5W VI: The Anarcho-Communist "Driving Force" Fights For A Libertarian Alternative

Part 6 of a 7-part article on the history of anarchist communism.

The fourth wave of anarchist insurgencies were crushed by neo-fascist repression in Latin America in the mid-1970s, with the USA funding death-squads into the 1980s, and by the increasingly right-wing regimes of Western Europe and North America in the same period, but revolutionary syndicalism steadily rebuilt, as did anarchist political organisation.

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FIVE WAVES: A BRIEF GLOBAL HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHIST COMMUNIST MASS ORGANISATIONAL THEORY & PRACTICE

FIFTH WAVE:

THE ANARCHO-COMMUNIST "DRIVING FORCE" FIGHTS FOR A LIBERTARIAN ALTERNATIVE

The fourth wave of anarchist insurgencies were crushed by neo-fascist repression in Latin America in the mid-1970s, with the USA funding death-squads into the 1980s, and by the increasingly right-wing regimes of Western Europe and North America in the same period, but revolutionary syndicalism steadily rebuilt, as did anarchist political organisation. And a fifth wave, far broader than the fourth, was soon unleashed in 1989-1991 with the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union and the liberation of its Eastern European satellite colonies, right down to the Stalinist oddity that was Albania and the Titoist dissident region of Yugoslavia.

Immediately, the underground anarchist movement in those countries surged forth, with the Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists (KAS) and the Confederation of Revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists (KRAS), both founded in Russia in 1989, the Polish Anarchist Federation (PAF), founded in the 1980s, and the Czechoslovak Anarchist Association (EAS), founded in 1989, leading the way.

The explosion of new anarchist organisations in the former Soviet empire has been remarkable: from the Baltic states to the Balkan states, and from Belarus to Kazakhstan, there is barely a region of the ex-USSR and its satellites which has not seen a newly emergent anarchist and syndicalist movement. Notable is the revival of organisations like the Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists - Nestor Makhno (RKAS-NM) in former anarchist strongholds like the Ukraine, plus the emergence of "Makhnovist" groups in countries like Greece and Turkey.

Probably the largest anarcho-communist organisation in the world today outside of the syndicalist union federations is Autonomous Action (AD), with branches in 20 Russian cities, plus branches in Armenia, Belorus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. And the recent development of underground anarcho-syndicalist organisations in "communist" countries like Cuba which are rapidly embracing liberal capitalism, demonstrates that we can expect a further emergence in times to come, especially as totalitarianism loses its grip in China, Vietnam and North Korea (though no current anarchist underground is known in those regions).

In Latin America, the collapse of the para-fascist dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Uruguay in 1983-1990, and the emergence of militant new social movements as capital contracts ever more severely into neo-corporatist crisis, has spurred on the revival of anarchism: Rebel - Libertarian Socialism (Auca - SL) and the Libertarian Socialist Organisation (OSL) of Argentina; the Gaucha Anarchist Federation (FAG), Cabocla Anarchist Federation (FACA) and the Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janiero (FARJ) of Brazil; Women Creating (MC) and Libertarian Youth (JL) of Bolivia; the Anarcho-Communist Unification Congress (CUAC) of Chile, later renamed the Libertarian Communist Organisation (OLC).

The primary organisation that helped initiate the spurt of new growth was the revived FAU of Uruguay that rebuilt in 1985, repudiated its earlier pro-Castroism and embraced the Platform. The result of its leading role in regenerating anarcho-communist ideas in the southern cone of Latin America is that most of the region's most significant new organisations - the FAG, FACA, FARJ, Libertarian Struggle (LL), OLC and others like the Libertarian Socialist Organisation (OSL) in Argentina - are platformist, or in Latin American terms, especifista (specific), organisations.

The Mexican Revolt of 1994 provided additional impetus and helped establish organisations like the Indigenous Popular Council of Oaxaca - Ricardo Flores Magon (CIPO-RFM) and its splinter Magonist Zapatist Alliance (AMZ). In Africa, the conditions of neo-colonialism lead to the construction of anarchist organisations including the Anarchist Party for Individual Freedoms in the Republic (PALIR) in Senegal in 1981, the 3,000-strong IWW section among diamond miners in Sierra Leone in the late 1980s-early 1990s, the Anarchist Workers' and Student's Group (ASWG) of Zambia in 1998 and the Wiyathi Collective within the Anti-Capitalist Convergence of Kenya (ACCK) in the 2000s. The closing phases of resistance to militarism and apartheid saw the (re-)emergence of anarchism where its heritage was slender: the Awareness League (AL) of Nigeria, the Anarchist Resistance Movement (ARM) and Durban Anarchist Federation (DAF) of South Africa.

Invigorated by the "Battle of Seattle" and public disgust at the US-lead imperialist wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, the organised anarchist movement in North America - long plagued by individualism, primitivism and other anti-class-war ideologies - has rediscovered itself, notably with the founding of the North-Eastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC) of the USA/Canada in 2000, which sparked the creation of similar regional organisations across the continent.

The neo-liberal crisis has seen the establishment of anarchist organisations in regions where they either had no historical precedent or where the traditions were long-dead: from Lebanon to Sierra Leone; from Costa Rica to Kenya; from El Salvador to Zambia. And a fifth wave of syndicalism has arisen, despite the fractious debates that have cost the IWA its Japanese and Colombian, and factions of its French and Italian sections.

This is apparent not only in the veteran anarcho-syndicalist organisations of Western Europe such as the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) of Spain, which at 60,000 members is now the largest in the world (and the third-largest union federation in Spain), but also the 6,000-strong Siberian Confederation of Labour (SKT), the 2,000-strong RKAS-NM of Ukraine, and the National Confederation of Labour - Vignoles (CNT-Vignoles) of France, which claims 1,000 dues-paying members and another 4,000 mobilisable supporters, all of which identify specifically as anarchist.

The Swedish Central Workers' Organisation (SAC) currently claims a membership of 9,000, a thousand lower than in the late 1990s, after it discontinued the practice of including members who had retired from their employment. In addition, there is the "grassroots syndicalist" tendency wihin the union "base committee" movement of Italy, the alternative syndicalist unions in France (Solidarity Unity Democracy, SUD), Switzerland (SUD) and Mexico (the 50,000-strong FAT), and a palette of new rank-and-file syndicalist organisations from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Malaysia, from Burkina Faso to Bangladesh.

New and old syndicalist unions are collaborating continentally by sector (railways, communications, education etc.) across neo-liberal "Fortress Europe" through the nascent European Federation of Alternative Syndicalism (FESAL) network of "grassroots syndicalist" unions. This expansive fifth wave has seen numerous splinters, but this is a sign of rapid growth and the development of a plethora of different libertarian communist approaches to the challenges posed to the working class by turbo-capitalism in the new millennium.

Lastly, the current wave is also a period of intense international organising, with the formation of two new networks: International Libertarian Solidarity (ILS), founded in 2001, and the Insurrectional Anti-authoritarian International (IAI), founded in 2000, representing the majority mass and minority insurrectionist traditions, respectively.

In 1991, following the collapse of Soviet communism, the French platformist Libertarian Alternative (AL) took up the pro-organisationalist torch with A Manifesto for a Libertarian Alternative. Its aim was not only to help inject a hardline perspective into the growing anarchist movement, but to show other true revolutionaries that there was a way out of the dead end which state "socialism" had lead the workers into. It dealt with the situation which the modern working class found itself in under neo-liberalism: mass unemployment, casualisation, neo-colonialism, the enclosure of the people's "commons" down to the genetic level, the rise of the new technical middle class (computer specialists etc) and so forth.

It emphasised the need for a worker-driven revolutionary project that would aim to dismantle capitalism and all oppressions like that directed against women. Like the Platform, it also called for "statutory rules" in order that the anarchist organisation run efficiently and co-ordinate its external activities. These rules would be based on "a common identity" and strategies would be worked out by free discussion among all members.

In 1997, the Anarchist Communist Federation of Britain (ACF, later renamed the Anarchist Federation, AF), which had sprung into existence as a result of the Miner's Strike 1984-1985, published Beyond Resistance: a Revolutionary Manifesto for the Millennium. Updated in 2003, it described the crises faced by capitalism, both private and state, the rise of religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism. It stated boldly that "the old workers' movement is dead", that "the old shock battalions of our class, the miners, the dockers, the steelworkers" have been seriously weakened by neo-corporatism. It said that as a result, the revolutionary struggle was now "in the public space of the towns, and of society in general, rather than in the private space of the workplaces".

The Revolutionary Manifesto said a new post-Soviet coherence would have to be developed within the working class, which required the building of a new mass revolutionary movement. The anarchist organisation should: work within popular struggles; teach workers' history; ceaselessly agitate for revolution; host open militant debates; support the self-organisation of workers' struggles; attack Leninism and other elitist "revolutionary" sects; assure the independence of worker's organisations; and always be at the forefront of countering capitalist repression. Again, as in the Platform, the Revolutionary Manifesto argued for "unified operational decision-making" involving all members.

The organisation should be based on a libertarian structure, a high degree of internal education, collective responsibility for its actions, and must have a collective plan of action. The organisation must be linked into a network of workplace and community organisations that should form a united revolutionary force when the time is ripe. It should rotate and recall its delegates frequently, should develop among members a variety of skills and should allow no leadership to develop.

The ACF's earlier position paper, The Role of the Revolutionary Organisation, stated that the organisation rejected "the Leninist concept which springs from the managerial strata and the intelligentsia which seek to dragoon the workers into a new form of oppression: the worker's state". The anarcho-communist revolutionary organisation must be both "part of the class" and "in ideological advance of the class as a whole" while recognising that "it is not infallible and does not have all of the answers all of the time. It is transformed as the working class is transformed in the revolutionary process".

The ACF called for a class-based approach to a diverse range of anti-capitalist struggles that embraced gender, anti-racist, environmental, cultural and unemployed struggles, calling for the creation of a ìlibertarian frontî of all such movements within which the task of the revolutionary anarchist organisation was, in echo of the ORA, to "act as the driving force", not in the Leninist sense of the domination of such a front, but in the sense of acting as a catalyst of radical mass self-organisation.

In regions like North America, where atomistic affinity-groupings and not large-scale anarchist organising had been the rule outside of the trade unions, the dominance of the anti-organisationalist approach seems to have lead to the collapse of specific anarchist organisations from the late 1920s and early 1930s until the founding of specific anarchist communist organisations in the 1980s through the 2000s.

In regions like France, however, where mass organisations were the rule, self-described platformist organisations have remained an important influence on the specific anarchist movement to the present day, spreading in the 1970s across Europe and in the 1990s to Latin America, the ex-Soviet empire, the Middle East and Southern Africa. In the new millennium, the mainstream mass organisational tendency is again in the ascendancy.

As a result of the clear need for an organised anarchist fighting strategy to counter neo-liberalism, recent and current anarchist communist, platformist and platformist-influenced groups had or have a presence in countries like:

ARGENTINA:

• Libertarian Socialist Organisation (OSL).
• Libertarian Communist Collective (CCL).
• Rebel - Libertarian Socialism (Auca -SL), dissolved 2004.

ARMENIA & KAZAKHSTAN:

• Autonomous Action (AD), Armenian & Kazakh sections of Russian.

AUSTRALIA:

• Melbourne Anarcho-Communist Group (MACG), formerly the Anarchist Communist Initiative (ACI).

BRITAIN:

• Revolutionary Anarchist Workers (RAW), since dissolved.
• Anarchist Federation (AF).

BRAZIL:

• Gaucha Anarchist Federation (FAG), founded 1995.
• Cabocla Anarchist Federation (FACA), founded 2001.
• Committee for Popular Struggle (COMLUT), Bahia State.
• Libertarian Struggle (LL), Rio de Janiero.
• Anarchist Federation of Rio de Janiero (FARJ).
• Forum of Organised Anarchism (FAO), uniting especifista groups across Brazil.

BULGARIA:

• Federation of Anarchists of Bulgaria (FAB), claims direct descent from the Bulgarian Anarchist Communist Federation (BACF), founded in 1919.

CHILE:

• Libertarian Communist Organisation (OCL), formerly Anarcho-Communist Unification Congress (CUAC).

COSTA RICA:

• Anarchist Communist Organisation (OAC).

CZECH REPUBLIC:

• Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists - Solidarity (ORA-S), moved towards left-communism.
• Anarcho-Communist Alternative (AKA), 2003 ORA-S split.
• Federation of Social Anarchists (FSA).
• Direct Action - Anarcho-Communist Labour Organisation (PA-AKOP).

DENMARK:

• Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists (ORA), founded 1973, possibly defunct.

ESTONIA:

• Anarcho-Communist Federation (AKF).
• Estonian Anarcho-Communist Movement - "Anti!" (AKDE-A!).

FRANCE, BELGIUM & LUXEMBOURG:

• Libertarian Alternative (AL).
• Libertarian Communist Organisation (OCL).
• Libertarian Occitania (OL).
• Co-ordination of Anarchist Groups (CGA), split off the FAF in 2002.

FRENCH GUYANA (French-occupied):

• Libertarian Alternative (AL), Guyanese section of the French/Belgian/Luxembourgian AL.

GERMANY:

• Federation of German-speaking Anarchists (FdA).

GREECE:

• Federation of Anarchists in Western Greece (OADE), founded 2003.
• Makhnovist group.

IRAN:

• Nakhdar group (exiled in France & USA).

IRELAND:

• Workers' Solidarity Movement (WSM).
• Organise!, formerly the Anarchist Federation Ireland (AFI), which merged with the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation (ASF) and others.

ISRAEL/PALESTINE

• Anarchist Communist Initiative (ACI).

ITALY:

• Federation of Anarchist Communists (FdCA).

LEBANON:

• Libertarian Alternative (Al Badil Al-Taharoui).

MEXICO:

• Alliance of Libertarian Communists (ACL), founded 2004.

POLAND:

• Anarchist-Communist Organisational Platform (AKOP), founded 1997, possibly defunct.

PORTUGAL:

• Revolutionary Anarchist Communist Councils of Action for Autonomous Intervention (ACRACIA), possibly defunct.

RUSSIA:

• Platform Front (PF), founded 2004, since dissolved.
• Autonomous Action (AD).
• Federation of Anarcho-Communists (FAK), AD split.

SLOVAKIA:

• Direct Action - Anarcho-Communist Labour Organisation (PA-AKOP).
• Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists - Solidarity (ORA-S), moved towards left-communism.
• Anarcho-Communist Alternative (AKA), 2003 ORA-S split.

SOUTH AFRICA & SWAZILAND:

• Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation (ZACF), founded 2003.

SPAIN:

• Mutual Aid Libertarian Network (RLAM).
• Andalusian Anarcho-Communist Organisation (OACA).
• Libertarian Alternative (AL).

SWITZERLAND:

• Libertarian Socialist Organisation (OSL).

TURKEY & WESTERN OCCUPIED KURDISTAN:

• BlackRed (KaraKizil) group, "Makhnovist".
• Liberter, which together with BlackRed runs the Anarchist Communist Initiative (AKi).

UKRAINE & BELARUS:

• Autonomous Action (AD), Ukrainian & Belarussian sections of Russian AD.
• Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists "Nestor Makhno" (RKAS-NM).

UNITED STATES & CANADA:

• North-Eastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists (NEFAC).
• Northwest Anarchist Federation (NAF).
• Furious Five Revolutionary Collective (FFRC), Pacific northwest.
• Heatwave Communist Anarchist Federation (HCAF), Texas.

URUGUAY:

• Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU).
• Cimarron Libertarian Organisation (OLC).

The lead given by both new organisations like NEFAC and older ones like the FAU have inspired a tremendous growth-spurt of anarcho-communist organising marked by the Platform-influenced coherence of their critiques and practices. The new organisations have mushroomed despite the unfounded, hoary old anti-organisationalist claims that they were reviving anarcho-Bolshevism.

There is no real platformist international, because as we have shown, platformism is primarily an organisational tactic within anarchist communism, not an ideological strategic orientation in its own right, albeit one that is oriented towards the mass line. But the aforementioned organisations - networked together loosely as the International Anarchist Platform (IAP) - are increasingly working alongside other anarchist groups and federations around the world, especially the International Libertarian Solidarity (ILS) network, the unaligned anarcho-syndicalists and the anarcho-communists, and to a lesser extent, the International of Anarchist Federations (IFA). There is also the platformist Latin American Anarchist Coordination (CALA) that links organisations in Argentina (OSL), Brazil (FAG), Chile (OCL) and Uruguay (FAU).

This brief introduction to anarcho-communist organisation originated in the experiences of ILS member organisation the Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation (ZACF) of southern Africa (zabalaza means struggle), a platformist organisation that was founded in 2003. The ZACF, with its paper Zabalaza: a Journal of southern African Revolutionary Anarchism, was built on ground established in the late anti-apartheid struggle by the semi-clandestine Anarchist Revolutionary Movement (ARM) and Durban Anarchist Federation (DAF) of more than a decade before.

We believe strongly that the platformist approach is a vital contribution to rebuild the mainstream international anarchist communist revolutionary workers movement, to put the movement at the forefront of the fight against capital and the state, and to ensure that its revolutionary gains are vigorously defended.

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