Anarchism And The National Liberation Struggle

by Alfredo M. Bonanno

An anarchist critique, with an introduction by Jean Weir. "The anarchist project concerning the national liberation struggle is very clear: it must not go towards constituting an 'intermediate stage' towards the social revolution through the formation of new national States. Anarchists refuse to participate in national liberation fronts, they participate in class fronts which may or may not be involved in national liberation struggles. The struggle must spread to establish economic, political and social structures in the liberated territories, based on federalist and libertarian forms of organization."

Genres: Politics

Paperback

Published April 20, 2002

About the author

Alfredo Maria Bonanno is a main theorist of contemporary insurrectionary anarchism who wrote essays such as Armed Joy (for which he was imprisoned for 18 months by the Italian government), The Anarchist Tension and others. He is an editor of Anarchismo Editions and many other publications, only some of which have been translated into English. He has been involved in the anarchist movement for over thirty years.

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Its an alright pamphlet. Its worth reading for both leftists who are curious about patriotism and nationalism, and how those impulses factor into the leftist project, and also traditionalists curious as to how those desires are acknowledged and addressed by the left.

Basically, anarchists should participate in national liberation struggles, but not comprise national liberation fronts. The national liberation struggle needs to be one oriented towards federalism and decentralism, not nationalism. Nationalism is often chauvinistic, and small centralized nations are easy for corporate multinationals to take control of. But this doesn't mean that home-feeling or whatever you want to call it, is not good and natural, or that ethnic differences should be wiped out. Indeed, in the absence of a state, ethnic groups would probably be the territorial blocks in which economic organization would be organized, simply because people tend to associate with people who look/speak/act like themselves. This is fine, so long as it isn't paired with the hostility towards non-tribe members. In some ways I think that the pamphlet is too idealistic on that point. How is in group solidarity going to be built along ethnic lines without generating out-group hostility? Anyway, its just a pamphlet so it doesn't go into those questions. Here are several quotes I mined out of the piece:

“Every people, however small they are, possess their own character, their own particular way of living, speaking, feeling, thinking and working, and this character, its specific mode of existence, is precisely the basis of their nationality. It is the result of the whole of the historical life and all the conditions of that people’s environment, a purely natural and spontaneous phenomenon.” -Bakunin

"Territorial limits will then not necessarily coincide with the political confines of the preceding State which has been destroyed by the revolution. In this case the ethnic division would take the place of the deforming political one." -Bonamo

"The State is not the Fatherland, it is the abstraction, the metaphysical, mystical, political, juridical fiction of the Fatherland. The common people of all countries deeply love their fatherland; but that is a natural, real love. The patriotism of the people is not just an idea, it is a fact; but political patriotism, love of the State, is not the faithful expression of that fact: it is an expression distorted by means of a false abstraction, always for the benefit of an exploiting minority." - Bakunin

"The attempt to replace man’s natural attachment to the home by a dutiful love of the state — a structure which owes its creation to all sorts of accidents and in which, with brutal force, elements have been welded together that have no necessary connection — is one of the most grotesque phenomena of our time. The so-called “national consciousness” is nothing but a belief propagated by considerations of political power which have replaced the religious fanaticism of past centuries and have today come to be the greatest obstacle to cultural development. The love of home has nothing in common with the veneration of an abstract patriotic concept. Love of home knows no “will to power”; it is free from that hollow and dangerous attitude of superiority to the neighbour which is one of the strongest characteristics of every kind of nationalism. Love of home does not engage in practical politics nor does it seek in any way to support the state. It is purely an inner feeling as freely manifested as man’s enjoyment of nature, of which home is a part. When thus viewed, the home feeling compares with the governmentally ordered love of the nation as does a natural growth with an artificial substitute." -Rudolf Rocker

[R. Reddebrek · Rating 3 out of 5]

I may come back to this in the future.

This is an interesting work, I don't think I am fully convinced of Bonanno's views, but it does bring up and explore a lot of the weaknesses of the "Pure" internationalist stance, that honestly I think are largely ignored by most of its proponents.

There's more nuance here than its reputation led me to expect.