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.