[NEWS] German translation of “Black Flame” is now published – AUGUST 2013
September 4, 2013 Leave a comment
Collecting my papers on the above issues + red-and-black anarchist/syndicalist perspectives.
September 4, 2013 Leave a comment
August 30, 2013 Leave a comment
Lucien van der Walt, 2013, “(Re)Constructing a Global Anarchist and Syndicalist Canon – a response to Robert Graham and Nathan Jun on ‘Black Flame‘,” ‘Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies,’ special issue on ‘Blasting the Canon,’ No 1 (2013), pp. 193-203
Online PDF mirrored here from here http://anarchist-developments.org/index.php/adcs/article/view/79/92
This article defends the argument that anarchism / syndicalism emerged in the 1860s, as a libertarian form of socialism, opposed to social and economic hierarchy/inequality, favouring international class struggle and revolution, from below, for a self-managed, socialist, stateless order; it defends the necessity using a truly global history and analysis, placing the colonial and postcolonial world, and a wide range of mass movements, centre-stage, in order to grasp the “canon” of texts/thinkers/theories that must be ‘regarded as authoritative for anarchist thought and practice or especially significant in the historical development of anarchism.’ It rejects claims that anarchism is a timeless “orientation” existing outside of contexts and classes, and demonstrates the methodological and analytical problems that arise from such approaches, including tautology, assertion and selective use of evidence.
Lucien van der Walt, 2013, “(Re)Constructing a Global Anarchist and Syndicalist Canon – a response to Robert Graham and Nathan Jun on ‘Black Flame‘,” ‘Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies,’ special issue on ‘Blasting the Canon,’ No 1 (2013), pp. 193-203
Robert Graham’s and Nathan Jun’s thought-provoking interventions in this special issue on ‘Blasting the Canon,’ regarding Michael Schmidt and my _Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism_ (2009), is welcomed. It is a pleasure to engage two thoughtful writers, and their considerations on the anarchist canon—i.e., the texts/thinkers/theories that (as Jun argues) should be ‘regarded as authoritative for anarchist thought and practice or especially significant in the historical development of anarchism.’
GRAHAM’S AND JUN’S CRITICISMS—AND MY CORE RESPONSE
_Black Flame_ made a wide range of arguments–about, for example, the social basis of anarchist peasant uprisings, the movement’s anti-colonial/anti-imperialist struggles, approaches to gender and unionism, struggle for the city etc. It has, of course, also spurred debates on anarchist (and syndicalist) theory, history and canon—such debate was one of its stated intentions (van der Walt and Schmidt 2009: 26-27).
The argument that is at issue with Graham and Jun is a fairly small part of _Black Flame_—the claim that anarchism (and its offshoot, syndicalism) is a distinctly modern phenomenon, born in the international socialist/ working class movement—specifically, the First International (1864-1877).
Here, in debates with Marxists and others, anarchism emerged as a distinct current, centred on the Alliance of Socialist Democracy: core members included Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta. Anarchism was a libertarian form of socialism, opposed to social and economic hierarchy/inequality, favouring international class struggle and revolution, from below, for a self-managed, socialist, stateless order; syndicalism is one anarchist strategy (van der Walt and Schmidt 2009: 71, 170).
Graham objects, claiming that _Black Flame’s_ approach is ‘narrow’ and ‘extraordinary’ (by excluding certain trends), ‘circular’ in approach, contradictory (for supposedly insisting that anarchism be ‘internally coherent,’ while tolerating an incoherent ‘socialism’ encompassing Marxism and anarchism), and closed to‘significant departures or modifications’ or ‘refinement’ (thus, ‘dogma’).
Jun claims it is circular, with a ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy (setting arbitrary, shifting standards for inclusion into ‘anarchism’). He rejects its (supposed) claim that anarchism is ‘whatever the mainstream’ of ‘historical anarchism’ accepted (since this might leave out other ‘anarchist’ views). He claims this is like asking a medieval European Catholic for a general survey of Christianity.
Both favour a vague (they say, ‘broad’) definition: for Graham, this means the ‘possibility of anarchist doctrines arising independently in different eras and circumstances,’ with anarchism having ‘different schools, currents and tendencies.’ Jun is more sweeping: ‘anarchism’ is not a ‘doctrine,’ but an ‘orientation’ ‘throughout human history,’ while not admitting this entails ‘mass excommunications.’
I suggest, however, that these are serious misrepresentations of the _Black Flame_methodology, claims and coverage—Schmidt and I provide a historically-based argument that _tracks_ the rise of anarchism (and syndicalism), _summarises_ its key claims, _traces_ its evolution and spread, _analyses_ its key debates and moments—this is a fairly standard social science approach, not an exercise in arbitrary boundary setting. And, rather than being ‘narrow,’ it uses a truly global history and analysis, placing the colonial and postcolonial world, and a wide range of mass movements, centre- stage.
Secondly, I demonstrate that Graham’s and Jun’s alternative approaches are far from satisfactory: both claims for multiple ‘anarchisms’ are simply assertions, resting on _a priori_ positions that lack a clear methodological rationale or empirical basis, and that are constructed in ways rendering any falsification impossible. Neither provides reasoned grounds, nor evidence, for the supposed superiority of their alternative definitions.
Both authors, in short, manifestly fail to apply to their own approaches the same standards of rigour they demand from _Black Flame_. I submit that a historical, as opposed to a speculative approach, is more justified, and more fruitful.
RESPONSE: A HISTORICAL AND SOCIOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY
Graham and Jun dispute dating anarchism to the 1860s.
It is a matter of record, however, that the anarchist movement appeared as something _new_ to its contemporaries, rivals, and adherents; with this appearance, anarchism _first_ became the topic of scholarly enquiry, police investigation, and media attention (Fleming 1979: 17–19). Even writers favouring exceedingly loose definitions of ‘anarchism’ concede that ‘anarchism’ did not previously exist as a ‘political force’ (see, for example, Joll 1964: 58, 82, 84; Woodcock 1975: 136, 155, 170)—as, so indeed, does Jun, with his allusion to ‘historical anarchism’ (is there a different kind?).
The very question of whether there were earlier or ‘different schools, currents and tendencies’ of anarchism (Graham), or an anarchist ‘orientation’ ‘throughout human history’ (Jun) could not even be _posed_ before this moment.
It is, then, anachronistic to represent this new, specifically, consciously ‘anarchist’ movement (and its syndicalist branch) as but one in a number of anarchist ‘schools’ ‘throughout history.’
It was, and is, one of several more-or-less _libertarian_ ‘currents,’ including socialist variants like _autonomia_ (van der Walt and Schmidt 2009: 71–71). But to conflate these very different approaches with anarchism is unnecessary.
It also requires gutting the ‘anarchist’ movement of its specificities, while forcing the others into a single ‘anarchist’ category. And to make the effort to include Stirner, Zerzan, etc. into ‘anarchism’ has little real justification (besides a sort of dogmatic convention), yet is analytically costly.
By contrast, _Black Flame_ consciously undertakes defining ‘anarchism’ (and thus, considering its ideology, history and canon) through a broad, global, representative overview of the history of this new worldwide historical and social phenomenon through examining a wide range of cases.
Building on the Age of Revolutions, located in the ‘capitalist world’ and the working class and socialism ‘it created’ (van der Walt and Schmidt 2009: 96), anarchism was ‘simultaneously and transnationally’ constituted by a radical network in North Africa, Latin America, and Europe (van der Walt and Hirsch 2010: liv). It then expanded globally, its first mass formations including Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and the United States.
By focusing on this movement, and taking a global view, _Black Flame_abstracts the core, shared features of its ideology, it’s often misunderstood relationship with syndicalism, unpacks its major debates, divisions and developments, and its core social features—for example, the class character of its urban mass base.
This historical and sociological approach forms the basis for the conclusion Graham so hotly rejects: there ‘is only one anarchist tradition, and it is rooted in the work of Bakunin and the Alliance’ (van der Walt and Schmidt 2009: 71).
To describe this methodology as ‘completely circular’ (Graham), or as entailing a ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy, or ‘excommunications’ (Jun), is a complete caricature, a failure to take seriously the core analysis Schmidt and I developed.
_Contra_ Graham, moreover, _Black Flame_does not require that anarchism be reduced to ‘self-described anarchists’: it only requires _ideological and organisational lineage_. The IWW thus fits in the broad anarchist tradition; Stirner does not. It does not _require_ that anarchism be ‘internally coherent’ (Graham), but merely claims that it _was_; this was a description.
There is no contradiction between a focused, precise definition, and a rich, nuanced, and broad account; the bulk of Black Flame provides a detailed history of the anarchist/syn- dicalist tradition, past and present.
RESPONSE: ‘NARROW’—OR GOING GLOBAL?
Graham’s charge that _Black Flame_ has a ‘narrow’ approach is unconvincing.
_Black Flame_is perhaps the only truly global, non-Eurocentric,survey of the theory and history of anarchism (and syndicalism), covering 150 years, and the only thorough survey of the tradition’s internal debates, again with a global—not a ‘narrow’— view.
Indeed, it is _precisely_ this scope that makes _Black Flame_ peculiarly central to any serious debate on the meaning of ‘anarchism’ and its canon.
This is radically different to the narrowly North Atlantic framing that dominates the standard English-language surveys— due credit must be given to Joll, Woodcock, and Marshall for their pioneering works, but it cannot be denied they almost entirely ignored the world outside of (only parts of) Western Europe and North America. [1]
Compounding this profound imbalance, such works discuss at length obscure Western figures like Stirner, whose historical importance is trivial, and links to anarchism doubtful. This problem continues today, with marginal Americans like Rothbard, Zerzan, etc., constituting common fare in ‘standard’ surveys—whilst major figures like Liu, Flores Magón, J.C. Mechoso, Shin, Szabó, Thibedi, etc. are (at best) passing asides.
But with a worldwide view, trivialities in the West fade away
in the light shed by truly important moments elsewhere. It is, then, rather peculiar to present _Black Flame_as ‘narrow,’ because it has a global sense of perspective.
Yet Graham continues: _Black Flame_has a problematic focus on ‘the more narrow’ world of ‘class struggle anarchism.’
What exactly is ‘narrow’ about this world? It is, by any measure, far larger and more influential than any other contender for the ‘anarchist’ label; a focus on it is _necessary_, not ‘narrow.’
This is the anarchism of towering figures, from insurrectionists (who Jun incorrectly assumes are excluded from _Black Flame_) like Galleani, to mass anarchists and syndicalists like Bakunin, Chu, Durruti, Goldman, Gutarra, Kim Jwa-Jim, Kropotkin, Makhno, Malatesta, Ōsugi, Rocker, and every historically important anarchist/syndicalist formation, from the Argentinean FORA and _Voz de la Mujer_, to Spain’s CNT and Mujeres Libres, to the global IWW, South Africa’s ISL/IWA, the Hunan Workers’ Association, FAU/OPR-33, the Korean _Ůiyŏltan_, etc.
What ‘school’ of significance is lost by this focus? This is the force that activated revolutions in Spain, Ukraine, and Manchuria, and demonstrated anarchism was a means to change the world.
RESPONSE: ‘DOGMA’ OR LIVING TRADITION, CENTRAL TODAY?
Does _Black Flame’s_ focus somehow turn ‘anarchism from a living tradition into a historical relic or dogma’ (Graham)? No, since ‘class struggle anarchism’ (his term) has a rich, powerful history, and is _also_ a ‘living tradition’.
This is the tradition represented today by such key examples as the Spanish CGT and CNT, the Chilean FEL, Brazilian FARJ and Uruguayan FAU, the IWA/AIT, Egyptian LSM and other Africans, Anarkismo.net, the Greek rebels, and innumerable local groups and projects worldwide. Notions popularised by certain academic texts—that worker-peasant anarchism has been superseded or overwhelmed by a post-1945 ‘new anarchism’ (e.g., Woodcock, 1975)—are highly misleading, even for the West today.
Graham worries that a strict definition will mean that ‘significant departures or modifications’ will entail exclusion from ‘anarchist status.’ But _every_ definition implies exclusion. Example: Russian ‘anarchist’ Bill Shatov’s ‘modifications’ included, as Petrograd Bolshevik police chief in 1918, crushing anarchists (Bryant 1923). Must he perpetually retain ‘anarchist status’?
Graham notes that some figures in the anarchist tradition (like Landauer) drew on other ideas (like Tolstoy). _Black Flame’s_ point, however, is that what a tradition _shares_ constitutes its defining features, the parameters for ‘refinement.’ (And Landauer, Tolstoy aside, was an anarchist, who died for the Munich councils revolution.)
RESPONSE: ONE, TWO, THREE MANY “ANARCHISMS”?
Of course, there are probably libertarian elements in all cultures, religions and historical periods (and most modern political ideologies).
But are these all _anarchist_? Graham and Jun insist they are, and claim this approach has support from ‘notable members’ of ‘historical anarchism’ like Kropotkin and Rocker.
This latter claim is indeed true—but does not resolve the matter.
Is this not precisely the methodological error that Jun claims of _Black Flame_ : asking a medieval Catholic for a survey of Christianity? Further, if anarchism arises ‘independently in different eras and circumstances,’ or ‘throughout history,’ why should Kropotkin have decisive weight? But if Kropotkin does, then why should his movement’s politics not define the parameters of anarchism?
Yet Graham and Jun _must_ invoke Kropotkin and Rocker, since it would be obviously anachronistic (and futile) to consult the works of those outside Kropotkin’s tradition (e.g., Lao, Win stanley, Godwin, and Stirner) for opinions on the general history of ‘anarchism.’
Graham and Jun are also engaging here in a rather selective reading, skipping over Kropotkin’s and Rocker’s writings that make claims _identical_ to _Black Flame_ : anarchism as new, revolutionary, socialism (e.g., Kropotkin 1927: 46, 289–290; Rocker [1938]1989: 23–24, 34–35). It was, indeed, Kropotkin—and not _Black Flame_ , as Jun suggests—who termed Stirnerism ‘misanthropic bourgeois individualism,’ opposed to anarchism’s ‘communist sociability’ (van der Walt and Schmidt 2009: 47–48).
What Graham and Jun also miss is that Kropotkin and Rocker were increasingly involved in manufacturing, for the controversial, embattled, anarchist movement, a legitimating propaganda _mythology_. This centred on precisely the claim that ‘anarchism’ existed ‘throughout history’ that Jun favours.
This myth-making was only possible once anarchism had _emerged_ in the 1860s—it started around 40 years later. It is a claim to antiquity by a new movement, no more evidently true than equivalent nationalist myths. Both anarchist and nationalist myths have an obvious political function, but they are analytically misleading and often demonstrably false: Kropotkin’s work in this genre was marked by contradictory claims and rather dubious readings of past trends.[2]
While many are (rightly) sceptical of nationalist mythologies, anarchist mythology continues to have a firm grip. Yet rather than interrogate such claims, many activists and scholars compound the problem by grouping widely different libertarian (and not so libertarian) strands into ‘anarchism,’ sometimes by selecting an (arbitrary) group of writers (e.g., Eltzbacher’s ‘seven sages’ approach: [1900] 1960), sometimes by creating vast compendiums of anything vaguely libertarian (Marshall [2008] starts with prehistory).
But this sort of exercise requires anachronistic, selective readings of the past, and such exceedingly vague (and often shifting) definitions of ‘anarchism’ as to render the term meaningless. For example, bringing Stirner into the same category as Bakunin requires eliding great differences, effectively reducing anarchism to ‘negating the state’ (Eltzbacher [1900] 1960: 189, 191, 201).
Two major problems then arise.
First, the boundaries such an exercise requires are necessarily shaky. For example, if anarchists are those who merely ‘negate the state,’ they must include Marxist-Leninists seeking the state’s ‘withering away’ (e.g., Mao [1949] 1969: 411), and neo-liberals opposed to statism (e.g., Thatcher, 1996). Since neither trend appears in most surveys of anarchism (except Marshall 2008: xiii, 517–518, 560), their exclusion is arbitrary and/or a _de facto_ admission of the stated definition’s fallacy.
Either way, the loose definition is unjustifiable, lacking clear criteria for inclusion and exclusion.
RESPONSE: ON METHODOLOGY AND ALTERNATIVES
Secondly, the arbitrary nature of the loose approach to studying ‘anarchism’ is exposed. An approach that seeks to assimilate as much as possible to ‘anarchism’—presenting ‘anarchism’ not as a concrete historical phenomenon, but as multiple ‘doctrines arising independently’ (Graham) or an ‘orientation’ ‘throughout history’ (Jun)—_must_ start from a preset _definition_ of anarchism in such terms by the writer. This definition is not tested, but assumed true; it is freed from the possibility of falsification.
Or, it _must_ start from an arbitrary _selection_ of cases, from which the definition is developed (e.g., Eltzbacher [1900] 1960). The problem here is that the selection lacks justification besides anecdote, convention, or personal preference (see van der Walt and Schmidt 2009: 35). The basis for the category is thus itself unreasonable; its boundaries end up equally so.
When Graham insists that anarchism has many ‘schools,’ he fails to provide a reasoned basis for this assertion. Having insisted _Black Flame_ has a ‘completely circular’ methodology, Graham simply asserts his claim, and then finds data that fits. When the claim is disputed, he can invoke the data thus generated, as evidence to support the claim’s veracity, thereby presenting alternatives as ‘narrow’—a tautology.
Jun asserts, also without serious grounds, that ‘anarchism’ exists ‘throughout human history.’ Once this is taken as true, it is easy enough to find an anarchist ‘orientation’ everywhere. The problem is that the definition rests upon nothing solid. Jun’s story of the medieval Catholic’s limitations reveals his assumptions: anarchism self-evidently exists universally; disagreement is evidence of intolerant ‘excommunication’ or parochial ignorance.
But the basis for the superiority, even validity, of Jun’s definition is never initially established.
To return to Jun’s medieval Catholic: it is well-established that the Christian Church first appeared two thousand years ago, attracting police, public, and scholarly attention; also that Catholicism was one of its main branches. By contrast, it is hardly self-evident that ‘anarchism’ has existed ‘throughout history,’ or that the movement of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Kim, Makhno, Mechoso, Thibedi et al. was merely one isolated branch.
RESPONSE: THE MEANING OF A WORD
And what do Graham and Jun mean by ‘anarchism’? For Graham, a ‘doctrine’ wanting society ‘without government,’ or ‘formal structures of hierarchy, command, control and obedience’ (Graham 2005: xii–xiv). For Jun, a loose ‘orientation,’ fusing ‘radical antiauthoritarianism and radical egalitarianism,’ opposing ‘morally unjustifiable . . . authority and inequality,’ and ‘unnatural’ or ‘arbitrary’ inequality, coercion or domination.
These are rather different claims, and in neither case is their validity obvious. Why is either better than that of _Black Flame_ or one another? Is anarchism a ‘doctrine,’ several ‘doctrines,’ or an ‘orientation’? Opposed to hierarchy or inequality?
There is no way of really resolving these issues, since this is discussion of _a priori_ assertions. And these are also replete with ambiguities: Is _informal_ hierarchy acceptable to Graham’s anarchists, or ‘obedience’ to agreed norms or essential ‘control’? In Jun’s case: what of ‘morally’ _justifiable_ inequality, or the coercion and domination that is neither ‘arbitrary’ nor ‘unjustified,’ like the military actions of the 1936 Durruti Column?
And there is, again, the problem of arbitrary inclusion/ exclusion. Both Graham and Jun include in their ‘anarchist’ gallery, figures that demonstrably do not conform to either definitions, such as Stirner—who rejected any constraints on individual’s right to ‘take’ by ‘might’ whatever they wanted, regardless of ‘justice,’ ‘truth’ and ‘equality’ (Stirner [1844] 1907: 200, 339, 421, 472).
And here we come full circle on the problems of vague definitions.
RESPONSE: SOME NOTES ON ARGUMENTS BY LABELLING
Graham claims that insisting that anarchism has definite historical referents is ‘analogous to reducing Marxism to canonical figures and texts’; he speaks of _Black Flame_ as promoting ‘dogma,’ while Jun invokes spectres of ‘mass excommunications.’
Such points are rather unpleasantly framed, tainting _Black Flame_ with a scent of heresy—argument-by-labelling that does not take us anywhere. Graham’s own anthology work, after all, is a definite attempt to construct a canon of ‘figures and texts’; Jun, too, admits that all political traditions entail some exclusions. If this means ‘dogma’ or ‘excommunication,’ the charge must apply to Graham and Jun as well.
CONCLUSION: A CLASS STRUGGLE, GLOBAL CANON—AND WHY
The issue is not, then, _whether_ anarchism has definite ‘canonical figures and texts,’ but _which_ merit inclusion. Vague claims about the nature of anarchism, developed through weak methodologies, cannot provide an adequate basis, since they entail deeply flawed definitions.
For its part, _Black Flame’s_ approach suggests the need to throw overboard spurious canons like the ‘seven sages,’ and to instead develop a historically-based, global canon, an accurate reflection of anarchism (and syndicalism) as a historical and contemporary current.
This must necessarily include Bakunin and Kropotkin, and while Stirner, Tolstoy and Thatcher have no justified place, figures like Goldman, He Zhen, Infantes, Landauer, Liu, Flores Magón, Makhno, Mechoso, Osugi, Rouco Buela, Shin, Szabó, and Thibedi must surely be serious candidates for canonical status.
AUTHOR: Lucien van der Walt works at Rhodes University, South Africa. He is the author (with Michael Schmidt) of _Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism_ (2009), and the editor (with Steve Hirsch) of _Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1880-1940_ (2010). He has published widely on labour and left history and theory, and political economy. Involved in union education and working class movements.
NOTES:
[1] Woodcock (1975) gave Latin America 3 pages, ignoring Africa, Asia, Australasia, and most of Eastern Europe; Joll (1964) gave the rest 9 pages; Marshall (1998) gave 2 of 41 chapters (33 of 706 pages) to Asia and Latin America.
[2 ] For example, his 1905 ‘Anarchism’ (in Kropotkin 1927) deploys quite contradictory definitions: anarchism as ancient philosophy (287–288), as ‘first formulated’ in the 1790s (289–290), as new, 19th-century, revolutionary socialism (285–287), as a scheme for peaceful reform (290–291) etc.
REFERENCES
Bryant, L. 1923. Mirrors of Moscow. New York: Thomas Seltzer.
Eltzbacher, P. [1900]1960. Anarchism. London: Freedom.
Fleming, M. 1979. The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism. Lanham, MD: Croom Helm/Rowman Littlefield.
Graham, R., ed. 2005. Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Vol. 1: From Anarchy to Anarchism, 300 CE to 1939. Montréal: Black Rose.
Joll, J. 1964. The Anarchists. London: Methuen and Co.
Kropotkin, P. 1927. Kropotkin’s Revolutionary Pamphlets. New York: Dover.
Mao Zedong. [1949] 1971. “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship.” Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung. Peking: Foreign Languages Press.
Marshall, P. 1998. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. New York: Harper Perennial.
Rocker, R. [1938] 1989. Anarcho-syndicalism. London: Pluto Press.
Stirner, M. [1844] 1907. The Ego and His Own. New York: B.R. Tucker.
Thatcher, M. 1996. “Speech at Poznan Academy of Economics,” July 4: http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108362.
Van der Walt, L. and S.J. Hirsch. 2010. “Rethinking Anarchism and Syndicalism: The Colonial and Post-colonial Experience, 1870–1940,” in Lucien van der Walt and S.J. Hirsch, eds., Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940. Leiden: Brill.
Van der Walt, L. and M. Schmidt. 2009. Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Vol. 1.: Counter-Power. Oakland: AK Press.
Woodcock, G. 1975. Anarchism, rev. edn. London: Penguin.
August 5, 2013 Leave a comment
Lucien van der Walt, 2002, “A History of the IWW in South Africa”, Bread and Roses, number 7, (Britain), pp. 11-14.
This short article looks at how the revolutionary syndicalist IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) influenced South African workers struggles into the 1920s. The IWW had an important influence on black as well as white workers, as well as on larger mass movements like the 1920s Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU).
PDF is online here
July 19, 2013 Leave a comment
Lucien van der Walt, 2007, “The First Globalisation and Transnational Labour Activism in Southern Africa: White Labourism, the IWW and the ICU, 1904-1934”, African Studies, volume 66, number 2/3, special issue ‘Transnational and Comparative Perspectives on Southern African Labour History’, pp. 223-251.
PDF is online here
In this article, I argue that the history of labour and the working class in southern Africa in the first half of the twentieth century cannot be adequately understood within an analytical framework that takes the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis.
The literature has, with very few exceptions (notably Bond, Miller and Ruiters 2001:4 – 5), generally presented the history of labour in the region in this period as a set of discrete national labour histories for Namibia (South West Africa), South Africa, Zambia (Northern Rhodesia), Zimbabwe (Southern Rhodesia), Swaziland, and so forth. Each national labour history is presented as taking place within a distinctively national context where organisational and political boundaries correspond with the administrative borders of the state, with labour politics developing inside these boundaries in response to national conditions, culminating in the emergence of national working-class movements.
Such approaches project postcolonial borders onto the period of imperial rule, ignoring the way in which international labour markets, regional political economies, and networks of activists and propaganda operated both across, and beyond, the British Empire and southern Africa to create a transnational southern African working class in which activists, ideas and organisational models circulated. Transnational influences played a critical role in shaping working-class movements, which straddled borders and formed sections across the region and beyond it. Furthermore, ideological, ethnic and racial divides within the working class across southern Africa played a more important role in constituting divisions than state borders.
This article explores these issues by examining three moments of transnational labour activism in southern Africa in the first three decades of the twentieth century.
Firstly, there was the tradition of ‘White Labourism’: rather than being a peculiarly South African phenomenon, it originated in Australia, spread to South Africa in the early 1900s, and subsequently developed into a significant factor in labour politics in the Rhodesias by the 1920s. Secondly, there was the tradition of revolutionary syndicalism, which stressed interracial working-class solidarity. As developed by the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or ‘Wobblies’) in the United States in 1905, this tradition came to South Africa via Scotland, where it spread from radical white labour circles to workers of colour in the 1910s, and then spilt over into the Australian IWW. Thirdly, there was the tradition of the Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union (ICU), whose politics were an amalgam of two transcontinental currents: Garveyism and IWW syndicalism. The ICU operated regionally, spreading from South Africa in 1919 to South West Africa and the Rhodesias in the 1920s and 1930s.
Set against the backdrop of regional waves of labour activism, the history of these transnational labour currents provides important insights into the social character of southern African labour movements in the period of the ‘first’ modern globalisation, lasting from the 1880s into the 1920s. The analysis presented here is influenced by, and makes a contribution to, the new transnational labour history that ‘relativizes’ and ‘historicizes’ the nation-state as a unit of analysis, stressing the ‘need to go beyond national boundaries’ and avoid ‘methodological nationalism’ in understanding working-class formation (Van der Linden 1999:1080 – 1081). A transnational labour history yields important insights into labour and working-class history, provides a new synthesis that goes beyond old labour history, with its stress on formal organisation, and new labour history, with its stress on lived experience, and stresses the interconnections between labour worldwide.
July 18, 2013 Leave a comment
This article appeared in German in the Archiv für die Geschichte des Widerstandes und der Arbeit (AGWA), of which more can be read here.
Get the PDF here
It discusses South African revolutionary syndicalism, with particular reference to the International Socialist League (a syndicalist political group, later merged into the Communist Party of South Africa), and the Industrial Workers of Africa (a syndicalist union amongst black Africans – and the first black African trade union in the country). The latter body later merged into the semi-syndicalist Industrial and Commercial Workers’ Union of Africa (ICU), which was a mass movement in the 1920s, not just in South Africa but in neighbouring colonies as well.
Lucien van der Walt, 2001, “Revolutionärer Syndikalismus, Rasse und Klasse in Südafrika: die ‘International Socialist League’ und die ‘Industrial Workers of Africa’ 1915 bis 1920”, Archiv für die Geschichte des Widerstandes und der Arbeit, number 16, (Germany), pp. 213-246.
July 11, 2013 Leave a comment
Lucien van der Walt, 2004, “Perspectives on Race and Anarchism in South Africa, 1904-2004,” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, volume 8 number 1, pp. 1, 14-16.
Correct PDF is here
This short analysis, looking at both the South African anarchist / syndicalist movement of the 1880s-1920s, and the revived movement that emerged from the 1990s, examined how local anarchists/ syndicalists sought to develop an approach to national/ racial oppression distinct from nationalism, and Marxism-Leninism. It rejected the “two-stage” theory of the mainstream Marxist-Leninists (resolving the national question through an independent capitalist state as first stage; socialism deferred to later), and the statist (use a nation-state) and cross-class (unite the nation / race across classes, in a democratic/ anti-colonial Popular Front) nationalist solutions.
In its most sophisticated form the anarchist/ syndicalist current sought to fuse class struggle with national liberation in a simultaneously anti-capitalist, anti-statist and anti-national oppression framework. This typically entailed creating One Big Union that was against racism/ national oppression, as well as against capitalism and the state. This would prefigure a racially integrated and egalitarian ‘workers republic’ built from below, through syndicalism. Examines current implications and experiences.
Core conclusions included
1. “First, the not too-uncommon view that race is the historic blindspot of anarchism is indefensible. If, for example, within white dominion, within the British Empire, within colonial Africa, anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists could play a path-breaking role in organizing workers of color, in defending African labour, in civil rights activities, and do so on the basis of a class struggle and anti-capitalist analysis and strategy, there is much that to be learned from the anarchist past. Their analyses may be context-bound but represent a larger position on the race issue: Cuba, Mexico and Peru are other examples.”
2. “Secondly, whilst the anarchist tradition in South Africa has generally been anti-racist, it has best succeeded in incorporating people of color when anti-racist principle has become anti-racist strategies and activism. The bridge between the two was an analysis rooted in the architecture of classical anarchist theory: class struggle, internationalism, anti-statism, anti-capitalism, and opposition to hierarchy. Such tools bear use, if some sharpening; rather than leap to incorporate ‘whiteness studies,’ postmodernism, nationalism and so on into anarchist analyses, the richness of classical anarchist theory rewards examination.”
May 8, 2013
This preliminary account was published as follows:
Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt, 2009, “The Anarchist Movement in North Africa, 1877-1951,” Zabalaza: a journal of southern African revolutionary anarchism, number 9, pp. 18-21
Click here for a PDF, including page numbers and pictures.
Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt, 2009, “The Anarchist Movement in North Africa, 1877-1951″
The history of the broad anarchist tradition in North Africa has yet to be written, and must therefore be pieced together from a wide variety of sources.
Modern, developed Egypt was – and still is – largely confined by its desert wastes to a narrow fertile funnel embracing the capital of Cairo on the Nile River and the Nile delta port cities of Alexandria and Port Said. Originally part of the Ottoman Empire, it became an autonomous Ottoman province under the dynasty of Mohammed Ali from 1805, but the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 proved too much of a temptation for imperialist Britain, which occupied the country in 1882. In “Egypt and Tunis,” Max Nettlau argues, “Italian Anarchist émigrés and refugees were for many years the life and spirit of libertarian activity,” but he adds little other material in either his Short History of Anarchism, or, indeed, the section on North Africa in his ten-volume study of anarchist history [1]. Spain often used its territories in the Sahara and the Canary Islands as penal colonies for its dissidents: it was here, for example, that both Durruti and Ascaso were imprisoned in 1932. A range of other materials have been drawn together by van der Walt, whose notes are incorporated here [2].
An Italian anarchist journal, Il Lavoratore (The Labourer), began printing in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1877, and Alexandrian anarchists were represented at the 1877 Verviers Congress of the Saint-Imier International. Malatesta himself fled to Alexandria in September 1878, but was deported when Italian workers organised a demonstration outside the Italian consulate to applaud an assassination attempt against Italian King Umberto I by a republican. He represented an ‘Egyptian Federation’ at the 1881 International Social Revolutionary Congress of the anarchists, with a mandate from ‘bodies from Constantinople and Alexandria.’ Malatesta returned to Egypt in 1882, – the year the country was invaded by the British – where he appears to have been involved in the ‘Pasha revolt’ that broke out that year, and which was suppressed by British forces. In 1884, the paper La Question Sociale (The Social Question) appeared in Egypt. In 1877, the journal L’Operaia (The Worker), appeared in Tunis, followed in 1881 by the Italian anarchist journal Imola (Inflame), published by Andrea Costa, and another, La Protesta Humana (Human Protest) was subsequently published in the city before relocating to Italy in 1896.
The Egyptian newspaper al-Hilal (The Crescent) reported on 18 March 1894 that a Greek worker was arrested in Alexandria for distributing ‘anarchist leaflets’ calling on workers to celebrate the anniversary of the 1871 Paris Commune. In 1901, an anarchist paper entitled La Tribune Libre (The Free Tribune) was also being published in Alexandria. In Alexandria, an Italian-language anarchist weekly, l’Operaio (The Worker) began publishing in 1902 and ran until the following year. In 1904, the Arabic-language radical journal al-Nur (The Light) was established in Alexandria by Daud Muja‘is, the Syrian-Lebanese editor of al-Hurriyya (Freedom) of Beirut (1909-1910?). According to Khuri-Makdisi [3], al-Nur had a correspondent in Cairo, was published until 1908, increasingly took an anarchist line and had subscribers among the Syrian-Lebanese Diaspora as far afield as Haiti and Brazil – one of the best examples of the extent of North African anarchist influence.
The Italian-language Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicles), published in Vermont, United States from 1903 onwards by Luigi Galleani, reached ‘far beyond the confines of the United States’ including North Africa and Egypt. Italian radicals played a key role in founding the labour movement in Egypt, forming a People’s Free University in Alexandria in 1901, and activists associated with the University and Le Tribune Libre appear to have been amongst those involved in founding ‘international’ unions in early 20th Century Egypt. Most notable was the International League of Cigarette Workers and Millers of Cairo in 1908, ‘open to workers of all nationalities, Egyptians as well as foreigners,’ and apparently including ‘production workers other than the skilled rollers.’ Other examples of integrated labour solidarity existed. A meeting in 1901 in support of striking garment workers (including Egyptians) in a Cairo café included a speech by the president of the cigarette rollers’ craft union, and a reading of the workers’ demands in Arabic as well as Greek, Italian, Hebrew and German. This was followed by a march of 3,000 chanting workers through Cairo.
What is interesting is that European cigarette workers living in Egypt were radicalised by the likes of the Egyptian syndicalists and returned to Europe to spread anarchist ideas there. Two notable examples of this are the anarcho-syndicalist Konstantinos “Kostas” Speras (1893-1943) and the anarchist-communist Stavros Kouchtsoglous (1878-1949). Both were radicalised in Egypt and returned to Greece to become the leading lights in the revolutionary trade union movement there. Speras was fluent in Arabic and Kouchtsoglous was involved in numerous worker demonstrations in Alexandria and Istanbul. They both helped establish anarcho-syndicalist trade unions in Greece including the syndicalist minority within the General Workers’ Confederation of Greece (GSEE) in 1918 [4].
Although these cases are not necessarily representative, they do indicate that anarchists were involved in founding racially integrated unions in colonial Egypt. The evidence for anarchist activity for subsequent years is less clear. Bearing in mind the possible mistranslation of ‘syndicalist,’ in academic studies, and the misapplication of the term ‘anarchist’ in official records, it is possible to find mentions of subsequent activity. Investigations into the assassination of the Egyptian Prime Minister, Butrus Ghali in February 1910, for example, revealed the existence of a number of secret societies, including one splinter group, founded in 1908, based on both Sufism – a mystical form of Islam – and ‘Syndicalism’. In 1919, Viscount Allenby of the British administration in Egypt noted in his records that ‘while the nationalist movement had lost some of its strength the syndicalist movement was growing, with secret support from Italian journalists.
A curiosity in this period was the production in 1921 of a French-Egyptian silent film called Aziz Bey, l’Anarchiste, the existence of which is noted in the list of anarchist-themed films compiled in 2004 by the International Centre for Research into Anarchism (CIRA) in Switzerland [5]. The mere creation of a film about an Egyptian anarchist, fictional or not, suggests the presence and influence of anarchist ideas in Egyptian society at that stage. While the Egyptian socialist movement seems to have been eclipsed by nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, it revived in the 1940s. The years 1942-5 saw the establishment of various socialist groups in Egypt, including one ‘under the syndicalist leader Mudarak.’
Algeria, under French rule from 1830, was also a site of anarchist activity. A range of anarchist journals were published in Algiers at the end of the 19th Century, including L’Action Revolutionnaire (Revolutionary Action) (1887), Le Tocsin (The Alarm) (1890), Le Libertaire (The Libertarian) (1892) and La Marmite Sociale (The Social Cauldron) (1893). According to Anderson, by 1894, Jean Grave’s influential anarchist-communist La Révolte (Revolt) had subscribers as far afield as Algeria and Egypt, while Emile Pouget’s anarcho-insurrectionist [this description is incorrect - LvdW ] Le Pére Peinard (The Toiling Father) had subscribers in Algeria and Tunisia, the latter a former Ottoman province that became a French protectorate in 1881 [6].
Fernand Pelloutier’s 1895 Anarchism and the Workers Unions mentions that anarchists had become increasingly active in “many trade unions”, including those in Algiers. The anarchist Victor Barroucand published a daily called Les Nouvelles (The New) in Algiers in the first decade of the 20th Century: its most famous correspondent was Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), the Swiss-Ukrainian dockworker/adventurer/writer whose father had been a friend of Bakunin. The syndicalist successor of the French General Confederation of Labour (CGT), the CGT – Revolutionary Syndicalist (CGT-SR) apparently operated a section in Algeria. Like the other French anarchist organisations, the CGT-SR opposed French colonialism. Thus, a joint statement by the Anarchist Union, the CGT-SR, and the Association of Anarchist Federations denounced the centenary of the French occupation of Algeria in 1930, arguing ‘Civilisation? Progress? We say: murder!’.
A prominent militant in the CGT-SR’s Algerian section, as well as in the Anarchist Union was Saïl Mohamed (1894-1953), an Algerian anarchist active in the anarchist movement from the 1910s until his death in 1953 [7]. Although resident in Paris and Aulnay-sous-bois for much of his life, Mohamed was a founder of organisations such as the Association for the Rights of the Indigenous Algerians and the Anarchist Group of the Indigenous Algerians with Sliman Kiouane in 1923, organised meetings on the colonial exploitation of North Africans in both French and Arabic, and was the secretary of the anarchist ‘Algerian Defence Committee Against the Provocations of the Centenary’ in 1929. Saïl Mohamed was also editor of the North African edition of the anarchist periodical Terre Libre (Free Earth), all copies of which have, sadly, been lost. Jailed on numerous occasions, Saïl Mohamed was also a contributor to anarchist journals such as L’Eveil Social, and La Voix Libertaire (The Libertarian Voice), often on the Algerian question, and fought as a volunteer in the international section of the Durruti Column in the Spanish Revolution. The international group of the Durruti Column included ‘400 Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Britishers, Moroccans and Americans’.
Another key Algerian anarchist was Albert Guigui-Theral (1903-?), who was born in Algeria, but raised in Paris, returning to Algeria in 1918 where he worked as a mechanic, but became involved in a series of metalworkers’ strikes and was jailed for distributing anarchist propaganda [8]. In 1922, after a failed attempt to establish a phalanstery [a utopian socialist community - LvdW] in Algeria, Guigui-Theral moved back to Paris where he lost a series of jobs because of his anarchist activities, but became active in the CGT’s Metal Federation where he fought against the growing Stalinist influence. From 1928, he began contributing to Le Libertaire, and briefly travelled to the USA, returning to France in 1932 where he worked in the Paris region of the CGT assisting the Spanish syndicalists. He was arrested for his activities in June 1940, as France succumbed to Nazi rule, but was released and escaped to the “free zones”, joining the Maquis resistance under Jean Moulin, working with the Clandestine CGT in trying to get aid from General Charles de Gaulle in London, and with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Philadelphia, USA. Returning to Paris among the city’s Spanish anarchist liberators in 1944, Guigui-Theral later worked for the ILO in Geneva.
Portuguese anarchists also played a role in disseminating libertarian ideas in North Africa. Some idea of the scope of activities may be gleaned from a report in early 1936, prepared by the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI)-affiliated Anarchist Federation of Portugal. The report noted that, ‘The Portuguese Federation entered a new phase in March 1935.’ It ‘established relations with nuclei of comrades in Spain, France, Brazil, Argentina, the United States, French Africa, Portuguese Africa, and Morocco,’ and was publishing ‘our journal, Rebellion, although not regularly, because we do not have sufficient funds.’ This was ‘distributed inside Portugal, as well as in the Azores, Africa and Oceania.’
Although the Spanish state used territories in North Africa for penal purposes, North Africa was also a haven for anarchist militants and refugees. Julio Sánchez Ortiz draws attention to the role played by Tangiers in Morocco, which was an international protectorate in the early 20th Century. After the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, and with the outbreak of the Second World War, Tangiers, which had formerly been an international city, came under the control of the dictator Franco, and there was a massive crackdown on the left and labour in that city. Many fled to Casablanca in Algeria. Exiled Italian anarchists, like Celso Persici, were involved in the anti-Nazi resistance in Morocco during the Second World War, as Vertice Persici notes. According to José Peirats, Roque Santamaria Cortiguera represented exile organisations from North Africa at a 1947 intercontinental congress of the exile Spanish anarchist movement in Toulouse, France [9].
A handful of Ethiopians fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Revolution, while Saïl Mohamed and other North Africans fought in the Durruti Column anarchist militia. Many Spanish anarchists fled from the defeat of the Revolution into exile in Algeria, where they established an exile community in the city of Oran. From 1939 onwards, however, Spanish Morocco and Western Sahara remained under the control of the new Spanish regime, while fascist Portugal controlled the Azores, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Principe in West Africa from 1927 until 1974. Ethiopia, Libya and Somaliland remained under Italian Fascist rule from 1935 until roughly 1942, while Nazi-linked Vichy France controlled Algeria and much of west and equatorial Africa until it progressively lost these territories as the Second World War wore on.
Saïl Mohamed became an identity document forger for the underground anti-fascist resistance in Vichy France during the Second World War. In the war, many Spanish republicans, including anarchists, served in the Long Range Desert Group and other special forces in North Africa. Republicans who had joined the French Foreign Legion in exchange from being released from the detention camps in southern France. Many of them were stationed in North Africa, Cameroon and Chad when the war broke out. The 9th Armoured Company – known as El Nueve – had been founded in Chad as part of the Regiments of March of Chad.
The 9th Armoured Company drove tanks and armoured half-tracks flying the Spanish Republican flag and with names redolent of the Spanish Revolution painted on their sides: “Durruti”, “Ascaso”, “Casa Viejas”, “Teruel”, “Madrid”, “Belchite”, “Guadalajara” and “Guernica”. It included libertarian fighters like Abenza Jesus, who had fought on the Madrid front, but had been trapped and unable to cross into France until 1941. Imprisoned in the Argeles concentration camp, then deported to Algeria, Jesus volunteered with the French Africa Corps, fought in Tunisia, then joined what became the Chad Marching Division that fought Rommel’s Afrika Korps before being sent to England to train for the Normandy invasion. Jesus and El Nueve hit the beaches at Normandy on the night of July 31/August 1, 1944, as one of two armoured divisions in the US 3rd Army that defeated three SS Panzer divisions and linked up with the Canadian forces at Falais – at the same time as some 30,000 Maquis took up arms in Brittany – before pushing on to Paris where the anarchists became the first “Allied troops” to liberate the city on 24 August 1944 [10].
The Italian conquest of Libya, and the Nazi victory over half of France had been followed by the suppression of the left in North Africa. By 1939, it seems clear that the anarchist tradition had largely withered away in Egypt, but remained extant in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria, with its links to the CGT-SR and the work of activists like Saïl Mohamed, and the existence of communities of foreign anarchists such as the Spanish exiles in the city of Oran. Among these exiles was Roque Santamaria Cortiguera (?-1980), a CNT-FIJL (National Confederation of Labour-Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth) barber who had sat on the Council of Valencia during the Revolution, and who fled to Oran after the Francoist victory in 1939. He is described by Stuart Christie as “a militant of great merit, with particular strengths as a public speaker and polemicist and well versed in matters organisational” [11].
The ascension of Vichy France saw Santamaria (and no doubt many other Oran anarchists) incarcerated in the concentration camps of Cerchel and Morand, where Santamaria co-ordinated National Confederation of Labour (CNT) activism, being released in November 1942 after the Allied forces took Oran. Another key Spanish anarchist who spent time in North Africa was the legendary Cipriano Mera Sanz (1897-1975), a bricklayer illiterate until the age of 20 who had taken part in the [Spanish] anarchist uprising in 1933 alongside Durruti and Isaac Puente, and rose to become the leading anarchist military strategist during the Revolution. Mera also fled to Oran in 1939, and was likewise interned in Morand but escaped to Morocco. However, Mera was arrested there in March 1941 and deported to Spain where he was sentenced to death (he was later released and lived in Paris the rest of his life, dying in 1975). What role, if any, these exiles played in the 1945 uprising in Algeria, is not known to us, but Santamaria stayed on in Algeria, acting as the secretary of the CNT’s North African branch until he travelled to Toulouse, France, in 1946 to represent North Africa at the MLE’s Intercontinental Congress the following year. He stayed on in Toulouse, however, becoming the city’s FAI secretary in 1948-1950, helping to reunite the revolutionary and reformist CNT factions in 1960/1, helping re-establish the CNT in Spain after Franco’s death.
In May 1948, at a pan-European anarchist conference in Paris, the Anarchist International Relations Commission (CRIA) was established by, among others, Parisian anarchist bookstore owner, former Friends of Durruti supporter and editor of Le Libertaire, André Prudhommeaux (1902-1968), Ildefonso Gonzalez, Renée Lamberet of the International Workers Association, Clément Fournier, Jules Pulidori and René Cavanhié, with the aim of maintaining ties between the dispersed and rather battered, but still vibrant post-war anarchist movement [12]. CRIA established a sister organisation in Latin America, the Montevideo-based Continental Commission of Anarchist Relations (CCRA).
The CRIA saw itself as continuing the work of the 1907 Amsterdam [Anarchist] International and maintained a network of correspondence between organisations, journals and individual militants in Argentina, Australia (League for Freedom), Bolivia, Brazil, Britain (Anarchist Federation of Britain), Bulgaria (the exiled Bulgarian Libertarian Union in France), Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, France (Francophone Anarchist Federation, Revolutionary Anarchist Action Groups, and the IWA), Germany, Guatemala, India, Israel, Italy (Italian Anarchist Federation, GAAP Filosofo, GAR-FAI and Umanita Nova), Japan (Japanese Anarchist Federation), Korea (Korean Anarchist Movement), Mexico, the Netherlands (Vrijheid), North Africa (the North African Libertarian Movement of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia), Panama, Peru, Portugal, Spain (Libertarian Movement in Exile and National Confederation of Labour), Sweden, Switzerland (Swiss Romande Anarchist Movement), Uruguay, the United States (Libertarian League, Free Voice of Labor, Resistance, and Cultura Proletaria), Venezuela, and Yugoslavia. The CRIA held its first congress in Paris in 1949 and at its congress in London in 1958, it joined with the Provisional Secretariat on International Relations (SPIRA) and was transformed into the Anarchist International Commission which survived until about 1960 but laid the groundwork for the International of Anarchist Federations (IAF) established in 1968.
It is the North African Libertarian Movement (MLAN) that intrigues us here. It appears from CRIA correspondence in the immediate post-war period [13] that the MLAN was a French-speaking organisation with close ties to the strong anarchist movement on the French mainland, and was divided into a Moroccan Section, an Algerian Section, and a Tunisian Section. It seems that the Algerian Section was, from 2 September 1947, recognised as the “13th Region” of the Paris-based Francophone Anarchist Federation (FAF). The Tunisian Section, appears to have started life as the Tunisian Libertarian Movement (MLT) and later also become a FAF affiliate after correspondence with Georges Fontenis. The MLT apparently initially shied away from affiliation to the Algerian Section because of the differences in the colonial administrations under which each suffered.
The Moroccan Section is not mentioned in the CRIA correspondence but presumably was based in the French-colonised Atlantic Ocean ports of Casablanca and Rabat and not in the Francoist-occupied Mediterranean ports of Ceuta and Melilla. In its first manifesto, Doukhan, secretary of the MLAN’s Algerian Section, announced that the principles of the MLAN’s Algerian Section were: “For economic and racial equality and the establishment of libertarian communism,” a “harmonious society based on solidarity, mutual aid, co-operation and federalism,” and opposed itself to “patrimonial feudal colonialism,” racism, war and imperialism. It appears to be a carbon-copy of the FAF’s positions. That was a tall order, for an undated CRIA document on the parlous circumstances in which the MLAN found itself noted that the Algerian Section consisted of only “three comrades in Algiers, and several comrades dispersed and isolated in the bled [the small-town countryside]”. Nevertheless, the Algerian Section embarked on a definition of its principles and tactics, a possible sign of the hands of Fontenis and Prudhommeaux in shaping the North African movement.
In 1950, Doukhan wrote to the CRIA Secretariat in Paris from the MLAN office at No.6 Rue du Rousillon, Algiers, saying that the Algerian Section had been legalised by the authorities on 31 March. As a result, the MLAN in Algeria was demanding its right to autonomy from the FAF and on its right to register in its own name as an affiliate of “the Anarchist Organisations” – presumably the CRIA [14]. In April 1951, a letter was written to the MLAN in Algiers from “R. Cavan” of the CRIA in Paris. Cavan was in fact René Cavanhié who also sat on the FAF’s national committee and he asked about activities on “the Spanish coast,” indicated concern that the group in Oran had not been heard of in some time, but supposed the MLAN was still working together with “the Tunis group”. Revealed in this letter is the intriguing suggestion, apparently raised by exiled “Spanish comrades” of the FAI, that the MLAN fuse with the FAI forces in North Africa.
The CRIA archives retain no further letters between the MLAN and the CRIA, suggesting that this merger did, in fact, take place and that the MLAN thus became part of the FAI and so of the broader libertarian exile resistance movement. The FAI was re-established in Iberia after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974 (provoked by the liberation wars in Portugal’s African colonies and precipitating Portuguese decolonisation) and the death of Franco in Spain in 1975 and continues to this day. In 1953, the year that Mohamed died and Fontenis gave the oration at his funeral, Fontenis’ platformist faction within the FAF, the Thought Battle Organisation (OPB), took over the FAF, renamed it the Libertarian Communist Federation (FCL) and adopted a pro-Algerian liberation line. The synthesist remnant reconstituted the FAF. Morocco and Tunisia gained independence in 1956 and some anarchists of European origin may well have stayed. But the situation in Algeria quickly spiralled out of control into all-out warfare. What became of the anarchists in Oran, Algiers and the bled is unknown to us, but it is likely that many were either killed or fled to France, especially after France’s loss of Algeria as a colony in 1962 following the Oran Massacre of that year.
We will examine the anarchist responses to decolonisation in Africa and South-East Asia – especially the very different attitudes of the FCL and the FAF – in a future edition of Zabalaza.
Notes: