© 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands (ISBN: 978-90-04-18849-5) RETHINKING ANARCHISM AND SYNDICALISM: THE COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL EXPERIENCE, 1870–1940 Lucien van der Walt University of the Witwatersrand Steven J. Hirsch University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg This volume examines the history, influence, aspirations, and actions of anarchism and syndicalism in the colonial and postcolonial world from the 1870s until the 1940s. By ‘colonial and postcolonial world’ we mean those regions of the world under the formal control of external powers, as well as the ex-colonies, that were ostensibly independent social formations, but remained subject to a significant degree to infor- mal imperial power influenced by colonial legacies. The case studies presented in this volume are drawn from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe (with the exception of Ireland). Each of these case studies analyzes anarchism and syndicalism within a colonial or a postcolonial context. In other words, they situate their analyses within the larger context of late 19th and early 20th century imperialism and globalization, from the 1870s into the 1930s. During this epoch, the first modern globalization, imperialist power increased substantially and coincided with a heretofore unprecedented revolu- tion in communication and transportation technologies, international mass migration, and the emergence of a truly global economy, which in turn spread industrialization across the colonial and postcolonial world. The regions and countries examined in this volume all had a his- tory of colonialism, including China, dismembered from the late 19th. century. By the early 20th-century, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States ruled 90 percent of Africa, 57 percent of Asia, a quarter of the Americas, around half of East and Central Europe, and all of Polynesia1 The great powers also exercised immense 1 J. Marko Bocjun, “The Working Class and the National Question in the Ukraine: 1880–1920”, Ph.D., York University, 1985, 132. xxxii lucien van der walt and steven j. hirsch indirect control over independent states and other polities in these regions, through the international state system, industrial investments, trade controls, and gunboat diplomacy.2 Very often imperial capital either displaced or worked closely with the local bourgeoisie to main- tain a highly unequal internal system of domination. Imperial capital also directed belated industrial change in subject territories in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. In recognition of the globalized character of the world during this period, this volume seeks to understand how anarchism and syndi- calism developed as transnational movements. To this end it focuses not only national and local contexts but on supranational connections and multidirectional flows of the ideas, people, finances, and organi- sational structures that gave rise to these movements. In this way, it transcends Eurocentric narratives and obviates the frequent tendency to view movements in the colonial and postcolonial world as mere imitations or extensions of European movements. Instead it carefully examines both the universal and particular history of anarchism and syndicalism as reflected in the ideas and culture, social composition, and character of each social movement. At another level, this collection pays close attention to how anar- chists and syndicalists engaged with imperialism, anti-colonial move- ments and the national question. By the national question, we have in mind both the challenge posed by the role of national and racial identities to working class movements, and the place of demands for national self-determination (and racial equality) in class struggles. The volume seeks, then, to recover the history of anarchist and syndicalist anti-imperialism—as it was manifest in both theory and practice. This is a vital history that has often been ignored, or dismissed, in many texts. The papers in this volume, however, demonstrate unequivocally that anarchism and syndicalism were important currents in anti-impe- rial, including anti-colonial, struggles in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries—and were, for most of this period, more important than their Marxist rivals. 2 Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 318; M. Lang, “Review Article: Glo- balisation and Its History”, The Journal of Modern History, 78, 2006, 913–918. rethinking anarchism and syndicalism xxxiii The framing of this volume In order to highlight this experience of imperialism and inequality, we have organised this volume around the framework of a “colonial and postcolonial world”, rather than the Cold War concept of a “Third World” (or its successor, the “Global South”). The “Third World” idea routinely excludes the colonial regions within Europe itself, despite obviously instructive parallels with African, Asian and other experiences. The concept has also always been defined in negative, incoherent, and state-centric terms.3 It originally signified countries outside the (“socialist”) East and the (“capitalist”) West—yet it was itself never defined by reference to its own economic system; it included “socialist” China and Cuba alongside overtly “capitalist” countries. It also signi- fied newly independent, and supposedly non-aligned, “nations.” Typi- cally, these states defined themselves as “anti-imperialist”—even when their ruling elites continued to collude with the great powers. Finally, it referred to those countries defined as undeveloped or underdevel- oped, which implied the need for economic assistance from advanced nations. This last claim always elided the great deal of socio-economic variation within and between these countries, and the reality of sub- stantial, even dramatic, growth and industrialisation, signified by the meteoric rise of Newly-Industrialising Countries (NICs). The notion of a “colonial and postcolonial world” avoids these difficulties, while retaining the stress on the importance of imperialism invoked by the “Third World” idea. The volume’s focus on the period 1870 to 1940 has been chosen both to capture an era of unmatched mass anarchist and syndicalist influence, and the distinctive economic, social and political processes that took place in that period. (The closure of this era, and its impli- cations for the anarchists and syndicalists, will be considered in more depth in our closing chapter, “Final Reflections”). 3 See, inter alia, Ajiz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso, 1992, chapter 3; Mark T. Berger, “After the Third World? history, destiny and the fate of Third Worldism”, Third World Quarterly, 25: 1, 2004, 9–39; Bill Warren, Imperialism: pioneer of capitalism, London: Verso, 1980; Heloise Weber, “Reconsti- tuting the ‘Third World’? poverty reduction and territoriality in the global politics of development”, Third World Quarterly, 25: 1, 2004, 187–206. xxxiv lucien van der walt and steven j. hirsch The period was one of unprecedented increases in transoceanic and intra-continental migration, global economic integration, and impe- rial expansion, with the first genuinely global economy emerging by the 1870s.4 From 1870 to 1914 world trade and output grew steadily, with major powers developing trade to gross domestic product ratios exceeding 35 percent.5 By all measures, levels of integration matched and typically exceeded those of the late 20th century, and capital moved “quickly and pretty freely across existing national and imperial boundaries”.6 Jack London, a perceptive witness to these globalizing processes, expressed astonishment at the extraordinary “shrinkage of the planet”, which made the “East . . . next-door neighbour to the West.”7 Critical to this integration was European technical prowess, which led to the effective partition of the globe between a few great states by 1914.8 British pre-eminence resulted in an empire incorporating a quarter of the world’s land and 800 million people in 1900.9 The next imperial tier comprised modern powers like Austro-Hungary, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. Declin- ing premodern empires, oscillating between modernization and dis- memberment filled out the bottom imperial tier: China, Iran, Ottoman Turkey, Portugal, Russia, and Spain. Such a world posed great opportunities as well as immense chal- lenges for the class-centred anarchists and syndicalists. At one level, the very circuits and centres of imperialism, industrial capitalism, and state formation provided the nexus in which their nemesis, the anarchists and syndicalists, emerged. The first globalisation’s unprece- dented mobilisations of labour for industry and war spread radicalism and connected the radicals, its cheap communications via steam- ships, telegraphs and the penny press provided a means of continual 4 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, Abacus, London, 1977, 66 et seq.; Lang, 924. 5 See Paul Hirst, “The Global Economy: myths and realities”, International Affairs, 73: 3, 1997, 411. 6 Anderson, 3. 7 Jack London, 1900, “The Shrinkage of the Planet”, from his Revolution and Other Essays, 1910, Macmillan, online at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/Writings/Revo- lution/shrinkage.html, accessed 15 January 1997. 8 Van Creveld, 317. 9 Ben Crow, Alan Thomas, Paul Frenz, Tom Hewitt, Sabrina Kassam and Steven Treagust, 1994, Third World Atlas, second ed. Buckingham/Milton Keynes: Open Uni- versity, 31. rethinking anarchism and syndicalism xxxv contact, and its new industrial centres provided the mass recruits to the syndicalist unions. The very experience of migration eroded insularity, and demon- strated the common experience of the popular classes the world over, giving the anarchist and syndicalist case for internationalist class- struggle the ring of truth. The routine brutality of states, both colonial and postcolonial, and the grim conditions in fields as well as factories, strengthened the case for radical anti-statism and anti-capitalism. The emerging power of unions and other mass movements, partly a reflec- tion of the era’s mass concentrations of urban workers, convinced many that a revolutionary transformation of society was within reach. Before V. I. Lenin, classical Marxists also lacked an effective approach to struggles in the colonial and postcolonial world (with the key excep- tion of Eastern Europe).10 Marxists in these regions were (where they existed), typically marginal, burdened with the doctrine that the mate- rial prerequisites for socialism were lacking, and a fixed commitment to legalistic reformism in contexts where few could vote. The rise of Bolshevism, with its distinctively anti-imperialist and militant posture, radically changed matters. Meanwhile, anarchists and syndicalists had inscribed a record of mass mobilisation across the colonial and postco- lonial world, and (see below) of anti-colonial struggle. With Bakunin, these revolutionaries envisaged the “completed and real emancipation of all workers, not only in some but in all nations, ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ ”,11 without supposedly necessary intermediate stages. However, while industrialisation, class formation and class conflict provided the social forces that the anarchists and syndicalists mobil- ised, and in which their programmatic flexibility and militancy could be activated, the contours of capitalism, the state and the popular classes were also profoundly shaped by imperialism. Thus, at another level, the colonial and postcolonial setting posed peculiar challenges to the revolutionary libertarian socialists: racial, regional, and national 10 See, inter alia, Ephraim Nimni, “Great Historical Failure: Marxist theories of nationalism”, Capital and Class, 25, 1985, 58–82; Sanjay Seth, “Lenin’s Reformulation of Marxism: the colonial question as a national question”, History of Political Thought, XIII: 1, 1992, 99–128; Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt, Black Flame: the revolutionary class politics of anarchism and syndicalism, San Francisco, Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009, 92–98. 11 Mikhail Bakunin, “Letter to La Liberté”, in Sam Dolgoff (ed.), Bakunin on Anar- chy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism, London: George Allen and Unwin, [1872] 1971, 284. xxxvi lucien van der walt and steven j. hirsch divisions amongst the working class and peasantry, as well as the rise of nationalism in the context of anti-imperialist movements. National and racial identities, as movements like Zionism and Garveyism showed, could flow as easily via migrant and other net- works as internationalist ones. Such sectional tendencies undercut internationalism, tended to become sharper as labour market compe- tition intensified, and foreshadowed the world that followed the first modern globalization and the age of empire: the world of nation-states and economic nationalism, rooted in the 1920s and running into the 1990s (discussed further in the concluding chapter). Anarchism and syndicalism Although the term “anarchism” is often applied very loosely, this vol- ume uses a narrow definition. The modern anarchist movement arose from the late 1860s in the context of an internationally expanding workers’ movement, linked together in the International Working- men’s Association (or First International, 1864–1877).12 Debates over the question of the state between Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) were critical in establishing the anarchist current as a dis- tinctive form of socialism. According to Piotr Kropotkin (1842–1921), the most important anarchist theorist after Bakunin, “modern anar- chism” emerged “little by little in the Congresses of the great Associa- tion and later on among its successors,” giving birth to a mass working class and peasant movement.13 The core ideas of anarchism, as expressed by Bakunin and Kropot- kin, are clear. Fiercely opposed to all forms of social and economic inequality and oppression, anarchism rejected capitalism, the state and hierarchy in general. A revolutionary and libertarian doctrine, anar- chism sought the establishment of individual freedom through the creation of a cooperative, democratic, egalitarian and stateless social- ist order. This would be established through the direct action of the 12 David Miller, Anarchism, London, Melbourne: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1984, 4, 45; George Woodcock, Anarchism: a history of libertarian ideas and movements, new edi- tion with postscript, Penguin, 1975, 136, 170. 13 Piotr Kropotkin, “Anarchism”, in Roger N. Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkin’s Revo- lutionary Pamphlets: a collection of writings by Peter Kropotkin, New York: Dover Publications, [1905] 1970, 295; Piotr Kropotkin, The Place of Anarchism in Socialistic Evolution, Cyrmu: Practical Parasite Publications, [1886] 1990, 5–6. rethinking anarchism and syndicalism xxxvii working class and peasantry, waging an international and internation- alist social revolution against capitalism, landlordism and the state.14 Syndicalism, on the other hand, refers to a form of revolutionary trade unionism, centred on the view that revolutionary union action can establish a collectivised, worker-managed social order resting on union structures.15 Syndicalists argued that “the trade union, the syn- dicate, is the unified organisation of labour and has for its purpose the defence of the interests of the producers within existing society and the preparing for and the practical carrying out of the reconstruction of society after the pattern of Socialism.”16 Syndicalist ideas emerged from “the non-political tradition of social- ism deriving from the libertarian wing of the First International”.17 The “main ideas” of syndicalism can “all be found” in the First Inter- national, “and especially in the writings of the Bakuninist or federalist wing”.18 This, as both Marx and Friedrich Engels noted, maintained that workers “must . . . organise themselves by trades-unions” to “sup- plant the existing states”, with the “general strike” the lever “by which the social revolution is started”.19 Thus, syndicalism was always an integral part of the broad anarchist tradition, although the relation- ship between anarchism and syndicalism was a complicated one: some anarchists rejected syndicalism, while a substantial section of syndi- calists denied (or did not know) that syndicalism was embedded in anarchism.20 14 Van der Walt and Schmidt, 33–81. 15 Ralph Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism: an interna- tional comparative analysis, Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008, 4–7. 16 Rudolph Rocker, Anarcho-syndicalism, London: Pluto Press, [1938] 1989, 86. 17 Wayne Thorpe, ‘The Workers Themselves’: revolutionary syndicalism and inter- national labour 1913–23, Dordrecht, Boston, London/Amsterdam: Kulwer Academic Publishers/International Institute of Social History, 1989, xiii–xiv. 18 Louis Levine, Syndicalism in France, second ed., New York: Columbia University Press, 1914, 160–161; L. Lorwin, “Syndicalism”, in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1959, 497. 19 Karl Marx, “Letter to Paul Lafargue in Paris”, In Marx, Engels, Lenin: anar- chism and anarcho-syndicalism, N.Y. Kolpinsky (ed.), Moscow: Progress Publishers, [19 April 1870] 1972, 46; Friedrich Engels, “The Bakuninists at Work: an account of the Spanish Revolt in the summer of 1873”, in N.Y. Kolpinsky (ed.), Marx, Engels, Lenin: anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, Moscow: Progress Publishers, [1873] 1972, 132–133. 20 Van der Walt and Schmidt, 20–22, 133–144, 149–170. xxxviii lucien van der walt and steven j. hirsch Taking anarchism and syndicalism seriously Anarchism and syndicalism, as Benedict Anderson recently reminded readers, constituted an immense “gravitational force” across the planet in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were, he notes, the dominant element in the self-consciously internationalist radical Left” from the 1870s onwards and “the main vehicle of global opposition to industrial capitalism, autocracy, latifundism, and imperialism” by the turn of the century.21 Before 1917, Eric Hobsbawm conceded, “the marxist left had in most countries” been “on the fringe of the revo- lutionary movement, the main body of marxists had been identified with a de facto non-revolutionary social democracy”, and “the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of clas- sical marxism”.22 Yet, in spite of its historical significance, anarchism and syndical- ism as an international movement, has “not been well-served by the academy.”23 Too often its history has been “buried under subsequent defeats and political orthodoxies,” when not effaced altogether by its rivals on the Left.24 But the history of the movement is of paramount importance, precisely because it is essential to understand the trajec- tory of labour, of the left, and of anti-imperialist movements. Fur- thermore, as Arif Dirlik points out, it is crucial to “recall anarchism, which Leninist Marxism suppressed”, for it raises questions about the very meaning of socialism, and the place “democratic ideals for which anarchism . . . served as a repository”.25 Taking a global view of anarchist and syndicalist history The general underestimation of the historical importance of anar- chism and syndicalism is rooted in the literature’s tendency to focus 21 Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: anarchism and the anti-colonial imagina- tion, Verso, 2006, 2,54. 22 Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries, London: Abacus, 1993, 72–3. The odd spelling of “marxism” appears in Hobsbawm’s text. 23 Robert Graham, “[Review essay] Alan Ritter, Anarchism: a theoretical analysis/ Michael Taylor, Community, Anarchy, and Liberty/David Miller, Anarchism”, Telos, 60, 1985, 197. 24 David Howell, “Taking Syndicalism Seriously”, Socialist History, 16, 2000, 30. 25 Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1991, 3–4, also see 7–8. rethinking anarchism and syndicalism xxxix on the North Atlantic. The standard surveys of the movement’s history scarcely take into account the three quarters of humanity that com- prised the colonial and postcolonial world. George Woodcock’s classic study ignored Asia and Africa, and only looked at one case of a colo- nial society within Europe itself: the Ukraine. Latin America garnered only three pages, despite the author noting that “until the early 1920s most of the trade unions in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Argentina were anarcho-syndicalist”, and that anarchism had there a “place that cannot be ignored”.26 The work of James Joll reflects the same imbal- ance.27 Studies by Daniel Guérin and Roderick Kedward fare no bet- ter, offering a brief treatment of the Ukraine.28 Peter Marshall’s more recent study by comparison is balanced. And yet, it allocates only 2 out of 41 chapters, totalling 33 pages out of 706, to the colonial and postcolonial world.29 To describe this literature as strictly “Eurocentric” would be mis- leading. Other than the coverage of the Ukraine, it ignores the colonial regions of Eastern Europe, and its coverage of Western Europe and its offshoots is oddly incomplete, with cases like Ireland omitted.30 Such a narrow and unrepresentative selection of cases has resulted in a flawed assessment of the history of anarchism and syndicalism. It posits, for instance, the thesis of Spanish exceptionalism, that is the notion that anarchism in Spain “became a mass movement . . . to an extent that it never did elsewhere”.31 Supposedly, Spain was “the only country in the 20th Century where Anarcho-communism and Anarcho-syndicalism 26 Woodcock, Anarchism: a history of libertarian ideas and movements, 401–403. 27 James Joll, The Anarchists, London: Methuen and Co., 1964, 175, 184–188, 217, 221–223, 239. 28 Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: from theory to practice, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970, 98–101; Roderick Kedward, The Anarchists: the men who shocked an era, London/New York: Library of the Twentieth Century, 1971, 81–83. 29 Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: a history of anarchism, London: Fon- tana Press, 1994, 473–475, 504–535. 30 The Portuguese movement, which dominated that country’s labour movement, is also strikingly absent. See Bernhard Bayerlein and Marcel van der Linden, “Rev- olutionary Syndicalism in Portugal”, in Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe (eds.), Revolutionary Syndicalism: an international perspective, Otterup/Aldershot: Scolar/Gower Publishing Company, 1990, 160–164. Likewise, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Scotland are routinely ignored. Contra. “Spanish exceptionalism,” the case can also be made that anarchism and syndicalism were “adopted extensively as revolutionary theories and practices” and a real “mass movement” in France and the Netherlands (in both, the main labour centres were, for a time, revolutionary syndicalist) and Britain, Germany and above all, Italy (in all three anarchism and syndicalism were a powerful minority tradition with mass support): see van der Walt and Schmidt, pp. 271–295. 31 Joll, 224. xl lucien van der walt and steven j. hirsch were adopted extensively as revolutionary theories and practices”.32 Another problematic conclusion either explicit or implicit in this lit- erature is that “anarchism has rarely taken root in ‘Third World’, colo- nial territories”, with the possible exception of Korea.33 Such claims only make sense if the history of anarchism and syndi- calism in most of the world is elided. “[T]he truth is”, as Jason Adams astutely notes, “that anarchism has primarily been a movement of the most exploited regions and peoples of the world”.34 In other words, the history of anarchism and syndicalism mainly took place in the “East” and the “South”, not in the “North” and the “West”.35 Latin America and Asia, for example, provide many examples of powerful and influ- ential anarchist and syndicalist movements, some of which rivalled that of Spain in importance. Similarly, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe (and Ireland) provide ample evidence of movements operating in colonial situations, as well as in postcolonial contexts. Argentina, Geoffroy de Laforcade’s contribution to this collection, is an instructive case. As de Laforcade demonstrates, Argentina pos- sessed a vibrant and deeply embedded movement by the turn of the century. It is worth noting that Argentine anarchism stretches back to the days of the First International, and that the great Bakunin-Marx debate resonated locally at that time. The precocious development of anarchism in Argentina stemmed from massive proletarian immigra- tion, the formation of transnational activist networks, and the diffusion of a radical press. As in other parts of Latin America these processes combined to produce a movement that would span continents. Anarchism and syndicalism in Argentina spread rapidly in the bur- geoning working-class neighbourhoods and workplaces in Buenos Aires, the nation’s capital and chief port. By the turn of the century, Buenos Aires was (with Paterson in the United States) one of the world’s two great anarchist publishing centres, and Argentina became 32 M.M. Breitbart, “Spanish Anarchism: an introductory essay”, Antipode: a radical journal of geography 10/11: 3/1, 1979, 1. Also see Marshall, 453. 33 John Crump, “Anarchism and Nationalism in East Asia”, Anarchist Studies, 4:1, 1996, 45–64, 60–61. 34 See Jason Adams, Non-Western Anarchisms: Rethinking the Global Context, Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, n.d. [2003], 2–4. 35 A point previously made in Lucien van der Walt, 2007, “Anarchism and Syn- dicalism in South Africa, 1904–1921: rethinking the history of labour and the left”, Ph.D., University of the Witwatersrand, Ch. 2; van der Walt and Schmidt, Chs. 1, 9.