review

Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World, 18701940 Brill: Leiden & Boston 2010, 155, hardback 431 pp, 978 90 04 18849 5

bryan palmer

THE BLACK AND THE RED

For the classic historians of the anarchist movement, the culminating act of the drama lay in Spain. Both George Woodcocks Anarchism (1962) and James Jolls The Anarchists (1964), after bows to Godwin and Proudhon, began by describing the tireless work of Bakunin and his disciples, Fanelli, Malatesta and the rest, building sections of the First InternationalMarxs International Working Mens Associationin Italy, Switzerland and Spain. Proudhons notion of production and exchange organized by free associations of workers was expanded by Kropotkin and Reclus. After the crushing of the Paris Commune, clandestine anarchist groups took to the propaganda of the deed and scored an impressive number of hits on ruling monarchs and heads of state. But as Kropotkin himself wrote in La Rvolte in 1891, however inspiring individual acts of heroism might be, revolution is above all a popular movement. Early trade unions had been largely reformist in scope, but the mass syndicalist movements that exploded onto the scene in the early 1900sthe cgt in France, the iww in the us, the militantly anarchist cnt in Spainmobilized hundreds of thousands of proletarians around revolutionary aims. The cnt had half a million members when the Spanish republic was declared in 1931. In the popular uprising against Franco in 1936, cnt workers in Barcelona seized control of the factories and streets. For Woodcock and Joll, the tragic epic of Catalonia in 193637 remained the central experience of the anarchist revolution; the curtain fell as Francos fascism drowned the black-and-red flag in blood. In recent years, however, this account has come under attack. Research into early labour-movement and anti-colonial struggles has unearthed evidence of anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist organizing across a much wider

new left review 77 sept oct 2012

151

152

nlr 77

sphere. A seminal contribution was Arif Dirliks Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (1991). Peter Marshalls uneven compendium Demanding the Impossible (1994) contained pages on Latin America and Asia; Jason Adamss Non-Western Anarchisms (2003) offered a view from Johannesburg; Benedict Andersons Under Three Flags (2006) traced the skeins of anarchist and anti-colonial solidarity linking Cuba and the Philippines in the 1890s via Barcelona, Brussels and Hong Kong. An impressive new collection of essays edited by Steven Hirsch and Lucien Van Der Walt offers a welcome addition to this work. Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World, 18701940 emerged from a panel on Anarchism in the Global South: Latin America in Comparative Perspective at an Amsterdam conference on social history in 2006. Its studies of Argentinian, Brazilian, Peruvian and MexicanCaribbean networks are complemented by papers on Africa, East Asia and colonial zones of Europe, Ireland and the Ukraine, with a preface on the relations between anarchism and communism by Benedict Anderson. A forty-page introductory essay by the editors, complete with a lengthy bibliography, constitutes a significant contribution to anarchist historiography in its own right. Hirsch and Van Der Walt argue that anarchism was not a European doctrine that diffused outward. Rather, the movement emerged simultaneously and transnationally, created by interlinked activists on three continents. Its history needs to be explored beyond the blinkered notion of a Spanish exceptionalism that has privileged the role of the Iberian Peninsula. Their collection also aims to investigate the part played by anarchism and anarchosyndicalism in anti-colonial struggles; coverage of East AsianKorean, Chinese, Japaneseas well as South African and Egyptian experiences examines the ways in which anarchism attempted to negotiate the divisive issues of nationalism, race and religion. A brief account of this materialmuch of it will be new to non-specialistswill give a flavour of the volume. Nineteenth-century Egypt may seem an unlikely setting for a section of the First International; yet as Anthony Gorman notes, Italian anarchists among the migrant-workers community in Alexandria supported the 1882 Urabi revolt against British rule. Italians, Greeks, Jews and Germans at first dwarfed the involvement of Arab-speaking Egyptians themselves in the disputatious left-libertarian circles of Cairo and Alexandria. Propaganda of the word trumped that of the deed: a short-lived but influential Free Popular University was established in Alexandria in 1901, giving classes in Arabic and Italian; a lecturer assailed the intellectual alcoholism of Catholicism and Brahmanism, which preached blind and passive obedience. In the early 1900s syndicalist organizations grew fast among Egyptian tailors, shoemakers and cigarette workers. The shoemakers leadership included five Egyptians, five Greeks, two Syrians, an Italian and an Armenian; the

review

palmer: Anarchism

153

lingua franca of workers solidarity was an amalgam of Arabic, French, Greek, Italian and German. Capitalism was declared the common enemy: Labour has no frontiers or language. In this context, anarchism and socialism were hard to distinguish from one another. The national uprising against British rule in 1919 was accompanied by insurrectionary anarcho-syndicalist strikes; many of these militants were drawn into the Egyptian section of the Third International in 1923. As Gorman shows, they had charted new paths of radicalism for two decades leading up to the 1920s, struggling against colonialism but refusing to pander to conservative-nationalist forces. The struggle against Japanese imperialism was the central question for Korean anarchism when it emerged in the 1920s. The peninsula itself was locked down under ferocious colonial-police repression, but paradoxically Tokyo itself served as a hub for East Asian radicalism in this period. Dongyoun Hwangs account illuminates the ways in which transnational networks were forged through educational projects and labour organizing. A Korean anarchist group was active in Tokyo from 1921 and put out a journal, Black Wave. The Korean syndicalist Kim Taeyeob, an organizer of Korean workers in Japan, was radicalized by attending a course of Open Lectures on Labour given by Japanese socialists and anarchists. Korean students in Shanghai put out a Kropotkinist manifesto, describing the dissolution of ruralurban divisions after the anarchist revolution: villages would have the amenities of cities, and cities the greenery of farming villages; money would be abolished and society as a whole would become artistic. Japanese anarchism is covered more fully in Arif Dirliks contribution. An early hero was Kotoku Shusui, a leftist gaoled for opposing the 1905 Russo-Japanese war. In prison Kotoku read Kropotkins Fields, Factories and Workshops and converted to anarchism. He led protests around the Ashio copper mine, winning sections of the Japanese Socialist Party to a directaction line. In 1911, amidst growing repression, Kotoku was executed on trumped-up charges of planning to assassinate the Meiji Emperor. His death ushered in a winter period through to the spring of 1919; but during the same years, the fall of the Qing dynasty created more space for Chinese anarchism, not least in the fast-growing South China labour movement. Two anarchist tendencies had formed among Chinese students sent abroad: the group in Paris, which produced the journal New Era, was ultra-modernist and waged a virulent campaign against Confucianism; the Tokyo group, organized around the journals Natural Justice and Balance, was inclined to see anarchist possibilities in traditional Chinese culture, especially Daoism. Yet as Dirlik notes, the Tokyo group was more radical on anti-imperialism and the woman question than the Parisians; indeed the anti-Communism of the latter eventually put them to the right of the kmt. Nipponsei anarchism, meanwhile, riddled by factional conflicts between syndicalists and

review

154

nlr 77

so-called pure anarchists, would be driven underground by the peculiar combination of gun-fuashizumu (military fascism) and Showa Ishin nationalist restoration that structured repressive politics in the 1930s. The story of Nestor Makhnos 191821 anarchist administration in the southern Ukraine is well told by Aleksandr Shubin. After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Makhno mobilized a peasant army of 20,000 against the German occupiers of the Ukraine and their kulak collaborators, whose brutal grain appropriations and land restorations had antagonized the masses. An anarcho-communist who fused the power of rural soviets, Ukrainian self-determination and workers and peasants control, Makhno was at first supported by the Bolsheviks. But Ukrainian peasant hostility to Bolshevism, castigated (though not by Makhno) as a yid conspiracy, eventually helped to set Makhno on a collision course with his Red Army allies and threatened to play into the hands of White counter-revolutionaries. The Makhnovists gradually melted away: some defected to Bolshevism, others suffered defeat and surrendered to Trotskys troops. Makhno managed to find his way to Budapest and eventually Paris. There he helped to author the 1927 Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists, a statement of anti-authoritarian internationalism and class-based social revolution, too bolshevik to suit most anarchists. Shubin describes Makhno as a mirror of the whole Russian revolution, reflecting the tragic collision between revolutionary agendas and popular aspirations. In Ireland, self-determination and socialism fused not in peasant initiatives, as in the Ukraine, but in proletarian practices. A rebellious working class wavered between nationalism and syndicalism, prone to link these conceptions together in its revolutionary consciousness, according to a 1916 assessment by Trotsky. Emmet OConnor shows how decisively Jim Larkin and James Connolly figured in this narrative of militancy: the cult of the agitator and reliance on the sympathetic strike were labelled Larkinism by disgruntled employers. Picket militias became a pocket army, with Connolly executed for his role in the abortive Easter Uprising of 1916. His memory lived on in the James Connolly Labour College, one of many institutions of subsequent red flag days, when faith in the idea of the workers republic animated sectors of the Irish working class. Between 1918 and 1920, three general work-stoppages rocked Ireland. The last upheaval, a successful demand for the release of hunger-striking political prisoners, was co-ordinated by soviet-like workers councils. It hinted at the extent to which what survived of revolutionism in the labour movement, in OConnors words, followed Larkin into communism. The Latin American essays draw on extensive labour-history research, much of it in Spanish. Argentinas first anarchist groups were founded by Italian immigrants; Malatesta set up a bilingual ItalianSpanish edition of La

review

palmer: Anarchism

155

Questione Sociale during his stay there in the late 1880s. By the early 1900s, the anarcho-syndicalist Federacin Obrera Regional Argentina (fora) had a quarter of a million members. Geoffroy de Laforcade offers a fascinating study of the longshoremen who made up its most militant sections. During the great strike waves of 190506 there were daily assemblies in the Verdi theatre, communal canteens served food donated by market stallholders and the barbers union offered strikers free haircuts. The fora maintained an anarchist library at its headquarters and organized open-air plays and poetry readings. Similarly in Brazil, it was an Italian anarchist coffee-bar owner who founded the first libertarian paper in So Paulo, Gli Schiavi Bianchi (White Slaves), in 1892. Italian immigrant workers in So Paulo formed the core of the anarcho-syndicalist federations that fought for the eight-hour day in 1907 and led the insurrectionary general strikes of 191719. Peruvian anarchism, by contrast, had Spanish roots. The volumes co-editor Steven Hirsch details the anarchist newspapers that sprang up repeatedly in Peru, from 1904 onwardsLos Parias (The Pariahs), La Simiente Roja (Red Seed), El Hambriento (The Hungry), El Oprimido (The Oppressed), El Ariete (Battering Ram), El Volcn (Volcano), La Escoba (The Broom). The Peruvian anarcho-syndicalists who organized the huge general strikes of 191819 also established workers libraries, theatre clubs, musical ensembles and sporting associations. Finally, a striking essay by Kirk Shaffer explores the role of two long-running anarchist newspapersthe Havana-based Tierra! and Regeneracin, edited by the Mexican revolutionaries Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magn from Los Angelesin coordinating workers and peasants struggles across a vast arc, stretching from the Panama Canal through Cuba, Puerto Rico, Florida, and Baja California to Mexico City, with armed-struggle anarchists fighting valiantly to reclaim border territory lost to Texas. There can be little doubt that the breadth of scope and scholarly detail of Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World will make it an indispensable resource for future studies in the field. In the ongoing rebuilding of the 21st-century left it will warrant close reading and sustained critical engagement. It does not aim to provide a total picture, so any omissionsfor example, relations between Latin American anarchists and indigenous or Afro-Brazilian forms of mutualism and solidaritymay justly be considered spurs to further research. Nevertheless, a preliminary evaluation needs to address both the historiographical argument that Hirsch and Van Der Walt advance and the political perspective they provide. To take the historiographical question first: how convincing is their claim that the global anarchist movement emerged simultaneously and transnationally across three continents? The case studies themselves seem to contradict it. As they show, it was Italian immigrants and exiled French

review

156

nlr 77

communards who introduced anarchism to Argentina, founding the Buenos Aires branch of the iwma in the early 1870s. Waves of Spanish anarchists fled abroad to escape Canovass ferocious repression in 1896; it was this generation that founded the first anarchist papers in Cuba. The extraordinary Errico Malatesta, another Italian Bakuninist, served as anarchisms Johnny Appleseed, founding groups among Italian migrant workers almost everywhere he visited in the decades following his initial exile in 1877: Alexandria, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Romania, Buenos AiresWoodcock tells the perhaps apocryphal story of Malatesta being carried on board ship in a packing case by friendly Neapolitan dockers, to help him avoid the policethen back to Nice, London and Ancona. In East Asia, the central reference point for the anarchists cited in Hwangs study was Kropotkin, who had travelled extensively through Eastern Siberia and Manchuria on his geographical surveys, and whose Memoirs and political writings were translated in Tokyo in the early 1900s, and devoured by Chinese and Korean students studying there. In South Africa, anarchism was introduced in the 1880s by an English radical, Henry Glasse, who had worked with Kropotkins Freedom Press in London. As for anarchosyndicalism, the syndicats that mobilized such vast numbers in the early 1900s first took form in France in 1895; the cnt and the worker-run labour exchanges, or bourses du travail, recast the longstanding tradition of artisanal mutualism that Proudhon had admired among Lyons textile workers in the 1840s. Catalan workers quickly adopted the idea from France; Spanish migrant workers brought syndicalism to the Mexican oilfields and industrial zones in the early 1900s. During the same period, as Edilene Toledo and Luigi Bondis study in this volume makes clear, Italian immigrants to So Paulo would form the backbone of the syndicalist movement in Brazil. Secondly, to what extent does Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Post-Colonial World succeed in challenging the importance of Spain the homage to Catalonia that has traditionally been the centrepiece of anarchist history? As Hirsch and Van Der Walt make clear, the Iberian peninsula was not the only place where anarchists controlled territory and tried to implement their ideas. Mexican Magonistas and Wobblies seized part of Baja California in 1911 and held it for six months, before being driven out by Maderos forces. Nestor Makhnos Insurrectionary Army distributed land to the peasants in the areas of southern Ukraine it controlled between 191921. In the Manchurian province of Shinmin, the Korean Makhno Kim Jwa-Jin established an anarchist administration that lasted from 192931, when it was overthrown by the Japanese (it is a shame this is omitted from the two East Asian essays in the volume). Zapatas egalitarian peasant insurgency in southern Mexico has also been likened to Makhnos.

review

palmer: Anarchism

157

Yet there is no evidence that the depth and sophistication of anarchosyndicalist influence in Catalonia has been surpassed elsewhere. In some respects 1930s Spain, even in the depths of the Great Depression, offered more propitious terrain for social transformation than war-shattered Tsarist Russia. Spanish workers and peasants inherited an unbroken tradition of anarchist organizing going back to the nineteenth century; repeated insurrectionary strike waves and peasant revolts had served as dress rehearsals. When the workers of Barcelona rose in July 1936 to defend their city against Francos forces, no instructions from cnt headquarters were required as they took over the factories, shops and offices, the transport systems and telephone exchange. Over the thirty months that followed, the anarchosyndicalist belief that seizure of the means of production and exchange was sufficient to establish workers control was put to the test. The courage and imagination of these militants, as well as the lessons learnt in the heat of struggle, deserve to be recalled. In assessing the political perspective that Hirsch and Van Der Walt bring to bear, it is worth stressing the extent to which anarchists, socialists and syndicalists shared the stage of possible social revolution, at least until the outbreak of World War One. A central example comes from the first and largest post-colonial country, unaccountably omitted from Hirsch and Van Der Walts collection. Hurrah for anarchy! were the last words of the Haymarket martyrsAlbert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fisher and George Engelhanged in November 1887 at Chicagos Cook County Jail. At issue was their dubious culpability in the deaths of policemen during a riotous clash of cops and working-class protesters at Chicagos Haymarket Square on 4 May 1886. The trial was an act of vicious anarchophobia, the legal proceedings characterized by serial improprieties. Yet the Haymarket events galvanized social-revolutionary protests around the world: meetings were held in London, The Hague, Rotterdam, Vienna, Brussels, Lyon, Marseille and Toulon; memorials of the Haymarket atrocities soon fused with the inauguration of May Day as an international festival of workingclass demands. The courtroom speeches of the convicted anarchists, published in many translations, were circulated not only throughout the Americas and Europe but also in China, Japan, Egypt and Iran. On an 1895 tour of continental Europe, the American Federation of Labor patriarch Sam Gompers noted, not entirely happily, that he could barely enter a union hall without seeing images of the executed men over the caption, Labours Martyrs to American Capitalism. The Haymarket Eight were proponents of the Chicago idea. As readers of Marx, they were ardent socialists as well as anarchists. Parsons, editor of the anarchist paper Alarm, defined his position as anti-government, anti-rulers, anti-dictators, anti-bosses, and saw no contradiction in blending this with an endorsement of socialism,

review

158

nlr 77

a more precise, more orderly, and more harmonious arrangement of the social relations of mankind than has hitherto prevailed. The Chicago idea of the 1880s envisioned social transformation as coming through struggles at the point of production, out of which a new civil society, nurtured in the shell of outmoded class relations, would be born. It prefigured the anarchosyndicalism that would explode after 1900. The momentous developments that followed 1914the disintegration of the Second International under pressure of national chauvinisms, the Bolshevik Revolution, the global insurrectionary wave of of 1919 to 1921 necessitated new directions. On the one hand, large sections were won to the newly formed Communist Parties or to the growing Social Democracies; this was the case in Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt and South Africa. On the other, workers were faced with a repressive onslaught, ranging from red scares and state trials to the imposition of fascist terror, as in Italy and Spain. The fundamental eclecticism and broad faith of the social revolution were shaken. A divide in what had been a complex dialectic of differentiated unity on the left was reached. The black and the red, once working in tandem, were marked as divergent, even oppositional. Benedict Andersons deft preface to Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World comes out of this calcified division and sets the analytic table for what follows. Anderson rightly stresses anarchisms utopian lan and its internationalist convictions, but the present-minded picture of Marxism he presents drains it of imagination and creativity, as well as any libertarian or avant-garde content. It is easy to poke the finger of jocular denigration at the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea; but for a serious engagement with how Marxism in a variety of forms, including Leninism, has historically contributed to anti-capitalist struggles and the utopian project, this would be a mischievously red herring. It leads too easily into the dichotomization whereby Anderson presents anarchism as a living politics of dissent (albeit in ways isolated from successful realization of revolution), while communism is little more than a deservedly dead letter, regardless of Marxs towering theoretical contributions. Such reading of the present back into the past manages to miss the pivotal influence of those decades in which the revolution was betrayed, assuming what happened in the Soviet Union under the guiding hand of Stalin, that Great Organizer of Defeats, was merely an extension of Leninismthe continuity that ideologues of the right have long preached. The complex relations of the black and the red as they struggled for hegemony in the period this collection addresses are flattened into a simplified antagonism. This leaves us ill-equipped to grasp not only the nature of previous mobilizations but also the temper of our own political times which Andersons preface addresses. Half-jokingly, Anderson portrays the two currents as a (Marxist) hare and an (anarchist) tortoise, the

review

palmer: Anarchism

159

latter still trundling forward after the former has collapsed. But Aesops fable offers no space for solidarity against a common foe. Strip down the politics of protest against economic austerity in Greece, for instance, and many of those active in the street battles are likely to identify themselves as communists. G-8 protesters do not only come dressed in the garb of the Black Bloc; many sport the red hammer and sickle. In India, Brazil, Nepal and elsewhere, identifiably communist political forces and cultures still thrive, exercising considerable influence; to state, as Anderson does, that there are only a few places left where seriously communist parties still exist bypasses too much. The anarchist groups that figure in contemporary struggles, moreover, are complemented by a range of Marxian cadre, some interacting quite productively with their anti-Leninist counterparts. In the Oakland wing of the Occupy movement, the anarchist-inflected Advance the Struggle, Black Nationalists and Marxists rooted in the Trotskyist milieu have united to spearhead forms of solidarity that reach back to the Chicago idea: class-struggle caucuses in the unions, criticism of labour officialdoms, campaigns that unite organized workers, the unemployed, street youth, students and peoples of colour. In the context of struggles such as these, a rigid differentiation of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism and Marxism may not be as easy, or as useful, as some would suggest. This separatist, not to say sectarian, sensibility somewhat mars Lucien Van Der Walts otherwise interesting discussion of revolutionary syndicalism, communism and the questions of race and nationalism in South Africa. Van Der Walt builds his essay on a rejection of what he calls the Communist School of South African labour history, a rather narrow body of texts published mainly in the 1980s and 90s, which apparently convey the view that the Communist Party of South Africa has been the unique repository of a revolutionary socialist answer to the national question. To be sure, such a stand obviously understates the significance of anarchists, syndicalists and other socialists, and unfairly typecasts many early activists as compromised by white supremacy, slighting the role of bodies like the Social Democratic Federation in organizing unions across the colour bar. To such skewed readings Van Der Walt provides a useful corrective. Yet the relentless polemic against the Communist straw man leads him into some dubious cul-de-sacs, mostly due to his insistence that forces subsequently seen as proto-Bolshevik were in fact anarcho-syndicalist. Thus he represents the International Socialist League as unambiguously syndicalist. The isl did indeed advocate industrial unionism, but so too did all manner of left-wing parties, including many that would sign up to the Communist Internationals Twenty-One Points. The isl contained a whole range of cadre, including both syndicalists and industrial unionists, just as it proved a centre for many eventually drawn to Bolshevism in the early 1920s.

review

160

nlr 77

Van der Walts discussion of Daniel DeLeons Socialist Labor Party in this vein is wrong-headed. He claims that the slp is often misunderstood as a Marxist organization and calls DeLeon the American iww leader, when in fact he headed a rather marginal iww split-off in Detroit. DeLeon is more accurately represented as an orthodox Marxist of the preWorld War I era and, as Lenin himself noted, a rather important one, to boot. Notwithstanding his advocacy of industrial unionism, DeLeon wrote insightfully about how syndicalisms political meaning varied in different contexts. In 1909, writing in the slps The Daily People, DeLeon condemned the knee-jerk anti-syndicalism identifiable in the tepid electoralism of sections of the socialist movement. At the same time, he argued that, while syndicalism had a role to play in its original French setting, in a country like the United States where large-scale capitalism had ranked the proletariat into battalions for an industrial insurrection, syndicalism would be as out of place as a monkey in the frozen North or a Polar bear in the wilds of the torrid zone. DeLeon cautioned his readers against furnishing grist to the crack-brained mill of Anarchy. As he put it elsewhere, workers needed both the shield of economic organization and the sword of the party. Subsuming DeLeon into a purely syndicalist tradition is indicative of a tendency to be found elsewhere in this volume, of attempting to force the varied currents of the libertarian left into anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist pigeon-holes in which they simply do not fit. It should perhaps be noted that the classic historians of anarchism never succumbed to this temptation. Nor is Woodcocks rich, informative and still indispensable Anarchism as Eurocentric as is claimed; it has an interesting chapter on Latin America, and the 1985 edition is updated to cover the anarchistic counter-culture of the 1960s. Nevertheless, Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World fully merits a place beside it on the shelf. Properly inter-continental in scope, Hirsch and Van Der Walts collection is a salutary reminder of a time when a plurality of international anarchist, socialist and syndicalist initiatives broke out of the narrow confines of national politics to challenge capitalism, colonialism and racism alike. It is a vital repository of revolutionary thought and practice, and will be all the more valuable if it can help to recover an appreciation of how the black and the red were not always locked in sectarian opposition. The hurrahs for anarchy shouted by the Haymarket martyrs have a clear echo in occupied streets and squares today. The moment of anarcho-syndicalist struggle was pregnant with possibilities in which Marxism and anarchism co-existed, if not always peaceably, certainly in creative, productive tension. A re-examination of that experience and its lessons for contemporary praxis is long overdue.

review