The publication of Black Rose Anarchist Federation’s programme Turning the Tide was quite significant. Stable anarchist organisations are rare, and detailed political programmes by said organisations are even rarer. The members of the Australian anarchist communist tendency have been inspired by Black Rose since it first began, and its persistent activity helped prod us to do more and get better organised. We also knew that Black Rose had spent much time hunkered down, regrouping after a serious internal crisis; it was thus a relief to see them finally turn outward again.
While there is a lot of good in Turning the Tide – that I won’t dwell too long on here – there is ultimately quite a lot of it that I have reservations about. My intentions aren’t to attack Black Rose but to express these differences in a way that I hope will be productive. In addition, while this article is directly about Black Rose, it also addresses problems with especifism generally and suggests some alternative ways forward. I hope therefore that this article contributes to a wider discussion about anarchist strategy, and the strategy of organised anarchist-communists in particular.
To be clear, this article is by no means a collective statement by the Australian organisations; I’m ultimately responsible for its contents, and I certainly don’t pretend that everyone agrees with me! It is, however, the product of continuous discussions on this topic that we’ve been having for a while, and may give overseas comrades a clearer understanding of why, for instance, we all prefer to conceptualise our politics as “working-class power”, rather than as “popular power”.
Capitalism vs. a system of domination
The most immediate problem with Turning the Tide is its understanding of class, which causes issues with the more circumstantial political judgements given elsewhere in the text. Their particular class analysis is put forward right from the beginning, in the introduction to the “structural analysis” section. They state that the world is divided “between the few who dominate, and the many who are dominated […] this deep seated division is the product of the core structures that define our society: capitalism, the state, heteropatriarchy, imperialism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy”. A key concept here is that of power, which they understand as a neutral concept1 and “shared by the ongoing struggle between social forces in society, particularly between the dominant and dominated classes” (pg. 9).
To clarify: the issue is not so much with their understanding of class per se, but the way they seem to avoid putting forward an understanding of class. Black Rose’s writing about class in this text is distinguished by its exceedingly general, non-specific character. Note the wording around “core structures”: it’s not that any one particular “structure” is more important than the other, but that they are all in the same kind of category.
They continue by separating themselves from “narrower Marxist conceptions” of class, and instead define class not as solely to do with the means of production, but also “the means of coercion (e.g. police, military, prisons) and administration (e.g. governmental bodies that create and administer the laws)” (pg. 9). Thus we no longer need to speak of workers and capitalists, but of the dominators and the dominated. Among the dominators are cops, judges, capitalists and governors, and among the dominated are workers, the unemployed and the incarcerated.
They do not clarify what is meant by “narrower Marxist conceptions” of class, which seems unfair; there are nearly as many Marxist conceptions of class as there are Marxists. There are a great many Marxists whose understanding of class leads them to conclusions virtually identical to those of Black Rose, albeit expressed differently. Where a Marxist might say that cops are capitalist lackeys and therefore should be fought against, Black Rose says that they are part of the dominant classes and therefore should be fought against. Where a Marxist might say that the unemployed and incarcerated are (usually) part of the working class and therefore should be supported, Black Rose says they are part of the dominated classes and therefore should be supported.
What are the tangible differences here? Black Rose does not explain; again, what is most obvious is the lack of analysis: they don’t give any reasoning for their viewpoint or explain why exactly this more generalised view of oppression is more meaningful than a “narrower” one. They proceed with the same sort of thing through page ten, stating that “the dominated classes are not a monolith” and are individually delineated by race, gender, and so on.
A trend with history
This framing of capitalism (and associated muddiness around class) as one form of oppression among others has something of a contemporary basis – not just in the sense that it resembles liberal/left intersectionalist theories popular in western academia, but also in the way that it is clearly influenced by the theoretical developments of the especifist tendency post-80s (when the former guerillas in their study-circles began to read Foucault).
There is, however, a historical echo here. There has always been a tendency within anarchism that wants to downgrade the importance of class in favour of a more generic hostility to all forms of oppression. Broadly, the line is that while Marxism only focuses on class to a reductionist degree, while we focus on everything repugnant in society.
This, incidentally, was a major point of contention during the initial debates over the Platform. I think this aspect has actually been neglected somewhat by the usual narrative that the debates were simply over organisational forms. In reality, a decent chunk of the disagreements between the Platformists, synthesists, Italian anarchist communists, etc were over the Platform’s heavy class focus.2
The Italian anarchist communists tended to emphasise a humanist critique of platformism more than other tendencies.3 For instance, Fabbri responded to the Platform’s class analysis by suggesting that anarchism’s actual defining characteristic was “the refusal of all imposed authority, of all government”, which was an ideal not tied to any particular class. To think that “the triumph of the working class should necessarily lead to anarchy” is mistaken; the achievement of anarchy is instead contingent on the masses “consciously becom[ing] anarchists”.4
The problem with this is that if anarchism is not embodied in working class action, then anarchism becomes a simple moral ideology. Fabbri’s argument that the working class is a “creative and liberating force” only to the extent that it is anarchist is not a viewpoint that consigns the working class to the dustbin, as some might suggest – it’s a viewpoint that consigns anarchism to the dustbin. If this is the perspective, then the task of anarchists becomes one of converting the population to a specific doctrine, and then exhorting them to act upon it. What can this strategy do, but create a new religion?
It is no surprise that Fabbri’s strategies are thus broadly focused on anarchist propagandism. This echoes Malatesta’s viewpoint expressed at the 1907 Amsterdam congress, that he supports participation in the union movement “above all in the interest of our propaganda”, stating that “the workers’ movement is nothing more than a means”. I feel it is important to point out that this is also the speech where Malatesta expressed regret that workers were attacking scabs, “who too are exploited and even more unfortunate” than regular workers.5
Malatesta himself implied that the Platform overestimated the capacity of the working class itself. Without “the stimulus, the drive, the concerted effort of people of ideas” (i.e., anarchists), the working class movement will “foster a spirit of conservatism and fear of change” and will “adapt to circumstances”.6 For all Malatesta’s criticism of Bolshevism – indeed, he criticises the Platformists for superficially resembling Bolsheviks – he seems to adopt one of their most basic strategic points: that “exclusively by its own effort”, the working class “is able to develop only trade union consciousness”, and that the only remedy for this an enlightened political tendency that will bring them socialist consciousness “from without”.
The most charitable thing you can say about this humanist critique of class struggle anarchism is that it stresses the importance of avoiding “workerism” and an excessively deterministic class outlook. This dogmatic tendency is usually associated with Marxism, though the best critics of it themselves tend to be Marxists.7 We should never fail to remind ourselves that the point of communism is the abolition of classes, which means the abolition of the working class itself, in doing so realising a meaningfully human society for the first time.
However, the point is that it is the working class that will abolish itself – not anyone else. It will not abolish itself by realising en masse that capitalism contradicts one or another set of moral principles. The fall of capitalism (and with it, the state) can only be realised when the working class practically realises its collective self-interest to an unprecedented degree. The new sense of justice that motivates people comes from within the class struggle, not from without.
The way Malatesta counterposes the self-interest of the working class with the bright ideals of enlightened men is galling: is it possible to phrase things more backwards? To the extent that the people of ideals are relevant, it is due to them being generated in the course of the working class fighting for its own interests. In fact, a key reason we support anarchism at all is because we believe it is a more authentic realisation of working-class self-interest than any other political doctrine.
Race and class
It’s understandable that BRRN would primarily refer to American examples; it’s an American organisation, after all. However, some of their conceptual remarks seem to be filtered through an America-heavy, or at least Western-focused lens. This is most acute in the analysis of white supremacy, which seems to only talk about the USA. For instance, the statement that “in capitalist societies, the division of reproductive labour has always been racialised” (p. 12) is understandable in an American context but cannot be generalised into a universal claim without either blurring history, or extending the definition of the term “racialised” into meaninglessness.
The conceptual separation of class from other concerns perhaps leads BRRN to understate the role of the state in the development of capitalism itself. For instance, in the section analysing the state (p. 18), they mention that the state gives itself an air of legitimacy by “providing essential services, such as education and healthcare” that appear as “state benevolence” but are more typically “a reflection of class struggle”.
The description of the state’s social services as being a “reflection of class struggle” is true, but only in a particular sense. It is true that pressures “from below” by workers and others can lead to shifts in the provision of social services: increased school funding, increases in welfare payments, the construction of public housing, and so on.
However, the fundamental reason the state provides these services is not because it is a “contested site of power” (p. 19), but because capitalist reproduction needs workers to be educated, (relatively) healthy and so on, and the state is ideally placed to intervene and ensure this happens. It is in this way (and others) that the state takes an integral role in the specific composition of capitalism and the division of labour within a particular nation. Circumstantial political disputes fill in the details, but do not draw the bigger picture.
BRRN’s presentation of white supremacy is reasonable (if Americo-centric), but is undercut by its own half-commitment to an intersectional analysis. They offer an analysis that is clearly derived from Marxist theorists like Noel Ignatiev and Theodore W. Allen, whereby the race system was consciously developed by the nascent capitalist class to undercut the potential of cross-race class solidarity (and continued for the same reason), resulting in a social division of labour that was more nightmarish than that which developed elsewhere.
But then, practically turning themselves around, they caution against the spectre of a class reductionism that “focuses wholly on class as the locus of domination” (p. 22). Instead of asserting unambiguously that capitalism is the driving force of white supremacy, they merely say that “race, class, and other forms of domination in the United States are intrinsically connected with each other, affecting different groups of people differently depending on time and place” (p. 22-23). They move from a good, specific analysis to meaningless platitudes, for reasons that seem totally unclear.8
It’s impossible to unlock the secret of abolishing white supremacy without looking at its class origin, or class basis: merely saying that race, class and gender interact offers very little. It’s as if one wished to answer the question of whether the earth revolves around the sun by saying that the earth and the sun both interact with each other.
It is here that it is important to note that white supremacy does not simply depend on the marginalisation of non-whites, but on the marginalisation of a large number of whites, too.9 Ignatiev, for all his sloganeering about “abolishing the white race” pointed this out constantly; the liberation of white workers could only occur if the whites realised their class self-interest lay in the abolition of white supremacy (and capitalism). In an article published before he died, he pointed this out and supported the claim that police kill poor whites, poor Blacks and poor Latinos at remarkably comparable rates – but that while the African-American community is able and ready to challenge police brutality en masse, whites are as quiet as a mouse, bound through white supremacism to worship the cops that kill them.
Without a doubt, anarchists need to involve themselves in social struggles around race (and gender, sexuality and so on) and in a political sense aspire to be leaders of such movements. Much of Black Rose’s concerns here are practical, and oriented towards their own activist practice. That’s a broad orientation we share. The question isn’t whether we should engage ourselves in movements not immediately related to the workplace, but how we should do it.
Mass organisations
The confusion about “categories of domination” reaches full bloom in the section on general strategy. BRRN follows the confused (and confusing!) analysis emanating from the especifist tradition, that proffers a clear division between “political” and “mass” organisations; it is this particular dichotomy that is fundamental to the strategy of the group. The mass organisations do not have a specific class basis, but only need to be a) big and broad, b) oppositional in some way to the dominant order, and c) identifiable with one or another “dominated group”. Trade unions can be part of this, but so can tenants unions, queer activist groups, student collectives and so on.
The mass organisations feature “actors of struggle” – unions have workers, tenants unions have tenants, etc. These actors operate in specific “sectors” – union in the workplace, tenant union in a block of flats, etc (p. 41). Once more BRRN raises the boogeyman of looking at things “in isolation” and in doing so again retreats into vague statements about things being interconnected.10
One of the more significant realisations we had in Black Flag is the importance of looking at categories that seem nominally unrelated to class – like students, tenants, queers – as actually being inseparable from it. In our engagement in student politics, we saw practically how an emphasis on students as the prime vector leads to reactionary politics at worst, and ineffectual politics at best. Instead, we had practical success reframing our interventions around working class students – i.e. the majority of them – who either work to pay their way through university or are in the process of entering into the workforce.
The same goes with tenants, which I know is a big focus of BRRN. It’s difficult to see “tenants” as the fundamental “actor” (in especifist terminology11) when in reality, the majority of people engaged in tenant unionism are not mobilised on the grounds of being tenants in the abstract, primarily, but as workers. The problems tenants unions organise around are nearly always the problems of the working class. The non-proletarians that rent, like small business owners, middle class professionals like doctors and managers, etc. are presumably not tenants we are particularly interested in, even when they might have a dickhead of a landlord. We in Black Flag tried to get at this in our article about housing, particularly in the concluding section – specifically, the importance of viewing the problem of high rents (and high cost of groceries, medicine, etc) as a disguised problem of low wages.
You can find a clear historical example of this, though – the CNT-led Barcelona rent strike of 1930-31. I’m surprised this hasn’t been studied more by the anarchists involved in tenant organising – I haven’t seen it mentioned in many publications, at least. The strike involved around 100 000 workers not paying rent in order to secure a 40% reduction.12 Though it ultimately was not successful, it was a vital moment in the history of Barcelona’s working class and fed into the revolution that occurred later in the decade.
More relevant here, though, is the fact that the strike was not organised with tenants as the actor! It was organised with workers as the actor, by a specifically working-class body. The unified strike emerged out of a series of lower-level strikes, at the instigation of the construction division of the Barcelona CNT, which set up a “Comisión de Defensa Económica” to investigate the economic life of Barcelona’s workers generally (not just the situation of renters specifically). This body led by CNT militants was the one that decided on the figure of 40% as the lead demand – as well as another about exempting the unemployed from paying rent altogether. It was CNT militants that then spread the strike and organised it practically.
The organisers of the strike made no attempt to generalise it as a broad tenants’ struggle. Rather, it was a rebellion of CNT-led workers, and they always knew this. Indeed, they actively argued that the reduction in rents only be applied to those with rents under 100 pesetas per month – in other words, the lower class. Additionally, they agitated specifically against shopkeepers and other small businessmen, who they blamed for the adulteration of food and hikes in the prices of necessities. The rent strike struggle was used in many instances to raise further working-class demands, like free public transport for the unemployed and even the closure of a particular church.13
It’s true, a “system of domination” analysis could interpret this as proof that “everything is interconnected” and that the tenants struggle “interacts” with the working class struggle, the struggle of the unemployed, the struggle against religion, and so on. But what is most vital is not that things are interacting in general – that is meaningless – but that they’re interacting as features of a rebellion of the working class, and that their struggles only make sense in this light.
Front of who?
The concept of the “Front of Dominated Classes” (capitalisation from the original, p. 47) is the intermediate goal of especifist strategy, derived from the theory mentioned above. The Front represents the bringing together of a number of different social causes in one broad movement, that would allow the many different actors to be represented in one cohesive, radicalised whole.
This is the feature of especifism that has probably had the most positive impact on our organisations. For us in Sydney at least, discussing this concept in our initial reading groups was helpful in solidifying the conclusions we made from years of participation in activism. We had seen acutely how social movements had suffered when they were forced into isolation from each other by an obsession with single-issue causes. The potential of social movements to radicalise people was being wasted.
So it’s not that the idea of a “Front of Dominated Classes” has absolutely nothing going for it – it is useful, at least in helping set a broad strategic direction for an organisation; it reflects what we should be doing as militants and encourages us to look for the links between disparate social causes. That much is very productive, and it’s part of what attracted some of us, at least, to especifism.
However, as a meaningfully revolutionary strategy, it is unclear what it offers. Black Rose acknowledges that “the organised working class remains a critical component of this front” (p. 47), but does not seem to draw out the appropriate lessons and instead endorses a genericised popular power built off the “dominated classes” idea. The link between the development of the Front and a rupture with capitalism is not made clear. It’s as if there’s a step in the reasoning missing.
Even the description of the Front makes little sense if one does not view workers at the core. The examples they give of “the full range of organised social forces fighting against the system of domination” all look very much like sections of the working class (p. 47). How else do you interpret, for instance, the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants in the USA? This group notoriously makes up the most exploited strata of the working class in the country.
The struggles of immigrants, women against domestic violence, etc only take on their full significance when they have a working class basis, and when the link is made between these problems and the big problem at the root of them – capitalism. Accordingly, while we always argue for unity between people in causes that seem superficially disparate, we do so knowing that there is something fundamental behind it all.
The inadequacy of their class analysis leads to points made in a vacuum: take, for instance, the discussion about the defence of the revolution. Discussions of political violence are always limited, due to the necessity of speaking very generally and in hypotheticals. This increases the risk of misinterpretation. However, it must be said that the examples of “defensive formations” they give on page 31 seem to indicate an unclear philosophy about violence, and its relationship to class struggle.
What exactly links the RIAU and the militias of the CNT with the Zapatistas in Chiapas and the YPG in Syria? Whatever it may be, it is not “popular self-defense”, or accountability to “workers’ councils and community assemblies”. This is particularly the case among the YPG, which is a fairly straightforward army, tied politically to the imperial system via the alliances its leaders make with major powers. It is not structured in a libertarian or anti-capitalist manner; the political society it represents is based around a parliament (the Syrian Democratic Council) and a constitution that protects private property and forbids its expropriation.14
Neither will violence appear in an exclusively defensive manner, as history shows. The militias of the CNT did not emerge ex nihilo when news of Franco’s coup hit. The work of the historian Agustin Guillamón on the defence committees15 clearly demonstrates that violence not only had a long history in the Spanish class struggle, but was organised and prepared on a consistent basis by action groups and then the committees throughout the 1930s. These small groups of CNT militants did not just act defensively, but acted as the CNT’s clandestine military force and proactively laid the groundwork that allowed for the defeat of the Fascists and the assertion of class power in Catalonia in 1936.
That was in the 1930s; it’s a totally different question in the 2020s and beyond, when the asymmetry between professional capitalist armies and the working class has taken on extraordinary levels. One can hardly hope for mass desertions and mutinies of troops in Australia, when the army is so small and its members disconnected to the working class.
The “hot period” of the 1960s/70s gives some indication of what the character of working class political violence might look like in the developed world: it would be worthwhile to study, for instance, the experience of Italian groups like Prima Linea and Senza Tregua, and their connection to class organisations like the Magneti Marelli Workers’ Committee.16 While the question of what a successful military strategy might mean remains open, we know enough to see it can only develop out of the class itself.
“The direct struggle of the working people against capital…”
It is likely that some people will think I’m being too harsh, but I really don’t intend to be – Black Rose are the closest comrades Australian anarchist-communists have on the international level, and – as made clear – have been the single biggest outside organisational influence on us. It’s a good thing that they’ve written and published this programme; the anarchist movement needs to have more debates like this. However, the flaws of Turning the Tide are in large part the flaws of much of the rest of the especifist movement, and the lack of internal criticism is hurting our movement’s development.
While I don’t think counterposing Platformism to especifism is necessarily productive, the original draft Platform contains a much more rigorous and relevant analysis of class society than any especifist document I’ve seen. The general section of the Platform expresses the starting point fairly well: “the principal forces of social revolution are the urban working class, the peasantry, and partly, the working intelligentsia”.
A contemporary application of the Platform would no doubt downgrade the role of the peasantry, which does not exist as an actual definable class in most of the world; the social role of the peasantry as the protagonists of the revolution in the countryside, in agriculture, has been taken up by the transient rural working class.
The working intelligentsia has also undergone significant shifts. The period of prosperity post-WWII went hand-in-hand with the rise of the intelligentsia in the state and in modern capitalist production, which developed such a division of labour so as to warrant the employment of huge numbers of highly trained specialists and bureaucrats. The tertiary education sector underwent a government-sponsored boom, in order to produce the necessary specialists and bureaucrats. Large numbers of 60s and 70s radicals were absorbed into the system through academic openings, which could allow them to pursue radical-themed research while ensconced in the semi-private existence of the university.
The past few decades, though, have seen a decline in the position of this class. Academia has shifted more openly to a for-profit model, which has stripped academics of the privileges they once enjoyed, and has turned more of them into direct wage-labourers. Universities are now economically dependent on the employment of tutors and lecturers on insecure, temporary contracts. “Unprofitable” departments like history or philosophy are regularly shut down while mining, pharmaceutical and armaments companies increase their sponsorship of the departments they want funded.
Outside academia, more and more of the middle class is proletarianised through reductions in wages and conditions, and through changes in the work process. Once-prestigious professions have undergone what researchers call de-professionalisation, where work that was once the domain of social workers, doctors and so on is filled by cheaper support workers and physician’s assistants respectively.
An oversupply of graduates in some areas (like the humanities) has resulted in a large number of downwardly mobile, debt-saddled educated people who have been forced to work low-wage jobs to pay the bills. Do they have the potential to be revolutionary? Well, a large number of leftists fall into this category, which says something (both good and bad): but more importantly, their potential depends on the potential of the working class more broadly.
We shouldn’t hesitate in describing the working class as the principal revolutionary force in society today. This is even more the case now than it was when Makhno & co. wrote the Platform. Not only has the working class increased in size as a proportion of the global population, it has also increased in nascent power and global reach. The transfer of much of the world’s manufacturing to the Third World has meant that a greater percentage of class power now resides in countries with unstable state systems – pointing to the increased possibility of a revolutionary rupture.
While automation has diminished the power of the working class employed in manufacturing, there has been a concurrent rise in the relevance of other industries like logistics, services and care. The rise of the carer workforce in particular has created a particularly dynamic working class, which is not only willing to fight for higher wages and better conditions en masse, but is also determined to challenge the subordinate position that comes from being a feminised workforce (along with other feminised workers like teachers and, increasingly, sex workers).
It’s on the basis that we are best able to make sense of, and fight, forms of oppression that are not immediately thought of as working class issues – like feminism, environmentalism, and queer liberation. It’s not the case that avoiding an dominator/dominated or intersectional analysis means putting these causes to the side. To the contrary, by looking at them through their relationship to the working class, we are better able to see their importance – we can begin to get a sense of how this class is able to use its social power to fight sexism, racism, and all the other issues that are treated as conceptually separate.
Much of what I’m saying here is speculative, and divorced from the Platform that I used as a starting point. However, what I’m trying to point at is the ultimate issue with Black Rose’s theoretical outlook: by putting the focus on power and domination as the primary issue, they miss the actual reality of the working class under capitalism, and the way it generates – whether slowly or quickly – revolutionary alternatives. The social power of the working class is not addressed except in a very general sense (workers are striking, good; they’re disorganised and still in the thrall of reformists, bad). The Platform, more than most especifist documents, goes beyond this.
Perhaps the most significant quote from the platform is this one:
Anarchism thus developed, not from the abstract reflections of some scientist or philosopher, but out of the direct struggle waged by the working people against capital, out of their needs and requirements, out of their psychology, their desire for freedom and equality, aspirations that become especially vivid in the most heroic stages of the working masses’ life and struggle.17
The especifist tendency’s retreat from class analysis is not just a theoretical mistake – it in fact cuts them off from understanding the only thing that might actually realise anarchism.
Addendum – 20/1/25
As mentioned earlier, it is a good thing that we are having debates over this text. The demise of Anarkismo has meant that anarchist-communists have no “official” public journal in which to discuss such things. It’s not that these conversations aren’t happening at all, but that they’re taking place in Facebook Messenger chats, Discord servers, between private individuals and small groups.
As I understand it, Black Rose deliberately does not prioritise having a regularly released written publication – either in the form of an agitational, mass-oriented paper, or something more for discussion among anarchists and the left. Fair enough; I may disagree with this decision, but it’s still abundantly obvious that Black Rose has a number of militants and fellow travellers that are both capable of writing very well, and experienced in practical politics.
Anarchists, particularly organisationalists, are in a weaker position theoretically compared to other left tendencies. There are many people who identify as anarchists but a large number of these people have an extremely undeveloped idea of what anarchism is, derived poor-quality internet sources and misconceptions from the bourgeois media. In the past ten years there have been a number of in-depth leftist publications that have appeared, but hardly any have come from our broad perspective. Marxist publications like Left Voice and Cosmonaut do well in addressing the need for written engagement with contemporary debates, but they do so from a perspective saddled by their own self-constructed orthodoxy.
It’s for these reasons that I hope this debate is the first of many, and that all our organisations can get in the habit of fleshing out these conversations in the written word. Perhaps something better can emerge to take Anarkismo’s place.
- Unlike other anarchists who view power negatively, or interpret it as being synonymous with political power (in the sense of governmentalism). ↩︎
- This is perhaps linked to the general neglect (among all contemporary anarchists, not just those in the organisationalist tradition) of the Platform’s theoretical outlook, expressed in the General Part of the document. I’ve never seen any comment from contemporary groups, for instance, on the Platform’s view of anarchism as the “negation of democracy”. This is directly counterposed to the currently dominant viewpoint that anarchism is an intensified form of democracy or that “direct democracy” should be part of our programme. ↩︎
- The response of the synthesists (led by Volin) on the other hand was slightly different: they did not reject a class-struggle focus altogether, but rejected the specific idea that a class-struggle analysis could be a doctrinal belief of an anarchist organisation – they thought it would be dogmatic and not meet the challenge of contemporary anarchism. Instead, there needed to be a synthesis of this idea – both organisational and theoretical – with other competing ideas, like the notion that anarchism is a human (not a class) ideal, and the individualist notion that anarchism is an expression of only individual concerns. ↩︎
- This is available to read on nestormakhno.info here. ↩︎
- See here; the full proceedings are worth reading. ↩︎
- From “A Project of Anarchist Organisation”, here. ↩︎
- See, for instance, Cyril Smith’s Marx at the Millenium. ↩︎
- A similar move occurs in their discussion of gender and “social reproductive labor” under “heteropatriarchy” on pg. 23-24: the oppression of women is necessary for the reproduction of capitalism… but this oppression of women also has a discrete existence conceptually separate from capitalism… but is nonetheless “symbiotic” with it (and racism, colonialism, etc.). Thesis–antithesis–synthesis? Clear as day! ↩︎
- The book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt describes this vividly in the context of the American slave-ocracy, where the marginalisation and repression of an enormous population of dirt-poor whites was necessary to keep the slave system running. ↩︎
- “Each [sector] is shaped by and also shapes the system of domination […] our ability to pay rent, for example, is tied to how much we are paid at work, which is often related to our formal education, but also questions of race, gender, nationality, and sexuality” (p. 42). ↩︎
- I don’t know whether this is an issue related to the fact that the majority of Anglophone anarchists are dealing with especifist material in translation, but much of the especifist jargon in BRRN’s publications (and other material) seems to be mimicking Marxist terminology, in a way that only superficially separates our theory from theirs. The discussion of the “actor of struggle” seems acutely familiar to what Marxists mean when they talk about the “revolutionary subject” – and the discussions we’re having now are a mirror of the Marxist and post-Marxist debates about the identity of the revolutionary subject in the contemporary era. In this case, Black Rose’s attempt to draw a hard line between Marxist and anarchist class analysis cuts them off from quite a lot of useful material, weakening the level of discourse. ↩︎
- From p. 80 of the book Red Barcelona: Social Protest and Labour Mobilization in the Twentieth Century, edited by Ángel Smith. ↩︎
- Information for the above two paragraphs drawn from p. 93-95 and 100-102 of Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona: 1898–1937, by Chris Ealham. ↩︎
- See article 70 of the AANES social contract here. ↩︎
- This interview with Guillamón serves as a good introduction to his research on the topic, but his full book Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933-1938 is a short, easy and compelling read. ↩︎
- Some interesting reflections on this by Angry Workers of the World can be read here. ↩︎
- Though, perhaps the Platformists were overstating it… for more on the development of anarchism as a break from – not the continuation of – the working class tendency around Bakunin in the First International, read René Berthier’s Social-democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864-1877. A digital copy has finally been uploaded here. ↩︎
