Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism

Introduction

The revolutionary vision of anarchism gained a foothold in the imagination of the popular classes with the rise of the anarchist strategy of revolutionary syndicalism in the trade unions affiliated to the First International.[1] It has since provided the most devastating and comprehensive critique of capitalism, landlordism, the state, and power relations in general, whether based on gender, race, or other forms of oppression. In their place it has offered a practical set of tools with which the oppressed can challenge the tiny, heavily armed elites that exploit them. Anarchism and syndicalism have been the most implacable enemies of the ruling-class industrialists and landed gentry in state and capitalist modernisation projects around the world. They have also unalterably shaped class struggle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, producing several key effects that we now presume to be fundamental aspects of civilised society.

This broad anarchist tradition had constructed, and continues to construct today, concrete projects to dissolve the centralist, hierarchical, coercive power of capital and the state, replacing it with a devolved, free-associative, horizontally federated counter-power. This concept of “counter-power” echoes that of radical feminist Nancy Fraser’s “subaltern counterpublics.”[2] In essence, her subaltern counterpublics are socio-political spheres separated from the mainstream, which serve as “training-grounds for agitational activities directed towards wider publics.” Likewise, anarchist counter-power creates a haven for revolutionary practice that serves as a school for insurgency against the elites, a beachhead from which to launch its assault, and as the nucleus of a future, radically egalitarian society—what Buenaventura Durruti called the “new world in our hearts.”[3] As Steven Hirsch notes of the Peruvian anarchist movement, they “transmitted a counter-hegemonic culture to organised labour. Through newspapers, cultural associations, sports clubs, and resistance societies they inculcated workers in anti-capitalist, anti-clerical, and anti-paternalistic beliefs. They also infused organised labour wit an ethos that stressed self-emancipation and autonomy from non-workers’ groups and political parties.”[4] In a sense, anarchist counter-culture provides the oppressed classes with an alternate, horizontal socio-political reality.

Beyond the factory gates, the broad anarchist tradition was among the first to systematically confront racism and ethnic discrimination. It developed an antiracist ethic that extended from the early multi-ethnic labour struggles of the Industrial Workers of the World, through anti-fascist guerrilla movements of Europe, Asia, and Latin America in the 1920s–1950s, to become a key inspiration for the New Left in the period of African decolonisation, and later of indigenous struggles today in regions like Oaxaca in Mexico. But anarchism was more than a mere hammer to be used against prejudice: over the last one hundred and fifty years, generations of proletarians developed a complex toolkit of ideas and practices that challenged all forms of domination and exploitation. The world has changed dramatically over those decades, shaped in part by the contribution of anarcho-syndicalists and revolutionary syndicalists, a contribution usually relegated to the shadows, derided, or denied, but woven into the social fabric of contemporary society.

THE COHERENCE OF THE BROAD ANARCHIST TRADITION

Anarchism did not rise as a primordial rebel state of mind as far back as Lao Tzu in ancient China or Zeno in ancient Greece as many have speculated, nor was it the child of declining artisanal classes facing extinction by modern modes of production as so many Marxist writers would have us believe.[5] On the contrary, it grew within the seedbed of organised trade unions as a modern, internationalist, revolutionary socialist, and militant current with a vision of socialism-from-below, in opposition to classical Marxism’s imposition of socialism-from-above.

Marxism has historically included some minority libertarian currents, such as the “Council Communists,” “Left Communists,” and “Sovietists” of the 1920s. However, the vast majority of historical Marxist movements strived for revolutionary dictatorship based upon nationalisation and central planning. Every Marxist regime has been a dictatorship. Every major Marxist party has renounced Marxism for social democracy, acted as an apologist for a dictatorship, or headed a brutal dictatorship itself. Even those mainstream Marxists who critique the horrors of Stalin or Mao defend Lenin and Trotsky’s regime, which included all the core features of later Marxist regimes—labour camps, a one-party dictatorship, a secret political police, terror against the peasantry, the repression of strikes, independent unions and other leftists, etc. Marxism must be judged by history and the authoritarian Marxist lineage that exists therein: not Marxism as it might have been, but Marxism as it has been. Accordingly, I do not refer to “Stalinism” but rather simply to Marxism or to Bolshevism in the post–1917 period.

Over the past 15 decades, the global anarchist movement and its progeny, the syndicalist movement, have been comprised mainly of the industrial working class—seamen and stevedores, meat-packers and metalworkers, construction and farm workers, sharecroppers and railwaymen—as well as of craftspeople such as shoemakers and printers, and of peasants and indentured labourers, with only a sprinkling of the middle classes, of doctors, scientists, déclassé intellectuals, and journalists. It developed a sophisticated theory of how the militant minority related to broader trade unions, and to the popular classes as a whole, seeking to move beyond an insurrectionary general strike (or “lock-out of the capitalist class”) to a revolutionary transformation of society. The movement sought to achieve this through organised, internally-democratic, worker-controlled structures, including unions, rank-and-file networks, popular militia, street committees, consumers’ co-operatives, and popular policy-making assemblies.

Many would ask what the relevance of the broad anarchist tradition would be in today’s world, a world of nanotechnology and space tourism far removed from the gas-lit origins of the movement. The world has changed. In 1860, Washington D.C. was a rough, provincial town. Today, it is the unchallenged imperial capital of the world, the heart of the US “hyperpower.” The telegraph had already begun to unite people, just as barbed wire divided their land—yet successful trans-Atlantic telephone cables and the Fordist production line had yet to see daylight. Many countries, notably Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic and Balkan states, Vietnam, and South Africa, did not yet exist, nor did much of the Middle East. Those countries that did, like Argentina, Egypt, Algeria, and Canada, were narrow riverine or coastal strips of the giant territories they would later lay claim to. In 1860, women, even in countries as advanced as France, would have to wait a lifetime merely to secure the bourgeois vote. Serfdom and slavery were widespread, and the divine right of kings reigned supreme over vast territories, including Imperial Japan, China, and Russia, and the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

And yet, there are strong echoes of that world that still resonate today, for it was a world experiencing a disruptive upsurge of globalisation, evident in the colonial scramble, the ascendancy of the modern banking system, and the integration of modern industrialising economies. As the means of production modernised, shadows of unilateral military interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia were cast, and corporations wielded more power than governments in the developing world. Established societal norms broke down and the rise of terrorism, populism, religious millenarianism, and revolutionary politics took their place, as means for the oppressed to explain their pain and fight back. These phenomena are all remarkably familiar in today’s world.

The broad anarchist movement has currency primarily because it remains a proletarian practise that grapples with the question of power, in relation to both intimate, interpersonal relations and the broader balance of forces in society. The anarchist conception of power is in opposition to the Marxist conception of the seizure and adaptation of coercive, vertical, centralised, bourgeois power. Instead, anarchists argue for, and in their innumerable revolts and their four main revolutions have practiced, a free, horizontal, federalist, proletarian counter-power that would equitably distribute decision-making powers and responsibilities across liberated communities. In particular, anarchist theorists have grappled with how to construct a real, living libertarian communist praxis, thereby encountering the key question facing all revolutionaries: how does the militant minority transmit the ideas of a free society to the oppressed classes, in such a way that the oppressed makes those ideas their own, moving beyond the origins of those ideas into the realm of libertarian autogestion. Central to this essay are the decisive moments in its history when the anarchist movement engaged with that very question.

In parallel to this drive to build counter-power, the early anarchist movement of the 1860s–1890s was remarkable for its deliberate construction of educational institutions everywhere that it put down roots, including rational, modernist schools in many parts of the world, and popular universities in Egypt, Cuba, Peru, Argentina, and China. The movement realised the necessity of buttressing these attempts at building structures of counter-power with a proletarian counter-culture, at creating social conditions for counter-power to flourish—by cutting the mental bonds binding the oppressed to the oppressor. While the movement aimed to cause a cultural and mental rupture between the oppressed classes and parasitic elites, they united elements of society divided by those elites: anarchist educators trained freed black slaves alongside white workers, and educated women and girls alongside men and boys, on the grounds that the oppressed of all races and genders had more in common with each other than with their exploiters.

Between 1870 and the early 1880s, the anarchist movement spread dramatically around the world, establishing anarcho-syndicalist and revolutionary syndicalist unions in Egypt, Cuba, Mexico, the US, Uruguay, Spain, and arguably in Russia. This was due in part to the fact that, until Lenin, there was no serious engagement in classical Marxism with the peasantry or the colonial world. The founders of the doctrine, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, had dismissed in their Communist Manifesto (1848) the colonised and post-colonial world as the “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries.” Instead, Marxism stressed the virtues of capitalism (and even imperialism) as an onerous, yet necessary stepping stone to socialism. Engels summed up their devastating position in an article entitled “Democratic Pan-Slavism” in their Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 14 February 1849: the United States’ annexation of Texas in 1845 and invasion of Mexico in 1846, in which Mexico lost 40% of its territory, were applauded as they had been “waged wholly and solely in the interest of civilisation,” as “splendid California has been taken away from the lazy Mexicans, who could not do anything with it” by “the energetic Yankees” who would “for the first time really open the Pacific Ocean to civilisation…” Engels extended his racist polemic of inherent ethno-national virility giving rise to laudable capitalist overmastery, to argue that the failure of the Slavic nations during the 1848 Pan-European Revolt to throw off their Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian yokes, demonstrated not only their ethnic unfitness for independence, but that they were in fact “counter-revolutionary” nations deserving of “the most determined use of terror” to suppress them.

It reads chillingly like a foreshadowing of the Nazis’ racial nationalist arguments for the use of terror against the Slavs during their East European conquest. Engels’ abysmal article had been written in response to Appeal to the Slavs by a Russian Patriot written by Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876), a minor Russian noble who moved from a position of Pan-Slavic liberation to become, over a lifetime of militancy and clandestinity, in exile and on the barricades, anarchism’s giant founding figure and Marx’s most formidable opponent in defining the path to true communism; it was the dispute between their supporters that would sunder the First International in 1872 into an anarchist majority and a Marxist rump. In his Appeal to the Slavs, Bakunin—at that stage not yet an anarchist—had in stark contrast argued that the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary camps were divided not by nationality or stage of capitalist development, but by class. In 1848, revolutionary class consciousness had expressed itself as a “cry of sympathy and love for all the oppressed nationalities.”[6] Urging the Slavic popular classes to “extend your had to the German people, but not to the… petit bourgeois Germans who rejoice at each misfortune that befalls the Slavs,” Bakunin concluded that there were “two grand questions spontaneously posed in the first days of the [1848] spring… the social emancipation of the masses and the liberation of the oppressed nations.” By 1873, when Bakunin, now unashamedly anarchist, threw down the gauntlet to imperialism, writing that “Two-thirds of humanity, 800 million Asiatics, asleep in their servitude, will necessarily awaken and begin to move,” the newly-minted anarchist movement was engaging directly and repeatedly with the challenges of imperialism, colonialism, national liberation movements, and post-colonial regimes.[7]

The record of the broad anarchist movement in the pre-World War II era is dramatically more substantial than that of their Marxist contemporaries, especially in the colonial and post-colonial world.[8] The anarchist movement focused on encouraging the oppressed to start resisting immediately, without promising an imminent revolution. There was an understanding that revolutions are processes, not events, requiring a massive confluence of historical circumstances, in addition to the clear-sighted agency of the oppressed. It is because of this very early and radical challenge to colonialism and imperialism, and to the constructs of gender and race, that the anarchist movement penetrated parts of the world that Marxism did not reach until the 1920s.

THE ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF ANARCHIST COUNTER-POWER

An examination of the movement’s industrial and social foundations helps to explain the spread of anarchism and its appeal to the popular classes. Aside from Guiseppe Fanelli’s dramatic conversion of the bulk of the organised Spanish working class to anarchism in 1868,[9] there is probably no better example of an industrial vector of anarchism and anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism than the Marine Transport Workers’ Industrial Union (MTWIU), a section of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the most international of all the syndicalist unions. The IWW had been founded in the United States in 1905, as the joint heir of the anti-racist, anti-sexist, internationalist traditions of the Knights of Labor founded in 1869, which had dominated organised American labour with a peak of 700,000 members by 1886 (weirdly, while the Knights had a large black membership, it violently opposed Chinese immigration, it also established sections in Canada and Australia, only closing up shop as a shadow of its former self in 1949), and of the explicitly anarcho-syndicalist traditions of the Central Labor Union (CLU) of 1883–1909. Despite intense repression and splits over the question of the majority’s opposition to electoral politics, the IWW rose to about 250,000 members in 1917 in the US alone, and in its incarnation as the “One Big Union,” perhaps 70,000 members in Canada in 1919. It was above all a movement of the poorest and most marginal workers—poor whites, immigrants, blacks, Asians, and women—many of whom worked in insecure and dangerous jobs as dockworkers, field hands, lumberjacks, miners, and factory operatives—and earned its stripes organising across racial lines in the American South. It was also an international phenomenon, with IWW groups and unions, and IWW-inspired organisations forming in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Canada, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, Mexico, Peru, Siberia, South Africa, Ukraine, and Uruguay; it had direct influence on the global labour movement as far afield as Burma, China, and Fiji; and in more recent times, it established sections in Iceland, Sweden, and Sierra Leone. In his essay on the IWW’s MTWIU,[10] Hartmut Rübner writes, “Based on statistical information on the period between 1910 and 1945, the evaluated material indicates an over-proportional number of industrial actions in the sector of shipping. In many of these labour disputes, seamen exhibited a close affinity to those forms of action which are generally characterized as typically syndicalist patterns of conflict behaviour.”

Asking why syndicalism was so prevalent, and why a relatively small group of revolutionary syndicalist militants could exercise such great influence, Rübner concludes that the sheer cosmopolitanism of maritime labour’s

common experiences in remote parts of the world[11] certainly created a “sense of internationalism,” that helped to overcome the separations between union activists and the rank and file… In the harbour districts, the seafaring-reliant community maintained a tight-knit communication network that provided the individual seaman with the necessary information interchange to accomplish recreation and job opportunities. Loadinghouses, employment agencies, hiring halls, trade union offices and International Seamen’s Clubs were situated in the direct neighbourhood of the docklands. When conflict situations arose, the localities and meeting places of the harbour districts often functioned as initial positions for collective strike activities.

This docklands community was not automatically progressive or revolutionary, but as Rübner notes, traditional socialist and union organisers tended to shy away from organising there, leaving the field open to proletarian revolutionary syndicalists. Moreover, the strongly anti-racist stance of the revolutionary syndicalists stood in sharp contrast to those of the traditional unions, in keeping with the seafaring and longshoring communities, where discrimination made no sense. In fact, he argues that the strength of “syndicalism in shipping should be seen in correlation to the dwindling attractiveness of exclusive trade union policies” that weakened workers’ power by splintering them into ethnic groupings. On the other hand, according to Rübner,

syndicalism promoted a programmatic internationalism and placed its perspectives upon the idea of a multinational counterpole to the interconnections of capital… [and] Organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) offered access for the semiqualified or non-white workforce. Due to this accessibility, the IWW scored their first organizational successes amongst those black and Hispanic seamen and dockworkers, formerly neglected by the exclusive and chauvinist union policy. An indication for the outgrowth of seamen’s radicalism can be seen in the fact, that maritime [revolutionary] syndicalism had gained remarkable strongholds in France, Netherlands, Italy and the USA before 1914. Through seafaring members of the IWW (“Wobblies”) and returning immigrants, the idea of industrial unionism spread over to Australasia, Latin America and Europe. In the aftermath of the war, the Maritime Transport Workers’ Industrial Union No.510 of the IWW developed to be the driving force behind international maritime syndicalism… Between 1919 and 1921, maritime syndicalism overrode its minority position and became a factor to be seriously reckoned with.”

Thus, maritime revolutionary syndicalism both counteracted the economic concentration of the industry and rose to meet the challenge of the motorisation of shipping. While Rübner incorrectly writes of the MTWIU’s “centralized industrial unionism,” rather than its decentralised structure, he recognises its superiority over the outmoded craft unionism of competing mainstream unions, and notes that the union’s “elementary council democracy” was based on “‘ship’s committees.’ Its delegates were supposed to cooperate with the dockworkers in a common ‘port district council.’ This model of ‘industrial communism’ which [was] based on regional councils connected to an ‘international headquarters,’ was implemented to overcome the ‘national frontiers.’”

In Rübner’s final analysis of why maritime revolutionary syndicalism lost the high ground of the early 1920s, he says that, firstly, the revolutionary syndicalists were excluded from new corporatist arrangements implemented in many countries, and, secondly, despite their flexible approach to modernisation, crew reductions and the redundancy of entire classes of maritime labour (such as the firemen and coal trimmers) put members out of work. Lastly, the general dilution of radicalism ashore seriously undercut the ability of the anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist cause to stay afloat. Rübner does recognise that “syndicalism displayed its greatest effects in its attempt to overcome both the divisions in craft as well as… ethnic segregation… [but] failed to stabilise radical workplace militancy in a lasting framework.”

Rübner goes on to admit that the Marxist movement stepped into the vacuum, but could only do so by “implementing the proven parts of the syndicalist strategy,” including ship’s committees. Today, as the corporatist labour arrangements that sustained the status quo in both Marxist and right-wing dictatorships collapse, and neoliberal austerity bites deep into the welfare gains once assured elsewhere, many workers are again as industrially excluded as their forebears were. And thus, revolutionary syndicalism, sometimes under the mentorship of the old anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist unions and traditions, is being rediscovered as a means of shifting power back onto the shopfloor. As globalisation creates conditions whereby, for example, Bangladeshis are working for slave wages in Sudan, the appeal of anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism’s multi-ethnic approach is becoming viable again.

THE SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS OF ANARCHIST COUNTER-POWER

The social conditions in which workers live, and not only their working life, contribute greatly to their understanding of the world, and inform the methods they adopt to defend their interests. Bert Altena offers insight into the importance of class and culture in various communities of workers, in determining whether anarchism and anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism gained a foothold within them.[12]

As Altena states,

revolutionary syndicalism contains [both] an authentic labour movement and one with a tradition. Revolutionary syndicalism was in fact either a continuation of very old labour movements or, as I will argue, a phenomenon in which the world of the workers was isolated from the rest of society. In these circumstances, workers generally had to rely on themselves for social security and they could develop their own workers’ culture. Parliamentary politics belonged to the world of the bourgeoisie, which was completely foreign to workers… The anarchists, who during the 1880s and 1890s saw that their strategy of insurrection and terror did not help their cause, brought to these workers only a sharper theoretical articulation of their beliefs by introducing them to the concepts of the general strike, direct action, the value of action by workers themselves, the importance of direct democracy. They also gave them a broader cultural perspective. They only taught the workers to state more clearly what they already thought, to do better what they already practiced and they brought them the perspective of a class society beyond the local sphere.

Altena takes as his examples two neighbouring towns of equal size (approximately 20,000 residents) in the Netherlands in 1899: the industrial port town of Flushing; and the local government seat and market town of Middelburg, a mere six kilometres away. At this time, Dutch anarcho-syndicalism was enjoying its first successes, evidenced by the growth of the National Workers’ Secretariat (NAS), and Flushing was dominated by one big shipyard, while other employment was to be found on the docks or on the ferry to England. By comparison, Middelburg had small construction yards, a metalworks, and a timber company. According to Altena,

As a result of the town’s economy, the social structure of Flushing consisted of a broad working-class base, a rather small layer of middle classes (shopkeepers, teachers and clerical workers) and a very small elite. The social structure of Middelburg was much less lopsided and at the same time more differentiated. The town had a rather broad layer of shopkeepers. The educated middle classes were much stronger because of Middelburg’s function as the administrative and judicial centre of the province and its rich collection of educational institutions. The elite of Middelburg (gentry, magistrates and some entrepreneurs) consequently was much larger and more strongly represented in the town than its equivalent in Flushing.

The shopkeepers in Flushing were pretty poor themselves, so the class function they could have performed as social middlemen between workers and the elite was weak. The municipality itself was too impoverished to assist workers in times of crisis, forcing them to rely on themselves. By comparison, in Middelburg, the broad middle class produced many social-democrat teachers, artisanal entrepreneurs, and lawyers, who not only provided the workers with a social connection to the elite, but who, enabled by the town’s greater wealth, could assist the workers in troubled times. As Altena notes,

Socialism appeared in Flushing much earlier (1879) than it did in Middelburg and it was entirely a working class affair. It developed in a libertarian direction. For the next forty years the labour movement of Flushing would be dominated by revolutionary syndicalism. It proved extremely difficult to establish a branch of the social-democratic party in this working-class town. Only in 1906 a tiny and weak branch was set up. The revolutionary syndicalists, however, developed a rich culture: choirs, a freethought union with its own library, musical societies and a very good theatrical club, which performed an ambitious repertoire… it was much easier to keep the syndicalist principle intact with the help of cultural activities than on the shopfloor only… Flushing presented no problem to the syndicalists in further developing their cultural activities. Bourgeois cultural life, with its own concerts, plays and libraries hardly existed in the town.

By comparison, in Middelburg, “After 1895, even their [the workers’] own branch of the social-democratic party was dominated by socialists from bourgeois origins… The workers of Middelburg not only found it much more difficult to develop an independent culture of their own, independence was also repressed on the shopfloor.” In Middelburg, where women often worked as maids in the houses of the wealthy, a working-class attitude of servility was cultivated, whereas in Flushing, where women were active and visible anarchists/syndicalists, workers’ pride in their skills, established through job control, was high. Altena concludes that working-class cultural counter-power is as important to the attractiveness of anarchism and anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism (which he equates) as its industrial counter-power. “When workers can build a world of their own, the choice for syndicalism is a logical, though not a necessary one. This could explain why syndicalist movements tend to appear in mono-industrial, company towns…,” according to Altena.

This was certainly true of, say, the mining towns of the American Midwest, where the IWW became a force to be reckoned with, but not in the more economically diversified worlds of port cities, where anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism entrenched itself, except to the extent that maritime workers formed their own subculture, distinct from their neighbouring railwaymen and meat-packers—as within the maritime workers, the cooks and the stokers performed different social as well as industrial roles. Altena argues that, whereas syndicalism created an alternate world for workers, the mainstream social-democratic and Christian unions, especially through parliamentarism, “integrated workers into the political structures and processes of the country.” Except in countries where they were forced to act much like the syndicalists, as an illegal counter-power, the Marxist unions also served to integrate workers into the needs of capital and the state, instead of standing opposed to it.

As Altena notes,

In cultural activities too the syndicalists were confronted with competitors: sports (which many syndicalists disliked because sports diverted from the essential struggle of the workers) or ‘capitalist’ forms of entertainment such as movies and dancing. The radio challenged the syndicalist music and theatre with “real” professional culture and made them look poor and amateurish. Possibly the most important factor was that syndicalist culture was intimately intertwined with the movement as a whole. It was always imbued with syndicalist norms and it pointed to the big syndicalist goal. As soon as syndicalism lost the realisability of its vision, its culture became hollow because its message became hollow… In so far as the syndicalists did not abandon their principles or disbanded, they had to accept marginalization. Marginal movements, however, can still be very useful movements.

ASSESSING ANARCHIST/SYNDICALIST HISTORY IN FIVE WAVES

From a long-term perspective, the fortunes of the broad anarchist tradition—like those of the militant, autonomous working class itself—rise and fall in waves. The nature of these waves is a complex textile, entwining the weft of working class culture and activity with the warp of capital in crisis, and the ebb and flow of the global movements of people, capital and ideas.

However, anarchist historiography has been distorted by the myth of the “Five Highlights” or the crude potted history by which many anarchists understand the high-water marks of their movement: the Haymarket Martyrs of 1887 [13]; the French General Confederation of Labour’s 1906 Charter of Amiens [14]; the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921 [15]; the Spanish Revolution of 1936–1939 [16]; and the “French” Revolt of 1968 [17]. This anaemic version of anarchism’s history suffers from a confused notion of what anarchism is, by, for instance, over-inflating anarchist involvement in the Kronstadt and Parisian Revolts, where anarchist influence was marginal, and accepting the verdict of hostile state socialists, by, for example, caricaturing the Ukrainian Revolution as an adventurist peasant sideshow of the Russian Revolution. It also completely ignores other Revolutions impacted by a major anarchist influence, such as Morelos and Baja California, Mexico in 1910–1920 (where anarchist praxis was influential), the Shinmin Prefecture of Manchuria in 1929–1931 (where the constructive anarchist social experiment was profound), and the Escambray Mountains and underground trade unions of Cuba in 1952–1959 (where mass anarchist traditions ran eight decades deep), as well as several urban anarchist communes, including in southern Spain in 1873–1874, in the mountains of Macedonia in 1903, and in the port city of Guangzhou in southern China in 1921–1923.

The most obvious weakness of this history, however, is that it is notably North Atlanticist, and ignores even the significant Dutch, Scandinavian, and Eastern European anarchist movements.[18] A far more important omission is the massive Latin anarchist and anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist movements which dominated the organised working classes of Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, Portugal, Argentina, and Uruguay—which I will detail later in this essay. Also excluded are the powerful East Asian anarchist currents. Lastly, there was the key role played by anarchist militants in establishing the first trade unions and articulating the early revolutionary socialist discourse in North and Southern Africa,[19] the Caribbean and Central America,[20] Australasia,[21] South-East Asia,[22] South Asia,[23] and the Middle East.[24]

To take a few examples: the initially anarchist anticolonial Ghadar (Mutiny) Party, established in 1913, built a world-spanning movement that not only established roots on the Indian subcontinent in Hindustan and Punjab, but which linked radicals within the Indian Diaspora as far afield as Afghanistan, British East Africa (Uganda and Kenya), British Guiana (Guiana), Burma, Canada, China, Fiji, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaya (Malaysia), Mesopotamia (Iraq), Panama, the Philippines, Siam (Thailand), Singapore, South Africa, and the USA, with Ghadarites remaining active in Afghanistan into the 1930s and in colonial Kenya into the 1950s—after Indian independence; meanwhile, in South Africa, a constellation of revolutionary syndicalist organisations such as the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA) and the Indian Workers’ Industrial Union (IWIU) were explicitly built on IWW lines for people of colour in 1917–1919, and consolidated into a single organisation, the ideologically mixed Industrial and Commercial Union (ICU), which peaked at 100,000 members in 1927, but which created sections in South-West Africa (Namibia) in 1920, in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) in 1927—which survived into the 1950s—and in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in 1931; lastly, from 1907, a Socialist Federation of Australasia (SFA) began spreading syndicalist ideas in Australia and New Zealand, with the result that in Australia, the IWW established itself in 1910, becoming the most influential radical labour tendency, albeit a minority one, peaking at perhaps 2,000 members in 1916, surviving into the 1930s, while in New Zealand, the IWW-influenced New Zealand Federation of Labour (NZFL) was founded in 1911 and within a year, the “Red Fed” numbered all the unionised miners and dockworkers in its ranks, had 15,000 members; given the small size of the New Zealand population, the “Red Fed” was—in relative terms—fifteen times larger than the American IWW; overshadowed by the reformist federation, New Zealand syndicalist tradition would nevertheless fight a last-ditch defence during the great waterfront lockout of 1955.

In other words, “Five Highlights” is largely a martyrology and a museum-piece, a quasi-religious tragedy recited like an anarchist rosary, thereby reducing the broad anarchist tradition to an honourable, yet failed, minority tradition of romantically doomed resistance. This convention must be replaced with a far broader, balanced narrative of the movement’s triumphs and tragedies, one that demonstrates its universal adaptability and its global reach, its overwhelming dominance in the organised labour movements of many countries, its numerous revolts against capital and the state, its breakthroughs in fighting for labour rights, gender equality, and against racism and imperialism, its successful revolutionary experiments in building a new society in the shell of the old, its complexities, challenges, and numerous arguments over tactics and strategies, and its multi-generational lines of ideological and organisational descent, as well as its current relevance.

Instead of this impoverished convention—which excludes the early anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist trade unions of Cuba, Mexico, Spain, the United States, and Uruguay in the 1870s and 1880s—I prefer to speak of “Five Waves” of anarchist and anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist militancy that rose and fell in accordance with a more general expansion and contraction of objective conditions for the organised popular classes. In the first volume of Counter-power,[25] linkages between the poorly-understood international First Wave of 1868–1894 and the far better studied Second Wave of 1895–1923, including the Revolutions in Mexico, Russia and Ukraine, are discussed, and I will explore them in greater depth in this essay. In the forth-coming Volume 2 of Counter-power,[26] we will examine the equally famous Third Wave of 1924–1949, which embraces the Revolutions in Manchuria and Spain and which, together with the Second Wave, constitutes anarchism’s “Glorious Period.” Discussion will also focus on the Fourth Wave of 1950–1989, which peaked with the Cuban Revolution in 1952–1959 and again with the New Left of 1968, and the current Fifth Wave, generated in 1989 by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the rising “horizontalist” challenge to hoary old Soviet-style Marxist “communism” (in reality, authoritarian state capitalism), right-wing dictatorship, and neoliberalism by the new movements of the globalised popular classes. Our “Five Waves” theory is, however, meant as a historical guide to high- and low-water marks, not as an ironclad law of cyclical progress and reaction.

Firstly, our approach in Counter-power expands the history of the broader anarchist movement beyond the limitations of the “Five Highlights,” which presuppose an initial prominence through the French CGT of the early 1900s, and a death on the barricades of Barcelona in 1939, with a belated last gasp in 1968. Secondly, it extends the movement’s geographical range beyond the usual West European and North American territories to the furthest reaches of the earth. By means of this approach, adequately supported by primary research, we debunk the common notion of “Spanish exceptionalism”: the false idea that only in Spain did anarchism achieve anything like a mass movement of the popular classes. We also show the universality of the anarchist message, a message that, while it was adapted to local circumstance, and which, like all political tendencies, has its aberrations and betrayals, remained and remains largely coherent and intact across space and time, relevant to oppressed people everywhere.

DEFINING ANARCHISM, ANARCHO-SYNDICALISM, AND REVOLUTIONARY SYNDICALISM

This essay is very far from a total history of the movement. It merely sketches the broader outlines of the Five Waves theory. The anarchist texts quoted do not form a holy canon, but rather indicate how, at decisive moments, the movement grappled with the complex question at the heart of making a social revolution, which has vexed all leftist revolutionaries: what is the relationship between the specific revolutionary organisation and the mass of the exploited and oppressed. It is also deliberately imbalanced, for it is unnecessary to rehash the wealth of knowledge on, for instance, the French and Spanish anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist movements. Rather, the emphasis is on the comparatively larger but understudied Latin American anarchist and syndicalist movements, as well as the powerful and significant, yet often unknown, movements in regions such as South-East Asia or North and Southern Africa.

First, however, we need to define what precisely we mean by “anarchism” and a vision of “libertarian communism,” although these are sometimes held to be two distinct tendencies (a distinction we find too fine and unconvincing). The term “anarchist-communism,” often opposed to plain “anarchism” and also opposed to anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism, has been used quite differently, in different circumstances, in different eras. In Black Flame, we show that it is false to set up a dichotomy between anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism and “anarchist-communism”—we prefer the overarching term “anarchism.” As we write: “Not only is this alleged distinction absent from the bulk of anarchist writings until recently, but it also simply does not work as a description of different tendencies within the broad anarchist tradition. Moreover, the vast majority of people described in the literature as ‘anarchist communists’ or ‘anarcho-communists’ championed syndicalism… On the other hand, the majority of syndicalists endorsed ‘anarchist communism’ in the sense of a stateless socialist society based on the communist principle of distribution according to need. It is difficult to identify a distinct ‘anarchist-communist’ strategy or tendency that can be applied as a useful category of anarchism.”

Instead, we develop a distinction within the broad anarchist tradition between two main strategic approaches, which we call “mass anarchism” and “insurrectionist anarchism.” Mass anarchism stresses that only mass movements can create a revolutionary change in society and are typically built by formal, directly-democratic organisations, such as revolutionary syndicalist unions, through struggles about bread-and-butter issues and immediate reforms. Anarchists must participate in such movements, to radicalise and transform them into levers of revolutionary change. Critically, reforms are won from below and act as a “revolutionary gymnasium,” preparing the masses for taking power in their own right. These victories must be distinguished from reforms applied from above, which undermine popular movements. The insurrectionist approach, in contrast, claims that reforms are illusory, that even revolutionary syndicalist unions are willing or unwitting bulwarks of the existing order, and that formal organisations are automatically authoritarian. Consequently, insurrectionist anarchism emphasises catalytic, armed action by small “affinity groups” (such action called “propaganda by the deed”) as the most important means of provoking a spontaneous revolutionary upsurge by the masses. What distinguishes insurrectionist anarchism from mass anarchism is not necessarily violence, as such, but its place in strategy. For insurrectionist anarchism, propaganda by the deed, carried out by conscious anarchists, is seen as a means of generating a mass movement; for most mass anarchism, violence operates as a means of self-defence for an existing mass movement.

By syndicalism, we mean a revolutionary anarchist trade union strategy, which views unions—structured around participatory democracy and a revolutionary vision of libertarian communism—as a key means to resist the ruling class in the here-and-now, and as the nucleus of a new social order of self-management, democratic economic planning, and universal human community. The “anarcho-syndicalists” explicitly root their politics and practices within the anarchist tradition, whereas the “revolutionary syndicalists” avoid the anarchist label, either for tactical reasons, or due to ignorance about the anarchist roots of syndicalism. Both are simply variants of a basic revolutionary trade union approach. That approach, as previously argued, was developed by the anarchists of the First International. Anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism are both part of a key mass anarchist strategy of building revolutionary counter-power and revolutionary counter-culture. The anarchist tradition, including all of anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism, is what we refer to as the “broad anarchist tradition.”

In this essay, an “anarchist-communist” versus anarcho- or revolutionary syndicalist binary will not be used to frame the issues discussed. However, I will highlight at key points an important thread in anarchist theory and strategy: the question of whether anarchists and syndicalists need political groups dedicated to the promotion of the ideas of the broad anarchist tradition, and, if so, what form such groups should take. When the editors of the Paris-based, anarchist newspaper Dielo Truda (Workers’ Cause) issued the Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists in 1926, they were met by a storm of controversy. Some anarchists saw the editors’ advocacy of a unified anarchist political organisation with collective discipline as an attempt to ‘Bolshevise’ anarchism, and accused its primary authors, Pyotr Arshinov and Nestor Makhno, of going over to classical Marxism. Nestor Makhno (1889–1934), born a peasant in small-town south-eastern Ukraine, was imprisoned in 1908 for terrorist actions, freed during the Russian Revolution in 1917, and established the Group of Anarchist Communists (GAK) and the Union of Peasants in his home town. Widely recognised as a brilliant military strategist, the libertarian armed forces that he established, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (RPAU), successfully defeated the Central Powers, Ukrainian nationalist, and White monarchist armies, before being betrayed by the Red Army. He died in exile in Paris of tuberculosis.[27] Pyotr Arshinov, sometimes rendered Archinov (1887–1937), was a Ukrainian anarchist metalworker, who was jailed for 20 years for arms smuggling. He met Nestor Makhno in prison, and went on to become a co-founder of the Alarm Confederation of Anarchist Organisations (Nabat), and the key partisan historian of the Makhnovist movement. Having escaped into exile in Paris, he returned to Russia in 1935 where he was murdered during Stalin’s purges for “attempting to restore anarchism in Russia.”

But Makhno’s and Arshinov’s idea, essentially, originates with Bakunin, and may be called a Bakuninist dual organisationist strategy. Namely, this is the idea that a revolutionary anarchist/syndicalist movement requires two distinct types of organisation: revolutionary mass organisations of the oppressed classes, open to all working and poor people, including a revolutionary anarchist/syndicalist line to form the bases of counterpower; and specific, exclusive, anarchist/syndicalist political organisations, based on tight political agreement. The former are the mass movements that can overthrow the system; the latter are the specific political organisations that systematically promote revolutionary anarchist/syndicalist ideas through engagement with the popular classes, ranging from propaganda to political struggles within the mass organisations.

Thus in Black Flame, we argue that the Platform and “Platformism” were not a break with the anarchist tradition, but rather a fairly orthodox restatement of well-established views. From the time of Bakunin, himself part of the anarchist International Alliance of Socialist Democracy operating within the First International, the great majority of anarchists and anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalists advocated the formation of specific anarchist political groups in addition to mass organisations, such as syndicalist unions, peasant soviets, workers’ militia, neighbourhood assemblies, and others. In other words, most supported organisational dualism: the mass organisation, such as a union, must work in tandem with specifically anarchist and syndicalist political organisations. Moreover, most believed that these groups should have fairly homogeneous, principled, strategic, and tactical positions, as well as some form of organisational discipline. Today, the term “anarchist-communism” is sometimes used to refer to the Bakuninist dual-organisationist approach. This is notable especially in Western Europe and North America, whereas in regions such as Latin America, terms such as Bakuninist and especifismo (specificity) are preferred. Due, however, to the confusion surrounding the term “anarchist-communism,” I have chosen to avoid the term wherever possible.

The First Wave, 1868–1894

The Rise of the Broad Anarchist/Syndicalist Movement in the Era of State and Capitalist Expansion

Looking briefly at the family tree of the broad anarchist movement and its watershed dates, the French Revolution of 1793 gave rise to radical republicanism, which embraced both Jacobin authoritarianism on the “right,” and Enrage libertarianism on the “left.” As a result of the Pan-European Revolt of 1848, a distinct socialist current, containing contradictory tendencies, branched out from radical republicanism, the contradictions coming to a head in 1868, with the separation of distinct anarchist majority and Marxist minority currents within the First International. Marxism would further divide into moderate Menshevik and radical Bolshevik strands in the Russian Revolt of 1905–1906. Earlier, in 1881, an anarcho-insurrectionary minority favouring armed struggle had branched off to the left of the anarchist working class majority, approximating in many respects, in its purism and immediatism, the tiny “left communist,” “council communist,” and “sovietist” tendencies that split to the left of Leninism in Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, and Britain during the period between 1918 and 1923.

The mass tendency of anarchism arose during an expansive phase of modern capitalism in the 1860s, when imperialist pioneers began their surge into the unconquered half of North America, and turned their greedy eyes towards the material—and human—resources of Africa, Latin America, China, and elsewhere. It arose from the ghettos of the newly-industrialised proletariat, in the heartland of imperialism and its key raw material producing nations, and its first decades infused everyone from déclassé intellectuals to Mexican peasants with its raw self-empowerment. The founding in 1864 of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA), or First International, realised all of the pre-conditions for revolutionary anarchism/syndicalism: important sections of the working class and peasantry had achieved an internationalist, revolutionary consciousness, and created a transnational federation of their own organisations, primarily based on organised labour. The proto-anarchist, libertarian socialist mutualism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, son of a barrel-maker, rapidly established itself as the major current in the IWMA, but was just as swiftly supplanted by its natural matured expression: anarchism/syndicalism under the influence of Mikhail Bakunin and his circle. The main wellsprings of anarchist-communism within the IWMA were the IWMA’s worker organisations themselves, aided and abetted by the International Brotherhood (IB) established by Bakunin in 1864, and replaced in 1868 by his International Alliance of Socialist Democracy (IASD).[28]

So it was that a First Wave of anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist organisations sprang up: the Spanish Regional Federation (FRE), was founded in 1870 by workers radicalised by IB agent Giuseppe Fanelli, peaked at 60,000 members by 1873 when it ran several cities in southern Spain during the Cantonalist Revolt, making it the largest section of the First International, was revived in 1881 after the post-Revolt repression as the Spanish Regional Labour Federation (FTRE), the largest section of the anarchist “Black International,” but was repressed in 1889, revived in 1891 under the influence of the Spanish Regional Anarchist Organisation (OARE) as the Pact of Union & Solidarity (PUS), but repressed again, a cycle that would repeat until anarcho-syndicalism rooted itself intractably in 1910 with the foundation of the famous National Confederation of Labour (CNT).[29] The early syndicalist Proletarian Circle (CP) in Mexico founded in 1869, became the Grand Circle of Workers (GCO) the following year with a significant anarchist presence, growing to 10,000 members within five years, then a parallel Grand Circle of Mexican Workers (GCOM) was established in 1876, with the anarchists in control of both organisations, representing the bulk of the organised Mexican working class, by 1881 (the CGO attained 15,000 members, while the GCOM attained 50,000 members and affiliated to the “Black International”). Both were repressed in 1882, but the GCOM was revived as the Grand Circle of Free Labour (GCOL) in the early 1900s, but was swiftly crushed, the syndicalist movement only reviving in 1912 during the Mexican Revolution.[30] The Regional Federation of the Eastern Republic of Uruguay (FRROU) was founded in 1872, affiliated to the anarchist wing of the First International, and was followed in 1885 by an anarcho-syndicalist Worker’s Federation (FO).[31] In Cuba, the syndicalist Artisan’s Central Council (JCA) was founded in 1883, becoming reorganised as the Labourer’s Circle (CT) in 1885, followed by a string of initiatives culminating in the establishment of the anarcho-syndicalist Cuban Labour Confederation (CTC) in 1895.[32] And lastly, in the US, the anarcho-syndicalist Central Labor Union (CLU) in was founded in 1883 (in anticipation of what would become a key anarchist strategy in the twentieth century, the CLU was established by and worked closely with an anarchist-insurrectionist “political” organisation, the International Working Person’s Association, IWPA, which was affiliated to the anarchist “Black International,” and grew to about 5,000 members, surviving in much-reduced form until the First World War).[33] The short-lived Northern Workers’ Union (NWU) established in Russia in 1878 was arguably part of this First Wave: echoing anarchists like Bakunin, the NWU demanded the abolition of the state and its replacement by a federation of industrial and agrarian communes, but took what could be seen later as an essentially De Leonist[34] line in proposing the parallel tactic of working-class domination of a constituent assembly.

The significance of this First Wave of anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist organising needs to be underlined—not least by comparing the sheer size of these working class organisations to the meagre 1,000 members world-wide who were affiliated to the Marxist rump of the First International at the time. Firstly, it is important to note that of the five countries where this First Wave entrenched itself, three were later to experience revolutions with significant anarchist involvement. In Cuba, the anarcho-syndicalist movement dominated the working class for 50 years, until the late 1920s, with a significant revival in the late 1930s and again in the mid–1940s, until its key, but usually ignored, role in the unions during the Cuban Revolution of 1952–1959. In Mexico, the movement was involved in the armed peasant risings in 1869 and in 1878, dominated the unions in the 1910s, and was the primary engine behind the revolutionary peak of 1915–1916. In Spain, the movement had a continuous trade union presence, in the FRE of the 1860s, continuing on in five different organisational incarnations, each suppressed in turn, until the formation of the famous National Confederation of Labour (CNT) in 1910, and onwards into the 1930s, when it became the most important revolutionary player in Spain. In Uruguay, the movement dominated organised labour in the early twentieth century, and remained a strong enough minority current to re-establish the dominant union centre in the 1960s, and to engage in guerrilla warfare and underground student work against the state between 1968 and 1976. In the USA, however, revolutionary syndicalism never grew to be anything more than a militant minority tendency, overshadowed by more reformist unions. In Imperial Russia, the movement was swiftly crushed, and it would take more than a generation to establish a minority anarchist presence in the trade unions there.[35]

Secondly, the presence of non-European organisations in this First Wave undermines the convention that anarcho-syndicalism—the application of anarchist federalism and direct democracy to the trade union movement—was a “French invention” of the 1890s, and emphasises its adaptability and applicability to countries as industrialised and sovereign as the USA or as agrarian and colonised as Cuba. In other words, it arose in both the global North and the global South, in concentrations of expansive industrial and commercial agricultural growth—but not among the declining artisanal classes, as Marxists often claim. Its social vectors were those of the intense upheaval created by a massive, constant movement of workers around the world to satisfy new growth, and the loss of political control experienced by the old landed oligarchies, the latifundistas, resulting from the rise of a modernising bourgeoisie and state bureaucracy, the inevitable corollary of which was the rise of a militant, industrial proletariat. Politically, anarchism arose during this First Wave period in response to the insufficiencies, authoritarianism, and reformism of both radical republicanism and Marxist socialism, and as an organised, mass-based corrective to the vanguard adventurism of narodnik[36] populist terrorism.

The Paris Commune of 1871 was a dramatic, innovative, two-month-long popular insurrection, in which several Proudhonists, alongside Blanquists[37] and others, ruled the city after the bourgeoisie fled from their guilt over initiating the disastrous Franco-Prussian War. Although the Commune was not an anarchist affair, its salient feature, that of workers’ control of the city, was anticipated by the earlier, short-lived Bakuninist uprisings in Lyons and Marseilles. The fall of Paris and the murder of approximately 20,000 Communards by the reactionaries resulted in the First Wave break, the driving underground of most European revolutionary organisations, and the subsequent split of the First International into an anarchist majority—based on the massed strength of the First Wave syndicalist unions—which survived until 1877, as well as a tiny, short-lived Marxist rump of perhaps only 1,000 adherents, which dissolved in practice after only a year. The defeat also saw a huge Communard Diaspora radiate out from France and settle in Belgium, Britain, Spain, Italy, the United States, and French-speaking Québec, where they often had a significant radicalising influence on the nascent working class organisations and where many of them turned to anarchism/syndicalism. Meanwhile, the Spanish anarchists gained valuable experience, as the 60,000–strong, anarcho-syndicalist Spanish Regional Workers’ Federation (FORE) ran its own “communes” in the southern cities of Granada, Seville, Málagar, Alcoy, and San Lucar de Barramed, and co-operated on local communes with federalist “intransigents” in Grenada, Seville, and Valencia, during the Cantonalist Revolt of 1873–1874.[38] While the experience with these communes grounded all future, large-scale, anarchist revolutionary projects, the early “social cantonalist” model was a narrow one, focused on the FORE’s defence and provisioning of single cities, with no overarching revolutionary plan. There were, nonetheless, significant levels of social change, including measures of land reform and wealth taxation, and large-scale peasant mobilisations, including land seizures.

Meanwhile, insurrectionist strategies and tactics were tested by armed anarchist uprisings against the newly consolidated Italian state in 1874 and 1877 and they failed because of their lack of social support. The final collapse of the anarchist wing of the IWMA in 1877 ended the first genuinely international attempt to organise the socially-conscious working class, although its torch was soon taken up by the Anti-Authoritarian International (AAI) or “Black International,” founded by the likes of Pyotr Kropotkin[39] in 1881, the year of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by narodniks. Pyotr Kropotkin (1842–1921), was a Russian prince, polymath geographer, zoologist, economist, and evolutionary theorist who turned his back on privilege to become Bakunin’s ideological heir and champion of anarchism. Kropotkin’s The Great French Revolution, 1789–1793 (1909) is the definitive libertarian communist analysis, while his books The Conquest of Bread (1892), Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), and Fields, Factories and Workshops (1912) remain among the most accessible and widely read anarchist texts. The Black International included the anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalists of the CGO and the body that merged with it, the Mexican Workers’ Grand Circle (CGOM), representing the majority of organised workers in Mexico by 1880, and the Central Labor Union (CLU) in Chicago. The Black International, however, later took an increasingly purist stance, became dominated by the minority anarcho-insurrectionist tendency, and only lasted until about 1893. More generally, the radical working class movement entered a period of defeat that saw an anarchist retreat from mass organisation, while terrorism became vogue for all revolutionary tendencies, and capitalism contracted with two great depressions, the last in 1893. The Black International cultivated an attitude of dangerous clandestinity and, although the American CLU, for example, continued to operate until 1909, it is primarily remembered today for the 1886 state murder of the Haymarket Martyrs, its militants who are recalled worldwide each year during the commemoration of May Day.[40]

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

In 1868, Bakunin wrote his seminal work, Programme and Object of the Secret Revolutionary Organisation of the International Brotherhood.[41] He laid out the ground-rules for the International Brotherhood (IB) founded that year. The Programme reflected Bakunin’s rejection of an authoritarian statist solution to the social revolution, “revolutionary in the Jacobin sense,” as he put it, an indication of rising tensions between anarchists and Marxists in the IWMA at that time. After spelling out the principles of the anarchist revolution, the Programme went on to address organisational matters following the dissolution of the nation-state and its armed forces, bureaucracy, courts, clergy, and private property. Anticipating the anarcho-syndicalist replacement of the state with a decentralised administration of material production and consumption, the Programme said that all church and state properties would be put at the disposal of the “federated Alliance of all labour associations, which Alliance will constitute the Commune.” A “Revolutionary Communal Council” based on a “federation of standing barricades,” comprised of mandated, accountable and revocable delegates from each defensive barricade, would “choose separate executive committees from among its membership for each branch of the Commune’s revolutionary administration.” This administration would be, according to anarchist principles, of public services, not of people. It would be spread by revolutionary propagandists across all old statist boundaries in order to build “the alliance of the world revolution against all reactionaries combined,” the organisation of which “precludes any notion of dictatorship and supervisory leadership authority.”

The Programme discussed the specific role of the anarchist revolutionary organisation in advancing the social revolution:

But if that revolutionary alliance is to be established and if the revolution is to get the better of the reaction, then, amid the popular anarchy that is to represent the very life-blood and energy of the revolution, an agency must be found to articulate this singularity of thought and of revolutionary action… That agency should be the secret worldwide association of the International Brotherhood. That association starts from the basis that revolutions are never made by individuals, nor even by secret societies. They are, so to speak, self-made, produced by the logic of things, by the trend of events and actions. They are a long time hatching in the deepest recesses of the popular masses’ instinctive consciousness, and then they explode, often seeming to have been detonated by trivialities. All that a well-organised [secret] society can do is, first, to play midwife to the revolution by spreading among the masses ideas appropriate to the masses’ instincts, and to organise, not the Revolution’s army—for the people must at all times be the army—but a sort of revolutionary general staff made up of committed, energetic and intelligent individuals who are above all else true friends of the people and not presumptuous braggarts, with a capacity for acting as intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and the people’s instincts.”

So, in the view of the IB, the anarchist revolutionary organisation is little more than an intermediary, a midwife and an enabler of mass social revolution, but is nevertheless clearly constituted as a distinct organisation, albeit submerged within the social struggle.

In his International Revolutionary Society or Brotherhood, published in 1865,[42] Bakunin had spelled out the internal dynamics of such an organisation, then in practice only in embryo form, and the duties of members, following an exhaustive account of the revolutionary’s understanding and practical application of equality. “He [sic] must understand that an association with a revolutionary purpose must necessarily take the form of a secret society, and every secret society, for the sake of the cause it serves and for effectiveness of action, as well as in the interests of the security of every one of its members, has to be subject to strict discipline, which is in any case merely the distillation and pure product of the reciprocal commitment made by all of the membership to one another, and that, as a result, it is a point of honour and a duty that each of them should abide by it.” This discipline was entered into, Bakunin stressed, by the “free assent” of the members, whose first duty was to society and only secondly to the organisation. Bakunin, who called in one of his letters for anarchists to be “invisible pilots in the centre of the popular storm,” has subsequently been much criticised for the clandestine nature of his plotting, which has been presumed by some anarchists to be authoritarian because of its secretive operations and requirements of discipline.

In light of such criticism, it must firstly be recognised that repressive conditions required secrecy. Secondly, the discipline of which he wrote was not an externally imposed one, but a self-discipline to freely abide by commonly-agreed-upon commitments. Thirdly, Bakunin’s IB had the practical result of helping to generate the first anarchist, mass-based, revolutionary organisations among the working class, from Spain to Uruguay: namely, the anarcho-syndicalist unions. In 1877, influenced by Bakunin’s arguments, a German-language Anarcho-Communist Party (AKP) was founded in Berne, Switzerland, one of the first of scores of specific, self-identified anarchist/syndicalist organisations around the world. The key question raised by Bakunin, that of the role of specific anarchist/syndicalist political organisations, was to remain at the centre of a core debate within the anarchist/syndicalist movement over the ensuing 150 years.

The Second Wave, 1895–1923: Consolidation of Syndicalism and Specific Anarchist Organisation in a Time of War and Reaction

Capitalism began expanding dramatically in the mid-1890s, with the opening up of the African colonies and significant parts of Asia to imperialist exploitation, and a Second Wave of anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist organising, larger than the first, exploded on to the world scene. An oft-forgotten precursor to this resurgence was the National Labour Secretariat (NAS) of the Netherlands, founded in 1893, which dominated the Dutch labour movement for a decade and peaked at about 18,700 members in 1895. In 1905, a Federation of Freedom-loving Communists (FVC)—later renamed the Country-wide Federation of Freedom-loving Communists (LFVC)—was founded in the Netherlands, and worked alongside the NAS, but the syndicalists were forced by the state’s move towards an early version of the welfare state to cede ground to the moderate Netherlands Union of Trade Unions (NVV). The NAS experienced somewhat of a revival in 1919–1922 with a membership of 30,000 climbing to 51,000—before Bolshevik competition eclipsed it. This Second Wave expansion took two primary forms: anarcho-syndicalism which explicitly recognised its anarchist roots established itself across much of Latin America; and revolutionary syndicalism which obscured its roots, spread across much of the English-speaking world.

Latin American anarcho-syndicalism was largely modelled on, but was a more explicitly anarchist version of, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) of France, established in 1895. The model proved attractive because anarchist militants of the Federation of Labour Exchanges (FBT)—a horizontal network of labour hiring halls and worker social centres founded in 1892, spreading across France and into French-colonised Algeria and French West Africa, that often survived until independence in the 1960s43—had established the CGT by merger in 1902 with the primary union centre, the National Federation of Trade Unions (FNS), meaning that the CGT was based on the local democracy of its FBT sections. In France, this powerful and worker-responsive bottom-up structure had lead to a dramatic growth, with the CGT boasting of 203,000 dues-paying members by 1906. Especially influential was its ringing Charter of Amiens (1906), which famously declared that the “trade union, today a fighting organisation, will in the future be an organisation for production and distribution and the basis of social reorganisation.” However, the CGT was expressly “apolitical,” a weakness that would later allow Marxists and other reformists to hijack it.44

This growth was accelerated by two other “jolts” that recalled the direct-democratic practices of the French and Spanish communes, and anticipated the soviets of the Russian Revolution: the 1903 Macedonian Revolt and the 1905–1907 Russian Revolt. In Macedonia, anarchist guerrillas were among those who established communes in Strandzha and Kruševo,45 while anarchists were involved in establishing the first soviets in Russia, in St. Petersburg and Moscow.46 The Russian Revolt also saw the establishment in occupied Poland of what is arguably the longest-living, international anarchist organisation, the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC)—originally the Anarchist Red Cross, a splinter off the Political Red Cross—a prisoner’s aid network which has member sections in 64 countries today.47 These jolts helped light the fuse on the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the USA in 1905, establishing an “industrial revolutionary” syndicalist organising model that swept the Anglophone world in particular, including branches in Australia, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, and South Africa, but also in Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Germany, the Ukraine, Siberia, and elsewhere.48 The IWW still exists today as a fighting “red” union—although usually as a transverse rank-and-file network across competing unions—with branches in countries as diverse as South Africa and Russia. The IWW Preamble was as influential in the Anglophone world as the CGT’s Charter was in the Hispanophone world, because of the clarity and intransigence of its class politics. According to the Preamble,

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organise as a class, take possession of the means of production and abolish the wage system. It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organised, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organising industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

The 1905–1907 Russian Revolt—and especially the exultation by colonised peoples all over the world at the spectacle of the defeat of a “white” empire by a “yellow” empire—had a direct impact on the radicalisation of social struggles in the Far East. Anarchism implanted itself in Japan from 1906, challenging the second-class status of both women and the Burakumin outcasts who worked with meat products—and the divine status of the Emperor. Initially embroiled in attempts to assassinate the Emperor, and bloodily persecuted for supposedly causing the devastating 1923 earthquake, the movement finally consolidated in 1926 with the formation of the All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labour Unions (Zenkoku Jiren), the third-largest of Japan’s labour federations, after the moderates and the Marxists, which rose to 16,300 members in 1931, when an explicitly “anarcho-syndicalist” faction, the Libertarian Federal Council of Labour Unions of Japan (Nihon Jikyō) split off, claiming 3,000 members. These numbers exclude the ethnic Korean syndicalist unions in Japan, the various “black societies” (anarchist political groups), and the anarchist tendencies within the Burakumin and peasant movements—all of which were suppressed by the fanatically militarised state from 1934 onwards—despite maintaining a twilight presence that survived into the post-war era.49

In China, where the movement was first activated in the early 1900s in the Portuguese enclave of Macau (near British-occupied Hong Kong, which became an entry point for IWW ideas) by deported Portuguese anarchists, the nascent anarchist movement threw itself alongside republican forces into the overthrow of the royal dynasty in 1911—the shock of which echoed across Asia. Shifu, the nom de guerre of Liu Szu-fu (1884–1915), was the leading Chinese anarchist, who modelled his views on Kropotkin, founded the Society of Anarchist Communist Comrades, and was the pioneer of Chinese syndicalism: the anarcho-syndicalists took the honours of establishing the first modern Chinese trade unions, with the 11,000–strong Teahouse Labour Union in the southern port city of Guangzhou in 1918; Guangzhou would remain an anarchist stronghold for at least a decade after the 1921–1923 period when the entire city was run as an anarchist commune. Further afield in the landmass of China, anarcho-syndicalism initially established itself by 1921 as the majority tendency within the Shanghai-based Confederation of Labour Associations (GLH), which had provincial affiliates as dispersed as the 5,000–strong syndicalist Hunan Workers’ Association (HLH). Black Societies, anarchist schools, and peasant associations flourished, but the flirtations of some leading figures with the heterogeneous Guomindang proved fruitless and the movement was suppressed from 1927 as the nationalists consolidated their hold on the cities. By the time the “Maoist” Marxists (Mao having been an anarchist in his youth), defeated the nationalists in 1949, the remaining 10,000 syndicalists had to choose between absorption into the official communist union federation—or exile in reactionary Taiwan.50

In Korea, the movement initially arose as a result of radical migrant labour exchanges with Japan, but truly consolidated after the 1910 invasion of the peninsula by Imperial Japan. Despite the proliferation of Black Societies and even of syndicalist trade unions such as the Wonsan General Trade Union and the Free Trade Union in the 1920s, it was in exile across the border in Manchuria that the Korean anarchist excelled. There, in 1929, in a long, mountainous valley, they achieved the least-known anarchist revolution, establishing the Shinmin free zone, based on village direct-democracy and defended by a peasant militia (I will detail this in the Third Wave). When Shinmin was defeated by direct Japanese invasion in 1931, the Korean anarchists fought a long retreat alongside their Chinese comrades, and both guerrilla units and some syndicalist unions survived into the post-war era.51

The Russian Revolt also resulted in a London gathering of exiled Russian anarchists, including the anarchist theorists Pyotr Kropotkin, Maria Isidine, and Daniil Novomirsky to discuss an organised response. Maria Isidine, the nom de plume of Maria Isidorovna Goldsmith (1873–1933), was a Russian-French scientist and anarchist, and an advocate of an extreme anti-organisationist—svobodnikist—position. Daniil Novomirsky, the nom de guerre of Yakob Kirilovsky (1882–193?), the foremost Russian anarcho-syndicalist of his Second Wave generation, was sent to a labour camp in Siberia in 1905, but escaped and settled in New York where he became a prominent pro-organisationist—burevesnikist—anarchist journalist. Novomirsky argued that, in order to fight reaction, all “anti-authoritarian socialists should unite into a Workers’ Anarchist Party. The next step would be the formation of a vast union of all revolutionary elements under the black flag of the International Workers’ Anarchist Party.” Such a party required theoretical unity to enable “unity of action.” It would be “the only revolutionary party, unlike the conservative parties which seek to preserve the established political and economic order, and the progressive parties [like the Social Democratic Labour Party: both its Menshevik and Bolshevik tendencies] which seek to reform the state in one way or another, so as to reform the corresponding economic relations, for anarchists aim to destroy the state, in order to do away with the established economic order and reconstruct it on new principles.” Novomirsky said such a “Party” was “the free union of individuals struggling for a common goal” and as such required “a clear programme and tactics” that were distinct from other currents. It needed to “participate in the revolutionary syndicalist movement [as] the central objective of our work, so that we can make that movement anarchist,” and to boycott all state structures, substituting them with “workers’ communes with soviets of workers’ deputies, acting as industrial committees, at their head.”

In 1907, at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, 80 delegates from Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bohemia, Britain, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Switzerland, and the United States met and debated anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism and the role of specific anarchist/syndicalist organisations.52 The individualists, who opposed all formal organisation, were roundly defeated by the organisationists, the key resolution being that “anarchy and organisation, far from being incompatible as has sometimes been claimed, are mutually complimentary and illuminate each other, the very precept of anarchy residing in the free organisation of the producers [the syndicalist influenced trade unions].” The congress further hailed the “collective action” and “concerted movement,” stating that “[t]he organisation of militant forces would assure propaganda of fresh wings and could not but hasten the penetration of the ideas of federalism and revolution into the working class.” The Amsterdam Congress also agreed that labour organisation did not preclude political organisation and urged that “the comrades of every land should place on their agenda the creation of anarchist groups and the federation of existing groups.” As a result, participating delegates helped establish a plethora of new anarchist specific organisations. These anarchist federations, some of which were affiliated to the “Amsterdam International,” worked in parallel to (and often inside) the anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist unions. One of the best examples is the Anarchist Communist Alliance (ACA), founded in France in 1911—its descendants in the 2010s are the Anarchist Federation (FA), founded in 1945, and the recent FA splinter the Co-ordination of Anarchist Groups (CGA)—as well as the anarchist Libertarian Communist Organisation (OCL) and Libertarian Alternative (AL).53

This powerful shift towards the adoption of Bakuninist-type, specifically anarchist/syndicalist organisations, within the context of mass (including anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist) organisations and movements, was driven by the likes of the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation (FORA), founded as the country’s primary labour centre in 1901, which adopted anarchist-communism as its goal in 1904 and provided the template for similar Second Wave anarcho-syndicalist federations across Latin America, almost all named in echo of the FORA.54 The FORA totally dominated Argentine organised labour for two decades. It first converted to revolutionary syndicalism its socialist rival, the Argentine Regional Workers’ Confederation (CORA), then absorbed it in 1914, leading to the hardline “anarchist-communists” splitting off and forming the FORA of the 5th Congress (FORA-V), and leaving a rump French CGT-styled “apolitical” anarcho-syndicalist FORA of the 9th Congress (FORA-IX), which had peaked at perhaps 120,000 members in 1919. The FORA-IX was absorbed into a new union centre in 1922, which later became Marxist-dominated, but the FORA-V, which peaked at 200,000 members in 1922, reverted to the name FORA and maintained a continuous, if tenuous, presence through decades of dictatorship from 1930, until today. And this is not to mention the MTWIU, which established its Latin American headquarters on the Buenos Aires docks in 1919—or the constellation of specific organisations such as the FORA-IX-affiliated Argentine Libertarian Alliance (ALA), the FORA-V-affiliated Anarcho-Communist Port-workers’ Group (ACAOP), the 5,000–strong autonomous Resistance Society of the Port-workers of the Capital (SROPC), and scores of women’s organisations and resistance societies.

Inspired by the FORA, anarcho-syndicalism spread rapidly across the “Southern Cone” of Latin America. The Uruguayan Regional Workers’ Organisation (FORU) was founded in 1905, drawing on 40 years of anarchist organisational experience dating back to the anarcho-syndicalist FRROU section of the First International from 1872. The the FORU peaked at 90,000 members in 1911 as Uruguay’s dominant labour federation—with a powerful “Feminine Section” (this was not a gender ghetto, but rather a vanguard, reflecting the dominance of women in the textile sector which was at the forefront of industrialisation across Latin America; and the Feminine Section model was replicated by all anarcho-syndicalist unions on the continent). Although the FORU’s dominance was undercut by an early form of welfare state, and from 1923 by the incursion of Bolshevism into the workers’ movement, the movement survived the imposition of dictatorship in 1930 and established an Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) in 1938 that appears to have survived until 1941—being powerfully revived in 1956.55

The Brazilian Regional Workers’ Federation (FORB) was founded in Rio in 1906, but within months, it was replaced by a Brazilian Labour Confederation (COB) at national level and a Workers’ Federation of Rio de Janeiro (FORJ) at state level. Although revolutionary syndicalism rather than a more explicit anarcho-syndicalism, dominated Brazilian labour during the Second Wave, the sheer size of Brazil meant the COB never achieved true national status and it folded in 1909, being revived between 1913 and 1915. However its constituent regional federations, the FORJ, the Local Federation of Labour of Santos (FOLS), the Workers’ Federation of the state of Rio Grande do Sul (FORGS), and the powerful Workers’ Federation of São Paulo (FOSP), predated and outlived the COB: the FOSP was still São Paulo state’s most important union centre by 1931 under the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship.56

In 1905, anarcho-syndicalists formed the Chilean Labourers’ Federation (FTCh), which was reformed in 1912 along FORA lines into the Chilean Regional Workers’ Federation (FORCh). The FORCh attained a peak of 60,000 members by 1921—but operated alongside the Chilean IWW which was a significant labour centre in its own right with 25,000 members by 1920.57 The Paraguayan Regional Workers’ Organisation (FORPa), founded in 1906, was absorbed in 1916 as the Paraguayan Regional Workers’ Centre (CORP), Paraguay’s main labour federation, but which in the 1920s lost ground to the Marxists. In 1928, Paraguayan anarchists established among the peasantry a Nationalist Revolutionary Alliance (ANR) the objective of which was “to establish Paraguay as a Communal Republic, part, ultimately, of a ‘Federal Union of the Peoples of Latin America.’” But an anarchist insurrection in 1931 was crushed and the unions outlawed, so syndicalists played a role in the underground Workers’ Trade Union Reorganisation Council (CORS) until all resistance was suppressed by a joint Marxist and fascist coup in 1936 which laid the groundwork for the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Higinio Morínigo in 1940. 58

On the Caribbean Rim, the Havana Labour Federation (FOH) was a reformation in 1921 of the moribund Cuban Workers’ Confederation (CTC), founded in 1895, and was a forerunner of the Cuban National Labour Confederation (CNOC) which was founded in 1925 on Spanish CNT lines with 200,000 members, Cuba’s main labour federation.59 The Mexican Regional Workers’ Organisation (FORM) was a reorganisation in 1915 of the House of the World Worker (COM), founded in 1912 but with a resilient organisational heritage stretching back to the 1860s, Mexico’s main labour federation with 150,000 members, and rebuilt as the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) in 1921, which broke apart a decade later.60 In the late Third Wave, the Venezuelan Regional Workers’ Federation (FORV) was formed—I will address this later.

In the Andes, the Peruvian Regional Workers’ Federation (FORPe), founded in 1913, was replaced in 1918 with the Local Workers’ Federation of Lima (FOL), which became Peru’s dominant labour federation.61 The Colombian Workers’ Federation (FOC) was founded in 1925 as the national Colombian trade union central.62 In Bolivia, the Local Workers’ Federation (FOL) of La Paz was founded in 1927 as the reformation of a body founded in 1908, and in the same year, established its formidable Feminine Workers’ Federation (FOF). The FOL was reformed in 1930 on FORA lines as the Bolivian Regional Workers’ Confederation (CORB). Although the CORB was suppressed by dictatorship in 1936, its FOL/FOF core survived, the latter until 1964.63 In Ecuador, the Guayas Workers’ Regional Federation (FORG) was established by 1928 by the anarcho-syndicalist current in the 30,000–strong Ecuadoran Regional Federation of Labour (FTRE), founded in 1922. The FORG was suppressed by dictatorship in 1934.64

On the Iberian Peninsula, the movement matured with the formation of Spain’s massive National Confederation of Labour (CNT), founded in 1910,65 and the relatively larger National Workers’ Union (UON) of Portugal, founded in 1914.66 The CNT was a revival of a long line of Spanish anarcho-syndicalist labour federations, stretching back to the “grandmother” of them all, the FRE founded in 1868, and rose to 2 million members in 1936. The UON, founded in 1914 with 50,000 members, changed its name to the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) in 1919 when it peaked at 90,000 members, but was suppressed in 1926 by the militarist regime that survived until the “Carnation Revolution” of 1974—which had a devastating effect on anarchist organisations in the Portuguese sphere of influence, such as Mozambique (where an anarchist Revolutionary League had been established in the early 1900s).

In 1910, the first great anarchist-influenced revolution broke out in Mexico, providing the template to be replicated in other upheavals, as to how anarchist-specific organisations, anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist unions, and armed worker-peasant militia could work in parallel, and sometimes in concert: in the north, the eastern seaboard oil-fields, and Baja California, the Mexican section of the IWW and the Magónistas of the Mexican Liberal Party (PLM)67 worked together. Ricardo Flores Magón (1874–1922) was the leading figure behind the PLM, which he turned into an armed insurgent anarchist organisation whose militants initiated the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Living much of his life in exile, he died apparently of diabetes in an American prison. In Mexico City and the the central Mexican states, the anarchists/syndicalists of the Struggle (Lucha) group worked with the 50,000–strong anarcho-syndicalist House of the World Worker (COM)—the direct descendant of the First Wave Proletarian Circle—defended by its Red Battalions; while south of the capital in Morelos state, Emiliano Zapata’s deeply anarchist-influenced Industrial Union of North and South America (UIANS), defended by its Liberation Army of the South (ELS), based on guerrilla militia of 200 to 300 fighters each, numbering 70,000 in total by 1915. This Mexican Revolution also illustrated how things could go awfully wrong. Despite the fact that the interventionist USA had its imperialist intentions diverted by a 1917 entry into the First World War, the Magónistas in the north failed to link up with the Zapatistas in the south, and the anarcho-syndicalists of the COM dramatically failed their watershed test of class solidarity, with some in the COM leadership breaking ranks with the Zapatista peasantry, and sending COM Red Battalions to fight the ELS, on behalf of the statist Constitutionalists. This class betrayal provoked a massive rupture in the COM, with revolutionaries siding with the Zapatistas in the rural areas and the IWW in the oil fields, and the reformists with the treacherous leadership. In disgust, some of the Lucha anarchists, such as Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama (1880–1967), broke with the COM, by then reorganised as the FORM. Originally a middle-class lawyer, Soto y Gama had been jailed for writing against the dictatorship in the PLM newspaper, became involved with the Lucha organisation and then the ELS, then backed the Zapatistas. But the fragmented Revolution never consolidated its libertarian zones. It sputtered and finally died after ten exhausting years, gutted by the Constitutionalists’ ability to divide and rule the working class and peasantry. A disillusioned Soto y Gama founded the libertarian reformist National Agrarian Party (PNA) in 1920, serving in parliament until 1928. He later wrote the seminal work, The Agrarian Revolution of the South and Emiliano Zapata, Its Leader.

The internationalist aspect of this new wave of anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism found expression in the 1913 Syndicalist Conference in London (the British syndicalist movement was at its peak, with the Industrial Syndicalist Education League, ISEL, boasting 150,000 members, while the IWW-influenced Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union, ITGWU, in occupied Ireland, had some 25,000 members and would peak at 120,000 members in 1917),68 drawing delegates from trade union federations in Argentina, Brazil, Belgium, Britain, Cuba, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden. American IWW and Russian observers also attended, while Austria adhered without representation. The congress established an International Syndicalist Information Bureau. Although disrupted by World War I, this conference laid the initial groundwork for the formation of the International Workers’ Association (IWA) in Berlin in 1922. Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian hostile to anarchism, was forced to admit that “in 1905–14 the Marxist left had in most countries been on the fringe of the revolutionary movement [and] the main body of Marxists had been identified with a de facto non-revolutionary social democracy, while the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical Marxism.”69

The most powerful anarchist movement in Eastern Europe was the Bulgarian movement, which rose in the 1870s, blooded itself with its valiant defence of Macedonian freedom from the Ottoman Empire in 1903, and which established its first trade unions in 1910. The Federation of Anarchist-Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB) which was founded in 1919 had branches across the country with youth groups in every large school and was a multifaceted armed force to be reckoned with—the third-largest organisation on the left after the agrarians then the Marxists— by the time it resisted the 1923 fascist coup, an extermination campaign in which perhaps 35,000 leftists were slaughtered. By 1931, the rural syndicalist Vlassovden Confederation had 130 sections nationwide, and the urban Anarcho-Syndicalist National Confederation of Labour (ASNKR) embraced 40 unions (excluding the IWA-affiliated Bulgarian Confederation of Autonomous Unions). The movement fought against the 1934 fascist coup, then as an underground force against the Nazi and later the Soviet invasions, and by liberation in 1945, the FAKB newspaper Rabotnicheska Misal (Workers’ Thought) had a circulation of 60,000 (at a time when the communist Bulgarian Worker’s Party had only 15,000 members)—before being suppressed by a cynical Marxist-fascist-agrarian alliance.

The Second Wave was not broken on the rocks of the First World War, into which the CGT, now dominated by reformists, was drawn. The imperialist powers had initiated the bloodbath because capital was in steep decline and beset on all sides by a militant working class with a lot of remaining momentum. Despite the scale of the slaughter, the conflict unleashed two other Revolutions—Russia and Ukraine—both of which drank deeply from the well of working class self-organisation before the counter-revolution unlatched the guillotine-blade. The events in Russia illustrated the danger of anarchists withdrawing from the battle into purist ivory towers, while simultaneously proving Bakunin’s predictions about the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat to be chillingly correct, in stark contrast to the anarchist-flavoured sovietism of the working class. The Ukrainian Revolution showed the efficiency of an innovative, armed, anarchist struggle, based on conventional armed forces using rapid-deployment shock tactics. Out of the original Makhnovist detachment (the Chernoye Sotnia, a cavalry unit of 500 with machine-gun carts) arose the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (RPAU), which, by December 1919, was just over 110,000 strong, divided into four Corps, consisting of 83,000 infantry, 20,000 cavalry, assault groups, artillery, reconnaissance, medical, and other detachments, including armoured cars and seven armoured trains, and was headquartered at Aleksandrovsk, Nikopol, Yekaterinoslav, and Crimea, but swept like a storm across south-eastern Ukraine.70

The true innovation, however, was not so much in battlefield tactics, but in the fact that the RPAU forces were politically pluralistic volunteers (including anarchists, social revolutionaries, Maximalists, non-party fighters and even dissident Bolsheviks), who elected their officers and, most importantly, secured the backing of the populace by redistributing the landed gentry’s estates to the peasants. The forces also submitted themselves to four Congresses of Peasants, Workers, and Insurgents, which set the general socio-political direction of the movement. In addition, they were linked, more organically than formally, to Nestor Makhno’s Anarcho-Communist Group (GAK) of Gulai-Polye, to the Alarm Confederation of Anarchist Organisations (Nabat), founded in Khar’kov, Kursk, and other centres in 1918, as well as to directly-democratic urban and rural communes, anarcho-/ revolutionary syndicalist-run factories, and the anarchist Black Guard militia which defended them, as well as the 30,000 revolutionary syndicalist coal-miners of the neighbouring Donetz Basin in the eastern Ukraine organised along IWW lines (it must be stressed that the Donetz Basin was by far the largest industrial zone in Europe at that time, putting paid to the notion of the movement as merely a bunch of peasants with pitchforks). Apart from those organisations in the broader Makhnovist movement, which included the Congress of Peasants, Workers, and Insurgents, most of these linkages were fluid and informal. Further afield, insurgent Ukraine was linked to the Russian Revolution via the clandestine network of the Pan-Russian Insurgent Committee of Revolutionary Partisans, based in Moscow, which had branches in Russia, the Ukraine, and Latvia. I presume that insurgent Ukraine maintained links via the Trans-Siberian Railway to the 5,000 to 10,000–strong armed formations of I. P. Novoselov’s Anarchist Federation of the Altai (AFA) in south-central Siberia71 and to the revolutionary syndicalist coal-miners of the Kuzbas Basin’s 16,000–strong IWW section in Siberia, founded in 1919, which appears to have survived as part of the IWW-dominated “Autonomous Industrial Commune” until being shut down by Stalin’s regime as an anomaly in a command economy in 1928. The now-familiar fluid mixture of syndicalist unions, specific anarchist “political” organisations, anarchist militia, and popular communes was replicated in European Russia itself, albeit on a smaller scale: the increasingly beleaguered All-Russian Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists (ARKAS), which claimed 88,000 members in 1918, was linked on the factory floor in the Petrograd working class district of Vyborg on the east bank of the Neva River to organisations such as Iosif Bleikhman’s Petrograd Anarchist Communist Federation (PACF). In Moscow, the Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda (UASP), and the Moscow Federation of Anarchist Groups (MFAG) were linked to the force of 1,000 Black Guards who defended the factories, and the nuclei of pluralistic popular communes were discernible at the anarchist-occupied Villa Durnova in Moscow and more so at the soviet at the Kronstadt naval base located on an island which guarded the Baltic Sea approaches to Petrograd.

While the self-described anarchist/syndicalist movement in Russia, barring the critical exception of the PACF and the anarchist tendency within the Kronstadt Soviet, failed to grasp the bull of power by the horns—in part because they never managed to achieve critical mass among the popular classes as in the Ukraine, the Makhnovist strategy of combining flexible military daring with a libertarian praxis of pluralistic internal democracy, and submitting the whole to civilian plenums, thereby liberating (for a time at least) a shifting territory with some 7 million inhabitants, made the Ukrainian Revolution the most holistic of the anarchist social experiments, despite the dire and continually-shifting circumstances of the war, which prevented it from achieving the continuity of the later Spanish Revolution. Both the Ukrainian and Russian Revolutions, defended so bravely by the anarchist forces from the assaults of the imperialists, indigenous nationalists, and pro-monarchist Whites, were mercilessly put down by the Bolsheviks. By the time the Global Revolt finally collapsed, with the last gasp of the failed 1918–1923 German Revolution, during which libertarian councillist praxis—the Munich Soviet in particular—had been tested and found wanting, the world was a totally changed place. The First World War and the Spanish Influenza epidemic had wiped out an entire generation, the Conservative counter-revolution was in full swing, the Chinese, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had collapsed, and had been replaced by a constellation of fragile nation-states in which right-wing nationalism ran rampant, and technological innovations like steamships, tanks, aircraft, the telephone, and the automobile had shrunk the world. All of this took place while Fascism and statist Marxist “communism” (or, rather, authoritarian state-capitalism) were deluding the working class with false alternatives to capitalism.

And yet, the Second Wave transformed anarchism into a truly global phenomenon, with sizeable mass anarchist organisations fighting the class war from Costa Rica to China, Portugal to Paraguay, and Sweden to South Africa. Furthermore, global anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism was drawn together in the International Workers’ Association (IWA), founded in Berlin in 1922, a reformation of the libertarian wing of the First International, and representing between 1.5 million and 2 million revolutionary workers globally.72 In 1922, the IWA’s largest sections were the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) with half a million members, the Argentine FORA, with some 200,000 members, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) of Portugal, with 150,000 members, the Free Workers’ Union of Germany (FAUD), with 120,000 members, and the Committee for the Defence of Revolutionary Syndicalism (CDSR) in France, which had taken 100,000 members away from the now irrevocably reformist CGT, which had peaked at 2.5–million members, most of them white-collar workers far removed from the blue-collar origins of the CGT (one of the ironies of this period is that when the CDSR founded the CGT Unitaire (CGTU) in 1921 as a revolutionary rival to the CGT, the new federation attracted Senegalese sailors who had abandoned the Marxists in 1919 after a failed strike). Minor anarcho-syndicalist organisations present at the founding of the IWA came from Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Norway, and Sweden, as well as the Chilean IWW (while most other branches of the IWW were closely sympathetic, they never joined the new international).

The movement’s most remarkable achievements at this time included the fostering of a deeply-entrenched tradition of rank-and-file labour militancy and a global proletarian counter-culture that eschewed bourgeois patronage, the establishment of near-universal labour protections, such as the eight-hour working day and worker’s compensation, a substantial contribution to the virtual annihilation of absolute monarchism, and the mounting of the most serious challenge to clerical control of education across the world. The defeats of the Mexican, Russian and Ukrainian revolutions did, however, lead a lot of anarchists to become defeatist, withdrawing from the fields of social and industrial struggle they had dominated for decades, leaving the door open to Bolshevism. Those critical of this retreat found themselves having to defend the core principles of the social revolution.

THE PLATFORMIST RESPONSE: THE “GENERAL UNION” BUILDS AN ORGANISATIONAL PLATFORM

Following their defeat at the hands of the Red Army whose flanks they had protected for so many years, Nestor Makhno and many surviving Ukrainian anarchist guerrillas fled into exile in 1921 (a Makhnovist underground would operate in the USSR into the 1930s), where they faced some hard questions. The most important question was: if anarchism places so much value on freedom from coercion, is it a powerful enough strategy to defeat a united, militarised enemy? The survivors were not only embittered by their experiences at the hands of the “revolutionary” Reds, they were also greatly disappointed in the poor support they received from Russian anarchist comrades. Sure, the Nabat had worked on an ad-hoc basis alongside the RPAU, the anarcho-syndicalist unions in the cities, and the various Black Guard detachments of guerrillas like Maroussia Nikiforova, but precious little aid had come from anarchists further afield—and the majority of the Nabat had split with the RPAU in 1919 over the latter’s third tactical truce with the Bolsheviks.

This dispute over strategy was to play itself out in exile in France, between ex-Nabatists like Voline and ex-Makhnovists like Makhno. In 1926, Makhno, Arshinov, Ida Mett, and other exiles from the Workers’ Cause (Dielo Truda) group in Paris published a pamphlet entitled Organizatsionnaia Platforma Vseobshchego Soiuza Anarkhistov: Proekt (Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists: Draft) or, more simply, the Platform.73 Ida Mett (1901–1973) was a Russian anarchist who escaped Bolshevik detention, becoming a writer in exile in Paris; her analysis The Kronstadt Commune (1948) remains a devastating critique of Bolshevism. The text caused big waves in the international anarchist movement because of its call for tight internal discipline, mutually agreed upon unity of ideas and tactics, and the formation of a “general union of anarchists.” By union, the writers of the Platform meant a united specific organisation of tendency, rather than a trade union. They supported anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism, but stressed that it was “only one of the forms of revolutionary class struggle.” Moreover, countering the notion that anarchist/syndicalist unions were self-sufficient, they stressed dual organisationism: unions needed to be united with anarchist political groups, anarchist militias, and anarchist municipal soviets. The Platform emphasised the class struggle nature of anarchism, reminding militants that it was a popular class movement, of both the peasantry and the working class, but one that was not exclusively focused on either industry or the trade unions. It called for ideological and tactical unity, collective responsibility, and a programme of revolutionary action. More controversially, it called for an “executive committee” to be formed within the general union of anarchists. By executive committee, the writers of the Platform meant a working group of activists, whose job it was to carry out tasks mandated by the union.

The Platform’s vision of the future social revolutionary soviet society was arguably derived from an earlier Makhnovist document, the Draft Declaration of the (Makhnovist) Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine, adopted in 1919 at a congress of the Military-Revolutionary Soviet (VRS), the representative insurgents’ body that linked the RPAU General Staff (Shtarm), which ran military operations, to the Congresses of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents. The Declaration called, as the Kronstadt Soviet would in 1921, for a “third revolution” against Bolshevik coercive power over the working class, poor, and peasantry, and stated that the basis of this revolution was the free soviet system, “libertarian organisation as taken up by significant masses,” freely self-organised to oppose “the notion of political power.” However, since the soviets and the RPAU were pluralistic organisations, consisting of anarchists, Social Revolutionaries, and other tendencies, including unaffiliated members, the Declaration did not assign the anarchists a specific social function by name. Instead, it stated that not only all “political activity” based on privilege, coercion, and enslavement, but all political organisation, presumably including all genuine socialist revolutionary factions like the anarchists/syndicalists, would “tend to wither away of themselves” under revolutionary conditions.

The Declaration further emphasised that the RPAU, while pluralistic, volunteer, and working class-controlled, did form the “fighting core of this Ukrainian people’s revolutionary movement, a core whose task consists everywhere of organising insurgent forces and helping insurgent toilers in their struggle against all abuse of power and capital.” The militant minority’s task was clearly pro-organisational, in support of the popular revolutionary forces. The document, however, stopped short of calling for a specific organisation of a distinct revolutionary tendency to carry out that task, a call the Platform later issued. Unlike the central committee of an authoritarian socialist organisation, which would typically make all policy decisions, the Declaration stated that the entire membership would form the decision-making body in a platformist organisation. Delegates or committees would merely carry out tasks mandated by that membership. The Platform was a restatement of the positions held by numerous anarchist political organisations in previous years, dating back to Bakunin’s Alliance. Yet now, some anarchists eschewed the classical Bakuninist line, and put forward unfounded claims that anarchism was traditionally opposed to solid anarchist political organisations with a clear political line.

The Platform’s critics included veteran anarchist militants such as Voline of Russia, himself a former Nabat member, Sébastian Faure of France, Errico Malatesta of Italy, and Alexander Berkman of the USA. Sébastian Faure (1858–1942) was an influential French anarchist writer, journalist, and radical educator. Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) was a diminutive mechanic and inveterate organiser, widely seen as the leading anarchist theorist after Kropotkin. Spending much of his life in exile, he moved from staging insurrections in Italy to founding anarcho-syndicalist unions in Argentina. Mistakenly hailed as the “Italian Lenin” on his return to Italy, he helped establish the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) and died under house arrest in the Fascist era. Critics also accused exiles of trying to “Bolshevise anarchism,” substituting professional revolutionary elites for the revolutionary masses. The subsequent and much-derided “conversion” of Arshinov to Bolshevism—which was merely a tactical move to enable the exhausted militant to return home—gave the critics lots of ammunition, despite the fact that he was executed in 1937 during Joseph Stalin’s purges for allegedly, according to the secret police, “attempting to restore anarchism in Russia.”

In 1928, Faure published a response to the Platform, La Synthèse anarchiste (The Anarchist Synthesis), which rejected the arguments of the Platform in favour of a looser ideological mix, which he contended was more in keeping with libertarian free thought; it is from his response that this all-in approach acquired the label “synthesist,” with the opposing view termed “platformist.” The two tendencies would continue to divide the anarchist movement ever after. Malatesta later conceded that there was no substantial difference between his pro-organisational views, expressed at the 1907 Amsterdam Congress, and those of the Makhnovists; this change of heart was to have a profound impact on the development of platformism in Latin America, where it was termed “specificity” (especifismo). Makhno and his co-authors argued that it was exactly because of the disorganisation of Russian anarchists that many of them went on to join the only group with a clear revolutionary plan—the Bolsheviks. Anarchists, they said, needed to be just as clear and as organised, but along libertarian, and not authoritarian, lines and guiding, not dictating revolutionary workers’ aspirations. Most of the anarchist opposition to the Platform has sprung from misconceptions.

Importantly, its original title as a “Draft” shows that the Platform was intended as an internal discussion document within the international anarchist movement, not as a final blueprint for the only possible style of anarchist organisation. It was neither authoritarian (as we have seen in discussing the executive committee), nor was it vanguardist, an attempt to get a tiny group of activists to lead the working class. The intention of the Platform was not to suggest that all anarchists should be absorbed into one massive, monolithic “platformist” organisation. It quite clearly stated that platformist groups would maintain links with other revolutionary organisations. The platformist method of organising was applied to all forms of anarchist/syndicalist organisation, whether economic, political, military, or social. Most importantly, the Platform was not an innovation, but a clear re-statement of the fundamentals of mass anarchist/syndicalist organising, dating back to Bakunin’s time. It spoke to the necessity for commonly agreed upon lines of attack, along which anarchist organisations had become the primary promoters of exclusively working class interests worldwide. It was in fact the Platform’s harshest critics, such as Voline, who tried to revise anarchism by making a principle of loose organisation without solid politics, an approach that would have made Bakunin turn in his grave.

The intense debate over the Platform split the Russian and Ukrainian anarchist movements in exile, notably in France, where the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad (GRAZ) fractured in 1927 into platformist and synthesist tendencies, and in North America, where the Russian/Ukrainian diaspora likewise split into burevestnikist (organisationist) and svobodnikist (anti-organisationist) groupings. That year, the platformist tendency in France founded a short-lived International Anarchist Communist Federation (IACF), with sections in France and Italy and delegates from China, Poland, and Spain. The IACF can be considered the ideological descendant of Bakunin’s IB and, to a lesser extent, of the organisational Amsterdam Anarchist International, but it never made much headway. In Bulgaria, the platformist tendency proved strongest within the Federation of Anarchist Communists of Bulgaria (FAKB), which adopted the

document as its constitution. This may account, in part, for the diversity and resilience of the Bulgarian anarchist movement, which organised workers, peasants, students, professionals, and intellectuals, and not only survived, under arms, the 1923 and 1934 fascist putsches, but also the Second World War, only to be crushed by Marxist-fascist-agrarian reaction in 1948.74 It was unfortunate that the Platform was not translated into Spanish early enough to influence the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI). The FAI, founded in 1927, was envisaged as an Iberian Peninsular organisation embracing Spanish and Portuguese anarchist groups, although the suppression of the anarchists in Portugal under Salazar made this difficult. It initially rescued the CNT from reformism, but its lack of internal ideological coherence allowed it to be hijacked in 1934 by technocrats who took it into the Catalan regional then Spanish national governments during the Revolution and were on the verge of transforming it into a conventional political party when the Revolution was defeated. It has several active descendants today, all claiming the FAI moniker; they reject reformism, but remain synthesist.

The debate also influenced those anarchists remaining in Russia itself, including former militants of the Nabat who had either been driven underground or jailed. According to a Nabat veteran (unnamed for security reasons), then in exile in Siberia, who wrote in Dielo Truda in 1928, the Nabat itself, initially a de facto “synthesist” organisation, had been refining its organisational structure, in the “whirlwind of revolution,” in what approximated a “platformist” direction. The Nabat veteran wrote that the organisation was, in a sense, a “party,” in that it was not a loose, affinity-based organisation, as claimed by Voline. Rather, they wrote, the organisation was a federation of groups that rallied “the most determined, the most dynamic militants with an eye to launching a healthy, well-structured movement with the prospect of a standardised programme.” Nabat members submitted to majority decisions reached at its congresses, which transcended its different tendencies to promote a unitary “policy line”—“a single, coherent platform… In short, it was a well-structured, well-disciplined movement with a leading echelon appointed and monitored by the rank and file. And let there be no illusions as to the role of that echelon [later referred to as the ‘Secretariat’, echoing the Platform’s ‘executive committee’]: it was not merely technically executive, as it is commonly regarded. It was also the movement’s ideological pilot core, looking after publishing operations, and propaganda activity, utilising the central funds and above all controlling and deploying the movement’s resources and militants.”