice.”<br /><br />Bernard said that as France’s grip on the African continent started to be eclipsed militarily by the USA in particular (4), in terms of the Francophone African CFA currency which is linked to the embattled Euro, in terms of French companies losing their exclusive relationships with African regimes as the International Monetary Fund took the reins in many countries and as Chinese, Brazilian and Indian investment poured into the continent, Sarkozy wanted the “network of go-betweens” such as Bourgi, who had “operated as a parallel diplomat,” to end.<br /><br />Smith agreed that France now made more money from its relations with Anglophone Africa – South Africa and Kenya in particular – than it did from its former colonies, but warned that “now you’ve got a multiplication of the French exceptionalist models: China’s Africa relationship is as corrupt as the French; the French preserve and privilege has now become globalised.” Membe added that in his view, the waning of the French star in Africa – despite French remaining a dominant African language, and despite the existence of an African Diaspora literati in France – was that France itself “has entered a process of re-provincialising,” of monocultural conservatism and retreat from world affairs.<br /><br />Membe said that “Robert Bourgi’s ‘revelations’ weren’t revelations in Africa. In Francophone Africa, this hasn’t been perceived as a scandal” because the prevailing cynicism about Franco-African relations was underscored by a long-term trend of the decline of the importance of France to its former colonies: “Geography is no longer centred on Paris… Robert Bourgi and others are the last spasms of a dead proposition, something that is on its knees, no longer historical but anecdotal… France will become a parenthesis.”<br /><br />But it is very far from clear whether the valise system has indeed come to an end and lost its ability to shape African history. Smith said that Sarkozy’s own reputation was in doubt as he had written off 40% of the debts of Congo and of Gabon – whereas Chirac had capped the write-offs at only 8%, so suspected payments to Sarkozy would have been “a good investment by African leaders.” If Sarkozy is also involved, then Bourgi’s end-game in speaking out about the valise system after 25 years – and claiming it ended with Chirac – is clearly not aimed at tarnishing Chirac, who is a dying man and a spent political force, but rather to threaten Sarkozy while he is still President, forcing him to allow Bourgi to retire smoothly, without fear of prosecution, aged 67, to his newly-purchased mansion in Corsica.<br /><br />Smith said the roots of the system lay in the fact that “when Europeans came to Africa, they ‘unbuttoned’ themselves,” initiating the corrupt relationship. But it takes two to tango, so what of the agency of African leaders themselves? “If I was an African leader today,” Smith admitted, “I’d still ‘invest’ in France because the United Nations, IMF etc will turn to France when they need assistance in Africa – despite it having lost leverage as a one-stop centre – so African leaders’ choices will still count.”<br /><br />It is clear the suitcase system will continue, although likely spreading to include several newly invested powers – the USA, China, Brazil, India and South Africa – and ironically, with continental growth at 5.5%, peripheral Africa’s ability to influence and corrupt political affairs in the metropole may well even increase.<br /><br />
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<h4>
FOOTNOTES:<br /></h4>
1) An example these tales of return is at www.nytimes.com/2010/07/14/business/global/14angolabiz.html <br />2) Born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1945 to a French Lebanese family, Bourgi was admitted at the Paris Bar as a lawyer. A former adviser to Chirac and de Villepin, Sarkozy awarded him the Legion d’honneur in 2007.<br />3) www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8756097/Jacques-Chirac-regularly-received-cash-from-African-leaders.html <br />4) In the 1960s, there were 20,000 French soldiers stationed in Africa, now there are less than 5,000 – although their technical capacity today is far greater. However, in Mali, which has just experienced a coup d’etat, there is a significant American military presence, whereas the French have indicated they will not intervene as was their practice in the past; Sarkozy had reopened the mothballed French military base in Ivory Coast, but France’s 2011 intervention in Ivory Coast only occurred under United Nations mandate. </div>
Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-71358640563586055992014-02-17T03:12:00.001-08:002014-02-17T03:12:08.810-08:00<h1 class="article-title">
The Wallpaper War: the United States a decade after 9/11</h1>
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<span class="article-details"><span class="article-detail"><img alt="category" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/star.gif" /><a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/international">international</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/imperialismwar">imperialism / war</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/feature">feature</a></span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/date.gif" /> Thursday June 14, 2012 19:10</span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/person.gif" /> by Michael Schmidt - ex-ZACF</span></span><a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/report_posts?subject=Reported Post: Story 23123 with title: The Wallpaper War: the United States a decade after 9/11&message=Reported Post: Story 23123 with title: The Wallpaper War: the United States a decade after 9/11%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.anarkismo.net%2Findex.php%3Fobj_id%3D53%26story_id%3D23123%26%0A%0AEnter+your+reason+here+-+please+do+not+remove+the+above+link+as+it+will+allow+an+editor+to+easily+remove+the+offending+content"><img alt="Report this post to the editors" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/report.gif" title="Report this post to the editors" /></a></div>
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The United States a Decade After 9/11</div>
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Uncle Sam gets stuck in</div>
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As the US enters yet another election cycle (though it is hard to say whether the US is ever not in election mode these days), it is worth interrogating the current state of the world’s unipolar hyperpower – and of the foreign policy, red in tooth and claw, that affects us all.</h3>
The first thing that is important to recognise about the foreign policy of the United States of America is that it has a very specific history, or rather a national mythology that distinguishes it from other countries by the explicit nature of its revolutionary aims. The Revolutionary War established a unique republican state in the West, a reflection in part of the values of the French Revolution, but, isolated by the vast Atlantic, destined to pursue a path of its own. It is thus useful to consider the US state as an explicitly revolutionary state (albeit institutionalised in the Mexican sense of the word), with a national mythology which endows it with a sense of mission in the world. Comparable, though very different, states with expansionist missions driven by revolutionary myths would include Revolutionary France, the Soviet Union until its collapse, Nazi Germany, and post-apartheid South Africa today, with a ruling party explicitly dedicated to a “National Democratic Revolution”. The foreign policy and thus warmaking of Britain and the Netherlands, in contrast, despite having possessed globe-spanning pre-war empires, were never guided by anything similar to such political myths. <br />
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<h1>
The Wallpaper War</h1>
<h2>
The United States a Decade After 9/11</h2>
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<h3>
Introduction: A Dispatch from the Hyperpower</h3>
As the US enters yet another election cycle (though it is hard to say whether the US is ever not in election mode these days), it is worth interrogating the current state of the world’s unipolar hyperpower – and of the foreign policy, red in tooth and claw, that affects us all.<br /><br />I arrived in the USA on the eve of the 10th Anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, spent just over a month there, and left just after visiting the Occupy Wall Street sit-in on Columbus Day. Book-ended by these two great, emotive American commemorations, my visit to the US was the first I had made there in 27 years and I was very curious to see how things had changed since the Wild West heyday of Reaganomics.<br /><br />Visiting as a teenager, albeit one from the side aligned with the West against the Soviet Bloc, I had been overwhelmed by the brash displays of American consumerism. I was, after all, visiting from the grey, razorwire-snarled frontlines, from a place not dissimilar, strangely enough, to East Germany (with their granite faces, black Hombergs and black suits with red lapel carnations, there was little visible or visceral difference between Erich Honecker and PW Botha). Accustomed to austerity, I was offended by Western waste, and by the hollow ostentation of what we would now call the “bling”.<br /><br />But the Wall had long fallen and the world and I had changed unalterably. Born into war – the 1961 formation of the ANC’s armed wing having preceded my birth by five years – and having expected peace with the end of that misnamed “Cold War” in which South African conscripts like myself had fought a hot war, partly a US proxy war, against Cuban, East German and Soviet-supplied armor in Angola, I had hoped the fall of apartheid and of the bipolar superpower world of which it was a relic to bring peace.<br /><br />But the world of 2011 was a world of permanent warfare – and the USA was the prime progenitor, in thrall to the ascendancy of what had once been accurately identified by warmongering US President Lyndon B Johnson as “the military-industrial complex,” a useful shorthand for the agglomeration of corporations based on the oil and defence industries which often drive US foreign policy in a protectionist and sabre-rattling fashion.<br /><br />As the days passed into weeks, I was impressed by the repeated references in the domestic media to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and to ongoing terrorism trials – references which, apart from a lone notice of the combat death in Helmand of a 22-year-old Marine from Asheville, in the mountains of North Carolina, seemed remote from the apparent calm of everyday American life, a wallpaper war that served as a frequently-referenced, but never quite real backdrop to daily dramas.<br /><br />That calm proved deceptive, as demonstrated in particular by the internal wars being fought over cultural issues such as the profiling of Muslim Americans as automatic terrorist threats, President Barack Obama’s reversal of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy on gays in the military, and Alabama’s harsh new law on undocumented immigrants. This article will interrogate that dynamic tension, between a country perpetually at war abroad – and a voting populace at home who enable that warmaking in a context in which they are largely untouched by its effects.<br />
<h3>
The Ghosts of Wars Past</h3>
The first thing that is important to recognise about the foreign policy of the United States of America is that it has a very specific history, or rather a national mythology that distinguishes it from other countries by the explicit nature of its revolutionary aims. The Revolutionary War established a unique republican state in the West, a reflection in part of the values of the French Revolution, but, isolated by the vast Atlantic, destined to pursue a path of its own. It is thus useful to consider the US state as an explicitly revolutionary state (albeit institutionalised in the Mexican sense of the word), with a national mythology which endows it with a sense of mission in the world. Comparable, though very different, states with expansionist missions driven by revolutionary myths would include Revolutionary France, the Soviet Union until its collapse, Nazi Germany, and post-apartheid South Africa today, with a ruling party explicitly dedicated to a “National Democratic Revolution”. The foreign policy and thus warmaking of Britain and the Netherlands, in contrast, despite having possessed globe-spanning pre-war empires, were never guided by anything similar to such political myths.<br /><br />And because the US national institutional-revolutionary myth is rooted in an armed defence of its version of democratic values, its missionary zeal comes armed; in colonial times this would have meant Bible and black-powder; but now it involves Hollywood/Madison Avenue and US Air Force/CIA-operated Reaper hunter-killer drones. Despite its institutional-revolutionary sense of mission, my term describes the USA at the federal, collective level, and it is important to recognise that there remain significant, deep, historically-rooted regional differences between blocs of individual States – and not merely between the Old North and Old South, or between the East Coast and West Coast (1). <br /><br />Wherever one goes in the US, one finds evocations of the ghosts of wars past. There are innumerable Revolutionary War statues of alert musket-toting Minutemen, and unashamed tributes in the Southern States to the Confederate Army (the chapel at Duke University in North Carolina has statues of Confederate generals guarding its portico (2)). Less in evidence, unless one looks at the US Marine Corps Museum in Washington DC, are remembrances of American armed interventions in half of the developing world, though a current USMC recruiting pamphlet that I found on the Duke campus boasts: “More than two centuries of winning battles”.<br /><br />But ubiquitous in the form of public memorials, is World War II which for the Baby-Boomer generation of US presidents prior to Obama was the revolutionary myth updated for the modern era: the shining democratic torch putting evil Nazism to flame and banishing it from the world stage. <br /><br />The National World War II Museum in New Orleans is an intriguing installation whose curators are clearly trying to grapple honestly with an uncomfortable set of facts. In attempting to redress the imbalances of the past, displays examine the anti-Japanese racism of the US military alongside Japanese anti-Americanism, and sombrely examine the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – but stop short of describing these latter as the actual crimes against humanity they were, for it is, I assume, considered morally impossible for an institutional-revolutionary democracy to admit to having committed genocide.<br /><br />Vietnam is of course the other war that is indelibly imprinted on the modern American conscience, though for very different reasons: there, the enemy was evil Communism, but the torch of democracy sputtered and died in Saigon, a failure that continues to define the Left and haunt the Right. A 10 October New York Times op-ed piece called Vietnam a ghost that dogged Obama’s war policy; meanwhile the “Wall of Healing” Vietnam Memorial – a mobile miniature of the long black marble wall inscribed with names of the dead at The Mall in Washington – travelled the country, affording far-flung veterans the opportunity to mourn their lost youth. <br />
<h3>
The Globalisation of War Today</h3>
Any commentator on American affairs worth their salt has noted the echoes in the American psyche of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in the 2001 “9/11” attacks in New York City and Washington: both were rare, massive attacks on US soil that shook a complacent, inward-looking populace to its core and forced them to re-examine the world outside. Conspiracy theorists claim that Pearl Harbour’s “day that will live in infamy” had in fact not proven so long-lived, had faded in the public mind, and that a cynical cabal within the military-industrial complex orchestrated 9/11 as a pro-war motivational spectacular. I’m not going to pronounce on that – aside from noting that the abysmal pseudo-documentary Zeitgeist, so beloved of the Left, in fact clearly originates with the paranoid American Right. What is true, however, is that the direct effect of 9/11 was to breathe new life into the American institutional-revolutionary mission abroad.<br /><br />Recognisable chunks of the aircraft engines and landing gear debris from 9/11 are displayed in shafts of light as holy relics at the Newseum in Washington, the centerpiece of a sort of stations-of-the-cross hagiography of the FBI’s role in American internal affairs. That very day, the nation’s front-page news in just about every newspaper celebrated the killing by Reaper drone of alleged Al-Qaeda leader in Yemen, Abu Ali Al-Harithi. The socio-political aftermath of 9/11 was ever-present.<br /><br />I walked to the 9/11 Ground Zero memorial building site in New York City – which is still partly a big construction site, a decade after the event – and took photographs in a local diner of a score of firemen who had lost their lives that day, a reminder of the intimate, emotional drivers behind the Iraqi and Afghan Wars; the widening ripples of the seemingly perpetual “War on Terror”:<br />
<ul>
<li>Pakistan: I visited the US Navy Memorial in Washington which lauds the SEALs whose Team 6 killed Osama bin Laden last year. Interestingly enough, former Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs had admitted at a talk that I attended at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that the SEALs had gone into Pakistan with orders to kill not capture and bring to trial Osama bin Laden, in line with the Nuremburg principles which the US had such a leading role in establishing. This embrace of extrajudicial action is more than adequately demonstrated by the “extraordinary renditions” (kidnapping) of terror suspects to Guantanamo and other detention facilities – and their treatment once there, something that Obama promised and failed to rectify.<br /><br />
<li>Iraq: I listened to former CBS Iraq correspondent turned Associated Press intelligence writer Kimberly Dozier, who was seriously injured in a car-bombing in Baghdad in 2006 which killed her driver and the US serviceman she was travelling with, speak on how investigative journalists in the wake of 9/11 navigate the disinformation minefields laid by intelligence agents. With the very reasons for the Iraq War incontrovertibly shown to be bogus, investigative journalists were increasingly called on to negotiate these minefields on behalf of a public that prefers its information stripped down to near-meaningless sound-bites and tweets.<br /><br />
<li>And back home in America: a visit to the Washington Post was notable for my guide, the Ombudsman, talking about how the newspaper had been forced to adopt a sophisticated mail-handling system to neutralise anthrax, or other attacks by mail; in some respects, the chickens had come home to roost. Later, I visited the colourful yet calm Occupy Wall Street sit-in in New York City on the on the contested anniversary of “Columbus Day”, a foundational part of the American myth, with its prevailing anti-war sentiment, where a former US Marine made a name for himself on television by defending protestors attacked by the police, saying that he had not fought abroad to defend police brutality at home. But the characterisation by so many people I spoke to of the Occupy Movement as “revolutionary” shows how far removed from reality is their understanding of the balance of forces in their own society.</li>
</li>
</li>
</ul>
It is clear to me that Americans, being unaccustomed to protest that does more than merely “speak truth to power,” with their organised working class long since domesticated and integrated into the relative benefits of the system (even though it is largely the poor and working class that forms the bulk of its footsoldiers (3)), have no real notion of how to grasp the nettle of power much beyond the ritual of voting or abstaining. So, despite this marginal domestic dissent, with the “borders” of the US now considered strategically to be located at the frontlines in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Colombia, Jamaica and elsewhere, the war has clearly been successfully globalised by the military-industrial complex. So the question then, was: what was the effect of being perpetually at war with the world mean to the American people themselves?<br />
<h3>
Homegrown Hate</h3>
It would be disingenuous to suggest that America’s threats all originated with foreign devils; after all, the 1995 Oklahoma Bombing was clearly a homegrown affair, committed by outriders of the persistent ultra-Right tendency within the American body politic which on the one hand takes America’s founding documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution with its early Amendments (including the right to bear arms) literally as the word of God, interpreted in a racial-nativist manner, while on the other hand seditiously attempts to strip the American Revolution of its ossified aspects (including federal institutions such as the Federal Reserve Bank), desiring a return to a presumed purer, original Revolution in which the county sheriff is the highest authority, taxation is abolished, and a rugged autonomous individualism prevails (4).<br /><br />In order to understand domestic terrorism, in New Orleans, I listened to Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) intelligence project director Heidi Beirich speak on the demographic and economic drivers behind the rise of domestic hate groups. The SPLC was founded in 1981 and has carved out a niche for itself as a key provider of intelligence on, and interdictor of, hate groups ranging from Neo-Nazis and the Klan, to the Nation of Islam and Radical Traditional Catholics, though two-thirds of them are white-supremacist, with 602 white nationalist groups in 2000, rising to more than 1,000 today.<br /><br />Beirich said there was a “frightening” proliferation of hate groups over the past decade, since 9/11, and especially since Obama’s election: while the FBI claimed about 800 hate crimes were committed each year; the Bureau of Justice Statistics put the figure at 200,000/year.<br /><br />Few hate groups are specifically anti-gay, and yet the reversal of the “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” policy on gays in the military erupted into the mainstream during my visit, with Republican politicians in a TV debate totally ignoring a question posed by an openly gay soldier via video-feed from Afghanistan – despite the fact that he was clearly serving his country on the frontline – while in North Carolina, legislative opposition to gay marriage was the big culture-war issue of the day. And although few hate groups are focused exclusively on the anti-immigration cause, the drastically changed ethnic demography of the US was a clear driver of hate: in 1970, Beirich said, the US population was 83% white; but that figure had dropped to 66% today; and by 2050, the white population was predicted to fall under 50%.<br /><br />Fears of being culturally overwhelmed by assimilation-resistant non-whites lay behind the controversial new immigration law, passed in Alabama while I was there, which made it a criminal offence to be found to be an undocumented immigrant in the state. The law was passed despite the fact that it was targeted at a tiny population of only 130,000 out of 4,7-million Alabama residents. The day it was passed, weird scenes unfolded as scores of immigrant families fled the state, leaving keys to homes with sympathetic neigbours and hungry dogs roaming the streets.<br /><br />A second key driver of hate was the parlous state of the economy after the sub-prime housing boom imploded and the banks responsible were bailed out by the taxpayer victims; this, against a backdrop of longer-term deindustrialisation which has seen factory capacity relocate to under-unionised developing countries, leaving former industrial cities such as Detroit transformed into eerie wastelands, with vacant lots, boarded hotels, looted doctors’ surgeries, vandalised concert halls, and abandoned apartments with food rotting in the fridges (5).<br /><br />And lastly, the election of the first black president – an initially successful attempt by the US oligarchy to divert attention from the bailout of the banks – provoked an ultra-Right backlash that resonated beyond its usual backwoods militia bunkers: grade-schoolers on an Oklahoma bus were reported recently to have chanted “Assassinate Obama!”<br /><br />And yet, Beirich noted, Muslims rather than the domestic ultra-Right have borne the brunt of investigations. An example of this Islamophobia was an instructor at the FBI base at Quantico, Virginia, who told his trainees that if a citizen was Muslim and religious, they were automatically suspect, and that the Qu’ran had come to Mohammed in an epileptic fit; trainees complained, the instructor was removed and all FBI training materials on religion and culture are currently under review. To interrogate this further, I attended debate at Duke on “the Radicalisation of Muslims in America.”<br />
<h3>
Muslims in America</h3>
Setting the scene by saying that the profiling of Muslims was out of proportion to the actual threat they represented, Prof Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina, said: “About 20 individuals per year are suspects, with no identifiable ethnic or citizenship profile. Most plots are disrupted before they acquire their materials or select their targets – and one this year was a Shi’ite planning an attack on a Sunni mosque. There have been only 35 murders [in the US] associated with Muslims since 9/11 – out of 150,000 murders a year. Since 2008, there have been 700,000 murders world-wide of which only 15,000 deaths have been associated with Muslim terrorism – excluding Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The world is safer from terrorism than at any time since the 1970s.” <br /><br />Kurzman went on to quote two recent surveys of public opinion in America, the one on Islam, in which half the respondents had positive attitudes, and the other on Muslims, in which 66% had positive attitudes. This, he said, indicated that while most Americans were ambivalent about the religion, most were also warmly disposed towards “real, living people,” their Muslim neighbours.<br /><br />Prof David Schanzer, director of the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, an institute with direct intelligence community involvement, responded in similar vein, saying that the sample of home-soil American Muslim terror threats was “so small that it is difficult to do retroactive causal analysis. The fairest answer to why Muslims are radicalising is: we don’t know. There is no profile of the ‘homegrown terrorist’.” The claim that religiosity drove radicalism was “not true, and discredited by many studies: out of the 188 individuals in the data-set, some never became pious at all; one’s grievance was related to an uncle killed in an American drone attack,” he said, hinting that the intimate impact of US foreign policy was a factor. Kurzman said that in recent “Homeland Security closed sessions,” it had been noted that many radical bloggers had, in fact, little knowledge of Islam. <br /><br />Schanzer referred to a 2008 debate in the New York Times between Dr Marc Sageman who stressed “self-radicalising individuals” and Bruce Hoffman who stressed organised recruitment by terrorists in the US (6), saying “There are many pathways to radicalisation.” Asked whether he thought mental illness played any role, Kurzman said: “Many of these individuals are isolated from their communities; these lone wolves are not weeded out. But recruited terrorists weed out psychotics because they are considered too unstable to be effective.”<br /><br />Imam Abdullah Antepli, the Duke Muslim Chaplain, a fiery yet moderate Muslim of Turkish extraction who conducts theological training for young imams in Afghanistan, laid the blame directly at the door of the US’s creation of proxy armed forces abroad: “The historical roots of this lie in Afghanistan in the 1980s. I remember the US back then idealising the same people we are chasing now. Our tax money played an extensive role in creating this cancer; we created this monster by our support for the Mujaheddin and we can trace the ideological hotbed of US Muslim extremism to our relationship to the Saudi regime… Religious money is exporting poison.” Kurzman responded, however, that “in the US, only a handful of suspects are connected to Saudi- or Middle East-funded outfits; terrorist attacks are cheap and you don’t need Saudi money.”<br /><br />In terms of Muslim voting patterns, especially in the swing states of Florida, Ohio and Michigan, where there are concentrations of Muslim voters: studies showed a total US Muslim population, mostly Sunni, of 2.75-million – 45% of whom had entered the US in the past 25 years – of whom about 1,5-million were of voting age; although they tended to vote 70% Democrat, 11% Republican, and the rest Independent, there was no “Muslim vote” per se as the putative “community” was fractured by race, ethnicity, class and country of origin and they tended to vote in synch with their neighbours. <br /><br />So while cultural wars over gays and immigrants, homegrown hate, and Muslim terrorism vexes Homeland Security, they should weigh very little in the scales – and yet are accorded disproportional importance as a threat partly justifying US gunboat diplomacy.<br />
<h3>
The Shape of Future War</h3>
What will a future American-lead perpetual war look like? If the Republicans can be believed, when (for it is only a matter of time) they reacquire the Oval Office, it seems we are in for “Intervention Lite,” a return to a form of 1930s isolationism, but with very targeted penetrations abroad – not unlike, perhaps the (failed) 1927-1932 combat in Nicaragua against Augusto Sandino’s “Light and Truth” liberated zone. <br /><br />According to Prof Charles Hermann, of the conservative Bush School of Government and Public Service in Texas (7), the ideal “over-the-horizon” military policy of a future Republican administration (and thus of NATO as well) involved strategic support for regimes that were prepared to hold regular elections, in order to prevent them spiraling downwards into failed states. Hermann asked whether the NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, nominally to prevent human rights abuses against the rebels by the regime, had not been its last hurrah, suggesting that if British and French defence spending continued at current levels, those two US allies would be unable to stage a repeat of Libya.<br /><br />But the US, despite itself being hit by financial crisis, recession and a soaring national debt at 90% of GDP, driven by the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the Department of Defence’s $675-billion/year budget had ballooned by 80% since 9/11. Hermann said that some of this defence spending was given flight by scare-mongering over the intentions of China, North Korea and Iran, but he felt that these were overstated: “I see this as a management problem, as they are running countries and are interested in staying in power.”<br /><br />Hermann quoted Robert Gates, former Defense Secretary under President George W Bush and now Dean of the Bush School, saying that “fractured or failing states are the main security threat of our times,” adding that Oxford economist Prof Paul Collier noted that there was a remarkable overlap between failed states and the “bottom billion” of the world’s poor, resulting in bad governments and recurrent coups (Mali in West Africa, which has recently experienced a coup as I write this, is the third-poorest nation on earth). <br /><br />So how would a Republican-run military-industrial complex wage war, via NATO in particular? Hermann recommended an “over-the-horizon” support role: “We’re not trying to overthrow bad governments [à-la Iraqi “regime change”]; we’re providing security for good governments – the reverse of [NATO policy in] Bosnia-Herzegovina – if you develop and allow free and fair elections.” So the bottom billion will be left to rot, but what would NATO do about bad governments like Syria? “If they don’t get on board, we leave them alone. I don’t think we have the resources, and to be honest, the political will, to overthrow the bad guys.” On the other hand, support for “good governments,” based on contracts with client states which would involve grooming the younger, upwardly-mobile middle officer castes, could embrace African states such as Nigeria and Kenya – to prevent the spread of the Arab Spring south of the Sahara, Hermann said.<br /><br />Precisely what impact the global economic crisis will have on American military strategy in future is far from clear, however. Take, for instance, the remarkable way in which the Pentagon views itself. I managed to secure access to this enormous complex of 23,500 workers (top-heavy with brass: 70% of the military staff are officers) with its Humvee-wide corridors and its courtyard Ground Zero Café above which any future enemy ICBMs would detonate dead-centre, having recognised the building’s unique geometry incoming from space, as a journalist, not a civilian, which perhaps explains the following.<br /><br />Bryan Whitman, the Principal Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (8), had just expounded on how the US military operated globally, across all time-zones, underscoring the unusual degree of personal latitude allowed by the Pentagon to its regional commanders, whose six regional combatant commands divide the Earth like segments of a giant orange: “We plan centrally and operate decentrally, so the field commanders have a lot of autonomy. The ambassadors [under the State Department] focus on their own country [of posting] but the commanders [under the Pentagon] look at regional security (9).” <br /><br />I responded that seeing as how the US military had this enormous 24-hour global presence, with its own state-like infrastructure (housing, engineering, social services, etc), massive staff and facilities (some ZIP codes are those floating cities called aircraft carriers), and heavily-armed semi-autonomous regional forces, and given that the military officer caste was largely unaffected by changes in whichever political party rotated through the White House and therefore could devise longer-term strategies than the State Department whose foreign policy was bound to the incumbent Presidency – given all that, was the US military not in fact a parallel world government?<br /><br />Whitman gave me a long, penetrating look, and then said “I think you have answered your own question” – which to me was a remarkably frank admission from the senior ranks about how the military-industrial complex viewed itself superior to the elected Presidency (10).<br /><br />The implication of this in Africa, was implied by Pentagon spokesman and legal expert David Oten who said direct military-to-military co-operation was often one of the best ways for the US to engage diplomatically “because often the [African] military is the only centre of national power – there is no strong legislature, etc.”<br /><br />In sum, I suspect that the Whitmans of the Pentagon will prevail over the Hermanns or whoevers of the forseeable-future White House. But it would be a mistake to cartoon the Whitmans as boorish hawks committed to bombing-for-profit; on the contrary, his caste are sophisticated navigators of the brave new world: “Just because CNN, etcetera asks me a question, how should I rank that against a guy who runs a blog in Bolivia that covers all of Latin America and that everyone reads?”<br /><br />Lieutenant-Colonel Todd Breasseale, former spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) and now the Pentagon spokesperson on Western Hemisphere policy, detainee affairs (including Guantanamo) and US Southern Command (Mexico-to-Antarctica), was even more disarming, describing ex-Marine turned Al Jazeera journalist Josh Rushing who resigned from the military after being ordered by the Pentagon not to speak to the media about his experiences managing information flow during the Iraq War, as “a revolutionary, a young, thinking officer who was engaging at a time of war. The Marines froze him out and treated him so poorly; he quit on principle – a very valid principle – and now runs the brilliant show Front Lines,” which covers the impact of US foreign policy in the Americas. “Now the Marine Corps has him speak to them about their mistakes. That’s progress.”<br /><br />I had met Rushing the day before and he was honestly described. But before we are too charmed, here is that language again: the institutional-revolutionary mission of America in waging war abroad.<br />
<h3>
Conclusion: Perpetual Institutional-Revolutionary War?</h3>
So, what to make of a country where the home front is so apparently placid that walls around homes are a rarity, and car crashes rate high on state-wide news programmes – and yet which wages war across a globe it considers its own? For one thing, the 1823 Monroe Doctrine that treated Latin America as the back-yard of the US, providing the rationale for interventions everywhere from Argentina to Cuba, has clearly long been updated to embrace the whole post-Soviet world. <br /><br />Regarding the American public’s investment in this vision, Breasseale estimated that “less than 1% have some involvement with the military, but the American people spend a lot of money on defence. Every time we lose someone in combat, we put out a press release, because we don’t want to ever hide the true cost – in blood.”<br /><br />That’s all very well, but it implies a deep level of disconnection between where and why American blood is spilled, and the populace who politically enable their youth to go off and fight obscure battles. And I’m not sure I agree with Breasseale: the presence of the military is hard to avoid in American civilian life. From the National Guard recruiting at the Society of Professional Journalists’ annual conference – of all things! – to the almost unquestioned presence on college campuses of students in uniform and of Reserve Officer Training Corps recruiters (the 1970 Kent State Shootings are a distant memory), from a Medal of Honor recipient opening the New York Stock Exchange, to the returnees greeted at airports by girls wearing military-groupie T-shirts, from the steady trickle of bodies coming home through the giant military morgue at Dover, to the veteran-themed country fairs, it is obvious that the military is a permanent yet strangely under-recognised feature of American civilian consciousness.<br /><br />The US just doesn’t feel like a country at war. And yet, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert “Disaster Bob” Ditchey, a Secretary of Defense spokesman who holds the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) portfolio for the US, Canada and Mexico, co-ordinating DHS, US Northern Command (US and Canada), and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD, the joint US-Canadian aerospace defence system), told me that on Obama’s initiative, 1,200 National Guardsmen were now helping police the border with Mexico; clearly even the Obama regime had felt the need to respond militarily to the widespread domestic fears of illegal immigration run out of control. Clearly, whether Republican or Democrat, “keeping things down on the farm” by force of arms is still considered a domestic political necessity.<br /><br />It also needs to be stressed that the supposedly kinder, gentler Obama regime (in 2007, before attaining office, Obama renounced the first-strike use of nuclear weapons) has also embarked on the largest-ever refurbishment and expansion of America’s nuclear warfare capacity, a programme that will run for several decades after Obama retires (11). This is clear evidence of an incumbent president serving the longer-range interests of the military-industrial complex rather than even his own party’s medium-term interests.<br /><br />When I visited the US last, it was the year 1984 and many people were throwing parties mocking George Orwell’s great dystopian novel 1984, saying smugly to each other, “see how wrong he was?” But they missed the point: the totalitarian hyperpower Oceania of Orwell’s tale draws its legitimacy from its geopolitical backdrop: a far-off, possibly fake, yet endless war with their seamlessly alternating enemies, Eurasia and Eastasia. I had the eerie sense on this visit, 27 years later, that a substantial part of the US citizenry themselves had become pilotless drones, operating against a backdrop of a far-off war that, like the citizenry of Oceania, left them physically unaffected – but which yet required their ideological acquiescence.<br /><br />The great French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in 1840 in his landmark work Democracy in America: “No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country… it must invariably and immeasurably increase the powers of civil government, it must compulsorily concentrate the direction of all men and the management of all things in the hands of the administration. If it does not lead to despotism by sudden violence, it prepares men for it more gently by their habits.”<br /><br />A unipolar hyperpower, its citizenry gently prepared by a perpetual war that is more wallpaper to their daily habits than painful first-hand experience, for the concentration not of the powers of civil government – but of the powers of a military-industrial caste erudite yet far more seditious of elected democracy than any on the political fringes, armed with world-ending weaponry and a messianic sense of revolutionary right and unassailable mission, such a power has as much potential to be a long-term destabilising, as well as stabilising, factor on the world stage.<br /><br /><b>Michael Schmidt</b><br />
<br />FOOTNOTES:<br /><br />1) An erudite examination of the shifts in these regional dynamics since the height of the Vietnam War is given in Jeremy Black, <i>Altered States: America since the Sixties</i>, Reaktion Books, London, UK, 2006. <br /><br />2) It is 150 years since the North’s still-controversial “Restoration” of the South following the Civil War, which critics call the imposition by force of alien values on Southerners, and an argument was raging during my visit in one North Carolina town about whether to restore to its place of public prominence a Confederate statue damaged in a van accident.<br /><br />3) A great cultural reference for the desperation that drives the poor into the US military, which offers them not only employment but the chance to get bursaries to study, is the harrowing film <i>Winter’s Bone</i>, starring Jennifer Lawrence, directed by Debra Granik, screenplay by Granik and Anne Rosellini, USA, 2010.<br /><br />4) A good exposition of the root elements and flowering of this ultra-Right is James Coates, <i>Armed and Dangerous: the Rise of the Survivalist Right</i>, Hill and Wang, New York City, USA, 1995. Coats repeatedly mentions, but seemingly fails to appreciate, the poverty which drove many of those he describes into extremism; perhaps this is why many ultra-Right themes in America are shared by the ultra-Left. Given that Coates’s book is outdated, being a reprint of a 1987 text, an update on the religious ultra-Right is provided by Chris Hedges, <i>American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America</i>, Vintage, London, UK, 2008. There was a restricted gathering of such ultra-Right groups in the Appalachian Mountains during my trip.<br /><br />5) For a chilling photographic essay on Detroit’s decline, take a look at Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s work online at <a href="http://www.marchandmeffre.com/">www.marchandmeffre.com</a>. Detroit was where the alleged “Underwear Bomber” stood trial during my visit, while Michigan state was home to a man arrested for planning to fly radio-controlled model aircraft armed with bombs into the Pentagon and the US Capitol.<br /><br />6) Sageman is a former CIA operative based in Pakistan in 1987-1989, now anti-terrorism consultant, and author of <i>Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century</i>, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, USA, 2008. Hoffman is Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, a specialist in terrorism and counter-insurgency, editor-in-chief of <i>Studies in Conflict and Terrorism</i>, and the series editor of <i>Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare</i>. Their debate is outlined in "A Not Very Private Feud Over Terrorism": <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/weekinreview/08sciolino.html">www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/weekinreview/08sciolino.html</a>.<br /><br />7) Why focus on the Republicans only here? We know how a Democrat regime currently wages war and we can expect more of the same if Obama wins; while the recession has clearly altered Republican objectives since the Bush era. I also met with representatives of the American constructivist far Right, and constructivist far Left, by which I distinguish them from the demolitionist terrorist ultras of both stripes: the Libertarian Party on the Right is minimum-state, minimum-war capitalist; the North-Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC) on the Left argued for an anti-war decentralist community control of the economy. The Libertarian Party has a marginal electoral showing (4% in the 2008 Presidential elections) and NEFAC had just split into revolutionary and moderate projects. But despite the intriguing arguments both sides could mount, they are both too far from the levers of power in America to have any impact on how, let alone whether, the US wages war.<br /><br />8) Whitman’s official bio is online at <a href="http://www.defense.gov/bios/biographydetail.aspx?biographyid=212">www.defense.gov/bios/biographydetail.aspx?biographyid=212</a>.<br /><br />9) For instance, the new Africa Command (Africom) has now calved off European Command (Eucom), which covers Europe and North Africa, because Sub-Saharan Africa is geopolitically detached from North Africa and Europe. Africom is still headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany, and has yet to find a home in Africa, though Ghana and South Africa are contenders. Africom is the aegis for the Africa-dedicated components of the US Air Force, US Marine Corps, and Special Operations (based in Germany), US Navy and US Army (based in Italy), and the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa (based at Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti).<br /><br />10) Beyond the Presidency’s considerable powers, including the President’s as commander-in-chief of all US armed forces, there exist three large, yet less visible and mostly unaccountable and unelected centres of power in the US: firstly the military-industrial complex itself; secondly the state bureaucracy, one of the world’s largest and most powerful, which, like the military-industrial complex, has its own strategic foreign interests separate to those of the incumbent Presidency and which because it is likewise unelected has longer tenure in office and thus longer-range objectives than incumbent parties; and lastly the plutocracy, the wealthy old-boys’ club of lobbyists from Washington, Silicon Valley, Houston and elsewhere who push their own private agenda, including the US-supremacist “Project for an American Century.”<br /><br />11) See Darwin Bond-Graham, "Obama’s Worst Sell-out?", <i>Counter-punch</i>, USA, September 23-25, 2011.</div>
Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-1749651243212953912014-02-17T03:09:00.001-08:002014-02-17T03:09:51.198-08:00<h1 class="article-title">
Internet & Ideology</h1>
<div class="article-subtitledetails">
<span class="article-details"><span class="article-detail"><img alt="category" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/star.gif" /><a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/international">international</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/miscellaneous">miscellaneous</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/debate">debate</a></span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/date.gif" /> Friday May 31, 2013 19:19</span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/person.gif" /> by Michael Schmidt - ex-ZACF</span></span><a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/report_posts?subject=Reported Post: Story 25619 with title: Internet & Ideology&message=Reported Post: Story 25619 with title: Internet & Ideology%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.anarkismo.net%2Findex.php%3Fobj_id%3D53%26story_id%3D25619%26%0A%0AEnter+your+reason+here+-+please+do+not+remove+the+above+link+as+it+will+allow+an+editor+to+easily+remove+the+offending+content"><img alt="Report this post to the editors" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/report.gif" title="Report this post to the editors" /></a></div>
<div class="article-subtitle">
Against the Nationalist Fragmentation of Cyberspace & Against “Astroturf Activism”</div>
<blockquote class="article-intro">
The Arab Spring redrew the battle-lines between over the control of information between the statist/capitalist elites and the popular classes – raising questions of increased restriction and surveillance, and of the limits of cyber-activism. In some ways this battle is often mischaracterised as being a narrow debate between cool intellectual property technocrats and wild-eyed free-use pirates, or as being a political dispute between authoritarian regimes and free speech activists, with no wider relevance to society. But it is clear that what is at stake is the global ideology (and exploitative practice) of corporatist enclosure versus that of the creative commons; in other words, it is more even than a universalist human rights concern, but is rather an asymmetrical war between the parasitic and productive classes over a terrain of power/wealth-generation known as the knowledge economy. </blockquote>
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<h1>
Internet & Ideology</h1>
<h3>
Against the Nationalist Fragmentation of Cyberspace & Against “Astroturf Activism”</h3>
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<br />The Arab Spring redrew the battle-lines between over the control of information between the statist/capitalist elites and the popular classes – raising questions of increased restriction and surveillance, and of the limits of cyber-activism. In some ways this battle is often mischaracterised as being a narrow debate between cool intellectual property technocrats and wild-eyed free-use pirates, or as being a political dispute between authoritarian regimes and free speech activists, with no wider relevance to society. But it is clear that what is at stake is the global ideology (and exploitative practice) of corporatist enclosure versus that of the creative commons; in other words, it is more even than a universalist human rights concern, but is rather an asymmetrical war between the parasitic and productive classes over a terrain of power/wealth-generation known as the knowledge economy. <br />
A gathering of journalists, media development experts, and online activists (among others) at the Highway Africa media and technology conference in Grahamstown, South Africa, in September 2012 grappled with the paranoid responses of many states to the supposedly social media-driven Arab Spring, but failed to grasp the nettle of the class nature of the statist/capitalist threat.<h3>
Nationalist fragmentation in Russia?</h3>
One of the keynote speakers was young Alexey Sidorenko of Russian website Teplitsa www.te-st.ru and author of “New Media Tools for Digital Activists” who spoke about the sea-change that had taken place in Russian cyberspace before the Arab Spring. Before 2011, he said, the old state-controlled legacy media was being bypassed as an information source by the “free blogosphere,” citing the fact that the audience of the www.yandex.ru website had outgrown that of the leading TV station, Channel 1.<br /><br />This reflected a shift in trust from the legacy media to the internet, especially among 12 to 34-year-olds, 96% of whom were connected today, making Russia the second-most connected European nation after Germany.<br /><br />Before the Arab Spring, the Russian authorities, whether retread “communists,” robber barons, or neo-liberals, had viewed the internet with suspicion, but had largely restricted their assaults to the harassment of bloggers (largely by the hacking of their sites, or by swamping the sites with requests in order to stall them – DDoS attacks).<br /><br />Worryingly, however, they had not only been covertly running “deep-packet inspection” (DPI) surveillance of online content, but had also begun overt prosecutions of internet “extremism” which, Sidorenko said, outlawed the dissemination of some 1,500 prohibited works, including classic 19th Century texts on Islam, or radical thinkers of socialism (including anarchists of course), or nationalism – “but which includes literary and oppositional works”.<br /><br />In the Arab Spring era, although electoral fraud to the Russian national parliament, the Duma, had continued at similar levels to the 2008/9 period, internet-based evidence of this fraud had rocketed, with the result that sites such as Karta Narusheniy (Map of Violations) and 23 other anti-corruption sites became so popular that they were frozen by DDoS attacks, presumably originating from the state. <br /><br />Internet activists responded, however, by mirroring the websites’ content and in December 2011, a 23-year-old activist managed to mobilise demonstrations of tens of thousands of protestors against the cyber-attacks, protests which lasted well into May this year.<br /><br />The state in turn responded with a three-pronged counter-attack: firstly, they put criminal libel – only decriminalised in 2011 – back on the statute books; secondly, they introduced the blacklisting of internet service-providers (ISPs) whose users posted content the censors found unacceptable; and lastly, they cynically foregrounded child protection as a major issue to be addressed online, creating the possibility that state agents by planting a single item of child porn on an oppositional site could threaten to shut down the entire ISP – and so forcing many ISPs to protect themselves by actively censoring user content.<br /><br />Sidorenko said there were worrying signs at the international level too, where there were several proposals by the likes of Iran to create and police “national sovereignty in national internet sectors” – which, he feared, could “create isolated, hermetic net islands,” in other words, the replication across the world of the amputated model employed in Belarus or China currently.<br /><br />“This will lead to an erosion of internet integrity and global interconnectedness, the result of a push by authoritarian regimes who will suppress free speech online as they do in traditional media. My question is how we as media activists can prevent this colonisation, this fragmentation, of the internet.” <br /><br />Sanctions against authoritarian regimes who embarked on online and mobile truncation would not work, however, he said, citing the case of the Belarus dictatorship, an ossified Stalinist regime, which had purchased surveillance software through a third party despite sanctions: “Sanctions can’t keep up with technological innovation.” <br />Sidorenko predicted that the big internet companies would readily kowtow to such proposals: we presumably all know about the “Google Wall of China,” whereby the internet giant struck a deal with the red corporatist state to restrict the socio-political functionality of the internet. But what are conditions like in China currently?<br />
<h3>
Nationalist fragmentation in China</h3>
Where there is a will, there is a way, and journalists and activists in China have laboured in Kafkaesque conditions to work around the hermetic status of their cyber-island – where internet penetration stands at a population-proportionately whopping 38% (compared to 13% in Africa).<br /><br />Professor Yuen Ying Chan, director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong, sketched a similar picture of digital ascendancy as in Russia, with some online writers having more followers than the multi-million readership of the largest Chinese daily newspapers.<br /><br />The authorities, apart from creating their own policed versions of Western social media such as Weibo (the “Chinese twitter”), had both human and mechanical censors which trawled Weibo and other internet content for outlawed content. <br /><br />Ironically, this data-mining was now being used by journalists and activists themselves. For example, Yuen said though the state had outlawed political reportage on rising “communist” leader Bo Xilai who was axed from his post, journalists used data-mining to map his business relationships in Hong Kong and further afield – because there is a loophole in the legislation on business reportage (and in “communist” China, the convergence between party power and business interests is intense, with the media sector being the third-largest tax revenue earner for the regime).<br /><br />Still, the lesson is obvious: not only is a “hermetic island” very tough terrain for social, economic and political activists to operate in, but the exact same data-mining processes used by activists can and will be turned on activists themselves by the authorities to gather information sometimes deemed treasonable and punishable by death.<br /><br />As Niels ten Oever, a fiery Dutch freedom of expression activist who has worked on projects in some very tough regions – Ethiopia, ex-Somalia, and Afghanistan – warned, social media has transformed us into “communications exhibitionists, standing naked at the window, exposing ourselves without knowing who is looking.” <br />
<h3>
The Arab Spring & “Astroturf Activism”</h3>
Of course, on the rare occasion that it goes down to the wire, as it has in Syria, one wants the whole world to be watching as the sheer deluge of publicity offers some degree of protection or at least of validation of one’s war against the parasitic elite (not that class war is the entire Syrian story).<br /><br />But, sub-Saharan African activists warned, that cut-and-paste social media solutions, even from the Arab Spring, might not work in other contexts. Abiye Teklemariam, a Reuters institute fellow from Ethiopia, said an oft-repeated question of why there had been no echo of the Arab Spring in sub-Saharan Africa usually ignored the fact that all the North African regimes had been complascent before a Tunisian vegetable-seller set himself on fire, so similar uprisings could perhaps occur in the south; objective conditions in several southern dictatorships made it possible.<br /><br />But, he warned, sub-Saharan political activists had often totally misunderstood the use of social media in North Africa as a tool to organise, quietly and for perhaps at least a decade before the uprisings – rather than as a tool to merely mobilise demonstrations in the short-term. In Egypt, for example, facebook was only used to mobilise the first Tahrir Square protest; the authorities shut it down the next day; from then on, the people organised the protests on the ground.<br /><br />“There was a perception of facebook as a magic tool to create revolutions; [sub-Saharan African] activists started overpromising on this basis, and this led to a decline in the public’s trust in activists when they failed to deliver,” Taklemariam said.<br /><br />“There has also been a rise of Astroturf activism. The original social media was linked through networks of trust, but governments and political parties started creating Astroturf groups and started calling actions, but people soon realised these groups were fake, which had the effect that mistrust started bleeding into the real groups.” <br /><br />I need to add that the failure of South African political activist groups to understand the necessity to prepare the groundwork by organising within poor communities for years – as the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) of South Africa has done – rather than relying on ersatz internet mobilisations was what lead to the embarrassing displays of Astroturf activism in attempts to mimic (without real grassroots organising) the Northern “Occupy” movements at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and in Cape Town.<br /><br />As in Russia, before the Arab Spring in Africa, statist repression was offline only; even if bloggers were targeted, they were targeted by physical assault, rather than by cyberwar. Earlier last year, I met young Egyptian blogger-dissident Kareem Amer and his girlfriend, Egyptian nude blogger-dissident Aliaa Maghda El-Mahdy. Amer said that it was ironic that, having been jailed for four years for blogging against the Mubarak regime, it was only after the regime was toppled that he and Aliaa had had been forced to flee into exile by the insecure conditions of the Arab Spring itself. So even within the Arab Spring countries, repression had merely shifted form.<br /><br />Admire Mare, an activist, researcher and the director of the Zimbabwe Youth Empowerment and Information Dissemination Trust, who blogs at “Scribbles from the House of Stones,” also asked whether social media could be used for change in southern Africa as it had in Moldova, the Philippines, Indonesia, Iran and Spain – as well as North Africa and Syria: “Is such a revolution possible here?”<br /><br />He said the battle-lines had been clearly drawn between the partisans of the “technology of surveillance and repression” and the “technology of freedom” – but he warned that social media can’t be automatically assumed to be a democratic space as it was “a profit-driven project,” vulnerable to hostile data-mining, and owned by digital elites: “We need to look at how activists can creatively appropriate this technology. Cut-and-paste models can’t be applied; we need to adapt to local contexts.”</div>
Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-58929589620217474432014-02-17T03:06:00.001-08:002014-02-17T03:06:17.333-08:00<h1 class="article-title">
Nelson Mandela</h1>
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<span class="article-details"><span class="article-detail"><img alt="category" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/star.gif" /><a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/southernafrica">southern africa</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/theleft">the left</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/opinionanalysis">opinion / analysis</a></span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/date.gif" /> Tuesday December 10, 2013 21:40</span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/person.gif" /> by Michael Schmidt - ex-ZACF</span></span><a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/report_posts?subject=Reported Post: Story 26519 with title: Nelson Mandela&message=Reported Post: Story 26519 with title: Nelson Mandela%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.anarkismo.net%2Findex.php%3Fobj_id%3D53%26story_id%3D26519%26%0A%0AEnter+your+reason+here+-+please+do+not+remove+the+above+link+as+it+will+allow+an+editor+to+easily+remove+the+offending+content"><img alt="Report this post to the editors" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/report.gif" title="Report this post to the editors" /></a></div>
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Reappraising the Legacy of an Icon</div>
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A frail multimillionaire dies peacefully in bed at the grand old age of 95, surrounded by a coterie of those who love him and those with an eye on the inheritance, an event that would in the normal course of events be seen as natural—but the man concerned has been treated internationally as more of a supernatural entity than an ordinary man. The unsurpassed hagiography around Nelson Mandela, who died in the über-wealthy enclave of Houghton in Johannesburg last Thursday night, the famous prisoner turned global icon on a par with Mohandas Gandhi is upheld by most observers of South Africa as a necessary myth of national unity, and not least of the triumph of racial reconciliation of over the evils of segregation. </blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="attachment13002"></a><a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/dec2013/mandela_prison_cell_michael_schmidt.jpg"><img alt="Nelson Mandela's Spartan jail cell on Robben Island. Picture: Michael Schmidt" class="summary-image" height="345" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/cache/imagecache/local/attachments/dec2013/460_0___30_0_0_0_0_0_mandela_prison_cell_michael_schmidt.jpg" title="Click on image to see full-sized version" width="460" /></a><br />Nelson Mandela's Spartan jail cell on Robben Island. Picture: Michael Schmidt</div>
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I had the privilege to meet Mandela several times during my career as a journalist, watching my country's dramatic transition unfold on the ground, with all of its tragedies and triumphs; on most occasions he was all business; I only saw him once in the relaxed and smiling mode in which he was best known and so beloved, for he had taken a huge burden on his shoulders and was mostly all business. He was by turns frighteningly stern and disarmingly charming, rigorously strict and graciously forgiving, a fierce revolutionary and a conciliator, a formidable intellect and a wisecracker, austere and chilled. Though a complex figure, he is justly considered as a colossus of global stature for sacrificing his life to inspire the South African masses to push forward to the irreversible defeat of the last white supremacist regime—and in doing so to inspire other popular struggles against injustice worldwide.<br /><br />But in a country where the promise of a more egalitarian democracy has decayed with shocking rapidity into an elitist-parasitic project, where those who raise concerns over the loss of our period of grace under Mandela are often silenced by murder, a state sliding inexorably back into a fog of paranoia and forgetting under the control of Stasi-trained "democrats", I've had to somewhat nervously consider my critique of the deliberate sanitising by all factions of power of Mandela's period in office because his deification has resulted and in the creation of a fanatical de-facto state religion that tolerates no heretics in its pursuit of unfettered partisan power. The slipping of South Africa, once hailed as a lighthouse of progress, in the rankings of several gobal institutions which monitor public freedoms is of concern to all freedom-loving people, and not just we anarchists.<br /><br />I need to be explicit: this is not a full obituary of Mandela because his life story is so well-known and has been repeated widely over the past week in the media; rather it is an analysis primarily of his presidency—the five years in which he was directly answerable to each poor woman who paid tax on every loaf of bread she bought—and of the unfortunate cult that has sprung up around him. I do not focus on the unquestionable legitimacy of his anti-apartheid struggle including its armed facet, nor on the long travails of his jail-time, nor even on his latter career as elder statesman, but rather on his presidency because that was the period in which he was responsible to South Africans as a paid civil servant. In other words, all his intentions before and after ascending to power need to be weighed up against his actions while in power.<h3>
Mandela’s Story and his Legacy</h3>
The scion of the Thembu royal house of the Xhosa tribe, nick-named after the British imperialist warlord Admiral Horatio Nelson, he escaped rural torpor and an arranged marriage, becoming trained in the industrial heartland of Johannesburg as a member of the first black South African law firm, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela would have been almost predestined by his class status for leadership—though that was hardly a given under a system dating back through three hundred years of colonialism that allowed for only a handful of black leaders (apartheid did raise up a clique of wealthy black Bantustan leaders, though Mandela to his credit echewed that comprador path). The story of the rise of this obscure lawyer to the leading charismatic figure of the century-old “terrorist” African National Congress (ANC), and thence via decades of incredible hardship to the highest office as the country’s first democratic, and more to the point, black, president—in what remains today the world's most racially divided and economically unequal society—is remarkable, powerful and revealing.<br /><br />It is remarkable as many personal tales are in this country for its trajectory from ghettoised exclusion to the corridors of power; as a transitional society, there are many personal ties—links that would be highly unusual in more established societies—between the new elite and those who shared their childhoods in dusty townships and Bantustans. It is powerful for its morality tale of the ascendancy, against one of the most militarised Cold War states, of a poorly-armed people with only the justice of their cause and the weight of their numbers on their side. It is sadly revealing for the ways in which the socialist traditions of one of the world’s oldest liberation forces was dismantled in its encounter with the realpolitik of running the state and its capitalist economy.<br /><br />Mandela’s story captivated the world: a man who had served 27 years in prison for treason, breaking rocks in the brutal little prison on Robben Island, tantalizingly close to Cape Town, emerged a reconciler this most bitterly divided society to lead it through its first democratic election in 1994. It encapsulates in one man the dominant narrative of South Africa’s transition from global polecat to “Rainbow Nation”—and in the light of the corruption endemic under fourth democratic-era president, Jacob Zuma, represents what many feel was the apogee of social cohesion across all races and classes. It remains a unifying myth of enduring power that seems to, in the figure of one man, represent the euphoria of the entire world’s post-Berlin Wall epoch which saw the collapse of Red dictatorships in Russia and Eastern Europe, of one-party rule in much of Africa, and of rightist authoritarian regimes in Latin America, East Asia, and not least, South Africa.<br /><br />And yet behind that myth of racial unity, it is conveniently forgotten that for 74 years until it opened all ranks to all races in 1986, the ANC was a racial-exclusivist party, dedicated specifically to the national liberation of the “Black”-classified majority (alongside the other oppressed races, officially classified into 18 ethnic groups, but in effect, mixed-race “Colored,” and “Indian”). Still, motivated by the Atlantic Charter of 1941, which held out the promise of self-determination for the colonised world, the ANC was the black organisation which, alongside its white (mostly Communist), Indian and Coloured sister organisations drafted the 1955 Freedom Charter, a text of blended liberalism and social democracy which in essence declared for all races access to the country’s resources (land, education, housing, etc). Yet when a young Mandela first came to the fore as an ANC leader, establishing the ANC Youth League (ANCYL) in 1944 as a kingmaker faction within the parent party, his orientation was explicitly black nationalist. <br /><br />We’ve recently seen a worrying resurgence of this de facto racist strain within the ANC: with the right-wing populist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) breaking away from the ANCYL this year; with the revival of tribal factionalism within the parent ANC, especially antagonisms between the Zulu ascendancy represented by Zuma, and what was nicknamed “la Xhosa Nostra” represented by Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, ousted by Zuma’s faction in a palace coup in 2008; and with racist relocation threats uttered by ANC leaders against ANC-unfriendly populations of Indians in KwaZulu-Natal and of Coloureds in the Western Cape. I’m not laying these later developments at Mandela’s door, but it is worth recalling that he once thought and acted similarly, helping ensure the longevity of this tradition within the ANC, a tradition recalled in 1999 by Andrew Nash in a piece on for the socialist journal Monthly Review: <a href="http://monthlyreview.org/1999/04/01/mandelas-democracy" title="http://monthlyreview.org/1999/04/01/mandelas-democracy">http://monthlyreview.org/1999/04/01/mandelas-democracy</a><br /><br />Nash correctly concluded his piece by saying that Mandela's "ideological legacy—in South Africa and globally—is startlingly complex" and this complexity is reflected in the diversity of the leaders who spoke at Mandela's state memorial service today: US President Barack Obama, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Chinese Vice-President Li Yuanchao, Indian President Pranab Mukherjee and Cuban President Raúl Castro (the choice of Ban probably relates to his international status, while that of Obama seems to be based both on US power and on Obama's own tale of ascendancy over racism, while the India, Brazilian and Chinese choices relate to SA's strategic partners in the developing world—but the Cuban dictatorship appears to be a purely ideological choice). <br /><br />In traditional black tribal societies here, praise-singers are poets who declaim accolades for their leaders—but praise-singers are not mere propagandists; they also perform the roles of both court jester and protected critic, ensuring that those being praised don't get too big-headed about their achievements. In line with this ethic, it is worth reading some of the more nuanced obituaries written this week, starting with South African writer Rian Malan, author of the seminal and very influential book on his Afrikaner family's intimate role in building and enforcing apartheid rule, My Traitor's Heart (1990), in his obituary for The Telegraph, available online at www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/nelson-mandela/10502173/Nelson-Mandela-he-was-never-simply-the-benign-old-man.html. Malan rightly highlights Mandela's immense courage in standing up to the apartheid authorities, in taking up arms against an overwhelmingly powerful enemy, and of going "eyeball-to-eyeball" with the "fascists". He credits Mandela as being the architect of South Africa's "Rainbow Nation" and in particular of its centrist economic policies, and stresses the often-neglected fact of Mandela's revolutionary fervour. Academic Patrick Bond, author of Elite Transition, returns to that book's theme of economic continuity rather than change in his obituary for US investigative journal CounterPunch: www.counterpunch.org/2013/12/06/the-mandela-years-in-power .<br /><br />Speaking for myself, I recognise—as the world at large has (even including a friend of mine who is a former apartheid Military Intelligence officer)—that Mandela's firm commitment to peaceful negotiation, and his magnanimity in eschewing the bitterness that could have resulted from 27 years of incarceration, instead forgiving his enemies so as to build a democratic country, provided the country's people with the watershed required to break with the past. This forgiveness is usually cited as his greatest attribute and the foundation of his status as a great statesman, as was his prodigious memory which enabled him to remember by name everyone he met, laying the foundation of his reputation for intimate knowledge of and care for those he interacted with in an attitude of humility. Regardless of the pragmatism that obviously underwrote Mandela's opposition to igniting a race-war, or a revolutionary war, for that matter—for such a war would be unwinnable and would decimate both sides—this achievement, which enabled a peaceful first democratic election for all races in 1994 is rightly hailed as the high-water mark of my country's history.<br />
<h3>
The SA Anarchist Movement in the Mandela Era </h3>
So what did the re-emergent South African anarchist movement—syndicalists of all races having built the first trade unions for people of colour in 1917-1919—of the mid-1990s have to say about Mandela and his guided transition? This was and remains a tiny minority revolutionary movement far to the left of the ANC, and yet which likewise claims deep roots in the socialist tradition and which worked hard to both ensure the universality of its politics—and its ability to address real local issues. Reduced to a rearguard of democratic socialism during the 1950s, then its syndicalist ethics producing an important "workerist" strain during the consolidation of the ANC-aligned revolutionary trade union movement in the 1970s, the explicitly anarchist movement re-emerged thanks to the alleviation of apartheid repression after Mandela's release in 1990. Since then, it has always been an active part of the extra-Parliamentary left, with a commendable consistency in its class-line politics, but an increasingly multiracial presence in poor areas, and an advancing sophistication in its praxis.<br /><br />The foremost point to make is that this small movement welcomed with great enthusiasm—and critical concerns—the coming of democratic governance under Mandela in 1994. While it did not focus on the man himself, it rather focused on ANC policies, in particular its economic developmental strategies. It is worth quoting from the first edition of Workers' Solidarity, journal of the majority-black anarchist working class Workers' Solidarity Federation (WSF), forerunner of today's Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF), the editorial under the headline 1994 Elections: a Massive Advance for the Struggle in South Africa: <br /><br />"Legalized apartheid is finally dead. For the first time in 350 years Black South Africans are not ruled by a racist dictatorship but by a democratic parliament. Along with this capitalist democracy came a whole series of rights we never had before. We have guaranteed freedom of association and speech. We have the right to strike and protest. We have some protection from racist and sexist practices. These changes did not come from the benevolent hand of the National Party [apartheid government]. They are the result of decades of struggle. We broke the pass laws. We broke the ban on African trade unions. We broke the racist education system. We broke the Land Act of 1913.<br />
<h4>
But free at last?</h4>
"However, the legacy of apartheid is still with us. 2.3 million South Africans suffer from malnutrition. Only 45% of Africans live in houses. Only 2 in 10 African pupils reach matric [the final year of high-school]. Even though South Africa produces 50% of Africa's electricity, only 30% of the population has electricity. At the same time 5% of the population own 80% of all wealth. Whites on average earn 9 times more than Africans. The ANC's RDP [Reconstruction & Development Programme] has set itself very limited goals to redress this. For example, it aims to build a million houses over 5 years. This will not ever deal with the massive housing backlog facing Black people. The RDP also places a heavy reliance on the market mechanism. The RDP only aim to redistribute 30% of the land to Blacks. But most of this will be bought through the market. Why should we pay for stolen land? White farmers will also be compensated for land unfairly acquired after 1913 even when this is returned. In any case, the RDP's ability to deliver is doubtful. The RDP will not be funded by increased tax on the bosses. Instead the focus is on make "more efficient" use of existing resources...<br />
<h4>
The Struggle Continues</h4>
"The only way we can force the new government to deliver its promises is through struggle. This is the only way our needs will be heard above those of the bosses who are in a business crisis. It is only through keeping up the fight on the ground that we can force the State to give in to our demands. Force the bosses to deliver! But we need to break out of the cycle in which the needs of the majority take second place to the profits and power of the bosses and their State. We need to attack and destroy the system of capitalism that caused our hardships and racism in the first place. We need a society without bosses or governments. A society based on workers and community councils which puts people before profit. Build for working class revolution!"<br /><br />By the final edition of Workers' Solidarity in late 1998, the tone had become more critical, as the ANC under Mandela shifted rightwards, with the editorial titled South Africa's Transition Goes Sour: <br /><br />"In 1994, people danced in the streets after the results of the elections were announced. How far have we come in the five years since that time? Not far enough. The elections were a great victory because they ended legalised racism in South Africa—the oppressive laws created by the bosses to ensure an endless supply of super-cheap Black labour. <br /><br />"But while the law has changed, conditions on the ground have not. Working and poor people have been increasingly impatient with the slow pace of "delivery" of the goods and services promised in the 1994 elections. Worried about its election prospects, the ANC has done its best to excuse the broken promises. It has manipulated the loyalty of many workers to blame the failure of delivery on unnamed "forces" who want to return South Africa to the past. It has done its best to label critics anti-patriotic or right-wing. And it has asserted its domination in the Tripartite Alliance, demanding that COSATU and SACP toe the line and stop criticising ANC policies. Of course, there are right-wing forces in South Africa. But the NP left the Government of National Unity years ago. As for the other big conservative group, the IFP, the ANC is hinting of a merger between Congress and the IFP.<br /><br />"The real blame for the ANC's lack of delivery lies in its GEAR (Growth Employment and Redistribution) policy. GEAR [an openly neoliberal policy which replaced the RDP] is an attack on the jobs, incomes and social services of the working class. It is based on the idea that the bosses must be allowed to make more profits from cheap labour. So instead of taking money from the bosses and using it to benefit the Black working class majority, the ANC policy tells the bosses to become richer, promising the poor that crumbs from the bosses' banquet table will fall to them.<br /><br />"However, we do not see the solution to GEAR as a new party to replace the ANC. The ANC did not adopt GEAR because it was "bad". ANC adopted GEAR because the bosses—who include many top ANC members and funders- demanded GEAR. We live in a time of class war—war by the employers against the working class. The only solution can be mass struggle, not elections. The Union is your Party, the Struggle is your Vote."<br />
<h3>
Separate Development 2.0: Neo-Apartheid?</h3>
Since those appraisals during Mandela's 1994-1999 presidency, it is obvious to all observers that (apart from events such as Mandela’s death and memorial service), the unity that the Mandela myth was supposed to ensure has rapidly unraveled. South Africa today is riven by entrenched racial hatred, is the world's most unequal society, and is currently ruled by what can only be seen as a syndicate-criminal cartel which is actively blurring the lines between private interest, party and state, recreating and reviving many aspects of the terrifying apartheid securocrat state including the notorious old National Key Points Act and the new Secrecy Act. <br /><br />The South African National Editors’ Forum (Sanef) has been campaigning without success for the ANC to honour its 1989 agreement that once in power it would amend or throw out some one hundred statutes that prevented the free flow of information in the country. Only the most obviously odious racist and separatist laws were thrown out. <br /><br />South Africa shockingly remains a state firmly committed to race-classification, except that instead of apartheid’s 18 different ethnicities, the ANC only recognises four: White, Black, Asian—a catch-all of everyone from Indians to Chinese—and Coloured, a mixed-race category into which Obama would fall, were he a citizen; the indigenous Bushmen simply do not exist, despite Bushman cave art dating back at least 30,000 years. As a white man who played his tiny role propping up apartheid as a conscript into the old army, I don’t personally give a damn that I’m classified white, but it’s a tragedy that our “born-free” children are still forced to take their chances with this racial Russian roulette—victims of a bureaucratic game supposedly tracking “change”.<br /><br />In my first South African book, Under the Rusted Rainbow: Tales from the Underworld of Southern Africa's Transition (BestRed, Cape Town, due in July 2014), I will argue that the ANC’s primary strategy position, the so-called “National Democratic Revolution” fell so far from the heights of manufactured grace of the Mandela myth to the sleazy swamp in which they now wallow precisely because the ANC was the midwife of continuity rather than of true transition from the apartheid state, despite its vigorous propaganda campaign to the contrary. <br /><br />I introduce my book with a comparative analysis of the transitions from autocracy to democracy in South Africa and Chile. South Africans have an irritating habit of avoiding learning from such comparisons as to do so would undermine their claim to special status because of their supposedly unique history. But I demonstrate that our "transition" was far from unique: in both countries, it was a socialist-led combine (the Tripartite Alliance in SA, and the Concertación in Chile) that enabled the exploitative structures of the state and capital to make the move to democracy almost unaltered, their repressive and exploitative functions, honed by centuries of colonialism, intact.<br /><br />Notably, right across South Africa, the geographic separation of apartheid continues to hold sway, with even black-dominated ANC town councils building new housing developments for the black poor literally on the wrong side of the tracks, far from goods, services and jobs. This despite the fact that the working class spends the largest chunk of their pitiful incomes on transport; 40% of the country simply languishes in poverty as their leaders swan about in jet-planes and motorcades. Even “Presidential Lead Projects” like the rebuilding of Alexandra township, east of Johannesburg, have been amputated by the nimby attitude of the new elite who blocked its articulation with bridges to their leafy Sandton suburbs a mere five kilometres away.<br /><br />In anticipation of Mandela's death, I was interviewed last year by the journalist Carlo Annese for GQ Italia on this question, I said: "Today there is a class division that replicates the racial division of the past... It is truly economic apartheid, in which the poor are getting poorer, the townships that were to have disappeared are still there, the workers do not earn enough to buy what they produce, and the white elite of the 45-year regime has added a wealthy black middle class of no more than 300-thousand people. <br /><br />"This is not only the effect of the government in recent years; even Mandela bears responsibility, but few want to see it. His figure was almost beatified as a new Gandhi, so that all he has done is sacrosanct, whereas criticism would help to restore a human dimension, beyond the myth: Madiba was a party man who succumbed to compromise..." <br /><br />South Africa and the world, I argued, would benefit from a judicious assessment of Mandela as a realpolitik politician, an analysis made impossible by the fanatically rabid insistence by his Pavlovian acolytes that he be treated as a demigod. There is a foolish argument on the South African Left, that replicates the delusional Trotskyist argument around the dictatorial succession in Russia, that Lenin was cool and right-on, but he was supplanted by treachery by Stalin who was an outright bastard—and only Trotsky stood up to him as a critic of the decay of “real, existing socialism”. <br /><br />The SA Lefty argument goes similarly: Mandela was cool and right-on, but he was supplanted by Mbeki who was an outright bastard—and only Zuma stood up to him as a critic of the decay of “real, existing democracy”. Unfortunately for these partisans of wishful thinking, it was Lenin, not Stalin, who reintroduced capitalism via the New Economic Policy, Lenin who established the Cheka—and it was Trotsky who ordered the Kronstadt Revolt and the insurgent Ukraine, which for almost five years defended Red Moscow from the White reactionary forces, destroyed. <br /><br />Likewise, sadly for ANC allies the tiny South African Communist Party (SACP, membership about 14,000 at the time of the 2008 split in the Alliance) and the massive Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu, membership about 1,8-million) who tried without success to find a “socialist” in current SA President Jacob Zuma, it was Mandela who scrapped the quasi-socialist RDP and substituted it for the outright neoliberal GEAR policy, the same Mandela who, it was only admitted after his death after 50 years of denials, was a member of the SACP's Central Committee at the time of his arrest. So Mandela, who served as ANC president from 1991-1997, having joined the party in 1943, was simultaneously a communist revolutionary, a social-democrat and an outright neoliberal?<br />
<h3>
True Believer or Opportunist: What are “Mandela’s Values”?</h3>
How are we to make sense of such a personal/party political mélange? Where did Mandela truly stand ethically, politically and economically; what did he believe in? This is of pertinent interest today and not merely a historical curiosity, because South Africans are continually exhorted to "live by Mandela's values". His birthday on 18 July, unofficially nicknamed Mandela Day, when such exhortations reach fever-pitch, is likely to be made a public holiday. So what are those values; what does the hagiography obscure?<br /><br />Of assistance in cutting through the fog of the myth is a recent debate in the letters pages of The New York Review of Books between Rian Malan and reviewer Bill Keller. In essence, Malan, who Keller calls "the heretic," argues that the influence of the SACP on the ANC has been grievously underestimated, and that an abiding centralising instinct and Stalinist anti-democratic practice has been its most damaging legacy: "during the struggle years (1960–1990) the SACP reeked of Soviet orthodoxy, and the ANC reeked of the SACP. As a journalist, you had to be very careful what you said about this. The civilized line was the one ceaselessly propounded in The New York Times—Nelson Mandela was basically a black liberal, and his movement was striving for universal democratic values. Anyone who disagreed was an anti-Communist crank, as Keller labels me...<br /><br />But, Malan continued, "New research by historian Stephen Ellis shows... that SACP militants found themselves in an awkward position in 1960, when their secret plans for armed struggle encountered resistance from South Africa’s two most important black politicians—ANC president Albert Luthuli and SACP general secretary Moses Kotane. Rather than back down, these militants co-opted Nelson Mandela onto the Communist Party’s Central Committee and tasked him to 'bounce' the mighty ANC into agreement with their position. The result, said veteran Communist Roley Arenstein, was tantamount to 'a hijacking' of the mighty ANC by a tiny clique of mostly white and Indian intellectuals."<br /><br />Keller's riposte was that: "I part company with... Mr Malan on the significance of this evidence. Malan... seems to believe that it discredits Mandela, and that the alliance with the Communists damns the ANC as a Stalinist front. That is simply Red-baiting nonsense. Nelson Mandela was, at various times, a black nationalist and a nonracialist, an opponent of armed struggle and a practitioner of armed struggle, a close partner of the South African Communist Party and, in his presidency, a close partner of South Africa’s powerful capitalists. In other words, he was whatever served his purpose of ending South Africa’s particularly fiendish brand of minority rule."<br /><br />In a country where the sources of political party funding are not required by law to be declared, the ANC's shady connections to a varied range of dictatorial regimes (not least those of the late unlamented Muamar Gaddaffi, of the Castro brothers, and of ascendant corporatist-capitalist China) need to be investigated in order to properly critique the ruling party's supposedly democratic credentials. <br /><br />Mandela reportedly personally received funding from General Sani Abacha, the military dictator of Nigeria (1993-1998) despite the fact that Abacha was a friend of Louis Farrakhan, leader of US race-hate group the Nation of Islam, and that Abacha's regime was responsible for gross human rights violations. Writing in London's The Guardian newspaper, David Beresford claimed Abacha had in 1994 donated £2,6-million (R35,7-million) to the ANC, with The News of Lagos reporting the following year that Abacha donated another $50-million. <br /><br />Mandela blithely took the cash, despite Abacha's bleak human rights record, being responsible for the execution in 1995 after a rigged military tribunal of writer-activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other Ogoni activists, for the suppression of free speech and association, and for the charging in absentia of world-famous writer Wole Soyinka with treason. Abacha is believed to have siphoned between $2-billion and $5-billion out of Nigeria's treasury during his five-year tenure, which begs the question of what the ultimate source of Mandela's money was, and how much went into party coffers and how much possibly into his own back pocket; none of this has ever been subject to public audit, but with mansions in Houghton, Qunu and Maputo, and with his children squabbling publicly over their inheritance, he certainly did not die a poor man.<br /><br />In 1997, President Mandela reached what should have been internationally condemned as the ethical low-point of an already checquered career, giving South Africa's then-highest order, the Star of Good Hope, to neo-fascist dictator Mohamed Suharto of Indonesia, whose bloody rise to power at the head of what became his militarised "New Order" state (1967-1998) was facilitated by the mass murder of between 500,000 and 1-million people during his coup and purge over 1965-1966 (a 2012 documentary puts the death toll at between 1-million and 3-million). This bloodbath, orchestrated by Suharto's army and carried out by interahamwe-like civilian militia, was profoundly both anti-Communist and anti-Christian, but also had elements of genocide in that ethnic Chinese were also targeted for slaughter. Rivers in parts of Indonesia were so choked with bodies that their flow was dammed.<br /><br />Suharto's regime still engaged in bouts of mass-murder of thousands of people well into the 1980s, so Mandela's endorsement of a man who ranks down there with Pol Pot is hard to understand: until one realises that in honouring Suharto, Mandela was thanking him for a cash donation to the ANC (not to the SA state) of some US$60-million; the ANC admitted only that Suharto "gave generously". Suharto is estimated to have embezzled a staggering $15-billion to $35-billion during his reign, so the cash given to Mandela can only be seen as blood money. In this light, the most honest monument to Mandela is his face's slightly mocking grin and hooded eyes on the new Rand bank-notes.<br /><br />Even in those early days after his 1990 release from prison, there was something Janus-faced about Mandela, who spoke a hard, revolutionary line to a hungry black majority, and who performed a blackface act for the whites who commanded the heights of the economy, charming them with his informal zoot-suit style, his trademark slow "Madiba jive" dance, and perpetual toothy smile. That's how the white elite liked their blacks: smiling, dancing, entertaining—and he cynically played the role perfectly, while all the time flexing an iron fist on the levers of state, a state barely altered in its essentials from the apartheid state (no-one should have been surprised that our remilitarised police force committed the 2012 Marikana Massacre of 34 striking miners).<br /><br />So I can only agree with Keller in that it simply does not matter whether Mandela was ever a Communist, the most telling point being rather that he was a consummate opportunist, with a lawyer's nose for the money. Initially an anti-Communist youth, feared for illegally using his boxer's training to beat up Reds and break up their meetings, Mandela was also in turn a virulently racial black nationalist who argued fervently against fighting apartheid arm-in-arm with other races in the 1940s, but then swung over to the Communists in the 1950s and 1960s, when the USSR was offering funding; and then he flipped again in the 1990s, becoming fascist-friendly, when Indonesia's New Order gave him money. That's a tough set of values of live up to, if only because I'm sure most of us are not personal friends with any communist oligarchs or neo-fascist dictators.<br />
<h3>
South African imperialism – Mandela style</h3>
In 1998, I covered two stories that demonstrated the capitalist and imperialist values of the ANC under Mandela's presidency. The first was the weird tale of the Mosagrius Agreement, signed in May 1997 by Mandela and his Mozambican counterpart Joaquin Chissano, which paved the way for hundreds of white South African farmers to settle in Mozambique's largest and poorest province, Niassa. The deal was promoted by the South African Chamber for Agricultural Development in Africa (Sacada), but engineered by the white right-wing Freedom Front (FF) party. In terms of the agreement, the Mozambican government granted a 50-year renewable concession for 220,000 hectares for agriculture, cattle-ranching, fruit-farming, and ecotourism to the farmers who also got tax exemptions to bring in supplies like farming equipment and medicines.<br /><br />The entire agreement was worked out in secret and "rammed through", said reports. The head of rural extension services in Niassa province admitted locals were not consulted: "But the ministers who design national policy know local people's needs". Alarmed Niassa peasants disagreed and organised themselves in response to what they feared was outright land-theft, enclosure and dispossession by Mandela's cohorts. They feared that they would end up as landless labourers or tenant farmers, dependent on white farmers for food and housing where previously they had been self-sufficient. The agreement amounted to grand theft terra in the old British imperial tradition of the enclosure of the land and the indenture of the peasantry; a more reactionary land policy is hard to envisage. <br /><br />The other 1998 story was the invasion of Lesotho in August of that year by SADC forces comprising armoured columns, helicopters and paratroopers of the SA National Defence Force, supported by a small Botswana motorised force, supposedly to "restore democracy" (tell me where you have heard that chilling phrase before?). According to South African Foreign Affairs, a story maintained to this day, a faction within the Lesotho Defence Force staged a coup attempt, so SA and Botswana intervened under SADC mandate to crush the coup and restore the elected government. <br /><br />But that just wasn't true: I was in Lesotho at the time, covering the invasion for Sunday Times, and it was clear that there had been no coup attempt, but rather a pro-democratic mutiny, not aimed at seizing power, but rather at ousting corrupt military brass whose allegiance had been bought by politicians with gifts of farms in the Free State. Although the mutineers put up brave resistance, we killed 40 of them for the loss of eight paratroopers.<br /><br />Mandela was conveniently out of the country at the time, with Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) leader Mangosutho Buthelezi as Acting President, but the invasion had been planned three months in advance and as Commander-in-Chief, Basothos were well aware that it was Mandela who bore ultimate responsibility for an action that had more to do with shoring up SA water and investment interests in our weaker neighbour, and that in doing so, Mandela had supported the corrupt status quo. On another visit to Lesotho in 2003, I was intrigued by the expressions of utter hatred expressed for Mandela, voiced by everyone from taxi-drivers to nurses, people who assured me that the weapons taken by the mutineers were well-cached and would be used again one day. <br /><br />Fast-forward to 2013, and a democratic South Africa that in 1994 foreswore aggressive military interventions in Africa is still to be found embroiled in firefights abroad, this time in the Central African Republic (CAR), allegedly, according to some sources, to prop up Mbeki's private uranium-mining interests. The corruption and anti-working-class violence of the current SA government stems directly from Mandela's compromise. I will argue in The Rainbow Regime that the Mandela regime (and those who got stupendously wealthy off it including Tokyo Sexwale, Patrice Motsepe and Cyril Ramaphosa) was the logical culmination and realisation of the strategy of the old PW Botha regime: that so long as real, structural apartheid kept the unwashed poor apart from the precious classes—and the continuity under the ANC of Group Areas-styled town planning is breathtaking—the Nationalists had achieved in Mandela and the ANC what they were incapable of achieving themselves because of their lack of a popular mandate under apartheid. In the ultimate recognition of their doctrinal similarities, the New National Party (NNP) was absorbed into the ANC in 2005.<br /><br />Mandela's earlier rapprochement with the Nationalists in the 1990s, albeit a thorny path with many switchbacks, meant he was not always a unifying force within the ANC. I well remember the murderous faction-fighting in Bhambayi, KwaMashu, on the outskirts of Durban on the eve of the 1994 elections between pro-Mandela "exile" and anti-Mandela "internal" factions of the ANC—the last assignment of photojournalist Ken Oosterbroek outside of Joburg before he was killed on the East Rand. The two sides were at each others' throats over what the internals perceived to be the hijacking of the struggle for democracy by exiles who had lived comfortably abroad while the internals died in their thousands at the hands of the police and proxy forces, exiles who moreover were committed to the rescue of the apartheid capitalist state which had lived for 46 years off the cheap labour of a black underclass it considered to be little more than draft animals.<br /><br />On 26 July 1990, barely months after the icon's release from prison, a secret signal from Ambassador Bill Swing at the US Embassy in Pretoria informed US Secretary of State James Baker III that a US intelligence source reported that in an interview with SACP leader Mac Maharaj on the very morning before he was arrested for Operation Vula, Maharaj confessed that "Plan B" of Vula, should it fail to insert an insurgent leadership into South Africa, was "to assassinate Nelson Mandela to provoke a national insurrection." <br />Maharaj flatly denied this to me in person, but it was clear to all observers at that time that Mandela's conciliatory approaches towards the Nationalist government were deeply distrusted by many in the SACP and ANC. It is ironic not only that the ANC and NNP merged but that Maharaj was the gatekeeper who presided over Mandela's final days.<br /><br />Between Mandela's 1990 release and the first democratic elections in April 1994, some 15,000 people were killed in an orgy of internecine violence, largely between the ANC and its black opponents—and no, I don't mean only the Zulu nationalist IFP, but also progressive forces such as the Azanian People's Organisation (Azapo), and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC). We all recall with a chill Mandela's wife Winnie Mandela endorsing terror by the ANC's favoured "necklace" method of torture-murder, placing a rubber tyre around the shoulders of a victim, pouring petrol over them and lighting them up like a Roman candle. My anarchist comrade Bobo Makhoba, who lived in Dlamini, Soweto, a former Azapo stronghold, told me of walking to school, terrified by the corpses of Azapo members left lying at the roadside after the previous night's bloodletting by the ANC. In some areas, the party literally murdered its way to power, and members still regularly resort to murder in holding on to such power-bases. <br />
<h3>
Black Anarchist & Shackland Youth Today on Mandela </h3>
So how are we to assess his legacy? Listen to the voice of one of our non-voting youth, Tina Sizovuka, writing this year: "Nelson Mandela has become a brand, 'Brand Mandela,' his image, name and prison number used to generate cash and to promote the legend of Mandela. In July 2012, for example, the 46664 clothing line was launched (all 'Made in China'). 'Brand Mandela' is more than just an opportunity to sell stupid trinkets to tourists and celebrities. It is also a dangerous myth, based on Mandela-worship, promoted daily in the public imagination to serve far more sinister interests. The myth of Mandela is used to give the vicious South African ruling class credibility by association, and to legitimise the ruling African National Congress."<br /><br />Sizovuka challenges the ruling party's "using the image of Mandela as a living saint," saying that the Madiba myth "has been a decoy to obscure the far less heroic story of the ANC in power... Like any other nationalist propaganda, Brand Mandela has been used by the rich and powerful to perpetuate a rotten class system—a system the ANC helps maintain through its neo-liberal policies, elite 'empowerment' deals and police massacres. A system that has caused misery for the millions of poor South Africans Mandela is said to have 'liberated'." <br /><br />In their June 2013 Youth Day press release, Abahlali base Mjondolo (Movement of Shack-dwellers), wrote that "Freedom and Democracy was supposed to be for everyone. Today it is for the rich. Rich people are getting the multi-racial education and the poor still have the third-rate education which back then was known as Bantu Education. Rich people get jobs. They have cars. They have nice houses. They can get married and move on with their lives. They are safe. This is Freedom to them. The poor have to survive as we can. We go in circles and not forward.<br /><br />"We live in shacks. We live in shit and fire. We are evicted. We have no safe and easy transport. The police treat us as criminals. They beat us if we try to organise. If you are young and poor you are treated as a threat to society and not as the future of society. Hector Peterson, Chris Hani, Steve Biko and other comrades who died for our Freedom and Democracy did not die for this. We do not respect their sacrifice by accepting that this is Freedom."<br />Sizovuka ended her piece saying that it is important to put the record straight: "Mandela was not the one-man author of the country’s liberation—even if he played an important role... For the advances made in 1994, the black working class majority and its allies of all races, have only themselves—their own collective strength and solidarity—to thank."<br /><br /> [ENDS]<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="attachment13003"></a><a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/dec2013/suharto__mandela_1997.jpg"><img alt="President Nelson Mandela awards neo-fascist dictator Mohamed Suharto for his donations to the ANC. Picture: The Telegraph" class="standard-image" height="334" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/cache/imagecache/local/attachments/dec2013/460_0___30_0_0_0_0_0_suharto__mandela_1997.jpg" title="Click on image to see full-sized version" width="255" /></a><br />President Nelson Mandela awards neo-fascist dictator Mohamed Suharto for his donations to the ANC. Picture: The Telegraph</div>
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Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-22067785511712815222014-02-17T02:58:00.001-08:002014-02-17T02:58:53.000-08:00<h1 class="article-title">
Bakunin's Women</h1>
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<span class="article-details"><span class="article-detail"><img alt="category" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/star.gif" /><a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/international">international</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/historyofanarchism">history of anarchism</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/review">review</a></span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/date.gif" /> Monday November 12, 2012 21:27</span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/person.gif" /> by Michael Schmidt - ex-ZACF</span></span><a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/report_posts?subject=Reported Post: Story 24259 with title: Bakunin's Women&message=Reported Post: Story 24259 with title: Bakunin's Women%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.anarkismo.net%2Findex.php%3Fobj_id%3D53%26story_id%3D24259%26%0A%0AEnter+your+reason+here+-+please+do+not+remove+the+above+link+as+it+will+allow+an+editor+to+easily+remove+the+offending+content"><img alt="Report this post to the editors" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/report.gif" title="Report this post to the editors" /></a></div>
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A partial review of Mark Leier's "Bakunin: a Biography"</div>
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A partial review of Mark Leier’s Bakunin: A Biography, St Martin’s Press, New York City USA, 2006 – by Michael Schmidt, founder member of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) of South Africa, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Counter-power Vol.1 (AK Press, USA, 2009), and author of Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire (Lux Éditeur, Canada, 2012). </blockquote>
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Bakunin's Women</h1>
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<br />Mikhail Bakunin “reappeared as a bogeyman after September 11” because the 1920 bombing of Wall Street by the Galleanist anarchist Mario Buda which left thirty dead, 200 injured, demolished the magnate J.P. Morgan's office, and caused $2-million in property damage was the worst prior terror attack in New York, “but his casting as the grandfather of terrorism was an exercise of mystification rather than explanation.”<br /><br />Bakunin’s towering intellect has always been reduced to caricature of his supposedly chaotic nature, despite the fact that the 1872 split in the First International left the Marxists with perhaps a total of 1,000 adherents across the world, while the anarchist faction (usually misrepresented as the minority) could count mass trade unions such as the Spanish FRE of 60,000 members, the Mexican CGO of 15,000 members, and the Italians unions with 30,000 members. It speaks volumes about the proletarian threat that Bakunin’s ideas posed to power that unlike Marxism, with its state-sponsored press and comfortable academic sinecures, that his complete writings only became available in 2000 thanks to the International Institute of Social History’s multilingual CD-ROM Bakounine: Ouvres complètes.<br /><br />Given that Leier’s timely biography was published several years ago – part of a wave of new anarchist movement studies emanating from Canada, not least focused on what was perhaps the highest expression of “real, existing anarchism,” the Makhnovist Ukraine – I am not going to attempt a complete review, but rather focus on a key area in the formulation of Bakunin’s thought: the women in his life.<br /><br /> While clearly sympathetic to Bakunin, Leier treats fairly with his not very likeable primary antagonist, Karl Marx, to whom all his turbulent life, Bakunin acknowledged a huge debt: Marx “advanced and proved the incontrovertible truth, confirmed by the entire past and present of human society, nations, and states, that economic fact has always preceded legal and political right. The exposition and demonstration of that truth constitutes one of Marx’s principle contributions to science.” Leier also has sympathies for libertarian strains of Marxism, concluding the book by saying that “with the main protagonists now long dead, it may be possible to consider the similarities [between anarchism and Marxism] and find ways to pose the differences as a progressive, dynamic, and creative tension as we confront the problems of the twenty-first century.” <br /><br />Lively, accessible and judicious, in essence, Leier’s work is a crucial restoration of Bakunin the thinker, who always tested his theories against the barricades in a manner anathema to the reclusive Marx. What emerges is a long progression from an idealistic pan-Slavism to a rigorously materialist anarchist-collectivism, Bakunin’s evolving praxis continually tested in the fires of revolt and reaction. And the clarity of his thought is revealed to be penetrating, even today. Take for example his comment on speculative capital: “speculation and exploitation undoubtedly constitute a sort of work, but work that is entirely unproductive. By this reckoning, thieves and kings work as well.”<br /><br />But I want to focus briefly on a group that Leier shows to have been formative in the shaping of that intellect, the women who surrounded him in youth: his sisters Liubov, Varvara, Tatiana and Alexandra, and their friends, the Beyer sisters, Alexandra and Natalie. In the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Russian academy of the 1830s where philosophy was outlawed because it rejected received wisdom, the creation of reading circles by the most progressive students proved a crucial first step in creating a new post-Decembrist generation of Russian militants. “The two most important circles were one headed and named after Nicholas Stankevich and another jointly by Alexander Herzen and Nicholas Ogarev. Almost exclusively male, the Stankevich circle and the Herzen-Ogarev circle became centres for avant-garde thought in literature, philosophy and politics. <br /><br />“According to Herzen and the many historians who have accepted his memoirs uncritically, the circles sprang up spontaneously. More careful historians, however, have noted that they owed much to the sophisticated discussion groups of the Bakunin and Beyer sisters. One reason Bakunin loved his sisters was the intellectual equality they shared, and they proved able sparring partners as he thought and rethought his own philosophy.” The older sisters, Liubov and Varvara, “were more conscious rebels” than their brother and the Bakunin-Beyer circle, properly called, created “the first spaces for provocative discussion” among the new generation that would eventually flower into the nihilist, narodnik, Essaire, maximalist, Marxist, and anarchist strands that would play such key roles in challenging and finally overthrowing the power of the Tsar. Curiously, it was above all the narodniks, whose quasi-anarchist philosophy of “going to the people” that drew an unprecedented number of women into their ranks.<br /><br />Tragically constrained by the gendered confines of Russian society, Liubov Bakunin died of tuberculosis in 1838, and it was only Varvara who to some extent lived her ideals, following her brother Mikhail abroad and mimicking his wandering, free-thinking lifestyle. But Leier’s work suggests that the Bakunin-Beyer circle and its far-reaching influences is deserving of further serious in-depth study. Certainly, his sisters’ example early confirmed Bakunin in his sexual egalitarianism: women “differing from man but not inferior to him, intelligent, industrious, and free like him, is declared his equal both in rights and in political and social functions and duties.” <br /><br />His beliefs were sorely put to the test when he allowed the love of his life, his wife Antonia, of whom he wrote to Herzen “she shares in heart and spirit all my aspirations,” to follow her heart in falling in love with and even bearing the children of fellow militant Carlo Gambuzzi. Perhaps because of this generosity of spirit, Antonia Bakunin “with no prospect of a comfortable or easy life… would stay with the errant anarchist until his death.”<br /><br />After the suppression of anarchism in Russia by Marx’s ideological heirs, it was another woman, the indomitable historian Natalia Mikhailovna Pirumova (1923-1997), who rescued much of the works of Bakunin and Kropotkin from obscurity, and whose brave and tireless work in doing so is credited with the revival of the Russian anarchist/syndicalist movement from 1979. By 1962, Pirumova was working for the USSR History Institute and had already scandalised Soviet academia with her work on Bakunin and Kropotkin in the historical journal Prometey. By 1966, she had gathered sufficient material to publish a book on Bakunin which was extended in 1970 and reprinted in the popular Life of Remarkable People series. Despite disgruntled reviews from the official press, she followed this up with a book on the life of Kropotkin in 1972. In this period, in echo of the Bakunin-Beyer circle, she gathered around her not only historians of Russia’s socialist movements, but the Vorozhdeniye (Renaissance) literary group as well as political prisoners including anarchists and socialists who had survived the gulags. A 93-year-old Essaire who attended Pirumova’s funeral in 1997 said that in Pirumova’s presence “we stopped thinking of ourselves as outcasts, forever excluded from society by Stalin”.<br /><br />It is a distinct irony that when he died, Bakunin remained an outcast, his funeral drawing a mere 40 mourners (albeit more than Marx’s), whereas a measure of the movement he helped initiate is given by the fact that Buenaventura Durruti’s funeral, 50 years later during the aerial bombardment of Madrid, drew 500,000 mourners. In Bakunin’s very last public fray with his pen, the tired old fighter asked only that he be forgotten so that a new generation could take up the torch of liberty. Fortunately, while largely deprived of Bakunin’s writings, the militants who built the mass anarchist trade unions that came to dominate the organised working class of Latin America in particular – fully 50 years in Cuba, for instance, before the tiny Communist Party was founded – relied heavily on his praxis, demonstrating to our own age that a libertarian proletarian counter-power is viable and not only a pretty dream. </div>
Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-26043741346644852912014-02-17T02:54:00.002-08:002014-02-17T03:07:26.122-08:00<h1 class="article-title">
South Asian Anarchism: Paths to Praxis</h1>
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<span class="article-details"><span class="article-detail"><img alt="category" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/star.gif" /><a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/southernasia">southern asia</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/historyofanarchism">history of anarchism</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/opinionanalysis">opinion / analysis</a></span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/date.gif" /> Monday July 16, 2012 23:59</span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/person.gif" /> by Michael Schmidt - ex-ZACF (South Africa)</span></span><a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/report_posts?subject=Reported Post: Story 23404 with title: South Asian Anarchism: Paths to Praxis&message=Reported Post: Story 23404 with title: South Asian Anarchism: Paths to Praxis%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.anarkismo.net%2Findex.php%3Fobj_id%3D53%26story_id%3D23404%26%0A%0AEnter+your+reason+here+-+please+do+not+remove+the+above+link+as+it+will+allow+an+editor+to+easily+remove+the+offending+content"><img alt="Report this post to the editors" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/report.gif" title="Report this post to the editors" /></a></div>
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Meditations on Maia Ramnath’s Decolonizing Anarchism: an Antiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle (AK Press, USA, 2012) and her Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (California World History Library, USA, 2011) – by Michael Schmidt, founder member of the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) of South Africa, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Counter-power Vol.1 (AK Press, USA, 2009), and author of Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire (Lux Éditeur, Canada, 2012). This piece was kindly edited by van der Walt. [<a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/article/23500">Italiano</a>]</blockquote>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="attachment10470"></a><img alt="Setting South Asia ablaze: the Ghadar (Mutiny) Party" class="summary-image" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/jul2012/ghadar_di_gunj.jpg" height="237" title="Click on image to see full-sized version" width="150" /><br />
Setting South Asia ablaze: the Ghadar (Mutiny) Party</div>
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<h2>
South Asian Anarchism:</h2>
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Paths to Praxis</h1>
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What the Institute for Anarchist Studies’ Maia Ramnath has achieved with these two books whose angles of approach differ yet which form companion volumes in that they intersect on the little-known anarchist movement of South Asia, is a breathtaking, sorely-needed re-envisioning of anarchism’s forgotten organisational strength in the colonial world which points to its great potential to pragmatically combat imperialism today.<br />
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Anarchism’s Anti-imperialism Enabled its Global Reach</h3>
To paint the backdrop to Ramnath’s work, we need to break with conventional anarchist histories. Lucien van der Walt and Steven Hirsch’s Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World (2010) states: “The First International provided the womb in which the anarchist movement emerged, but the formal meetings of the International, its press, and its debates were located within the body of a dynamic global working class and peasant network. Anarchism had an organised presence in Argentina, Cuba, Egypt and Mexico from the 1870s, followed by Ireland, South Africa and Ukraine in the 1880s. The first anarchist-led, syndicalist, unions outside of Spain (the Spanish Regional Workers’ Federation, 1870) and the USA (the Central Labor Union, 1884) were Mexico’s General Congress of Mexican Workers (1876) and Cuba’s Workers’ Circle (1887). These were the immediate ancestors of the better known syndicalist unions that emerged globally from the 1890s onwards. To put it another way, anarchism was not a West European doctrine that diffused outwards, perfectly formed, to a passive ‘periphery.’ Rather, the movement emerged simultaneously and transnationally, created by interlinked activists on [four] continents – a pattern of inter-connection, exchange and sharing, rooted in ‘informal internationalism,’ which would persist into the 1940s and beyond.” They concluded that to “speak of discrete ‘Northern’ and ‘Southern’ anarchist and syndicalist movements’” as is common in contemporary anarchist discourse, “would be misleading and inaccurate.”<br />
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It cannot be overemphasised how for the first 50 years of its existence as a proletarian mass movement since its origin in the First International, the anarchist movement often entrenched itself far more deeply in the colonies of the imperialist powers and in those parts of the world still shackled by post-colonial regimes than in its better-known Western heartlands like France or Spain. Until Lenin, Marxism had almost nothing to offer on the national question in the colonies, and until Mao, who had been an anarchist in his youth, neither did Marxism have anything to offer the peasantry in such regions – regions that Marx and Engels, speaking as de facto German supremacists from the high tower of German capitalism, dismissed in their Communist Manifesto (1848) as the “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries.” Instead, Marxism stressed the virtues of capitalism (and even imperialism) as an onerous, yet necessary stepping stone to socialism. Engels summed up their devastating position in an article entitled Democratic Pan-Slavism in their Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 14 February 1849: the United States’ annexation of Texas in 1845 and invasion of Mexico in 1846 in which Mexico lost 40% of its territory were applauded as they had been “waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilisation,” as “splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it” by “the energetic Yankees” who would “for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilisation…” So, “the ‘independence’ of a few Spanish Californians and Texans may suffer because of it, in some places ‘justice’ and other moral principles may be violated; but what does that matter to such facts of world-historic significance?” By this racial argument of the “iron reality” of inherent national virility giving rise to laudable capitalist overmastery, Engels said the failure of the Slavic nations during the 1848 Pan-European Revolt to throw off their Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian yokes, demonstrated not only their ethnic unfitness for independence, but that they were in fact “counter-revolutionary” nations deserving of “the most determined use of terror” to suppress them. <br />
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It reads chillingly like a foreshadowing of the Nazis’ racial nationalist arguments for the use of terror against the Slavs during their East European conquest. Engels’ abysmal article had been written in response to Mikhail Bakunin’s Appeal to the Slavs by a Russian Patriot in which he – at that stage not yet an anarchist – had by stark contrast argued that the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary camps were divided not by nationality or stage of capitalist development, but by class. In 1848, revolutionary class consciousness had expressed itself as a “cry of sympathy and love for all the oppressed nationalities”. Urging the Slavic popular classes to “extend your had to the German people, but not to the… petit bourgeois Germans who rejoice at each misfortune that befalls the Slavs,” Bakunin concluded that there were “two grand questions spontaneously posed in the first days of the [1848] spring… the social emancipation of the masses and the liberation of the oppressed nations.” <br />
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By 1873, when Bakunin, now unashamedly anarchist, threw down the gauntlet to imperialism, writing that “Two-thirds of humanity, 800 million Asiatics, asleep in their servitude, will necessarily awaken and begin to move,” the newly-minted anarchist movement was engaging directly and repeatedly with the challenges of imperialism, colonialism, national liberation movements, and post-colonial regimes. So it was that staunchly anti-imperialist anarchism and its emergent revolutionary unionist strategy, syndicalism – and not pro-imperialist Marxism – that rose to often hegemonic dominance of the union centres of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay in the early 1900s, almost every significant economy and population concentration in post-colonial Latin America. In six of these countries, anarchists mounted attempts at revolution; in Cuba and Mexico, they played a key role in the successful overthrow of reactionary regimes; while in Mexico and Nicaragua they deeply influenced significant experiments in large-scale revolutionary agrarian social construction. <br />
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The anarchist movement also established smaller syndicalist unions in colonial and semi-colonial territories as diverse as Algeria, Bulgaria, China, Ecuador, Egypt, Korea, Malaya (Malaysia), New Zealand, North and South Rhodesia (Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively), the Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, South Africa, South-West Africa (Namibia), and Venezuela – and built crucial radical networks in the colonial and post-colonial world: East Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, Central America, the Caribbean, South-East Asia, and Ramnath’s chosen terrain, the South Asian sub-continent. In recent years, there have been several attempts to take on the huge task of researching and reintroducing anarchists, syndicalists and a broader activist public to this neglected anti-authoritarian counter-imperialist tradition: Lucien van der Walt’s and my two-volume Counter-power project is one global overview; the book edited by van der Walt and Hirsch is another; and there are important new regional studies such as Ilham Khuri-Makdisi’s, Levantine Trajectories: the Formulation and Dissemination of Radical Ideas in and between Beirut, Cairo and Alexandria 1860-1914 (2003), and Benedict Anderson’s study of the Philippines, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination (2005).<br />
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But so far, research into historical anarchism and syndicalism in South Asia (in Ramnath’s pre-Partition terminology, India) has been lacking. In part this is because it was an immensely fragmented sub-continent, with three imperialist powers, Britain, France and Portugal, directly asserting dominance over a multiplicity of principalities and other indigenous power-structures, often integrated into the European empires through alliances and indirect rule, a patchwork not unlike Germany prior to Prussian expansion in the mid-19th Century: Ramnath calls India’s pre-colonial structures “a range of overlapping, segmentary, sovereign units oriented towards different centers”. This “beehive” polity was further fractured and complicated by religion, language, colour, and caste, so it is arguably difficult to scent the anarchist idea and its diffusions in such a potpourri. <br />
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Then again, van der Walt and my experience in researching Counter-power over 12 years has suggested that the lack of knowledge of the Indian anarchist movement is probably simply because (until Ramnath), no-one was looking for signs of its presence. While the history of Indian Marxism has been well documented, the anarchists have been ignored, or conflated with the very different Gandhians. For example, it was obvious to us that the strength of the French anarchist movement in the first half of the 20th Century definitely implied that there must have been an anarchist or syndicalist presence or impact on the French colonial port enclave of Pondicherry; and indeed Ramnath now confirms that Pondicherry was at least a base for anarchist-sympathetic Indian militants. <br />
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There were, of course, very real structural obstacles to the diffusion of anarchism and syndicalism in colonial South Asia. Much of India was pre-industrial, even semi-feudal; and while there was a large mass of landless labourers, capitalism had a limited impact. Despite the misrepresentation of anarchism and syndicalism in mainstream Marxist writings as a refuge of the declining artisanal classes, and as a revolt against modernity, it was primarily in the world’s industrial cities – Chicago, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, Valparaíso, São Paulo, Veracruz, Glasgow, Barcelona, Essen, Turin, Yekaterinoslav (Dnipropetrovs’k), St Petersburg, Cairo, Johannesburg, Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou), Yokohama, Sydney and so forth – that the movement raised strongholds: the ports, slums, mines, plantations and factories were its fields of germination; and it was the shipping lanes and railways that were its vectors. Its agrarian experiments were also centred on regions where old agrarian orders were being shattered by imperialism, capitalism and the modern state, like Morelos and Pueblo in Mexico, Fukien in China, Shinmin in Manchuria, Aragon, Valencia and Andalusia in Spain, Patagonia in Argentina, and Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. So in some respects, India’s colonial fragmentation and level of development can be seen as similar to contemporary West Africa, where syndicalist unions only sprung up in the 1990s in Sierra Leone and Nigeria. <br />
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Yet India was also very much part of the modern world, its older systems being transformed by imperialism as well as the rising local bourgeoisie; the “jewel” of the British Empire, it was locked into late nineteenth century globalisation as a source of cheap labour (including a large Diaspora of indentured migrants), raw materials and mass markets; Indian sailors were integral to the British fleets and Indian workers and peasants were integral to British industry; Indian workers and intellectuals resident in the West were heavily involved in radical milieus and alliances. So I am fairly certain, given that syndicalism was propagated incessantly in the pre- and inter-war period by Indian revolutionaries, and given their links to the British working class, the leading edge of which in the pre-war period was syndicalist, that someone actively looking for de facto syndicalist unions in India’s port cities would unearth something of interest.<br />
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Introducing Ramnath’s Books</h3>
Briefly, Decolonizing Anarchism looks through what Ramnath calls “the stereoscopic lenses of anarchism and anticolonialism” for both explicitly anarchist as well as less explicitly libertarian socialist approaches, in the words and deeds of a wide range of local thinkers and activists, from the Bengali terrorists of the early 1900s, to the Gandhian decentralists of the mid-century Independence era, and to the non-partisan social movements of today. This is an important recovery of a tradition that rejected the statism of both the Indian National Congress, and of Communist traditions, and that raises important questions about the trajectory of Indian anti-imperialism. <br />
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Her Haj to Utopia explores the closest thing that colonial-era India had to an explicitly anarchist-influenced sub-continental and in fact international organisation, the Ghadar (Mutiny) Party. This took its name from the 1857 “Mutiny” against British rule, an uprising revered by Indian revolutionaries of all ideologies, as reflected in Ghadar’s fused and phased mixture of syndicalism, Marxism, nationalism, radical republicanism, and pan-Islamicism. The two books intersect in the figure of Ghadar Party founder Lala Har Dayal (1884?- 1939), a globe-hopping, ascetic Bakuninist revolutionary and industrial syndicalist, secretary of the Oakland, California, branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and founder of the Bakunin Institute near that city. Har Dayal is of interest to van der Walt and I, in writing the South Asian section of Counter-power’s narrative history volume Global Fire because he was explicitly anarchist and syndicalist and because he was a true internationalist, building a world-spanning liberation movement that not only established roots in Hindustan and Punjab, but which linked radicals within the Indian Diaspora as far afield as Afghanistan, British East Africa (Uganda and Kenya), British Guiana (Guiana), Burma, Canada, China, Fiji, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaya (Malaysia), Mesopotamia (Iraq), Panama, the Philippines, Siam (Thailand), Singapore, South Africa, and the USA, with Ghadarites remaining active in (for example) colonial Kenya into the 1950s.<br />
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Oddly, Ramnath often uses the formulation “Western anarchism” – by which she says she means a Western conception of anarchism, rather than a geographic delimitation. Yet her own work underlines the point that anarchism/syndicalism was a universal and universalist movement, neither confined to nor centred on the West, a movement sprung transnationally and deeply rooted across the world. Of course, it adapted to local and regional situations – anarchism in the Peruvian indigenous movement was not identical to anarchism in the rural Vlassovden in Bulgaria, or amongst the Burakumin outcaste in Japan (this latter having implications for the Dalit outcaste of India) – but all of these shared core features and ideas. Anarchism in South Asia is a small but important link in the vast networks of anarchism across the colonial and postcolonial world. I feel Ramnath could have benefited from a deeper knowledge of the movement’s historical trajectories across and implantation in colonial Asia, not least in China, Manchuria, Korea, Hong Kong, Formosa (Taiwan), Malaya (Malaysia), the Philippines, and the territories of Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina (together, Vietnam) – but then our Global Fire is not yet published. <br />
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Lucien van der Walt and my books have challenged the narrow, North Atlanticist bias of most anarchist historiography, and were written from such a perspective because we live in post-colonial Africa, and we needed to rediscover and re-establish the legitimacy of the anarchist/syndicalist praxis in our own region – where, for example, syndicalists built the what was probably the first union amongst Indian workers in British colonial Africa in Durban, South Africa, in 1917 on the IWW model, and where we work alongside Indian Diasporic militants today. It is hugely to Ramnath’s credit that the implications of her work in restoring to us the contemporary relevance of South Asian libertarian socialism far exceed her own objectives. Despite her location in the imperialist USA, her motivations appear to be similar to our own: a rediscovery of her own people’s place in anti-authoritarian history. And despite the fact that our approach favours what David Graeber calls “big-A anarchism” – the organised, explicitly anarchist movement of class struggle – and hers what he calls “small-a anarchism” – the broader range of libertarian and anarchist-influenced oppositional movements – our objectives coincide; taken together, her and our trajectories amount to a Haj, a political-intellectual pilgrimage, towards recovering a viable anarchist anti-imperialist praxis.<br />
<h3>
Reassessing Gandhi’s “Libertarianism”</h3>
Just as she has introduced us to the details of the life of the ubiquitous figure of Mandayam Parthasarathi Tirumal “MPT” Acharya (1887-1954), a life-long anarchist, and, ironically, Lenin’s delegate to the Ghadar-founded “Provisional Indian Government” in Kabul, so we hope to introduce her to ethnic Indian revolutionary syndicalists such as Bernard Lazarus Emanuel Sigamoney (1888-1963) of the IWW-styled Indian Workers’ Industrial Union in Durban. In many respects, we have walked the same paths, for we too needed to assess the Bengali terrorists who interacted with British anarchists like Guy Aldred, to ascertain whether they were ever convinced by anarchism, beyond the simple and dangerous glamour of “propaganda by the deed”. We too have weighed up whether Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) can be claimed – as in Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible: a History of Anarchism (2008), a magisterial work, yet flawed in its definitions – as “the outstanding libertarian in India earlier this century”. This same argument has been made by the late Geoffrey Ostergaard, who called the Gandhians “gentle anarchists”.<br />
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Ramnath writes of Gandhi that he “harboured a deep distaste for the institution of the state”. This is unquestionable and it is important to recall that there was an anti-statist strand in Indian anti-colonialism. Yet anarchism is more than simply anti-statism: it is libertarian socialist, born of the modern working class. Gandhi’s anti-statism was really a parochial agrarianism and Ramnath is correct to group him with the “romantic countermodernists”; it never translated into a real vision of national liberation without the state as its vehicle, and never had a real programmatic impact on the Congress movement. Ramnath is more convincing than Marshall in showing the libertarian socialist nature of Sarvodaya, the Gandhi-influenced self-rule movement of Jayaprakash “JP” Narayan (1902-1979). <br />
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Gandhian Sarvodaya falls outside of the anarchist current, but initially appears, like anarchism, to be part of the larger libertarian socialist stream within which one finds the likes of council communism. There are some parallels between Gandhi’s vision of “a decentralized federation of autonomous village republics” and the anarchist vision of a world of worker and community councils. Yet this should not be overstated. Gandhi’s rejection of Western capitalist modernity and industrialism has libertarian elements, but Ramnath perhaps goes too far to conclude that he had a clear “anti-capitalist social vision” that could create a new, emancipatory, world – a world in which modernity is recast as libertarian socialism by the popular classes. By her own account, Gandhi’s opposition to both British and Indian capital seems simply romantic, anti-modern and anti-industrial, a rejection of the blight on the Indian landscape of what William Blake called the “dark Satanic mills”. Absent is a real vision of opposing the exploitative mode of production servicing a parasitic class, of seeing the problem with modern technology as lying not in the technology itself, but in its abuse by that class.<br />
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Gandhi’s libertarianism leads easily into right wing romanticism. Ramnath admits this, and is unusually frank in noting that there are strands in the Indian anti-colonial matrix that can provide the seed-bed from which both leftist and rightist flowers may sprout. As she notes in Decolonizing Anarchism, “it is a slippery slope from the praise of a völkisch spirit to a mysticism of blood and soil, to chauvinism and fascism”. Although her example of that French prophet of irrationalism and precipitate violent action, Georges Sorel, overinflates his influence on the syndicalist workers’ movement (he was uninvolved and marginal), she is correct in saying that “certain [historical] situations create openings for both right and left responses, and, even more importantly, that the “rejection of certain (rational, industrial, or disciplinary) elements of modernity, became for Indian extremists and Russian populists a proudly self-essentializing rejection of Western elements”, and constituted “a crucial evolutionary node, from which Right and Left branchings were possible.” <br />
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This contradiction is at the very heart of the Gandhian Sarvodaya movement. On the one hand, it has a healthy distrust of the state. On the other, it retains archaic rights and privileges, traditional village hierarchies and paternalistic landlordism – in line with Gandhi’s own “refusal to endorse the class war or repudiate the caste system”. In practice, Ramnath warns that the traditional panchayat “village republic” system from which Sarvodaya draws its legitimacy “is far from emancipatory… women who hold seats are frequently chosen more for their potential as puppets than as leaders.” By contrast, anarchist agrarian revolutionaries like the Magónista Praxedis Guerrero fought and died to end the gendered class system, and to create genuinely free rural worlds, free of feudalism and patriarchy as well as capitalism – not to revert to feudalism over capitalism. Gandhi’s embrace of caste, landlordism, and opposition to modern technologies that can end hunger and backbreaking labour, is diametrically opposed to anarchist egalitarianism. <br />
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Moreover, the mainstream of the anarchist tradition is rationalist, and thus opposed to the state-bulwarking mystification of most organised religion, whereas Gandhian Sarvodaya explicitly promoted Hinduism as part of its uncritical embrace of traditionalism. So what do we make of Gandhi himself? Speaking plainly, I do not like Gandhi because I am a militant anti-militarist who believes that pacifism enables militarism. I am very suspicious of Gandhi’s central role in midwifing the Indian state. On balance, in his völkisch nationalist decentralism, I would argue for him to be seen as something of a forebearer of “national anarchism,” that strange hybrid of recent years. Misdiagnosed by most anarchists as fascist, “national anarchism” fuses radical decentralism, anti-hegemonic anti-statism (and often anti-capitalism), with a strong self-determinist thrust that stresses cultural-ethnic homogeneity with a traditional past justifying a radical future; this is hardly “fascism” or a rebranding of “fascism,” for what is fascism without the state, hierarchy and class, authoritarianism, and the führer-principle?<br />
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Turning to the Ghadar movement: besides unalloyed anarchist and syndicalist national liberation figures such as Nestor Makhno (1888-1934) of the Ukraine, Shin Chae’ho (1880-1936) of Korea, Mikhail Gerdzhikov (1877-1947) of Bulgaria, and Leandré Valero (1923-2011) of Algeria, Ghadar can be located within a larger current of anti-colonial movements that were heavily influenced by anarchism, yet not entirely anarchist in that they were influenced by a mixture of beliefs current in their times. For example, Augusto Sandino (1895-1934) of Nicaragua, was influenced by a mélange of IWW-styled industrial syndicalism, ethnic nationalism, and mysticism. Phan Bội Châu (1867-1940) of Vietnam was influenced by anarchism, radical republicanism and, for temporary tactical reasons, was a supporter of the installation of a Vietnamese monarchy. Clements Kadalie (1896-1951) in South Africa drew on the IWW as well as liberalism and Garveyism to organise workers.<br />
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In Haj to Utopia, Ramnath notes that “Ghadar was the fruit of a very particular synthesis; of populations, of issues, of contextual frames, and of ideological elements. It is precisely the richness of this combination that enabled it to play the role of missing generation in the genealogy of Indian radicalism, and of medium of translation among co-existing movement discourses.” Likewise, in South Africa, through figures like Thibedi William “TW” Thibedi (1888-1960) we can trace a vector of revolutionary syndicalism from the Industrial Workers of Africa, into the early Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA), and into Kadalie’s Industrial and Commercial Union which established an organisational presence in the British colonies as far afield as North Rhodesia (Zambia), that survived into the 1950s in South Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).<br />
<h3>
Three South Asian Anarchist-influenced Movements</h3>
What is of interest to van der Walt and I is not so much the ideas of individual Indian libertarian socialists – where these are legitimately identified – but rather whether those ideas motivated any mass movements; broadly because anarchism is only relevant if it escapes ivory towers and self-absorbed radical ghettoes and organises the popular classes, that is, the working class, poor and peasantry; and narrowly because it is important in engaging with ethnic Indian militants today to know of historic Indian anarchism and anarchist-influenced currents. So it is here that both the pre-war Ghadar and post-independence Sarvodaya movements need to be assessed in their own right as living social instruments that developed beyond their founders’ ideas, and also – and this is important – to learn from both their successes and failures. Of Ghadar, Ramnath argues in Haj to Utopia that it was not only a party, but also “a movement, referring to an idea, a sensibility and a set of ideological commitments that took wing – or rather, took ship – exuberantly outrunning their originators’ control.” The same can also be said of Sarvodaya. So what are we to say about Ghadar and Sarvodaya as organisational tendencies, in terms of their practices which overspilled the original visions of Har Dayal and Gandhi? <br />
<h4>
a) Pre-Independence: Ghadar</h4>
For both movements, the question is inflected with shifts of emphasis over their decades of development, but in the case of Ghadar, its anarchist provenance is clearer and Ramnath argues that this was a very coherent movement: “though many observers and historians have tended to dismiss Ghadar’s political orientation as an untheorized hodgepodge, I believe we can perceive within Ghadarite words and deeds an eclectic and evolving, yet consistently radical program.” She argues, for example, that Ghadar’s “blending of political libertarianism and economic socialism, together with a persistent tendency toward romantic revolutionism, and within their specific context a marked antigovernment bent, is why one may argue that the Ghadar movement’s alleged incoherence is actually quite legible through a logic of anarchism… not only did Ghadar join the impulses towards class struggle and civil rights with anticolonialism, it also managed to combine commitments to both liberty and equality. Initially drawing sustenance from both utopian socialism and libertarian thought, their critique of capitalism and of liberalism’s racial double standard gained increasingly systematic articulation in the course of the [First World] war and the world political shifts in its aftermath.” <br />
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Ghadar’s “indictment of tyranny and oppression was on principle globally applicable, even while generated by a historically specific situation and inflected in culturally specific terms; moreover they increasingly envisaged a comprehensive social and economic restructuring for postcolonial India rather than a mere handing over of the existing governmental institutions.” A “proper Ghadarite” was, she states, anti-colonial, passionately patriotic, internationalist, secularist, modernist, radically democratic, republican, anti-capitalist, militantly revolutionist, and “in temperament, audacious, dedicated, courageous unto death” – all virtues that can honestly be ascribed to all real revolutionary socialists, including the anarchists – but with Ghadar’s aim being “a free Indian democratic-republican socialist federation, and an end to all forms of economic and imperial slavery anywhere in the world.” Thus, despite its heterodox sources of inspiration, Ghadar, in its decentralist, egalitarian, free socialist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and universalist yet culturally-sensitive vision, closely approximated “big-A” anarchism. <br />
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As an organisational model, she says that “Ghadar is often positioned as a transitional phase between two modes of revolutionary struggle, namely, the conspiratorial secret society model and the mass organizational model, which is also to say the voluntarist and structuralist theories of precipitating change.” However, she writes, Ghadar was a distinctly different and “relatively stable mode” that involved a necessary articulation between the two other modes, between what we would call the specific organisation (of tendency) and the mass organisation (of class).<br />
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To expand: in most sub-revolutionary situations, specific anarchist organisations organised workers at the critical fulcrum of exploitation by creating syndicalist unions, unions to defend the working class but with revolutionary objectives. As these movements of counter-power developed, they went beyond the factory gates, to build revolutionary class fronts embracing (for example) rent strikes, neighbourhood assemblies, subsistence food-gardens, popular education, proletarian arts, and popular councils (soviets, we might say, although that term has been severely abused by awful regimes). As this grassroots counter-power and counter-culture became a significant threat to the ruling classes, armed formations (militia, guerrilla forces, or even subversive cells within the official army and navy) were often formed to defend the people’s gains. And lastly, at this matured, the productive, distributive, deliberative, educational, cultural and defensive organs of counter-power would be linked into regional and national assemblies of mandated delegates. This enabled the co-ordination of a social revolution over a large territory, and the transformation of counter-power into the organised democratic control of society by the popular classes. This was the ideal route, aspired to by most anarchist movements; we can see elements of it in the Ghadar sensibility and aspirations too. <br />
<br />
But the world does not always work as planned, of course, and sometimes anarchists, like the Bulgarians who fought for the liberation of Macedonia from Ottoman imperialism in 1903, were forced by living under imperialist circumstances into different routes – in this case, creating popular guerrilla formations first in order to wage anti-colonial war, only paying attention to industrial organisation in subsequent years. This is similar to the path taken by Ghadar, which focused on military and propaganda work, including the subversion of Indian colonial troops (Indian servicemen returning home from defending the British Empire were receptive to Ghadarite stresses on the contractions between their sacrifice and their conditions at home). This was clearly informed not only by the insurrectionary tendencies of the day (including strands of anarchism), but also the objective difficulties of open mass work against colonialism in a largely agrarian context.<br />
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With the formation of an independent Indian state in 1947 under the Congress party, supported by Gandhi, conditions changed again. Ghadar was, by this stage, still operational but increasingly intertwined with the Communist Party, which in turn, had a complex on-off relationship with the ruling Congress party – yet “Ghadar’s influence,” Ramnath writes, “continued to echo long after independence. The Kirti Party and later the Lal Communist Party espoused a heterodox socialism that resisted the diktats of CPI correctness and retained characteristically Ghadarite elements of romantic idealism.” Veteran Ghadarites came to the fore again when the CPI Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML) split from the Party in the 1960s, and in 1969, a Communist Ghadar Party of India (CGPI) was founded among the Indian Diaspora in Britain and Canada with “anticapitalism and opposition to neocolonialism in India and antiracism and the struggle for immigrant rights in the West” as its key goals. The best epitaph of Ghadar appears to be that of Rattan Singh, quoted by Ramnath as saying the party consisted of “simple peasants who became revolutionists and dared to raise the banner of revolt at a time when most of our national leaders could not think beyond ‘Home Rule’.”<br />
<h4>
b) Post-Independence: Sarvodaya</h4>
Beyond Ghadarite echoes within heterodox communism, did libertarian socialism implant itself within post-Independence India in any way? To answer this question, we have to turn to Sarvodaya as a movement. I must say that Ramnath makes a strong case that its key interpreter in his later years, JP Narayan, had moved from Marxism to a position far to the left of Gandhi, of de facto anarchism, by Independence. Narayan was a founder in 1934 of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), then a left caucus within the Indian National Congress. Ramnath makes no mention of the inner dynamics of the CSP, which make for intriguing reading. According to Maria Misra’s Vishnu’s Crowded Temple: India since the Great Rebellion (2008), the CSP “included both socialists and [after 1936] communists – following the recent U-turn in Soviet policy encouraging communists to collaborate with nationalist parties. The goal of this group was the continuation and escalation of mass agitation, the boycott of constitutional reform and the inclusion of the trade unions and kisan sabhas [peasant associations] in Congress in order to strengthen the institutional representation of the radicals”. According to Kunal Chattopadhyay in The World Social Forum: What it Could Mean for the Indian Left (2003), after the Communists were expelled from Congress in 1940 for advocating measures that would warm an anarchist heart (a general strike linked with an armed uprising), a growing “anarchist” influence led the CSP under Narayan’s leadership into a more strongly anti-statist, anti-parliamentary orientation. A tantalising hint – although much depends on what Chattopadhyay means by “anarchist”! <br />
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Then, after Indian statehood in 1947, the CSP split from Congress to form a more mainstream Indian Socialist Party – and Narayan exited, turning his back on electoral politics entirely. For the next 30 years – before his return to party politics to rally the forces that defeated the 1975-1977 Indira Gandhi military dictatorship – Narayan worked at the grassroots level, together with fellow Sarvodayan anti-authoritarian Vinoba Bhave (1895 -1982), pushing Sarvodaya very close to anarchism in many regards. Ramnath quotes Narayan: “I am sure that it is one of the noblest goals of social endeavour to ensure that the powers and functions and spheres of the State are reduced as far as possible”. Marshall traces the development of the post-Gandhi Sarvodaya movement from the 1949 formation of the All-India Association for the Service of All (Akhil Bharat Sarva Seva Sangh), an anti-partisan formation aiming at a decentralised economy and common ownership, to its peak in 1969 when the Sarvodaya movement managed to get 140,000 villages to declare themselves in favour of a “modified version of Gramdan” or communal ownership of villages, although in reality only a minority implemented this. Still, this push apparently “distributed over a million acres of Bhoodan [voluntary landowner-donated] land to half a million landless peasants”. <br />
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For Narayan, “decentralization cannot be effected by handing down power from above”, “to people whose capacity for self-rule has been thwarted, if not destroyed by the party system and concentration of power at the top”. Instead, the “process must be started from the bottom” with a “programme of self-rule and self-management” and a “constructive, non-partisan approach”. Ramnath quotes him saying of the state that “I am sure that it is one of the noblest goals of social endeavour to ensure that the powers and functions and spheres of the State are reduced as far as possible…” <br />
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In the Asian anti-imperialist context, the Manchurian Revolution precisely demonstrated the possibilities of Narayan’s vision, but also the necessity of this entailing a revolutionary struggle, rather than mere moralistic appeals to exploitative landlords. This road was mapped out by Ghadar as well as in the vibrant minority stream of East Asian anarchism. In 1929, Korean anarchists in Manchuria, who were waging a fierce struggle against Japan’s 1910 occupation of Korea, formed the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria (KAF-M). The KAF-M and the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF) reached agreement with an anarchist-sympathetic general commanding part of the anti-imperialist Korean Independence Army to transform the Shinmin Prefecture, a huge mountainous valley which lies along the northern Korean border, into a regional libertarian socialist administrative structure known as the General League of Koreans (Hanjok Chongryong Haphoi) or HCH. <br />
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This self-managed anarchist territory was based on delegates from each Shinmin district, and organised around departments dealing with warfare, agriculture, education, finance, propaganda, youth, social health and general affairs. Delegates at all levels were ordinary workers and peasants who earned a minimal wage, had no special privileges, and were subject to decisions taken by the organs that mandated them, like the co-operatives. It was based on free peasant collectives, the abolition of landlordism and the state, and the large-scale co-ordination of mutual aid banks, an extensive primary and secondary schooling system, and a peasant militia supplemented by fighters trained at guerrilla camps. This vital example of an Asian anarchist revolution is grievously understudied, but ranks with Ukraine 1918-1921 and Spain 1936-1939 as one of the great explicitly anarchist/syndicalist revolutions.<br />
<h4>
c) Contemporary: Shramik Mukti Dal</h4>
The third Indian anarchistic organisation that Ramthath considers in Decolonizing Anarchism is the “post-traditional communist” Shramik Mukti Dal, which rose in rural Maharashtra in 1980. She quotes founder Bharat Patankar saying that “revolution means… the beginning of a struggle to implement a new strategy regarding the relationship between men and women and between people of different castes and nationalities. It means alternative ways of organizing and managing the production processes, alternate concepts of agriculture, and of agriculture/industry/ecology, and of alternative healthcare.” The Shramik Mukti Dal that emerges here is one that goes well beyond a backward-looking idealisation of tradition: its manifesto calls for a holistic and egalitarian revolution, assaulting through the transformation of daily life, “the established capitalist, casteist, patriarchal, social-economic structure,” “destroying the power of the current state” and replacing it with an “organized network of decentralized and ecologically balanced agro-industrial centers” – with “a new ecologically balanced, prosperous, non-exploitative society” as its aim. A de facto anarchist position if ever there was.<br />
<h3>
Anarchist Women in the Colonial Context</h3>
Ramnath’s work has highlighted for me – by its absence – the question of where were the leading women in these organisations, especially in light of Har Dayal’s opposition to women’s oppression, and the awe in which she says he held the likes of the Russian anarchist (later Marxist) Vera Zasulich? Latin America saw the rise of many towering female anarchist women, such as La Voz de la Mujer editor Juana Rouco Buela (1889-1969) of Argentina and her close associate, factory worker and Women’s Anarchist Centre organiser Virginia Bolten (1870-1960), syndicalist Local Workers’ Federation (FOL) leader Petronila Infantes (1922- ) of Bolivia, libertarian pedagogue Maria Lacerda de Moura (1887-1944) in Brazil, Magónista junta member María Andrea Villarreal González (1881-1963) and fellow Mexican, the oft-jailed Vésper and El Desmonte editor and poet Juana Belém Gutiérrez de Mendoza (1875-1942), an indigenous Caxcan. In many Latin American countries, women’s workplace strength was such that the anarchist/syndicalist unions had a Sección Feminina, such as the FOL’s powerful Women Workers’ Federation (FOF) – not as a gender ghetto, but because women workers tended to be concentrated in certain industries, especially textiles. <br />
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Is this absence of Indian women revolutionaries due to our lack of sources, or did the anti-colonial struggle and the related national question somehow limit women’s participation? Many of the most prominent women anarchists and syndicalists outside of the West were in postcolonial or in imperialist countries. In colonial Latin America, the feminist syndicalist Louisa Capetillo (1880-1922) of Puerto Rico stands out. Most of the prominent East Asian anarchist women of which we know were located in imperialist Japan: the journalist Kanno Sugako (1881-1911) who was executed for her alleged role in a regicidal conspiracy; the anarchist-nihilist Kaneko Fumiko (1903-1926), who committed suicide in jail after plotting to assassinate the Emperor to protest against Japanese imperialism in Korea; the syndicalist Itō Noe (1895–1923) who was murdered by the police; and writer and poet Takamure Itsue (1894–1964). <br />
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There were, of course, outstanding Chinese anarchist women – notably He Zhen – but of them we know precious little, beyond some of their writings. Again, there are tantalising glimpses in colonial Asia: Wong So-ying, who committed suicide in jail aged about 26 after attempting to assassinate the British governor of Malaya (Malaysia) in 1925; the Lee sisters, Kyu-Suk and Hyun-Suk, who smuggled arms and explosives into the anarchist Shinmin zone in Manchuria in the late 1920s; and Truong Thi Sau, who apparently commanded a guerrilla section of the anarchist Nguyan An Ninh Secret Society in Cochinchina (Vietnam) in the mid-1920s, languish in the margins of history and have yet to be adequately studied. In India, it is perhaps significant that the lone early woman anarchist-influenced militant, Sister Nivedita (1867-1911), was born as Margaret Elizabeth Noble in Ireland. It still needs to be explained why it was only in recent years that libertarian socialist Indian thinkers such as the anti-imperialist writer Arundhati Roy (1961 - ), a staunch supporter of Kashmiri autonomy – she has been called a “separatist anarchist” by her enemies – have come to the fore.<br />
<h3>
Revisiting Anarchist Anti-imperialist Praxis</h3>
Ramnath concludes Decolonizing Anarchism with a dialogue on the practical applications of these historical experiences: the key question arising from both volumes is the legitimisation of the anarchist project through effective locally-grounded strategy coupled to effective international solidarity. Her inspiration was partly derived from the questions raised by the now-defunct Anarchist People of Color (APOC) network in the USA, about how to deal with ethnic power differentials within movements, how to relate the lessons of grappling with ethnically-shaded internal neo-colonialism to international anti-imperialist solidarity. The majority-black Workers’ Solidarity Federation (WSF) in South Africa, in which I was active, clashed with the ethnic separatist approach (later associated with APOC), because the WSF stressed multiracial class unity due to its view of the primacy of class as the spine of capital and the state which articulated all other oppressions such as racism and sexism. The WSF’s successor, the Zabalaza (Struggle) Anarchist Communist Front (ZACF) has likewise based its approach on the strategies of the Brazilian Anarchist Co-ordination (CAB), which operates within a society with great similarities to ours, of multiracial “social insertion” of anarchist practice within multiracial popular classes.<br />
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In South Africa, one of the world’s most deeply ethnically fragmented societies, this articulation is far from easy: any successful anarchist project here will have to convince masses of the black, coloured, indigenous and Indian popular classes, across lines of colour, but along lines of class (building layers of militants-of-colour by social insertion in grassroots struggles is the key ZACF strategy) so anarchists cannot ignore the fate of the 3,3-million white African workers and poor. The most obvious divide in South Africa today is the world’s most extreme wealth-gap, slightly worse on the GINI scale than Brazil, with the post-apartheid state in many ways structurally indistinguishable from its apartheid predecessor. I feel my situation analogous to that of Ramnath when she travels to Palestine to work against the imperialism of her own USA, when travelling from the eroding privilege of multiracial lower middle-class Johannesburg to the shacklands of overwhelmingly black, excluded, underclass Soweto. <br />
<br />
Ramnath speaks of her experiences, citing a Palestinian activist telling US activists on a visit to rather “go back home and end U.S. imperialism. Liberating ourselves is our job. Ending U.S. imperialism is yours.” If as the saying goes the revolution begins in the sink, at home, perhaps I need to make a start within my own community – a notoriously reactionary one – and, if successful there, then widen my scope. It’s a much harder option to do revolutionary work among people who have the social power of proximity to hold you to account, compared to the potential irresponsibility of rootless revolutionary tourism and summit-hopping. Ramnath advises us to “look to your own house; work at and from your own sites of resistance.” For Ramnath, her own house sits at the intersection of the power of the US metropole and of her exclusionary status as a person of minority Indian extraction. My own house sits at the intersection between the subaltern SA periphery and my declining power as a person of minority European extraction. Wrestling with the traditional authoritarianism of my own white African people is perhaps today of greater worth than my best-considered position on the Palestinian question, which Palestinian statists will find offensive – though they are ethically and consequentially linked.<br />
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Ramnath’s view is that international solidarity work is crucial, linking struggles in imperialist and postcolonial countries, and that this cannot mean only supporting struggles if they are explicitly anarchist. I agree. Anarchists are fighting for a free world – not an anarchist world. My greatest personal revolutionary model, that of the Makhnovists, is of a politically pluralistic movement of the oppressed classes that operated along free communist lines. This was, however, a movement profoundly shaped by organisations of convinced anarchists – and showed the absolute necessity and value of homogenous anarchist organisations, inserted into mass movements, as crucial repositories of the lessons of a century and a half of anarchist class struggle. The Ukraine in which the Makhnovists operated had a long history of colonial subordination to Russia (an imperialism reinforced by the Bolsheviks), and a highly ethnically diverse population of Ukrainians, Russians, ethnic Germans, Jews, Cossacks, Tartars, Greeks and others – and the Makhnovists made a point of defending by force of arms ethnic pluralism (ethnic Germans were only dispossessed as landlords), publicly executing anti-Semitic pogromists.<br />
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Ramnath notes in Decolonizing Anarchism how the centralist Indian and Pakistani states, having emerged from colonialism, continue to emulate it with regard to their own minorities. In her view, these states’ behaviour towards regionalist, decentralist aspirations is “colonialism plain and simple, complete with the illegal occupation of territory” such as disputed Kashmir, the two states steamrolling over of many Kashmiris’ own clear desire for autonomy. It remains to be seen what the central South African state – which largely takes command-economy India as its model – would do if ever its own ethnic minorities with their own small-scale republican traditions such as the Boers or Griquas demanded more autonomy by extraparliamentary means, though “democratic” SA’s illegal invasion of Lesotho under Nelson Mandela in 1998 to crush a pro-democratic mutiny gives a foretaste of the type of neo-colonial response we can expect. <br />
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What is to be put in place of the centralised state in regions where colonialism imposed borders that do not match the demographics of the resident peoples? Ramnath shows how anti-colonial movements ended up in statist dead-ends, yet she herself argues for the construction of a Palestinian state, whose borders would be respected by the international system of states, as a means to secure space within which a decentralised and non-hierarchical socio-economic project may be possible; not to do so risks reconquest or dissolution, she says. But surely such a Palestinian state would itself conquer its own population, and surely we already see the proof of this in embryo with the Palestinian Authority? And the extrajudicial actions of imperialist states against insurgent zones, such as the USA in Iraq, or of sub-imperialist states such as SA in Lesotho, shows, to paraphrase August Spies, the restraints of international law on the powerful to be as cobwebs.<br />
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Anarchist revolutionary counter-power has historically achieved territorial control over large areas through the primacy of its egalitarian socio-economic project – not by the international system of states respecting its juridical status. The tragic failure of the Spanish Revolution lay precisely in the attempt to use the state system to protect the revolution: allying with Republicans against Franco’s forces, the anarchists found the Republican state would no more tolerate a decentralised and non-hierarchical socio-economic project than would Franco; the revolution and its territory were destroyed by the Republic before Franco marched into Barcelona. The “fuzzy” border areas which concern Ramnath for their indeterminacy were precisely the kind of regions in which the Makhnovist and Manchurian anarchist zones of 7-million and 2-million people respectively were able to establish their constructive social revolutions, which in turn underwrote the territorial control that the RPAU army and HCH militia were able to defend for several years. <br />
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Today’s borderlands no longer offer effective protection from the modern state’s over-the-horizon intelligence/munitions reach (let alone that of capital’s “private military companies”). Yet is it not precisely the autonomous municipalities of the Zapatistas rather than its armed forces, the EZLN, per se that have allowed them to secure some territorial control and to force the Mexican and US states to take Zapatista claims seriously? This is not the weak liberal concept of “speaking truth to power,” but rather it is a demonstration of pragmatic, egalitarian-revolutionary counter-power. Yes, both insurgent Makhnovia and Shinmin were later defeated by Red Army and Japanese Imperial Army imperialist invasions, but this simply shows that the “international community” will not tolerate real challenges – they can only be forced to respect them by force. And that requires counter-power to be established territorially by an armed social revolution. Perpetual “small a” opposition within the system of states, with no larger horizon of revolutionary rupture, will not remove the basic causes of oppression, and will not be perpetually tolerated either. Ramnath admits that a multi-fronted approach is necessary: “There can be no post-colonial anarchism in one country! No doctrine of peaceful co-existence, but continuous world revolution!” Thus, the project of counter-power: attempting to build tomorrow within the shell of today, to actively dismantle statist borders by means of social reconstruction, to defeat of the system, and to move beyond fond dreams to a genuine anarchist anti-imperialist liberation of society.<br />
<h3>
Conclusion</h3>
Both of Ramnath’s books are brave, groundbreaking and vital contributions to the liberation literature of an entire sub-continent. My criticism of some points should not occlude this. Decolonizing Anarchism is written from the perspectives and sensibilities of an activist, while Haj to Utopia from those of a social historian. In some respects, the latter, being the more academic work, is the more detailed and solidly argued, whereas the prior relies to some extent on statements of synthesis reflecting reductions of long internal and external debates, of Ramnath’s personal journey of discovery. They are packed with so many new vistas on the unknown South Asian aspects of anarchist anti-colonialism that they demand repeated readings, which never fail to delight. They should be read in tandem, as together they retrieve a lost set of libertarian socialist (and anarchist) tools once used within a vastly complex culture, and by this process relegitimise and sharpen the potential today for such anti-authoritarian approaches as multiple blades directed at the Gordian knot of ethnic identity, post-colonial capitalism and neo-imperialism, within South Asia and globally.<br />
<br />
[ENDS]</div>
Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-47988543908053751242014-02-17T02:39:00.001-08:002014-02-17T02:39:52.426-08:00<h1 class="article-title">
Χαρτογράφηση του Επαναστατικού Αναρχισμού</h1>
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<span class="article-details"><span class="article-detail"><img alt="category" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/star.gif" /><a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/international">Διεθνή</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/historyofanarchism">Αναρχική Ιστορία</a> | <a class="category-text" href="http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire/review">Κριτική / Παρουσίαση</a></span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/date.gif" /> Monday August 19, 2013 18:29</span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/person.gif" /> by Dmitri - MACG (personal capacity)</span><span class="article-detail"><img alt="author email" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/email.gif" /> <a href="mailto:ngnm55%20at%20gmail%20dot%20com">ngnm55 at gmail dot com</a></span></span><a href="http://www.anarkismo.net/report_posts?subject=Reported Post: Story 26029 with title: &#935;&#945;&#961;&#964;&#959;&#947;&#961;&#940;&#966;&#951;&#963;&#951; &#964;&#959;&#965; &#917;&#960;&#945;&#957;&#945;&#963;&#964;&#945;&#964;&#953;&#954;&#959;&#973; &#913;&#957;&#945;&#961;&#967;&#953;&#963;&#956;&#959;&#973;&message=Reported Post: Story 26029 with title: &#935;&#945;&#961;&#964;&#959;&#947;&#961;&#940;&#966;&#951;&#963;&#951; &#964;&#959;&#965; &#917;&#960;&#945;&#957;&#945;&#963;&#964;&#945;&#964;&#953;&#954;&#959;&#973; &#913;&#957;&#945;&#961;&#967;&#953;&#963;&#956;&#959;&#973;%0Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.anarkismo.net%2Findex.php%3Fobj_id%3D53%26story_id%3D26029%26%0A%0AEnter+your+reason+here+-+please+do+not+remove+the+above+link+as+it+will+allow+an+editor+to+easily+remove+the+offending+content"><img alt="Report this post to the editors" class="icon" src="http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/report.gif" title="Report this post to the editors" /></a></div>
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Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism</div>
<blockquote class="article-intro">
Michael Schmidt, Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism (Χαρτογράφηση του Επαναστατικού Αναρχισμού), AK Press 2013</blockquote>
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Μια συνοπτική ιστορία για τη σημασία και την παγκόσμια εμβέλεια του μαζικού οργανωμένου αναρχισμού, την ανίχνευση της συνδικαλιστικής του προέλευσης στο Μεξικό το 1869, μετά στην Ισπανία, περαιτέρω στην εξάπλωσή του στην Αίγυπτο και την Ουρουγουάη από το 1872, στη συνέχεια στην Κούβα και τις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες από το 1883, την κατακόρυφη άνοδό του στα εργατικά κινήματα σε ολόκληρη τη Λατινική Αμερική, και την επιρροή του στις ριζοσπαστικές μειονότητες στην Ασία, την Ανατολική Ευρώπη, τη Μέση Ανατολή, την Ωκεανία και την Αφρική νοτίως της Σαχάρας. <br /><br />Ο ιστορικός Michael Schmidt εντοπίζει πέντε «κύματα» μαχητικού εργατικού κινήματος που καθορίζουν την αναρχική οργάνωση τα τελευταία 150 χρόνια, εξηγώντας τα κεντρικά χαρακτηριστικά του καθενός από αυτά. Ερευνά, επίσης, τις οικονομικές και κοινωνικές βάσεις του αναρχισμού / συνδικαλισμού, και κατά τη διάρκεια του καθενός από τα «κύματα», μέσω ντοκουμέντων-“κλειδιών” συζητά της ζωτικής σημασίας σχέση μεταξύ της μαχητικής μειονότητας των αγωνιστών και των εργατικών και φτωχών μαζών.<br /><br />”Εν μέρει ιστορία, εν μέρει μανιφέστο, η ‘Χαρτογράφηση του Επαναστατικού Αναρχισμού’ είναι μια περιεκτική και διορατική πολεμική. Ο Michael Schmidt χρησιμοποιεί μια τεράστια βιβλιογραφία για να αποδείξει ότι ο αναρχισμός είναι ένα ιστορικό κίνημα με βαθιές ρίζες στην εργατική τάξη και συνέχεια στο παρόν. Το βιβλίο είναι μια ζωντανή αφήγηση, με ρεαλιστική κρίση και ελπίδα. Είναι απλό αλλά και δυναμικό και προσεγμένο. Οι ακτιβιστές και οι επιστήμονες εκείνοι που ενδιαφέρονται για τον αναρχισμό θα βρουν πολλά να συλλογιστούν και να συζητήσουν από καρδιάς” λέει ο Mark Leier, συγγραφέας του βιβλίου “Bakunin: A Biography” (Thomas Dunne Books, 2006, New York).<br /><br />Ο Michael Schmidt είναι εκτελεστικός διευθυντής του Ινστιτούτου Προχωρημένης Δημοσιογραφίας και διοικητικός γραμματέας του Συνδέσμου Επαγγελματιών Δημοσιογράφων Νότιας Αφρικής. Συμμετέχει ενεργά στο διεθνές αναρχικό κίνημα, ερευνητής δημοσιογράφος, ιστορικός, ερασιτέχνης στιχουργός τραγουδιών και ακούραστος υπέρμαχος της δημοσιογραφικής ελευθερίας. Με τον πανεπιστημιακό καθηγητή Lucien van der Walt, είναι οι συγγραφείς του βιβλίου Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Μαύρη Φλόγα: Η επαναστατική ταξική πολιτική του αναρχισμού και του συνδικαλισμού), που κυκλοφόρησε το 2009 από την AK Press (ο δεύτερος τόμος του οποίου αναμένεται από τον ίδιο εκδοτικό οίκο μάλλον στο 2014). Ζει και εργάζεται στο Γιοχάνεσμπουργκ της Νότιας Αφρικής.<br /> *Μετάφραση “Ούτε Θεός-Ούτε Αφέντης”, Αύγουστος 2013. </div>
Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-35021446555863067302014-02-12T05:32:00.001-08:002014-02-12T05:32:50.883-08:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4772807440122567157.post-51055219408839309002014-02-12T01:24:00.001-08:002014-02-12T01:24:46.652-08:00
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Le </span></i><a href="http://www.mauvaiseherbe.ca/2012/07/24/anarchie-anarchisme-premier-point-de-contact/"><i><span lang="FR" style="color: #e76b2c; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">texte publié par Étienne Desbiens-Després</span></i></a><i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"> cette semaine se voulait une démystification, un
premier point de contact avec l’anarchie et l’anarchisme. Décidément fort du
point de vue philosophique, il a suscité plusieurs commentaires fort
intéressants, dont un texte de la part d’un membre du collectif Emma Goldman,
très étoffé et documenté. Donc, pour ceux et celles qui souhaitent poursuivre
la réflexion:</span></i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<b><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Anarchie et
anarchisme : Pour s’y retrouver</span></b><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Le texte «
Anarchie et anarchisme : Premier contact » d’Étienne Desbiens-Després m’est
apparu comme une présentation assez efficace pour démystifier la philosophie
politique de l’anarchisme. La présentation est assez bien documentée et dégage
plusieurs éléments du courant d’idée. En commentaire, je voudrais ici
développer davantage sur la matérialisation de cette philosophie politique au
sein de l’un des premiers mouvements sociaux transnationaux, le mouvement
anarchiste. Pour tenter de présenter le poisson dans son eau, je m’inspirerai
des réflexions de Michael Schmidt et de Lucien van der Walt (dans Black Flame,
2009) sur l’historiographie anarchiste.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">La définition de
l’anarchisme mise de l’avant dans le texte m’apparait un peu trop floue; la
confusion sur certains éléments pouvant le rapprocher d’idées très
contradictoires. Je considère que c’est tout à notre avantage de définir
celle-ci de façon beaucoup plus étroite étant donné la profondeur de la
transformation sociale recherchée.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Je reviendrais
tout d’abord brièvement sur la notion de liberté individuelle. Malatesta
écrivait : « <i>L’aspiration à la liberté illimitée, si elle n’est pas tempérée
par l’amour de l’humanité et le désir que chacun jouisse d’une liberté égale,
pourrait bien créer des rebelles qui, s’ils sont assez forts, deviendraient
vite des exploiteurs et des tyrans mais jamais des anarchistes.</i> »<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Autrement dit,
la liberté individuelle doit ainsi être harmonisée avec les « obligations
communales », la liberté collective, pour qu’elle s’accompagne de l’égalité;
les deux étant inséparables dans la conception des anarchistes. Les droits sont
ainsi liés à la participation à la vie quotidienne de la communauté et il n’est
pas rejeté qu’une certaine forme de coercition soit exercée légitimement, mais
celle-ci devrait comme toujours être portée par des prises de décisions
collectives et démocratiques. L’anarchisme s’inscrit ainsi comme une doctrine
sociale, au sens où je ne peux pas être libre, tout seul dans mon chalet, tant
que tous le monde ne l’est pas – la libération recherchée est collective,
sociale. L’individu n’y perd pas son plein épanouissement. Au contraire, comme
l’écrivait Bakounine : « <i>La liberté des autres étend la mienne à l’infini</i>
».<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Deuxièmement, il
est important d’exposer comment l’anarchisme s’est développé comme mouvement
transnational puisqu’il ne tire vraisemblablement pas ses racines d’une nature
humaine particulière. Le courant d’idée tient ses origines d’une époque
particulière de l’histoire et, comme mouvement, se transforme depuis avec un
dynamisme variable à travers les âges. Pour Schmidt et van der Walt,
l’anarchisme est un phénomène social plutôt nouveau dans l’histoire, datant de
près de 150 ans. Il faut plus précisément le situer dans la création de la
classe ouvrière moderne et du socialisme, ainsi qu’aux tous débuts du
syndicalisme ouvrier.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Marx et Engels
écrivaient dans le Manifeste du Parti Communiste : «<i> À mesure que grandit la
bourgeoisie, c’est-à-dire le capital, se développe aussi le prolétariat, la
classe des ouvriers modernes qui ne vivent qu’à la condition de trouver du
travail et qui n’en trouvent qui si leur travail accroit le capital. Ces
ouvriers, contraints de se vendre au jour le jour, sont une marchandise, un
article de commerce comme un autre; ils sont exposés, par conséquent, à toutes
les vicissitudes de la concurrence, à toutes les fluctuations du marché. […]
Une fois que l’ouvrier a subi l’exploitation du fabricant et qu’on lui donne
son salaire en argent comptant, il devient la proie d’autres membres de la
bourgeoisie, le propriétaire, le détaillant, le prêteur sur gages, etc., lui
tombent dessus.</i> »<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Les grandes
transformations matérielles de la société, une révolution industrielle comme
l’ont décrit Marx et Engels, ont pour corollaire le développement du
socialisme, visant l’abolition révolutionnaire du système capitaliste et des
classes sociales pour former une société égalitaire, le communisme. Une
première scission dans le mouvement socialiste s’opère avec la Première
Internationale, où les anarchistes ne s’entendent pas avec les marxistes sur la
question de l’attitude face aux partis politiques et aux gouvernements.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Sur la position
tenue par les anarchistes, Carlo Cafiero a écrit : « <i>Non; nous l’avons dit :
point d’entremetteurs, point de courtiers et d’obligeants serviteurs qui
finissent toujours par devenir les vrais maîtres : nous voulons que toute la
richesse existante soit prise directement par le peuple lui-même, qu’elle soit
gardée par ses mains puissantes, et qu’il décide lui-même de la meilleure
manière d’en jouir, soit pour la production, soit pour la consommation</i> ».<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Dans
l’opposition entre les travailleurs et travailleuses, ceux et celles qui ont à
vendre leur force de travail pour subsister à leurs besoins, et la bourgeoisie,
qui tire son profit des salarié-e-s qui produisent pour elle, apparaît dans
l’histoire moderne une contradiction importante, propice pour que les
salarié-e-s abolissent le système de classe. Kropotkine écrivait dans La
Conquête du pain : « <i>Le salariat est né de l’appropriation personnelle du
sol et des instruments de production par quelques-uns. C’était la condition
nécessaire pour le développement de la production capitaliste : il mourra avec
elle, lors même que l’on chercherait à le déguiser sous forme de « bons de travail
». La possession commune des instruments de travail amènera nécessairement la
jouissance en commun des fruits du labeur commun</i> ». Et pour Daniel Guérin,
le socialisme représente alors « <i>la cessation de l’exploitation de l’homme
par l’homme, la disparition de l’État politique, la gestion de la société de
bas en haut par les producteurs librement associés et fédérés.</i> »<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Ce n’est pas
anodin si les anarchistes ont, par conséquent, tant participé au mouvement
syndical naissant. Une des stratégies clés des anarchistes fut l’implantation
des idées et de la praxis libertaires au sein des mouvements sociaux populaires
dans le but de les radicaliser et d’y développer une culture autogestionnaire
et radicale. Le vrai changement ne peut venir que « du bas », des masses en
quelque sorte. Il est faux de prétendre que l’anarchisme fut historiquement un
mouvement marginal en dehors de l’Espagne. Les anarchistes ont réussi à rallier
autour d’organisations et de campagnes portant leurs idées des dizaines, et
parfois même des centaines, de milliers de personnes dans des pays aussi
diversifiés que Cuba, le Chili, le Japon, les États-Unis, le Portugal, la
Corée, le Mexique, l’Italie, l’Afrique du sud, l’Ukraine, la Suède, la Chine et
même le Canada. Au sein de ces campagnes et organisations de masse, les
anarchistes ont insisté sur la nécessité de l’égalité peu importe le genre ou
la couleur de peau et ont accordé, depuis le début, une importance aux luttes
contre les dégradations environnementales et les systèmes d’oppression spécifique
(patriarcat, racisme, etc.). Ces dernières n’étaient ainsi pas considérées «
luttes secondaires » comme dans la révolution « par étapes » des marxistes –
pour les libertaires, elles sont plutôt interreliées et méritent qu’on y prête
attention dès maintenant. Déjà, à travers les luttes sociales, les anarchistes
souhaitent transfigurer des rapports sociaux nouveaux exempts de domination.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<b><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Et aujourd’hui…</span></b><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">On peut
légitimement se demander si la lutte des classes n’est pas aujourd’hui une idée
d’un passé révolu. À voir nos syndicats, par exemple au Québec, on pourrait
bien observer qu’une forte collaboration avec le patronat s’est instaurée dans
les « relations de travail », que l’aspiration à l’appropriation collective des
moyens de production a été supprimée, ne subsistant pratiquement que des
revendications immédiates, et que des centrales contrôlent même d’importants
fonds d’actions investissant dans de grandes entreprises.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Il est, de plus,
vrai qu’en produisant une gamme de plus en plus étendue d’objets de
satisfaction, le système capitaliste a pu développer une accommodation
pacifique des conflits de classe. Les gens perçoivent que le travail devient
moins exténuant, plus mental et mieux « compensé » en confort avec leur
pick-up, spa, ski-doo et semaine à Cuba. Toutefois, croire cela, c’est
justifier toutes les formes d’oppression et l’enfer vécu dans d’autres régions
de la planète. Pour se perpétuer, le système capitaliste s’est transformé avec
le temps, mais ses principales caractéristiques, l’appropriation privée de la
plus-value et son accumulation par le grand capital, demeurent les mêmes. La
surproduction engendrée par la nécessité de produire toujours davantage
contribue à la crise écologique et à la crise économique que l’on traverse
actuellement. Si nombre de conflits se trouvent pacifiés ici, il faut observer
la vivacité avec laquelle s’organise la classe ouvrière dans les pays en voie
de développement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">La crise
économique, les mesures d’austérité budgétaire et les restructurations
d’entreprises nous sont annoncées comme des fatalités économiques. Ce sont des
fatalités au sein du capitalisme, où les travailleurs et travailleuses mettent
en production les lieux de travail et cultivent la terre, pour se faire voler
le fruit de leur travail contre un salaire. Hors de la mystique inculquée, il
est, de jour en jour, de plus en plus important de remettre en question la
supposée rationalité de l’exploitation. Bien concrètement, aujourd’hui, les
travailleurs et travailleuses rejeté-e-s à la rue par les fermetures
temporaires ou permanentes pourraient prendre exemple sur la panoplie de lieux
de travail, allant d’usines à des restaurants et hôtels, que les travailleurs
et travailleuses, devant des situations similaires en Argentine et en Grèce,
ont occupé, puis refait fonctionné à leur propre compte – sans patrons. C’est
l’<i>expropriation sous contrôle ouvrier</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Ce n’est pas à
des lieux de ce que Malatesta écrivait durant la crise en 1929 : « <i>Afin que
nous soyons libres, afin que chacun puisse en pleine liberté atteindre le
maximum de développement moral et matériel, et jouir de tous les bénéfices que
la nature et le travail peuvent donner, il faut que tous soient propriétaires,
c’est-à-dire que tous aient droit à ce peu de terre, de matières premières et
d’instruments qui est nécessaire pour travailler et produire sans être opprimé
et exploité. Et puisque l’on ne peut espérer que la classe possédante renonce
spontanément aux privilèges usurpés, il faut que les travailleurs l’exproprient
et que tout deviennent la propriété de tous</i> ».<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">À travers
l’autogestion et les difficiles relations avec la police, les patrons véreux,
l’État corrompu et le système judiciaire, nombreux et nombreuses sont ceux et
celles qui ont pris conscience de leur position d’acteurs et d’actrices dans la
lutte des classes et les systèmes d’oppression, plutôt que de simples victimes.
De moutons, ils et elles sont maintenant devenu-e-s des loups. C’est dire qu’un
mouvement de masse d’inspiration anarchiste est aujourd’hui encore possible
alors que l’écart de richesse entre les classes sociales poursuit sa course
folle.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">ALAN GILBERT,
membre du Collectif Emma Goldman<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Pour poursuivre
la lecture :</span></i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Black Flame par
Michael Schmidt et Lucien van der Walt (2009)</span></i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Cartographie de
l’anarchisme révolutionnaire par Michael Schmidt (2012)</span></i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">Abrégé du
Capital de Karl Marx par Carlo Cafiero (1910)</span></i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); border-color: currentColor currentColor windowtext; border-style: none none dotted; border-width: medium medium 3pt; mso-element: para-border-div; padding: 0cm 0cm 1pt;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240); border: currentColor; line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; mso-border-bottom-alt: dotted windowtext 3.0pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; mso-padding-alt: 0cm 0cm 1.0pt 0cm; padding: 0cm;">
<i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;">La
Conquête du pain par Pierre Kropotkine (1892)</span></i><span lang="FR" style="color: #454545; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: FR; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Michael Schmidthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04555321898470964579noreply@blogger.com0