Non Western Anarchisms

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e Anarchist LibraryAnti-CopyrightJanuary 20, 2014

Jason AdamsNon-Western Anarchisms

Rethinking the Global Context

Retrieved on January 20th, 2014 from hp://tahriricn.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/non-western-anarchisms-rethinking-the-global-context/

Jason Adams

Non-Western Anarchisms

Rethinking the Global Context


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Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Asian Anarchism: China, Korea, Japan & India . . . . . . . . . . 17

African Anarchisms: Igbo, Egypt, Lybia, Nigeria and

South Africa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Latin American Anarchism: Argentina, Uruguay,

Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Cuba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Middle Eastern Anarchism: Armenia, Lebanon,

Turkey, Palestine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Conclusion: Implications for the 21st Century High

Tide of Anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51


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Wolfe, J. (1993)Working Women: Working Men: Sao Paulo and the Riseof Brazils Industrial Working Class 19001955Durham: Duke UniversityPress

Zarrow, P. (1990) Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture. New York:Columbia University Press

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e future of anarchism must be appraised within a global context; anyaempt to localize it is bound to yield a distorted outcome. e obstacles toanarchism are, in the main, global; only their specifics are determined bylocal circumstances.

- Sam Mbah

To the reactionists of today we are revolutionists, but to the revolution-ists of tomorrow our acts will have been those of conservatives

- Ricardo Flores Magon


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Bibliography

Baku, H. (2001)Anarchism in TurkeyBrandstaer, K. (1997) Update on the Sierra Leone IWWChilcote, R. (1974)Te Brazilian CommunistParty:ConflictandInte-

gration 19221972New York: Oxford University PressDirlik,A. (1997)Dimensions of Chinese Anarchism: An Interview With

Arif Dirlik

Dirlik,A. (1991)Anarchism in the Chinese RevolutionBerkeley: Uni-versity of California Press

Do or Die (1999)Direct Action In IsraelErickson, K. (1977)e Brazilian Corporative State and Working-Class

PoliticsBerkeley: University of California PressFederacion LibertariaArgentina (2002)Argentina: Between Poverty

and Protest [Leaflet]Held, D. (1980) Introduction to Critical eory. Berkeley: University

of California PressJoll, J. (1970)Anarchism TodayNew York: Anchor Books

Katsiaficas, G (2001)Myth and Implications of the Kwangju PeoplesUprising

Katsiaficas, G. (1987)eImagination of the NewLe:A GlobalAnaly-sis of 1968Boston: South End Press

Poole, D. (1977)Land and Liberty: AnarchistInfluences in the MexicanRevolution Ricardo Flores Magon Montreal: Black Rose Books

MacSimion(1991) e KoreanAnarchist Movement[Lecture in Dublin,Ireland]

Meltzer, A. (1998)e Floodgates of AnarchyMunck, R. (1987) Argentina;From Anarchismto Peronism;Workers,

Union and Politics 18551985London: Zed Books

Oved, Y. (2000) Kibbutz Trends [Journal] No.38, pg. 45Rao, N. (2002)Bhagat Singh and the Revolutionary MovementStiobhard, (2001)Libertarians, the Le and the Middle EastVan der Walt, L. (2002) (Personal Communication)


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this project will ultimately lead us, we do know that it will be a placeradically more holistic, global, and aligned with the origins of anarchismas a counterhegemonic force than what has developed in the traditionof Western anarchism in the past several decades.

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Introduction

e purpose of this paper is to help anarchist / anti-authoritarianmovements active today to reconceptualize the history and theory offirst-wave anarchism on the global level, and to reconsider its relevanceto the continuing anarchist project. In order to truly understand thefull complexity and interconnectedness of anarchism as a worldwidemovement however, a specific focus on the uniqueness and agency ofmovements amongst the people without history is a deeply neededchange. is is because the historiography of anarchism has focusedalmost entirelyon these movements as theyhave pertainedto thepeoplesof the West and the North, while movements amongst the peoples ofthe East and the South have been widely neglected. As a result, theappearance has been that anarchist movements have arisen primarilywithin the context of the more privileged countries. Ironically, the truthis that anarchism has primarily been a movement of the most exploitedregions and peoples of the world. at most availableanarchist literaturedoes not tell this history speaks not to a necessarily malicious disregard

of non-Western anarchist movements but rather to the fact that even inthe contextof radicalpublishing,centuries ofengrained eurocentrismhas not really been overcome. is has been changing to an extenthowever, as there here have been several aempts in just the past decadeto re-examine this history in detail in specific non-Western countriesand regions, with works such as Arif Dirliks Anarchism in the ChineseRevolution, Sam Mbahs African Anarchism andFrank Fernandez CubanAnarchism. It is within the footsteps of this recent tradition that thispaper treads further into the relatively new ground of systematicallyassessing, comparing and synthesizing the findings of all of these studiescombined with original investigation in order to develop a more wholly

global understanding of anarchism and its history.To begin our inquiry we first must make clear what it is that is actu-

allymeantby thetermWestern anarchism.Going backtothe debateswithin the First International, it quickly becomes apparent that this termis a misnomer,asit is actually the opposite casethat istrue;anarchismhas always been derived more of the East / South than of the West /


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North. As Edward Krebs has noted Marx (and Engels) saw Russiannessin Bakunins ideas and behavior while Bakunin expressed his fearsthat the social revolution would become characterized by pan-German-ism and statism. is debate has led some to characterize it as largelybetween Western and Eastern versions of socialism; one marked by afundamental commitment to order and the other marked by a fundamen-tal commitment to freedom (1998, p. 19). So in this sense anarchism canbe understood as an Eastern understanding of socialism, rather than

as a fullyWesterntraditioninthe usualsense of theterm. At the sametime it should be remembered that there also developed an extremelycontentious North / South split between the more highly developed na-tions ofEngland and Germanyand theless developed semi-peripheralnations of Spain, Italy and others. is split was based on differencesof material reality but developed largely along ideological lines, withthe northern Anglo-Saxon nations siding primarily with Karl Marx andthe southern Latin nations siding with Mikhail Bakunin (Mbah, p. 20).So in both the East / West and the North / South sense, anarchism hasoen been the theory of choice for the most oppressed peoples; particu-larly in those societies whose primarily feudal nature writes them out of

historicalagency inthe Marxistunderstanding of the world. is mayexplain a good deal of why anarchism became so popular throughoutLatin America, and why immigrating anarchists from the Latin nationsof Europewere so well received in country aer country that they visited,aempting to spread the anarchist vision.

So by employing the label Western I am not referring to the ac-tual history of anarchism but rather to the way in which anarchism hasbeen constructed through the multiple lenses of Marxism, capitalism,eurocentrism and colonialismto be understood as such. is distorted,decontextualized and ahistoric anarchism with which we have now be-

come familiar was constructed primarily by academics writing within

the context of the core countries of the West: England, Germany, France,Italy, Spain, Canada, United States, Australia and New Zealand. Sincethere was virtually no real subversion of the eurocentric understandingof anarchism until the 1990s, the vast majority of literature available thatpurports to deliver an overview of anarchism is wrien in such a waythat one is led to believe that anarchism has existed solely within this

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e strong SouthAfrican anarchist movement in the early 20 th cen-tury lead also to the current proliferation of anarchism in the form ofanarchistmedia organizations,bookstores and otherorganizations.Bik-isha Media Collective is an example of this, as is the South AfricanWorkers Solidarity Federation. Much of this came out of white and In-dian members of the urban punk scene who wanted to put their ideasinto practice. e high point of this renewal was the year 1986, whichsaw the largest general strike in the history of the country when over 1.5

million workers and students struck, demanding recognition of Maydayas a public holiday (Mbah,p. 64). roughoutAfricain general,capital-ism is becoming more and more unworkable; a downward developmentfrom which African socialism already has largely fallen from as a result.Beyond the crises of capitalism and socialism, the post-colonial nation-state system further threatens to give way under the weight of imminentpressure from below; the stateless societies they were propped on top ofin order to facilitate imperialism and capitalism cannot function in thecontext of such a foreign body. Indeed, Mbah has stated quite clearlythat the ethnicviolence andriotsthatare seenthroughout the continentspell the beginning of the collapse of the modern nation-state system.

He goes on to say the rise of a new angry generation during this chaosis an important factor in determining how and in which direction thepresent crisis is resolved (p. 104). Such a situation is ripe for the (re)in-troduction of the decentralized, democratic, self-determined nature ofan anarchist system synthesized with the indigenousAfrican system ofautonomous yet interconnected stateless societies.

In the final judgement, the relevance of this work to the future ofsocial movements may not be so complex but alternatively, it might be

simply to keep the maps that show the roads not taken as EdwardKrebs has put it (1998, p. xiii). Academics oen have a tendency to see

everything they develop as being new and unprecedented; I believe this

work has demonstrated that while there are several new currents withinanarchism today, many of them were preceded by other roads that werenot taken or thatwere conveniently forgoenin the constructionof whathas becomethe phenomenon ofWestern anarchism. Inleague withtheother more specific aempts at such a project in the recent past, I saylet the deconstruction begin. While we may not know exactly where


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and translating anarchist works intoArabic. From around the same timeperiod, anarchism has become a recognized force in Turkish politics aswellwiththe appearance ofanarchistcontingents atMayDaycelebra-tions, and their appearance amongst international anarchist meetingsas well. Anarchist Italian and Greek immigrants helped to spread theirideas around the Medieranan region intothe North African countries ofTunisia and Egypt, mostly in the port cities. ough their activity at thatpoint seems not to have had a major effect on the local populations, by

the mid-1960s it seems that at least some Tunisian national was open toanarchist ideas. In 1966, a Tunisian Situationist by the name of MustaphaKhayati helped to write the seminal text On the Poverty of Student Lifewhile studying in Paris. eAlgerian section of the Situationist Inter-national was represented byAbdelhafid Khatib at its 1958 conference(Stiobhard).

African anarchism has built on first wave anarchism as well as onthe traditional society. In Nigeria, the communalist nature of certaintraditional tribal societies formed a social environment that would pro-

vide aframeworkfor thetransformation of the once-MarxistAwarenessLeague in 1990 into a 1,000-member strong anarcho-syndicalist branch

of theInternationalWorkers Association based primarily inthe southernpartof the country. In additiontoindigenous communalism, thefallofMarxism alsoformed animportantbasisfor therise of theAwarenessLeague. Interestingly,Awareness League members have expressed in-terest not only in the anarchist-syndicalism of the IWAbut also in thenewer ecological anarchism as expressed by both Murray Bookchin andGraham Purchase. e AwarenessLeague was preceded byan anarchis-tic coalition in the 1980s that went by the name of e Axe (Mbah, p.

52). In 1997, amidst major social upheaval, over 3,200 workers in SierraLeone aresaid to have joined theIWW, accordingto local delegate BrightChikezie who had comeinto contactwith BritishIWW memberKevin

Brandstaer. A military coup later the same year resulted in mass exileof these IWW members to the neighboring country ofGuinea whereBright immediately set about aempting to organize metal workers intothe union. Aer arrival inGuinea, theGeneral Secretary Treasurer ofthe IWW traveled to Guinea to meet with him and discuss the situation(Brandstaer, 1997).

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context, and rarely, if ever, outside of it. erefore, the anarchism thatbecomes widely known is that which has come to be identified with theWest, despite its origins in the East; Kropotkin, Bakunin, Godwin, Stirner,andGoldman in first wave anarchism: Meltzer, Chomsky, Zerzan, andBookchinin second andthird wave anarchism.Rarelyare such seminalfirst wave figures as Shifu, Atabekian, Magon, Shuzo, or Glasse evenmentioned; a similar fate is meted out for such second and third wavefigures such as Narayan, Mbah, and Fernandez all of non-Western ori-

gin. is construction of anarchism as Western has unfortunately led toan unintentional eurocentrism that has permeated the writings of manysecond and third wave theorists and writers. eir work then becomesthe standard-bearer of what anarchism actually means to most people,as it is printed and reprinted, sold and resold perennially at anarchistbookfairs, infoshops, bookstores and other places, as it is quoted andanalyzed, compared and debated in reading circles, academic papers, atsocials, parties, demonstrations, meetings and on picketlines. Clearly,there has been a great deal of reverence in second and third wave anar-chistmovementsfor thisWestern anarchism theresulthas beenthatmuch of anarchism has moved from being a popular tradition amongst

the mostexploitedin societiesthe world over to beinglile morethan aloose combination of an academic curiosity for elite Western academicsand a short-livedrebellious phase of youththat is seen as somethingthatis eventually, and universally, outgrown.

is paper demonstrates an alternative understanding in the hopethat this fate can be overcome; that anarchism, in the first quarter ofthe 20th century, was the largest antisystemic movement in almost allparts of the world, not just in the West. Upon considering that overthree quarters of the global population is situated outside of the West,it quickly becomes clear that anarchism actually claimed the greatestnumber of adherents outside of the West rather than within it as well.

erefore, it is fair to say that not only has anarchism been a globallysignificant movement from its very inception, it has also been a primarilynon-Western movement fromitsinception as well. is basicfactwasreconfirmed with the rise of second wave anarchism, spanning from thelate1960s and onintothe early 1970sinIndia,Argentina,Mexico,andSouth Africa (Joll, 1971, pg. 171). In turn, third wave anarchism, which


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has risen to popularity from the late 1990s to the present, also reconfirmsthis in resurgent movements in Brazil, Argentina, Korea, Nigeria andelsewhere. e relevance of this particular essay, however, is to criticallyreexaminethe firstglobal waveof anarchism in order to enable anarchiststo think more holistically and effectively about the relevance of the pastand its long-term effect on the present. is aempt to critique thenarrow vision of Western anarchism should of course result in a moreaccurate understanding of the significance and potentiality of second

and third wave anarchism in both the present and the future as well.Indeed, it was a similarmotivationthatdrovethe critique of Leninism/ Stalinism that came out in the wake of the largely anarchist inspiredevents of May 1968, as well as the critique of Maoism that came in thewake of theDemocracy Movement of the late 1970s in China; both ofwhich contributed greatly to the development of second and third waveanarchism worldwide.

In working to critique our understanding of the past though, there areseveral points that should be kept in mind at all times. A cursory readingintothe contextualhistorysurroundingthese waves ofanarchism couldeasily seem be to unearthing several historical stages. For instance one

might get the impression that first wave anarchism universally fell intodecline worldwide with the rise of the Bolsheviks, or that the declineof state socialism since 1989 has been the lynchpin that brought anar-chism back in its third wave. While both statements are indeed true to

a certain extent, the temptation to systematize and essentialize globalsocial movements in order to make them easier to digest is one thatshould be undertaken with great care and discrimination; indeed, oen itis a step that should not be undertaken at all. e reason is that one can-notever fullyunderstandthe nuance and complexityof thethousandsof social movements that have pulsed through non-Western societiesthrough the lens of any singular overarching theory; even seemingly

small factors of social difference can render them worthless. For instance,while anarchism declined in much of the world aer the October Rev-olution of 1917, in large sections of the planet this was precisely thepoint at which anarchism rose to a level of unprecedented popularity.In these countries this was largely due to the saturation of anarchist-oriented periodicals in a particular local language which meant of

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stated in place of hypocritical unity we provide an open arena foreveryone to do what they feel is necessary . . . let positions be definedand each work his own way (p. 232). One other change in the 1960swas the branching out of anarchists into non-working class sectors suchas the peasant movement. All the anarchist groups, indeed all of thele, were involved in building the Movement for the Land (MT) thusuniting both working class and peasant movements in alliance for thefirst time. Unfortunately, the vision that these new tendencies displayed

would ultimately be short-lived due to the imposition of a long series ofmilitary dictatorships, meant to serve U.S. corporate interests.

But it is only recently, since December 2001, that these ideas havebeen seriously tested aer the overthrow of the neo-liberalDe La Ruaregime. First the government destroyed the lives of millions throughoutthe country by accepting several successive austerity measures handeddown from the IMF and World Bank. And on top of state employeesnot being paid for months in a row, many workers were only allowedto withdraw a limited amount of money from their bank accounts. Butthen came the final straw: the government took away the full freedomof people to protest by declaring a state of siege. It was at this point that

the movement tooktheradical turn ofcallingforallpoliticiansto beousted, and not to be simply replaced by a more acceptable set of suits.isis alsothe pointatwhich people begantotake power intotheirownhands by creating self-governing, horizontally structured neighborhoodassemblies, as well as city-wide, regional and national networks of theseneighborhood assemblies. Whenever various ideological factions wouldaempt to seize control of the assemblies, they would be told that noone wantedtofollowtheir ideology, they justwanted directcontroloftheir country (Federacion Libertaria Argentina).

In the Middle East today, anarchism has grown especially in thosecountries where relatively small movements had emerged in the early

20th

Century, largelyamongst immigrants. Italian anarchistcommuni-ties in Turkish and Lebanese port cities have spread since the 1980s tothe local populations, oen through the conduit of punk culture. For in-stance, since the mid-1990s a Lebanese group called Alternative Liberty(Al Badil al ariri) has been sending delegates to international anarchistmeetings, as well as composing reports on the local anarchist movement


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pure anarchism between Bookchins balance of economic self-sufficiencyand intercommunal trade (p. 203). Early Japanese anarchism also helpedto set the stage for the development in the late 1960s of Zengakuren, amilitant student organization that was praised by the Situationists for itsuniting of student and working-class struggles. In its focus on culture,the anarchist movement in China prefigured Maos Cultural Revolutionbut even more so the Democracy Movement of the 1980s, and it mayhave helped to inspire the Tiannemen Square incident. Certainly the

reassessment of the socialist history of China has been informed by arenewal of interest in anarchism even today in the country. Koreasearly anarchist movement can be seen as a precursor to the KwangjuRebellion of 1980. AsGeorge Katsiaficas has remarked, like the ParisCommune, the people of Kwangju spontaneously rose up and governedthemselves until theywere brutallysuppressed by indigenous militaryforces abeed by an outside power (2001). at military power, was, asone might guess, the United States. e anarchist influence on GandhisSatyagraha movement in India carried through into Vinoba Bhaves andNarayans Sarvodaya movement in the 1960s and can be seen in morerecent movements as well.

In the late 1960s Argentina experienced a resurgence of its ongoinganarchist tradition through the student movement. e split between theFORU andthe USUinArgentina aer the Bolshevikrevolution meantthat not until the 1960s would anarchism regain somewhat of a con-stituency. istime around however, itwas notbased primarily intheworking class movements. Rather it was in the student movements asa result of the 1956 formation of the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation(FAU). Some of those originally involved with the FAU, which wouldeventuallymovetowards more deterministic Marxist tendencies,wouldgo ontoform anarchist-oriented studentorganizations. ese activistslaterhelpedto buildthe Center forPopularAction(CAP)as a meansto

engage wider sectors of the population in anti-authoritarian struggleswithout the ideological pressures of being explicitly anarchist per se.is tendency shied away from ideological universalism and in favorof a more subjective pluralism or panarchy which would interest-ingly foreshadow the direction of antiauthoritarian movements at thedawn of the 21st Century all over the world. One of CAPs pamphlets

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course that anarchism became the major filter for general alternativeunderstandings of the nature of events in the world. In other words arather minor variation in language and social conditions from one re-gion of the world to the next rendered any broad statement on the globalsignificance of Lenins rise to power completely indefensible. Or, forinstance, if one was to posit that primitive communism inevitably hasgiven way to feudalism, followed lockstep by capitalism, socialism andfinally communism, that person would be rendering the entire history of

hybrid African socialisms non-existent. ese aempts atconstructinguniversal laws in the understanding of history are the sorts of things thatneed to be deliberately avoided in order to understand the significance ofdifference in the creation of the whole. Indeed, as eodore Adorno hasshown in Negative Dialectics, it is only through negation and differencethat one can conceive of the historical process in its entirety (Held, 1980,p. 205).

So, while the world has been connected on the global level for sev-eral centuries now, and there are many paerns that seem to presentthemselves as a result, it is important to remember that this connectionhas also been entirely uneven, chaotic and unpredictable. As a result,

what istrueforone particular regionis not trueforanother,and what istrue for a particular country within a particular region is oen not truefor a sub-region lying within it. erefore universal declarations abouthistory tend to crumble quite easily when put to the test of criticism.is critique becomes especially simple amongst the representatives ofthe worst of such deterministic thinking. For instance, as Sam Mbah haspointed out, many Marxist-oriented academics have even gone to suchan extentas toarguethatcolonialismcan be understood as being a goodthing as it has allowed all parts of the world to reach the capitalist stageof history, a necessary precondition of course, to the dictatorship ofthe proletariat. In order to avoid this sort of univeralistic absurdity, I

have chosen to focus in this paper not just on the positivism of samenessand homogeneity between disparate regions, but equally so on negation,heterogeneity and difference. at is, I aempt to discover that whichmakes the anarchisms of various non-Western countries, regions andsubregions unique,with an eye as well to whataspectstheymayhavein common and how they have been interconnected. It is my hope that


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in this choice I will have made a greater contribution to the future ofthe global anarchist project by consciously choosing not to define thehistories ofnon-Western societiesfor them. InsteadI let theindividualhistories speak for themselves, drawing connections where they actuallyexist, while allowing contradictions to arise freely as they must. I do thisdeliberately, as this is the approach of one who would be an ally.

Despite my decision to avoid adopting any one overarching theory,I have decided to focus primarily on one particular time period; from

the late 19th Century up until the end of the first quarter of the 20thCentury. While second and third wave anarchists typically describe thistime period as the being the domain of what they call classical anar-chism I argue that anarchism has always been a decentered and diversetradition. Rather than essentializing an entire time period as being ofone persuasion or another I choose to focus instead on the primacy ofcontradiction and difference, using the wave concept as a means ofunderstanding the wax and wane in the global spread of anarchismsrather than as a way of defining the nature of the anarchisms themselves.Whilethis would seemto putatemporal framework over the develop-ment of a historical ideological current that is not necessarily bound by

such frames, my approach in this regard is not related to the pursuit oftemporal frameworks but rather to the refutation and deconstruction ofthe concept of classical anarchism as a homogenous body of thoughtthat can be located in a specific time and place. is is because I believethat this notion of classical anarchism plays a key role in the construc-tion of the concept of Western anarchism, as it is in the context of theWest that this conception has developed andit is never inreferencetonon-Western anarchism that such terminology is used. Ironically, byfocusing on a particular time period, I actually am aempting to decon-struct the false dichotomy of classical vs. postmodern currents ofanarchism in order to show that such temporal understandings of the

progressive development of anarchist currents are ultimately flawed.is is because they do not recognize anywhere near the full spectrumof thought that has existed on the global level in the history of anarchistideas;nordothey recognizethe directconnections between early ideasand more recent ideas.

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punk, but also a concomitant punkification of radical activism as wellas both played off against each other.

e Zapatista rebellion in January 1994 solidified this trend as decen-tralized, internet-based support networks were formed that spanned theglobe, helping to ensure the otherwise unlikely success of a largely non-violent autonomist movement in southern Mexico. By the late 1990smany anarchist punks had diversified their cultural affiliations and be-gan to identify more with activism and anarchism itself than with the

independent punk counterculture, which was largely dying. Many en-gaged themselves with the Zapatista struggle, travelling to Chiapas andworking as international observers, or aending the International En-cuentros held in Mexico and Spain. e new anti-political tradition ofZapatismo, with its rejection of the universalism of both socialism andanarchism, had a large influence on anarchists the world over. By thetime the 1999 WTO uprising in Seale occurred, many anarchists werealready entering the post-Western anarchist paradigm, refusing to labelthemselves as anarchists per se but stillstrongly identifying withits basicideas. Manybegantorefer tothemselves asautonomist rather thanas specifically anarchist per se. e real change brought about by this

development was that countercultural resistance had been transcendedas a morphing process in the aainment of the new anarchism whichcan be characterized aspost-hegemonicoras some have calledit post-Western.

In conclusion then, I would like to briefly assess the results of the syn-thesis between the social nests which first wave anarchism has formedand the rise of second and third wave anarchism as a counter-spectacleamongst non-Western anarchisms. Despite the common dismissal ofalmost all anarchism from the early 20 th Century as a monolithic clas-sical anarchism and therefore worthless and outdated in the contextofanarchisms current third wave, this studyofearlynon-Western an-

archism demonstrates that in fact anarchism at the time was no lessdiverse ideologically than it is today in the early 21 st Century. epure anarchism of Japan for instance, in many ways prefigured thecurrentdevelopmentofa more green anarchism,elements ofwhich arepresent in anarchistcurrents within both deep ecologyand socialecol-ogy. Indeed, John Crump remarked on the remarkable similarities to


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regions demonstratestheimportancethis goalhadfor the United Statesat the time. Yet, not content with simple military operations to securethis power, the promotion of American culture as universal also under-stood as the activation of the spectacle became a centrally importantpart of thisstrategy. As in the firstwave, tucked in along with the societyof the spectacle was its antidote; spectacular counterculture. is coun-terculture had arisen as part and parcel of the broader rise of spectacularculture; but as with the rise of modernity, it also was understood that it

was a reaction against it. For example, in Middle Eastern countries likeIsrael, anarchist organizations such as the Black Front arose out theyouth counterculture, and published journals like Freaky. ese journals,while ostensibly part of the general spectacular culture of Pax Americana,were also some of the only publications in the country to actively opposeand critique wars such as the Yom Kippur War (Do or Die, 1999).

ird wave anarchism is largely regarded as having roots as a culturalphenomenon as well; its gestation period beginning in the decline ofthe 1980s with the globally networked independent punk counterculture.Unlike second wave anarchism, this counterculture prizedindependencefrom corporations at least as much as it did internationalism and worked

to buildindependentnetworks between punks,bands,zines andlocalscenes the world over. Small self-produced fanzines became the mediumfor exchanging ideas and non-corporate record labels, record stores anddistribution services. In countries like Brazil, Israel and South Africa thepunk counterculture was instrumental in the rebuilding of the anarchistmovement. While the encroaching PaxAmericana brought a McDon-alds to nearly every city on the planet, it also brought through itsdistributive arms, cultural magazines and ceaseless promotion of Englishas a lingua franca anarchopunk bands like Crass, Conflict and othersto the local record store. For many, the 1991Gulf War provided thefirst real opportunity to put these ideals into action by organizing mass

demonstrations and direct actions all over the world. e very next yearthis was followed by the actions surrounding the 500 th year anniversaryof the colonization of the Americas by Europe. And just a few monthslater came the Los Angeles riots; in the ensuing continental and globalreverberations, anarchist punks began to get more involved in directsocial activism and organizing. is meant not only a politicization of

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If Western anarchism is a eurocentric construction, then of course,non-Westernmustalso be somewhatproblematic. Byemployingit, Ido not mean to give the impression that non-Western societies can orshould be seen as some homogenous singular world in any sense. NoramI implyingthatwithinthe West itself there are notpeoples who areoriginallyorancestrallyofnon-Western societies or that these peopleshave never engaged in anarchist activity. Indeed, a more complete studyofnon-Western anarchisms wouldinvestigate additionally the history

of anarchism amongst indigenous peoples and people of color withinthe borders of Western countries. However, I do make a particular pointto focus on the considerable impact global migrations and the resultantideological hybridity has had on the development of anarchism someof this has even been within the borders of the Western countries, no-tably Paris and San Francisco. Another criticism that I anticipate is myinclusion of Latin America in the context of this study and what exactlythetermthe West is supposedto mean here. Tothis questionI replythat by including LatinAmerica I am denying that the region can beunderstood as being whollya partof the Westsimplybecause muchof the regions populations identify strongly with the colonist culture

orperhapsitcould be saidthat it isthe colonistculturethat identifiesthem. Rather, in the tradition of Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, I recognize thedeep indigenous context that these largely mestizo societies were bornwithin and the lasting impact this has had, and continues to have onthese societies. In this way, Latin America can indeed be seen as beingpart of the context of non-Western societies. For the purposes of thisstudy, which is to aempt to piece together a history of anarchism inthose countries in which it has been largely ignored, I would define theterm theWest as essentially beingcomprisedof Europe,Australia, NewZealand, Canada and the United States. ese regions and nation-statesare grouped together because they have represented the heart of world

domination from the late 15th

Century to the present, both in oppositionto the self-determination of the rest of the world, and in opposition to theself-determination of indigenous peoples,people ofcolorand workingclass people within their own borders.


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All nation-states in the world are today hybrids of both Western andnon-Western as the phenomenon of globalization has enforced the hege-mony of the neo-liberal capitalist project the world over. is is not

just a result of the force of arms: it is also because non-Western coun-tries largely responded to encroaching domination by the Western worldby both emulating it and by adopting its basic values and ideas. Butwhat the Westnevercounted on wasthatbypromoting and enforcingmodernization through the Social Darwinist cocktail of neo-liberalism,

colonialism, industrialization and capitalism, they were also indirectlylegitimizing the anti-SocialDarwinist versions of modernization, thatis to say, the socialist and anarchist projects. However, as Turkish anar-chists have recently pointed out, non-Western socialism oen fell inline with the modernization project, even allowing neo-liberal capitalistStructuralAdjustment Programs. In contrast, they have pointed outthat anarchism was born of the Western and modern world, yetat thesame time it was a denial of these things . . . anarchism was a denial ofmodernity and Western domination (Baku, 2001). So throughout theworld,manynon-Western peoples sawtheirgovernments bowingtothepressures of the West and took the only options that came within that

modernistpackage which seemedto offereithera modicum of libertyor equality, anarchism or socialism. In this way, it can be said that themodernistprojectwasturnedinside outand against itselfby thoseitwould intend to victimize and place under its control. is inside-outmodernism (or anti-modernism) was spread through the global migra-tion of anarchists and anarchist ideas, more oen than not a result offorced exile. Erricco Malatestafor instance,helpedto spread anarchistcommunism from countries a far apart as Lebanon and Brazil, and Egyptand Cuba. Kotoku Shusui almost single-handedly delivered anarchistsyndicalism to Japan aer spending time organizing with the AmericanIWW in San Francisco in 1906. And Kartar Singh Sarabha became a

major influence influence on the Indian anarchist Bhagat Singh aerorganizing Indian workers in San Francisco in 1912.roughout this work, which will consider anarchism in its Asian,

African, Latin American and Middle Eastern regional contexts, there arethree primaryareas of investigationthatwe areinterestedin. efirst

of these is a consideration of what specifically local social conditions

43

Conclusion: Implications for

the 21st Century High Tide of

Anarchism

rough this work it has been demonstrated that one of the most

fundamental factorsinthe developmentofanarchist ideas and move-ments has been that of global migration of peoples, which is of coursethe result of the development of a capitalist and imperialist world-sys-tem. roughout EastAsia, it was demonstrated that global anarchistnetworks between San Francisco, Tokyo and Paris were of prime impor-tance in the development of both anarchist syndicalism as well as pureanarchism forms of anarchist communism. In the SouthAsian con-text, we know that Gandhi first became involved in his lifelong struggleagainst British rule while living in South Africa; this was at a time whenthe anarchist-syndicalistIndustrial Workersof Africa were at their prime.e development ofAfrican anarchism itself arose originally from im-ported movements of European immigrant workers in the country, bothin SouthAfrica and in the Mediterranean port cities of North Africa.What lile anarchist movements there were in the Middle East werelargely the result of Italian immigrant workers who had been aractedto anarchist thought primarily within their owncommunity. roughoutLatin America,migrations ofpeoples were especially importantas wellwith Malatestas residence and agitation in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina,Mexico and Cuba being the prime example.

It has been further demonstrated that in the non-Western context,first wave anarchism arose both as part of the package of the moder-nity project and as a reaction against it, ironically providing subjectcountries with a modernweapon with whichtofightmodernityand

Westernizationitself. Asimilardialecticis presentwithin second andthird wave anarchism, both of which arose largely around the globalcountercultures of thelate1960s and againinthelate1990s. Inthe1960sthe United States was busy securing its position as the only superpoweronthe planet;brutal interventionsin SoutheastAsia and severalother


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lead to the rise of anarchism as an ideology and how these conditionsshaped its growth into a uniquely hybrid manifestation of the worldanarchist movement. e second is to map and to analyze the influenceof the migrations and inmigrations of peoples and ideologies and howthese differing social contexts influenced each other through a hybridexchange. elastarea of investigation,whichis containedinthe con-

clusion, is to assess which unique aspects of first wave non-Westernanarchisms carried over into second wave anarchism,as wellasto con-

sider what valuable aspects of first and second wave anarchism have tothe continuing anarchist project, now in its third wave.


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before the creation of the Israeli state. is movement began to die outaer 1925, with the creation of the movement for an Israeli state and thesolidification of the party (Oved, 2000, p. 45).


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the publication of several anarchist journals in the Armenian languagein the United States around the same time (Stiobhard).

Apart from Armenia, Malatesta is known to have spent time in anar-chist communities in the port cities of Beirut, Lebanon as well as Izmir,

Turkey (Stiobhard). However, very lile is known about the natureof these communities or the extent to which these communities weresuccessful in building an anarchist movement locally amongst the non-immigrant populations. As we have seen in the case of Alexandria and

Tunis, Mediterranean port cities were oen very diverse and chancesare that these anarchist communities were primarily composed of Italianimmigrant workers. But there is one more country that anarchism hasbeen present in that has not been discussed: that is Palestine / Israel.

Beforethe creation of theIsraelistate, inthefirstquarterof the 20th

century, an anarchist movement had already begun amongst both Pales-tinians and Jews which resisted the creation of the Jewish state andworked instead for a stateless, directly democratic, pluralistic society ofboth Jews and Arabs. Anarchist sections of the communitarian move-ment, inspired by the collaboration of notable Jewish anarchists such asGustav Landauer and Rudolf Rocker, formed the basis for the early Kib-

butzim movement in Palestine,and accordingto Noam Chomsky,wasthe original meaning of the term Zionist. e original communitarianZionists opposed the creation of the state because it would necessitatecarving up the territory and marginalizing, on the basis of religion, asignificant portion of its poor and oppressed population, rather thanuniting them on the basis of socialist principles (Barsky, 1997, p. 48). Ofthe anarchist-communitarians at the time, Joseph Trumpeldor was oneof the most important, drawing members of the first kvutzot over to theanarchist-communist thoughtofPetrKropotkin. By 1923,KropotkinsMutual A id had become one of the first books ever to be translatedinto Hebrew and distributedthroughoutPalestine; this earlyanarchist

groundwork by activists likeTrumpeldor became a major influence in thethought of Yitzhak Tabenkin, a leader in the seminal Kibbutz Hameuhadmovement. e anarchist-communitarian newspaper, Problemen wasthe only international anarchist periodical to be published in both Yid-dish and Hebrew, and was one of very few voices calling for the peacefulcoexistence of Jews and Arabs in the communitarian manner that existed

17

Asian Anarchism: China, Korea,

Japan & India

In order to begin to challenge the predominant Eurocentric under-standing ofanarchism andits history,one should beginfirstwiththemost populated continent on the planet, Asia. With over half of the

global population, to ignore the volatile political history of the regionis to engage in the worst sort of eurocentrism; this is of course, not tomention the shallow and warped understanding of anarchism that onethen arrives at as a result. roughout many parts ofAsia, anarchismwas the primary radical le movement in the first quarter of the 20 th

Century. is should be considered quite significant to the anarchistproject because within the global context China is by far the most popu-lated country with a population of over 1.2 billion people. India comes

in second in population at just over 1 billion. e two countries holdover 1/5 of the worlds population respectively, and in each, anarchistthought has risen to a level of political importance unparalleled in the

other smaller nation-states withinAsia. In terms of population sharealone, these facts make a rethinking of the global context extremely valu-able, and this is why I begin here. Within the continent, we will beginfirst with China then move on to the other countries of East Asia, andthen I will proceed to India.

ere were multiple locally specific reasons why anarchism gainedsuch widespread popularity in China. Many have pointed out the lim-ited government (wuwei) element in traditional Chinese thought, rang-ing the gamut from Taoism to Buddhism to Confucianism. In line withthis view, Peter Zarrow claims in Anarchism and Chinese Political Cul-turethatanarchism wascreated outof theruins ofNeo-Confuciandiscourse. Building on this belief, he goes on to trace the connections be-tween Taoist ideas of order without coercion and the later emergenceof anarchism (1990, p. 5). While there certainly is some truth to Zarrowsclaims,whatmustbe deliberatelyavoidedis anyoverfocus onthean-archistic elements contained within Chinese traditional thought to thedetriment of an understanding of the important role played by global


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migration and by colonialism itself.AsArifDirlik has remarked, an over-focus on traditional thought can also be said to be somewhat Orientalist,as it aributes everything new in China to Chinese tradition . . . anotherwayofsayingthat thereis neveranything significantlynewin China.Alternatively, Dirlik posits that the Chinese past is being read in newways with the help of anarchism, and conversely there is a rereading ofanarchism through Taoist and Buddhist ideas (1997). In other words thedevelopment and spread of ideas is never a completely one-way process,

it is always an exchange.In any case, this is just one part; another major reason was that prac-

tically no Marxist theoretical works had been translated into Chineseuntil around 1921, and even then a movement based around it failed tomaterialize until around the end of the decade. As a result, anarchism en-

joyed a nearly universal hegemony over the movement from 19051930,thereby serving as a sort of filter for developments in the worldwide rad-ical movements. Even Russias October Revolution of 1918 was claimedas an anarchist revolution as a result, though this distortion did notlast.So unlikeintherestof the world, the anarchistmovement in Chinadid not fall with rise of the Bolshevik victory in Russia, but instead rose

in popularity along with it (Dirlik, 1991, p. 2).In China, anarchism arrived at the apex of its popularity during the

Chinese Enlightenment,also known asthe New Culture Movement.It was through the conduit of influential Western ideas of liberalism,scientism and progressthatanarchism was ableto gain afoothold.Andironically, it was from the new realization of China as a nation-state in

a decentered, cosmopolitan world of nation-states, rather than as thecenter of all culture, that brought about the rise of an ideology that calledfor the abolition of the nation-state (p. 3).

e concept of cultural revolution, which is the very definition ofvariance between Chinese socialism and that of the rest of the socialist

movement, can be traced directly back to this heavily anarchistic NewCulture period when Mao himself was a member of the anarchist Peo-ples Voice Society and enthusiastically endorsed the thinking of theimportant anarchist leader Shifu amongst others (Dirlik, p. 195; Krebs,p. 158).

39

Middle Eastern Anarchism:

Armenia, Lebanon, Turkey, Palestine

In light of both historical and recent events, it could easily be arguedthat the Middle East is and has been ofcentral importanceto manyde-velopments around the world.As in Africa, this region saw first wave

anarchism develop primarily along the margins of the region;Armeniananarchists, for instance, were already being brought under control by theOoman Empire by the late 19 th Century due to their widespread agita-tionalactivity. Of the Armenian anarchists,Alexandre Atabekian main-tained the highest international profile and had the most connectionsto the international anarchist movement, befriending Petr Kropotkin,Elisee Reclus and Jean Grave while studying in Geneva. His friendshipwith Kropotkin was so great in fact that he was actually with him athis deathbed and subsequently helped to organize the famous funeralprocession through the streets of Moscow. Atabekian translated severalanarchistworksinto Armenian and published and distributed an anar-

chist journal called Commonwealth (Hamaink) that was translated intoPersian as well.Atabekian made a serious aempt to make the politics of anarchism

relevant to the political situation of the Middle East. roughout hiswritings there is a clear paern of opposition to both the domination oftheOoman Empire overArmenia and to European intervention anddomination over the region in general. ese culminated eventuallyin the development of the Revolutionary Armenian Federation (Dash-naktsouthian),which was a coalition ofanarchists,nationalists,and so-cialists who amongstotheractivities,published and distributed severalanarchist tracts throughout Armenia. ough their manifesto was earlyon comparedtotherhetoric of the Russian nihilists,Dashnaktsouthiananarchism seemsto have beenlargely replaced byMarxism-Leninismwithin a fewyears. However,even as Marxism-Leninismroseto popu-larity in Armenia, anarchist ideals became popular amongst Armenianimmigrants heading to the nation-states of the West, as is evidenced by


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Cuban anarchism developed in the mid-19th Century due to the earlyintellectual influence of Proudhonian mutualism in the workers move-ment. By the late 1800s it had reached a higher level of maturity withthe rise of the anarchist leader Roig San Martin, the paper he editedEl Productor, and the national anarchist organization AlianzaObrera(Fernandez, 2001, p. 20). As with Chinese, Indian and Mexican anar-chism however, Cuban anarchism cannot be properly understood solelywithin the confines of the Cuban nation-state; much important activity

occurredin Cubanimmigrantcommunitiesin KeyWest,Merida(Mex-ico) and Tampa as well. In fact, in October 1889 a general strike broke outin Key West with solidarity and support from Cuban workers in Havana,Tampa and Ybor City. Just months before this historic strike, San Martinhad died of a diabetic coma, with over 10,000 Cubans coming from allover the island to aend the funeral.

By the turn of the century, the fight for Cuban independence hadbecome a major source of division within the anarchist movement; theworking class anarchists accused the independentistas of taking moneyfromtobacco capitalism (p.30). Eventuallyhowever,mostanarchistsrallied around Jose Marti and his Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC)

which was analogousinits advocacyofdemocracyand decentralizationto Mexicos PLM. In Europe, anarchists such as Elisee Reclus helpedto helpedtoforminternationalsolidarityorganizationsto support theindependence movement. But shortly aer independence the UnitedStates occupied the island; Errico Malatesta decided to move from New

Jersey to Havana to help the anarchist movement there. e MexicanRevolution deeply impacted Cubas anarchist movement, and the Magonbrothers found their way over to Cuba several times both in the pages ofRegeneracion andin person.But the Cuban anarchistmovement finallyfell into a period of steep decline with the rise of the October Revolution(p. 51). It isremembered however, that itwasthe anarchists who paved

the way in Cuba for both the trade union movement and the socialistrevolution that occurred later.

19

Of course, the anarchist conception of cultural revolution variedgreatly fromthe CulturalRevolution which Mao actuallyput into prac-tice, as by then he had been thoroughly convinced of the need for cen-tralized, absolute authority aer extensive contact with the Comintern.

It is from the anarchist movement of this period that most of the laterleaders of the Chinese Communist Party would later emerge.

When speaking of Chinese anarchism one might be tempted to thinkof it as simply that which developed within the actual borders of the

country. But to do so would be to disregard the important influencemigration has had on the movement, which was quite internationalistin scope. On the mainland, Chinese anarchist activity was concentratedprimarily in the Guangzhou region of southern China, as well as inBeijing. In Guangzhou, Shifu was the most active and influential of theanarchists, helping to organize some of the first unions in the country.Students from Guangzhou formed the Truth Society, the first anarchistorganization in the city of Beijing amongst many other projects. Butlike other nation-states around the world at this time, China was quicklybecomin ga more dynamic,diversenationmarkeddeeply by the repeatedinvasionsof foreign powersas well as bythe globalmigrations ofits own

peoples. Anarchistslived and organizedin Chinese communitiestheworld over, including Japan, France, the Philippines, Singapore, Canadaand the United States; of these, the two most significant locations werethe diaspora communities in Tokyo and Paris.

Of thetwo, the Paris anarchists were ultimately the moreinfluentialon a global level. Heavily influenced by their European surroundings(as well as whatever other personal reasons brought them there), theycame to see much of China as backwards, rejecting most aspects oftraditional culture. Turning towardsmodernism as the answer to Chinasproblems,they embraced whatthey saw as theuniversal power of science,embodied largely in the ideas of Kropotkin. In this spirit, Li Shizeng

and Wu Zhihui formed an organization with a strong internationalistbent, called the World Society in 1906 ( Dirlik p. 15). In contrast theChinese anarchists in Tokyo were such as Liu Shipei were blatantly anti-modernist, embracing traditional Chinese thought and customs. Livingin a different social context, for many different reasons, they were far


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more heavily influenced by anarchism as it had developed in Japan;which brings us of course, to the question of Japanese anarchism.

As in China, the October Revolution in Japan did not carry the samedownward impact on the movement as it had in so many other partsof the world. In fact, the period immediately following 1917 becamethe apex of Japanese anarchism in terms of actual numbers and influ-ence (Crump, p. xvi). Anarchism in Japan was quite diverse, but fromamongst the broad array of anarchisms were two major tendencies; the

class struggle ideals of anarchist syndicalism, promoted by figures suchas Kotoku Shusui and Osugi Sakae, and the somewhat broader tendencyof pure anarchismpromoted byactivistslike Haa Shuzo. Bothten-dencies aracted a sizeable number of adherents, and both had theirheyday at different points in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

e anarchist-syndicalists followed in the footsteps of the Bakuninisttradition of collectivism, which was largely based on exchange relations:to each an amount equal to their contribution to the greater collective.In addition, the syndicalists were largely concerned with the day-to-daystruggles of the working class, reasoningthat thelargergoalof revo-lution had to be put off until they had reached a significant degree of

organization. Aer therevolution, therevolutionarysubjects wouldretain their identities as workers as they had been before the revolu-tion. e mostprevalentembodimentof thistendencywasthe All-JapanLibertarian Federation of Labour Unions (Zenkoku Jiren), an importantanarchist-syndicalist federation of labor unions founded in 1926 thatboasted over 16,000 members (Crump, p. 97).

In1903 Kotoku Shusui resignedfrom hisjob as ajournalist inTokyowhen it announced its support for the Russo-Japanese war and the occu-pation ofKorea. He wenton fromthereto start the anti-warCommonPeoples Newspaper (Heimin Shinbun) for which he would soon be im-

prisoned. While in jail, he made contact with anarchists in San Francisco,

and became more and more intrigued by anarchist theory. Aer geingoutof jail,Shusuimovedto San Francisco,organized with members ofthe IWW, and returned to Japan with the intellectual and practical seedsof syndicalism. is development would soon influence figures such asOsugi Sakae and lead to the formation of Zenkoku Jiren (Crump, p. 22).

37

Debs that Mexicans were too ignorant to fight for freedom and thatthey would surely lose any aempt to rise up (p. 88). e essay pleadedwith North American anarchists to take the PLM seriously; roughoutthe world the Latin races are sparing neither time nor money to assistwhat they recognizedimmediatelyas the common cause. We are satis-fied that the greatAnglo-Saxon and Teutonic branches of the army oflabor will not lag behind; we are satisfied ignorance due to languagedifficulties alone is causing a temporary delay (p. 90) en in 1910,

Francisco Madero published his Plan de San Luis Potosi which calledfor an uprising starting November 20 of that year; the uprising spreadquickly until it became a nationwide revolt led by Magon, Zapata, Villaand Orozco.

Amidst the uprising, one of the few honest elections ever to occurin Mexico took place, which Madero won easily. Before the election oc-curred, however, Magon, Zapata and their followers had already brokensharply with Madero over the issue of land reform and Indian autonomyandas a resulthad publishedtheir own Plande Alaya. e Zapatistas andMagonistastook up armstogether,bound bya common southern Mexi-can tribal background that within a few years had lead to the successful

encirclementofMexico City. Huertas dictatorship continued astherev-olution continued to grow, then, when Huerta resigned and VenustianoCarranza became president in1917, the Mexican Constitution also cameinto effect. Due to the influence of Zapata and Magon, many extremelyprogressive features were included such as the right to an educationfree of charge, the right of Indians to collectively run farms (ejidos), andother social and land reforms. Unfortunately, Carranza exploited thedivisions between anarchist-syndicalists and anarchist-communists andsuccessfully bribed the anarchist-syndicalist Casa del Obero Mundial toorganize Red Baalions to fight against Zapata and Villa. By 1919, Mex-ican Col. Jesus Guajardo had ambushed and murdered Zapata, ridding

the Carranza regime of their main populist enemy. But once Carranzahad been overthrown,Obregon, Calles, as well as a long line of othercentrists came to power, opposing the domination of the clergy but sup-porting foreign investment into Mexico; this development marked thebeginnings of the PRI dictatorship and the end of first wave anarchism.


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much of the rest of the word as well was that which developed in Mexico.is began in 1863, when a Mexico City philosophy professor of Greek

descent named Plotino Rhodakanaty formed the first anarchist organiza-tion in the country, a coalition of students and professors called the ClubSocialista de Estudiantes (CSE). e CSE proceeded to spread their ideasthrough organizing anarchist labor unions amongst the urban workingclass;shortly thisleadtothefirststrikein Mexican history, to organiz-ing amongst Indian populations in southern Mexico and eventually to

a new organization called La Social, which featured activists from theParis Commune in exile, eventually reaching a peak level of 62 memberorganizations nationwide (p. 9). For all of this considerable activity,Rhodakanaty and many of his comrades were eventually executed at thehand of Porfirio Diaz.

As elsewhere in Latin America, the postcolonial period had beenmarked by dictatorship aer dictatorship and then finally a major socialrevolution in 1910. In this revolution, the cause of the Mexican workerand peasant was taken up by a temporary alliance between RicardoFlores Magon,Emiliano Zapata, PanchoVilla and Pascal Orozco. Ofthese, Magon can be characterized most accurately as being an anarchist;

his brotherEnrique and he published a popularanarchistnewspapercalled Regeneracion beginning in 1900. Of Zapotec Indian background,the two were driven largely by a determination to ensure the autonomyof Indian peoples in whatever social arrangement would arise out of therevolution (Poole, 1977, p. 5). By 1905, they had formed the anarchist-communistoriented Mexican Liberal Party (PLM);named as suchin orderto not drive people away, while still remaining thoroughly anarchist indemands. is strategy worked well eventually leading to two armeduprisingsthat involved members of theIWW as wellas anarchistsfromItaly (p. 22).

Activists with the P LM crossed borders freely to relocate to LosAn-

geles, SanAntonio and St. Louis, several cities in Canada, as well asnumerous cities throughout Mexico. In doing so, a loose network ofanarchists from all over the world participated in the project of buildingan anarchist contingent within the Mexican Revolution. Yet this rela-tionship was not always healthy: at one point Magon was even forcedto write an angry anti-racist essay in response to a statement by Eugene

21

In contrast, the pure anarchists were more similar to anarchistcom-munists in the tradition of Kropotkin, combined with a strong anti-mod-ernist, pro-traditionalist bent. As a group they were embodied largely inthe militant organization the Black Youth League (Kokuren). Historically,the mid-19th Century agricultural communist anarchist theoristAndoShoeki is considered by many to have been their primary philosophicalpredecessor. e pure anarchist critique of anarchist syndicalism wasfocused largely on the syndicalist preservation of a division of labor in

the administration of the post-revolutionary society. is division oflabor meant that specialization would still be a major feature of societythat would lead to a view that focused inwardly on particular industriesrather than blending the intellectual and the worker. e pure anarchistsalso sought to abolish exchange relations in favor of the maxim fromeach according to their ability, to each according to their need. In a sense,they can be seen as aempting to develop a more uniquely Japanese in-terpretation ofanarchism. For instance, theyquestionedtherelevanceof syndicalism to a society that was still largely peasant-based and hada relatively small industrial working class (Crump, p. 7).

Despite the variance between syndicalist and pure anarchisms, in

general the onethingtheyhadin common wasthatall Japaneseinterpre-tations of anarchism were hybrid theories, made relevant for the localsituation. atsituation was an extremely repressive one; meetingswere broken up, demonstrations suppressed and anarchist publicationsbanned on a regular basis throughout the life of first wave anarchism.e Red Flags incident of 1908 is a good example of this, when dozens ofanarchists celebrating the release of political prisoner Koken Yamaguchiwere brutally aacked and arrested simply for displaying the red flag.Translation and publication of anarchist texts were oen done secretlyin order to avoid repression, as was Kotokus translation of Kropotkinse Conquest of Bread. Another aspect of unique local conditions was

that texts that described Western realities had to be made relevant to thelocal population. For instance, in the widely available Japanese trans-lation of Kropotkins Collected Works, the European commune wastransformed into a traditional Japanese farming village (Crump, p. xiii).But this process also occurred partially through the conduit of West-ern anarchists, and through the migration and inmigration of people


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and ideas. is is of course, is the way in which these essays becametranslatedintoJapanese. Kropotkin corresponded directlywith Kotokuseveral times and agreed to allow him to translate several of his majorworks, while his travels to San Francisco resulted in dramatic changesin Japans anarchist movement as well. So this global connection ofanarchists was extremely important, but as I have demonstrated, it wasmade relevant to people on the local level.

Another local condition that shaped the development of EastAsian

anarchism was that Japan had its own Monroe Doctrine of sorts overmostof region. As has oenbeen the caseelsewhere, Japanese anarchistsused their relative degree of privilege as a means to spread anarchismthroughout theregion. ese effortsthroughoutAsialedtotheforma-tion of the Eastern Anarchist Federation, which included anarchists fromChina, Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan. is is in fact, how anarchism firstreached Korea aer Japans 1894 invasion in order to protect it fromChina. Korean migrants living in Tokyo came under the influence of

Japanese anarchism and engaged heartily inthe anti-imperialistmove-ment. As a result, over 6,000 were rounded up aer incredulously beingblamed by the authoritarian Japanese state for Tokyos 1923 earthquake.

eywere beaten, jailed,andtwo were even sentencedto death alongwith their Japanese comrades in the High Treason Case (MacSimion,1991). Later,duringthe1919independence struggle, in which anarchistswere prominent, refugees migrated into China, which was at the heightof anarchist influence as a result of the New Culture movement. At thesame time, Japanese anarchists at the time continued their solidaritywork with the Korean liberation movement.

By 1924, the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF) inChina had formed with an explicitly anti-imperialist focus and helpedto organize explicitlyanarchist laborunions as well. At the sametime,anarchist tendencies were developing within Korea itself. For instance

the Revolutionists League is recorded to have organized around this timeand to have maintained extensive communications with the Black YouthLeague in Tokyo. By 1929, their activity had materialized fully in Koreaitself, primarily around the urban centers of Seoul, Pyonyang and Taegu.e apexofKorean anarchism howevercamelater thatsameyearout-side the actual borders of the country, in Manchuria. Over two million

35

other workers, leaving the majority of other types of workers such asimmigrants and women without union representation.

As in China and South Africa, the Brazilian communist party, the PCB,grew out of the ruins of the once-volatile anarchist movement (Chilcote,p. 11, 1974). However, anarchism had the greatest influence in Brazilprimarily from 1906 to 1920, mostly amongst urban immigrant workers.It was in this context it became the predominant stream within the labormovement by 1906, far more important in fact, than state-socialism (p.

19). Anarchist labor militants, active in the Congresso Operario do Brasil(COB) are remembered for helping the Brazilian working class to winthe eight-hour day as well as significant wage increases across the board.e Sao Paolo GeneralStrike of 1917markedthefirstof threeyears ofmilitant anarchist activity within the labor movement. During theseyears, a strategy of repression combined with cooptation became thestrategy of the corporative state. Anarchists did not initially call theGeneral Strike, rather it was initiated by those masses of female textileworkerswhom anarchist organizers hadignored. At firstthis self-activityofworking women and othersections of theindustrialworking class putmale anarchist leaders on the defensive. But ultimately the anarchists

acceptedfemaleleadership and choseto work withthemrather thanagainst them (Wolfe, 1993, p. 25).

e anarchist movement in Brazil began its decline for several reasons;one was that it oen failed to adequately reach out to the rural majoritypopulation. Another is that the success of the Bolshevik revolutionspelt the beginning of the end anarchist ideological hegemony. As inArgentinaand Uruguay, anarchist movementsplit evenly intotwo camps:pro-Bolshevik and anti-Bolshevik. Many of the most active anarchistswould soon move on to become heavily involved in the activities of thePCB as a result of this split. e party shunned those who did not do so,and internal purges eventually ousted those who retainedsome anarchist

sympathies (p. 33). e final nail in Brazilian anarchisms coffin wasthe Revolution of 1930, which marked the beginning of a new era of theofficialistic, paternalistic, cooptative system of corporatism.

While anarchism in the southern cone countries impacted the globalmovement to an extent, the anarchist movement that most affected andinfluenced the direction of anarchism throughout Latin America and


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e movement was largely based on affinity group based Resistance So-cieties affiliated to the FORU, which formed in 1905. Malatesta soon be-came involved in the FORU as well, influencing it away from Bakuninistcollectivist anarchism and towards Kropotkinist communist anarchism.e FORU worked on a widevarietyof issues,welloutsidethe scope ofthe business unions. For instance, a major campaign against alcoholismwas initiated, as well as initiatives to set up cooperative schools andlibraries. ese developments came largely due to the anarchist focus

on the importance of creating a parallel anarchist culture. While muchof this came out of the FORU, most anarchist culture, including plays,poetry readings and other events of the time, came out of those affiliatedwith the Center for International Social Studies (CIES) in Montevideo (p.224). e CIES was heavily involved as well in the anarchist press, withsuch publications as La Batalla presumably named aer the earlierArgentine paper of the same name which was published continuouslyfor over fieen years.

Dynamic in many ways that other anarchist movements were not, theUruguayan anarchists were very internationalist in scope as well; somewould say too much so. When the Mexican revolution erupted onto the

global stage in 1910, Uruguays anarchist movement sent delegations tohelp the Magonistas; they likewise aided the CNT-FAI with InternationalBrigade soldiersinthethick of the Spanish CivilWar (p. 226). eeventual decline of anarchism in Uruguay stemmed primarily from the

successful Bolshevik revolution and the enormous ideological loyalty-based splits that emerged in the movement between the FORU and the

USU as a result.e final anarchist movement of the southern cone countries we will

examinethatwhich developed withinthe massive nation-state ofBrazil.Within the context of Brazilian latifundia, corporatism and authoritari-

anism in which large landholders held great sway over the destiny of the

vast majority of the population with the backing of the military and thestate, mutual aid societies and cooperatives were the only recognizedlegal form of organization. But as in Argentina and Uruguay, clandes-tine affinity-group based Resistance Leagues formed the backbone ofmilitant Brazilian unionism, protecting anarchists from repression. How-ever, this anarchist unionism was limited largely to skilled artisans and

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Korean immigrants lived within Manchuria at the time when the KACFdeclared the Shinmin province autonomous and under the administra-tion of the Korean PeoplesAssociation. e decentralized, federativestructure the association adopted consisted of village councils, districtcouncils and area councils, all of which operated in a cooperative mannerto deal with agriculture, education, finance and other vital issues. KACFsections in China, Korea, Japan and elsewhere devoted all their energiestowards the success of the Shinmin Rebellion, most of them actually

relocating there. Dealing simultaneously with Stalinist Russias aemptsto overthrow the Shinmin autonomous region and Japans imperialistaempts to claim the region for itself, Korean anarchists by 1931 hadbeen crushed (MacSimion, 1991).

roughout East Asia, anarchists demonstrated a strong commitmentto internationalism, supporting each other and reinforcing each othersmovements rather than thinking simply in terms of their own nation-states. e nationalism of Chinese and Korean anarchists can thusbe seen as a form of anarchist internationalism dressed up in nation-alistclothingforpoliticalconvenience. In both of these countries, theanarchist movement sought to reinforce nationalist struggles insofar

astheycastoff imperialdomination;but theywere decidedly interna-tionalist in that the long term goal was to abolish both the Chinese andKorean nation-state systems as well. e same can be saidfor Japaneseanarchists who lent their solidarity to the anti-imperialist movements in

Japan, Korea and other parts of EastAsia. As noted earlier, the rise ofthe Eastern Anarchist Federation and its paper e East (Dong Bang)is testament to the global nature and focus of anarchism during the early20th century.

ough India is located on the Western border of China, connectionand communication between the anarchisms of both are relatively un-known since in India anarchism never really took on much of a formally

named anarchist nature. In India, the relevance of anarchism is primar-ily in the deep influence major aspects of it had on important movementsfor national and social liberation. In order to understand the develop-ment of the heavily anarchistic Satyagraha movement in India, one mustfirst consider the objective local conditions in which it developed. Indiais the second most populated country in the world, weighing in at over


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1 billion people.Going back into ancient Hindu thought, one can indeedfind predecessors to the concept of a stateless society; the Satya Yugafor instance, is essentially a description of a possible anarchist society inwhich people governthemselves based onthe universalnatural law ofdharma (Doctor, 1964, p. 16). But at the same time that a stateless societyis seen as a possibility, much of Hindu political thought is focused on theinherently evil nature of man and the therefore divine right of kingsto govern, so long as they maintain protection from harm for the people.

If they do not govern on the basis of dharma, however, the Chanakya-sutras allow that it is beer to not to have a king then have one whois wantingin discipline (p. 26). is ofcourseis a majorcontrastwiththe Western notion of a universal divine right of kings regardless of theconsequences.

Anarchism finds its first and most well-known expression in Indiawith Mahatma Gandhis statement the state evil is not the cause but theeffect of social evil, just as the sea-waves are the effect not the cause ofthe storm. e only way of curing the disease is by removing the causeitself(p.36). In other words, Gandhi saw violence as the root ofall socialproblems, and the state as a clear manifestation of this violence since its

authoritydepends on a monopolyof itslegitimate use. erefore he heldthat that state is perfect and non-violent where the people are governedtheleast. e nearestapproachto purestanarchywould be a democracybased on nonviolence (p. 37). For Gandhi, the process of aaining sucha state of total non-violence (ahimsa) involved a changing of the heartsand minds of people rather than changing the state which governedthem. Self-rule (swaraj) is the underlying principle that runs throughouthistheoryofsatyagraha. is did notmean,as manyhaveinterpretedit, just the aainment of political independence for the Indian nation-state, but actually, just the opposite. Instead, swaraj starts first from theindividual, then moves outward to the village level, outward further to

the national level; the basic principal is that of the moral autonomy ofthe individual above all other considerations (p. 38).So overall, Gandhis passion for collective liberation sprang first and

foremost from a very anarchistic notion of individualism; in his view,the conscience of the individual is truly the only legitimate form ofgovernment. As he put it, swaraj will be an absurdity if individuals

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was sentenced to life in prison. In fact he was so popular that eventuallydetermined comrades organized to a plan to successfully break him outof jail (p. 219).

La Semana Tragica the Tragic Week was an important event thatoccurred in 1919 when a general strike was declared but was brutally putdown by Colonel Varela, resulting quickly in his assassination. By 1931,the military had taken over and the anarchist movement was suppressedthrough a combination of death squads, prison sentences and general

intimidation. When martial law was finally lied nearly two years later,all the anarchist newpapers and organizations that had previously beenat odds discarded with the past and published a joint declaration calledEighteen Months of Military Terror. e intense repression in Argentinahadresulted in a great deal of solidarity andmutual aidamongstdifferenttypes of anarchists, leading to a number of joint publications and actionsthat transcended diverse ideologies. It was from this new solidaritythat both the FORA and other anarchist organizations sent delegationstotheInternationalBrigadesfor the Spanish CivilWaragainstFranco.But soon Argentina would have its own fascist government to contendwith. General Peron officially seized power in 1943, forcing the FORA

to go underground again,along withLa Protesta Humana. WhenthePeron regime finally fell, another joint publication involving all anarchisttendencies wasissued calledAgitacion. OtherpublicationsincludedEl Descamisado, La Baallaand La Protesta Humana, the paper withwhich Max Nelau and Erricco Malatesta were involved. In the faceof such repression, much of the population had accepted the strategiccooptation of popular movements by the Peronist state; those who didntaccept it oen looked to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia as proofthat anarchism was no longer a viable idea. e eventual failure of theSpanish Civil War didnt help maers either, and eventually anarchismbecame of marginal influence (p. 230).

As in Argentina, Uruguays anarchist movement was largely com-posed of immigrant European workers who had come from industrial-ized societies, this meant that anarchism was in the early years primarilya working class rather than a peasant movement. Here too, it was thelargest revolutionary movement in the first quarter of the 20 th Century.


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In Latin America, the anarchist movement was without a doubtstrongest in South America; and in South America, anarchism was with-out a doubt strongest in the southern cone countries ofArgentina,Uruguay and Brazil. It was the largest social movement in Argentinafrom around1885untilaround1917when state-socialiststook controlof the large union federations (Joll, 1971, p. 218). e movement wasextremely contentious due to the prevalence of the latifundia system inwhich a very few families controlled almost all of the land. is extreme

social stratification set the stage for Peronism, a system in which the oldelite families ruled with impunity over the masses of newly arrived immi-grants in an extreme aristocratic fashion. Since the only legal means ofaffecting change in this society was voting, the fact that up to 70% of theurban population was legally disenfranchised did not endear many tothe system; in fact, it created a social situation ripe for the developmentof anarchism.

Anarchism was most popular amongst Argentinas working class sec-tors: it really never aained a high degree of organization amongstthe peasantry. However, there were some aemptsto organize anar-chiststudentunionsin additionto anarchist laborunions(Joll,p. 222).

Stirnerist individualist anarchism never found much audience here andso as in many countries around the world, the movement was a balancebetween anarchist-communistsinthetradition ofKropotkin and anar-chist-collectivists in the tradition of Bakunin; however there was verylile conflict between the two streams. e Italian anarchist-communistErricco Malatesta immigrated in 1885 and within two years had orga-nized the countrys first Bakers Union in 1887. is move helped to setthe stage for the organizing of the Resistance Societies, an affinity-groupform of worker organization that was the backbone of the FOA, whichin 1904 became the FORA.

From 1905 1910 the anarchist movement exploded in popularity,

generalizing into the popular movements and pulling off general strikesin Buenos Aires and other places. Society became so unstable that martiallaw was routinely imposed for short periods of time. Workers were shotat Mayday demonstrations, others imprisoned at Tierra Del Fuego, andtorture was rampant. Simon Radowitsky, a youth who threw a bomb atthe Chief of Police car quickly became a well-known martyr when he

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have to surrender their judgement to a majority. While this flies in theface of Western notions of governance,Gandhi reasoned that a singlesound opinion is far more useful than that of 99.9% of the population ifthe majority opinion is unsound. It was also this swaraj individualismthatcaused himto reject bothparliamentary politics andtheir instrumentof legitimization, political parties; he felt that those who truly wanteda beer world for everyone shouldnt need to join a particular party inorder to do so. is is the difference between Raj-Niti (politics of the

state) and Lok-Niti (politics of the people). Swaraj individualism meantthateverything hadto berethoughtanew: for instance, the notionthatthe individual exists for the good of the larger organization had to bediscarded in favor of the notion that the larger organization exists forthe good of the individual, and one must always be free to leave and todissent (p. 44).

However, Gandhis notions of a pacifist path to swaraj were not with-out opposition, even within the ranks of those influenced by anarchism.Before 1920 a parallel, more explicitly anarchist movement was repre-sented by Indias anarchist-syndicalists andthe seminal independenceleader, Bhagat Singh. Singh was influenced by an array of Western

anarchisms and communisms and became avocalatheist in a countrywhere such aitudes wereextremely unpopular. Interestingly, he studiedBakunin intensely but though he was markedly less interested in Marx,he was very interested in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky who hadsucceeded in bringing about a revolution in their country. So overall,Singh can be remembered as something of an Anarchist-Leninist, if sucha term merits use. In the history of Indian politics, Singh is today remem-bered as fiing somewhere betweenGandhian pacifism and terrorism,as he activelyengagedinthe organization ofpopularanti-colonialorga-nizations with which to fight for the freedom of India from British rule.However, he was also part of a milieu which Gandhi referred to as the

cult of the bomb which of coursehe declared wasbaseduponWesternnotions of using violence as a means to aain liberation. In response,Indian revolutionaries countered that Gandhis nonviolence ideas werealso ofWestern origin,originatingfromLeoTolstoyand therefore notauthentically Indian either (Rao, 2002). It is in fact likely that Singhwas influenced by Western notions of social change: like his Japanese


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counterpartKotoku Shusui,Singhs comrade and mentorKartarSinghSarabha organized South Asian workers in San Francisco, leading bothof them to eventually commit their lives to the liberation of Indians theworld over.

Notable amongst this milieu was the Hindustan Republican Associa-tion as well as the youth organization Naujawan Bharat Sabha; both ofwhich Singh wasinvolvedin.Despite his earlier reluctance,by the mid-1920s Singh began to embrace the strategy of arming the general Indian

population in order to drive the British out of the country. In serviceto this mission he traveled throughout the country organizing peoplesmilitias, gaining a large following in the process. In 1928 this strategy oforganized armed revolt gave way to an open support for individual actsof martyrdom and terrorism in an article Singh published in the pro-in-dependence paper Kirti. In other issues of this same paper he publishedhis famous essay on Why I am an Atheist as well as several articles onanarchism. In the anarchist articles, Singh equated the traditional Indianidea of universalbrotherhood tothe anarchistprinciple of norulers,focusinglargelyon the primary importance ofaainingindependencefrom any outside authority whatever. ough he had been influenced

by the writings of Lenin and Trotsky, Singh never did join the Commu-nist Party of India even though he lived for six years aer its originalfounding. (Rao,2002). Perhapsthis was duetothe anarchist influencein his ideas; either way anarchist ideas (if not anarchist ideology as awhole) played a major role in bothGandhian and Singhian movementsfor swaraj.

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Latin American Anarchism:

Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile,

Mexico and Cuba

e development of anarchism in Latin America was a process shaped

by the unique nature ofeach countrywithintheregion,as wellas bythosefactors which many of them had incommon. Onething they allhadin common was their subordinate relation to the 1823 Monroe Doctrinewhich held theAmericas under the tutelage of the one country thatarrogantly refers to itself as the only America that is, the UnitedStates. As such, shortly aer independence was achieved from Spainand Portugal, the Western Hemisphere was promptly re-colonized unofficially in the name of U.S. interests. It was in this subordinatecontext that the first anarchist movements in Latin America arose, all toooen under the iron fist of dictators imposed from above, in El Norte. Inaddition, it is important to note that the Latin American governmentalcontext was far more influenced by the thinking ofAristotle and St.omas Aquinas than it was by liberalism, the largest philosophicalinfluence in theAnglo-Saxon democracies (Erickson, 1977, p. 3). Here,corporatism was the major philosophical force, espousing a view of thestate as organically reflecting the moral will of the people, rather thanas a referee for different political forces in society as in North America.e ironic result of this was that all oppositional forces would be seenby much of society as essentially anti-liberatory. e ideological processofcorporatisminvolved a slycombination ofofficialistic cooptation ofrevolutionary movements and violent repression of those who would notaccept such moves. e prevalent role of the Roman Catholic Churchin society combined with the tradition of Roman law made up the other

two primary factors that set LatinAmerican societies apart from muchof the North. is meant of course, that the anarchisms that developed

there were qualitativelydifferentastheyarosein a significantlydifferentpolitical environment.


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was almost entirely an immigrant phenomenon.As early as 1877, theEgyptian anarchist movement began to put out the Italian language anar-chist journal II Lavoratore, which was followed shortly by La QestioneSociale. Its primary audience was Egypts thriving Italian immigrantcommunity concentrated primarily in the Mediterranean port city ofAlexandria. As Alexandria was a port city, it was quite diverse andwould actas areservoirnotonly foranarchistactivitybut foranarchistexiles from around the Mediterranean region as well. In the la

Documents

Non Western Anarchisms