Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870-1940: The PRAXIS of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution

by Steven Hirsch, Lucien Van Der Walt (Editor)

Narratives of anarchist and syndicalist history during the era of the first globalization and imperialism (1870-1930) have overwhelmingly been constructed around a Western European tradition centered on discrete national cases. This parochial perspective typically ignores transnational connections and the contemporaneous existence of large and influential libertarian movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. Yet anarchism and syndicalism, from their very inception at the First International, were conceived and developed as international movements. By focusing on the neglected cases of the colonial and postcolonial world, this volume underscores the worldwide dimension of these movements and their centrality in anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. Drawing on in-depth historical analyses of the ideology, structure, and praxis of anarchism/syndicalism, it also provides fresh perspectives and lessons for those interested in understanding their resurgence today.

Contributors are Luigi Biondi, Arif Dirlik, Anthony Gorman, Steven Hirsch, Dongyoun Hwang, Geoffroy de Laforcade, Emmet O'Connor, Kirk Shaffer, Aleksandr Shubin, Edilene Toledo, and Lucien van der Walt.

With a foreword by Benedict Anderson.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Anarchism, Philosophy, Social Movements

464 pages, Hardcover

First published November 11, 2010

Reviews

[Michael Schmidt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anarchists have traditionally had three responses to the "national question" in colonial and post-colonial societies: unfortunately, the best-known has been a total rejection of any sympathy with the question; a few anarchists uncritically threw themselves into national liberation struggles; but by far the majority position was that of critical support.

By 1873, when Bakunin, by then a fully-fledged 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.

In stark contrast, the founders of the "communist" doctrine, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, dismissed the colonised and post-colonial world in their Communist Manifesto (1848) as the “barbarian and semi-barbarian countries” and instead stressed the virtues of capitalism (and even imperialism) as an onerous, yet necessary stepping stone to socialism.

This is why from its emergence in the trade unions of the First international in 1868 until the development of a Marxist-Leninist pseudo-alternative in the early 1920s, it was anarchism and not Marxism which dominated the revolutionary left in the colonial and post-colonial comprador world.

And this book is a groundbreaking series of case studies of those anarchist engagements on the national and national liberation questions in Africa, Asia, colonial Europe, and Latin America. By colonial Europe - an environment where the term is seldom applied outside of the Nazi or Soviet occupations of World War II and its aftermath - I mean Russian-occupied Ukraine and the Makhnovist movement which resisted Russian monarchist, Ukrainian nationalist, foreign German and Austro-Hungarian, and Bolshevik attempts to reconstruct statist exploitation by constructing a revolutionary counter-power, and British-dominated / British-occupied Ireland and the syndicalist responses to that power imbalance. In this regard, Aleksandr Shubin writes on The Makhnovist Movement and the National Question in the Ukraine, 1917-1921, while Emmet O'Connor contributes the essay Syndicalism, Industrial unionism, and Nationalism in Ireland.

I must confess that Lucien van der Walt is a friend, comrade and co-author and that I was asked to review this book prior to publication in order to give input into its conceptual framing, but without needing to veer into hagiography, this is an incredibly valuable collection, if unfortunately expensive in hardcover.

Apart from charting a new direction in anarchist colonial / post-colonial studies, this work also contributes to another emerging trend, that of anarchist transnational studies, and here, Kirk Shaffer's essay Tropical Libertarians: anarchist movements and networks in the Caribbean, Southern United States, and Mexico, 1890s-1920 provides new insights into the transnational linkages between Central America, the Caribbean and the US metropole.

Dongyoun Hwang's essay Korean Anarchism before 1945: a regional and transnational approach tells the tale of how the Korean movement's apogee occurred in exile in Manchuria, while transnationalism in a single city is examined in Edilene Toledo and Luigi Biondi's essay Constructing Syndicalism and Anarchism Globally: the transnational making of the syndicalist movement in São Paulo, Brazil, 1895-1935.

I personally used the book to construct a comparative analysis of the anarchist movements in South Africa and Egypt, drawing on van der Walt's Revolutionary syndicalism, communism and the national question in South African socialism, 1886-1928, and on Anthony Gorman's “Diverse in race, religion and nationality… but united in aspirations of civil progress”: the anarchist movement in Egypt 1860-1940. The result was an essay (with van der Walt's input) that should be included in an Argentine book looking at anarchist movement roots and adaptations due out fairly soon.

So clearly this book is provoking further research by other specialists and generalists, but in itself is a mine of region/country-specific information of value to students of specific movements. I just hope that a more affordable edition is made available in soft cover soon - or that individual essays are published online.

[Michael’ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Western Leftists have a tendency to speak for or about the third world though it rarely plays any role in their actual views, other than as boogeyman full of “dictators”, “authoritarians” and even “Stalinists” (gasp!). Hirsch & co. try to address this by educating their comrades on the third world, or rather on movements which agree with them who happen to be from the third world. Except that they don’t. Though the whole bundle is clearly directed to ‘prove’ the third world had major and creative Anarchist movements independent of the movement in the West, their ‘prove’ for this is that they repeat it very often. Time after time, however, the book turns into a discussion of European, particularly Italian and Spanish, migration patterns and how they brought Anarchism with them.
The best essays are those on Korea, which is the most insightful one, on Ukraine, a basic but well written overview of the Makhnovshina, and on Brazil, which is not as readable as the Ukraine one and not as insightful as the Korean one but is interesting by virtue of its subject matter.
The essays on South Africa and Ireland are mediocre and unimportant. Those on Egypt and China are utterly uninteresting. Arif Dirlik in particular is a terrible writer. His style is dry, boring, imprecise and generally embodies everything wrong with academic prose. The authors are at pains to repeat that Anarchism was not a foreign theory imposed on unfitting situations but a set of terms and ideas which people across the world made use of to clarify their local realities in the most creative ways. But every time they discuss these local Anarchisms, it’s a mix of universalist values and awkward adaptation of conditions the Anarchists were clearly not able to grapple with. They consistently fail to overcome ethnic and language barriers (Brazil excepted, to some extent) and consistently either fail to take a meaningful stance on pressing issues or fall away from Anarchism as soon as they do.
The one thing which above all, and especially in the essays on Egypt and Brazil, stands out in the collection is, once again, that Anarchism was mainly an immigrants’ phenomenon. They somewhat try to salvage their thesis by saying influence went both ways but they fail to name even a single instance of third world influence on first world Anarchism. Considering a many, if not most, of Anarchists named are either Spaniards or Italians, the authors fail to explain how emigrés returning home means third world influence on Europe. If, as the authors have to admit, these emigrés mostly lived with, worked with and read other emigrés, how is that Third World influence? Is Tuscans convincing other Tuscans of Anarchism really Third World influence if it happens in Egypt or Brazil?
So the conclusions of the authors are at odds with the story they themselves tell. But Hirsch has another big claim to make in the closing essay. Because other scholars have found a great chasm between the classical anarchism of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the lifestyle anarchism of today. They take issue with this. They can’t refute that gender expression or purely symbolic protest has greatly gained in importance or that the old school labour activity has largely disappeared, at least in the West. So Hirsch takes statements which are about Anarchism in the West or even just in a specific country and ‘refutes’ them by dragging in the Third World. But the Third World, far from proving Hirsch’s claims instead refute them. Compared to the number and size of Anarchist organisations mentioned in the essays, which cover only a few countries, Hirsch’s global overview of Anarchism 1940-1989 is paupers’ broth.
Hirsch’ prove that Anarchism stayed widely influential in Latin America throughout that time is that the women’s branch of the Local Workers’ Federation of Bolivia and the Culinary Workers’ Union of La Paz remained officially Anarcho-Syndicalist into the 50’s, when they changed their stated outlook to be more in line with their actual positions and abandoned Anarchism. Hirsch’ proof of a flourishing Anarchist milieu is two minor unions which, by then, weren’t strongly committed to Anarchism. These unions where not part of any larger Anarchist milieu. They abandoned their Anarchism without issue. If their members really still were Anarchist or they were mere appendages of a healthy Anarchist movement, why didn’t the members leave and create a new, Anarchist union? If Anarchism was still strong, how could its main organisations abandon it without the rise of more ideologically committed competitors? In fact, these examples prove that Anarchism died so rapidly and completely that even these surviving, once Anarchist groups no longer believed in it.
Another ‘proof’ of Anarchism’s surviving appeal is a 1953 Soviet prison riot which involved some former Makhnovites. Even if Anarchism kept its appeal among Anarchist prisoners, that doesn’t mean it did for anyone else. Perhaps the fact that these were Anarchists who spent 33+ years in prison together had something to do with the fact that they still liked Anarchism. Prison, after all, hardly makes one like the state. But the riot also involved non-Anarchists so that some old Makhnovites took part doesn’t prove they were still hardcore Anarchists.
From these and a few more equally weak examples, Hirsch concludes that “This revolutionary continuity helped lay the basis for the big upsurge of the 1990s, and refutes the claim that 1939 marked a break in anarchist and syndicalist history, either in terms of its ideology or its class composition.” Numerous have shown the strong disconnect between the Anarchisms of the 20’s and those which arose mainly in the 90’s, Hirsch and company have trouble even finding a few vestiges of the old movement into the 40’s, even though the thesis that Anarchism had relevance into the 40’s is one of their major theses, and yet, Hirsch thinks he can refute much scholarship and even more personal testimony that the Anarchism today is vastly different from its old form with a few very weak continuities between the two. This is all the more glaring because Hirsch does not (because he cannot) even attempt to prove that these differences are overstated. What’s worse, the essays admit that Third World Anarchism was so weak that even at its height, it largely disappeared from whole countries for whole periods.
Which brings us to a further abuse of historical scholarship. Hirsch uses modern day radical unionism, quite lively in Africa, to ‘prove’ that Third World Anarchism has not just survived but thrived and even influenced Western radicalism, more than the other way around at least. Throughout the book, Anarchism and Syndicalism are treated as uniquely closely related, even when it is admitted that they didn’t always get along, while both are contrasted to “socialism”, as if Anarchists and Syndicalists did not consider themselves Socialists. Daniel de Leon, a Marxist ideologue praised by Lenin and described by his contemporaries as dogmatic and inflexible in his Marxism, is mentioned several times as an important Syndicalist and even an Anarchist. Whenever it suits Hirsch & co. trade union radicals in general, even Marxists and Nationalists, are equated with Anarchists. All to prove that Anarchism was more widespread and more continuous than it really was. Despite being the sort of extremely dull academic piece that’s not read outside a very select audience, the editors seem bent on transforming Anarchism’s reputation, on separating it from Socialism in general (without forgetting its Socialist ideas) and on claiming much more credit for it than it actually deserves. Who do they think to deceive by this? Scholars? Activists? But these very same editors clearly (and wrongly) believe Anarchist activists are much more well-versed in Anarchist history than to fall for that. Do they think the general public will read this piece cover to cover?
I suppose that here, I should sum up my thoughts. But I don’t feel like that. See ya!