Black Flag: Anarchist Review Summer 2022 issue now out

Black Flag: Anarchist Review Summer 2022 issue now out

From Anarchist Writers by Anarcho

The new issue of Black Flag: Anarchist Review is now available:

https://www.blackflag.org.uk

This issue includes articles on and by the Federalist wing of the First International, to mark the birth of revolutionary anarchism at the St. Imier Congress of the First International in 1872, as well as articles on and by Camillo Berneri and Errico Malatesta. We also discuss the formation of the 1922 syndicalist International Workers’ Association and include its first Information bulletin, itself an excellent introduction to the ideas of syndicalism. Malatesta is also subject of an article on national self-determination in light of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. We end by a long critical review of a Marxist collection about the First International, exposing its assumptions and prejudices.

Our next issue will be a special on Peter Kropotkin to mark the 180th anniversary of his death. This will include, along with rare articles, letters and new translations, accounts of his ideas by Rudolf Rocker, Camillo Berneri, Errico Malatesta and Gaston Level.

Contributions from libertarian socialists welcome on these and other subjects!

This issue’s editorial and contents are:

Editorial

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the 1872 St. Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association which saw the creation of revolutionary anarchism as a specific tendency. To mark this event, we present a summary of events leading up to the conference by Robert Graham plus a selection of the key documents of the federalist wing of the International which shows the actual politics of the libertarians in a clear light. With that in mind, we include a lengthy critique of a book by a Marxist academic seeking, but failing, to do justice to the Association 150 years on.

We then move onto the 100th anniversary of the founding of the syndicalist International Workers’ Association, a body still going strong today and uniting syndicalist unions and groups across the globe. We include its first Information Bulletin as it remains an excellent introduction to the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism.

Next, we move onto veteran Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta who was a member of the First International and saw the birth of the Third International and the syndicalist IWA. Ninety years after his death, we reprint an article on his attempts to fight cholera in Naples as well as a selection of articles by one of the greatest thinkers and activists the anarchist movement has ever seen. Wayne Price uses Malatesta’s writings on war and self-determination as inspiration for what anarchists should do as regards Russia’s imperialism in Ukraine.

Finally, we include texts by another Italian anarchist, Camillo Berneri who was assassinated by the Stalinists during the May Days in 1937. These texts are a taster for the first English-language collection of his texts due to be published by Freedom Press later this year, a collection we hope will show his importance for modern-day anarchists.

Our next issue, due out on the 11th of November, will be a Kropotkin special to mark his birth in 1842.

If you want to contribute rather than moan at those who do, whether its writing new material or letting us know of on-line articles, reviews or translations, then contact us:

blackflagmag@yahoo.co.uk

Contents

The Birth of Revolutionary Anarchism

                Reports and Resolutions

  • Report of the Brussels section
  • Resolution on Collective Ownership
  • Resolution on War
  • Resolution on Resistance Societies
  • Discussion on Resistance Societies

                Articles, Manifestos and Letters

  • The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future — César De Paepe
  • Organisation and General Strike — Michael Bakunin
  • Programme — International Alliance of Socialist Democracy
  • Policy of the International — Michael Bakunin
  • Manifesto — Parisian Sections of the International Workers’ Association
  • Letter to Albert Richard — Michael Bakunin

                Circular to all the Federations of the International Workers’ Association — Jura Federation

                The Revolutionary Movement in Italy — Michael Bakunin

                The Hague Congress

  • The Spanish Federal Council to the Belgian Federal Council in Brussels
  • Report of the Jura Federation Delegate — James Guillaume
  • General Conclusion from the Hague Congress — Pierre Fluse

                Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress — International Workers’ Association

                The St. Imier Congress of the International — Max Nettlau

                Documents of Working Class History: Syndicalist Methods Outlined in 1869

The Founding Congress of the International Workers Association

  • Information Bulletin of The International Working Men’s Association
  • Resolution on War and Militarism

The Anarchists versus the Plague: Malatesta and the Cholera Epidemic of 1884

  • The First Of May, Commonweal, 1 May 1893
  • Resistance Societies, May 1, 1897
  • Organisation, L’Agitazione, June 1897
  • Anarchism and Syndicalism, Freedom, November 1907.
  • An Anarchist Programme, Unione Anarchica Italiana, July 1920
  • On Bolshevism
    • The Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Anarchy
    • The Third International
    • What is the Third International
    • At Last! What is the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’?
    • The Authoritarian Psychosis of the Socialist Party
  • The First International
  • Anarchist principles as formulated in 1872 at the Congress of St. Imier

Camilo Berneri — Emma Goldman

  • State and Bureaucracy
  • Marxism and the Extinction of the State
  • The State and Classes
  • Abolition and Extinction of the State
  • Dictatorship of the Proletariat and State Socialism

Malatesta on War and National Self-Determination — Wayne Price

Review: Workers Unite! The International 150 years later

Parish Notices

Manifesto — Spanish Regional Federation of the International Workers’ Association

There are 23 Comments

They just become the almost-exclusive focus of boring leftist publications like Black Flag. Don't take my word for it - just look at the table of contents for any issue on their web site.

If you find material from the history of anarchism to be boring, then by all means do not read it.

But if you want to find out more about what anarchism is and has been, perhaps it won't hurt to read some of this material. Certainly reading the comments on this site from would-be anarchists has not impressed me with the level of knowledge about anarchism among many who use that label.

Coming from somebody who still can't get his head out of Trotsky's ass thirty years after he and the rest of the Revolutionary Socialist League suddenly declared themselves anarchists and joined Love & Rage (whose leader, Chris Gunderson, later declared himself a Maoist), I find that remark about "would-be anarchists" highly amusing.

oh, snap! although if we take Wayne at his word, he was some sort of anarchist before plunging into the trot rabbit hole. but having a pedigree starting with Love and Rage and continuing through NEFAC certainly calls into question an adherence to modern (not postmodern) forms of the circle-a rather than the same retrograde failures epitomized by Black Flag

Why do I challenge the political illiteracy of so many "would-be anarchists"? My article speaks to this issue.

When the Ukrainian-Russian war began, I defended the Ukrainian people on the grounds of national self-determination. I was immediately denounced as un-anarchist, on the grounds that anarchists did not support national self-determination, did not believe in the real existence of nations (countries, peoples), never supported "war," and that the concept of "national self-determination" was invented by Lenin.

As I have repeatedly demonstrated, not one of these statements (widely believed by "would-be anarchists" on this site) is true. My essay on Malestesta proves this. So do my other references in the past to other significant anarchists, from Bakunin and Kropotkin onwards, who supported wars of national self-determination. (This does not deny that there were also some anarchists who did oppose all national self-determination.) It does not prove that the anarchist supporters of national wars of self-determination were correct. Only that they existed and were important in our history.

And that a great many people who regard themselves as anarchists are unaware of this fact. So instead of denouncing me for not having always been an anarchist, you should discuss these real issues.

does it bother anyone else when people like Wayne use terms like "would-be" to describe other anarchists who disagree with them? his know-it-all attitude toward what *real* anarchism is or what *real* anarchists believe is an affront to all anarchists who understand that there's not doxology or orthopraxis in anarchism. there are different (sometimes conflicting) tendencies, but nobody gets to declare that those anarchists with a different idea of anarchism are "would-be" or somehow not really anarchists (except the so-called anarchy-capitalists -- we can all agree that they are completely phony). there are anarchists who stop being anarchists when they engage in actions or support the actions of others that run counter to anarchist ideas and principles -- unless, like Wayne said before on this site, they have no principles. at least temporarily. like when an anarchist votes or campaigns for some electoral charade, that anarchist isn't acting as an anarchist, but as a (temporary) non-anarchist. like when Wayne acts as a shill for the Ukrainian state and its military by supporting "the Ukrainian people" fighting the Russian invaders.

does it bother anyone else when people like Wayne invoke the ideas and actions of people from a century ago to bolster his perspective in a world that has gone through a few changes in the past 100 years? "national self-determination" means something different in the post-WWII world (with all those anti-colonial movements subject and subordinate to the logic of the Cold War) than it did during the era just before and just after WWI; international relations have irrevocably shifted to "national self-determination" always having a nation-building component that might have been inherent (my view) before WWII, or might have been unimportant (Wayne's view).

what is clear is that nobody here ever said that Lenin "invented" the idea. i have said several times that Lenin revamped the idea of *anti-imperialism* (maybe Wayne really believes that they are the same thing, but they aren't) to make it suit the policies of the Bolshevik state, and that he got it backwards when he wrote that imperialism was the highest form of capitalism. the analogy that's most relevant here is when stalinists in the 1930s called themselves *anti-fascists* to obscure their political program; in the era of the New Left, stalinists called themselves *anti-imperialists* to obscure similar programs of state-building along the lines of Tito, Ho, Castro, Hoxha, and whoever else was flavor of the month. that kind of Anti-Imperialism is the legacy of Lenin (and of course Stalin), but is distinct from the anti-imperialism of Malatesta (for example) or that of the various other anarchists who engaged in anti-colonial struggles.

does it bother anyone else that Wayne presents opponents to his completely outdated analyses as ignorant of the actions and ideas of anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist anarchists? as i, for one, have said all along, there have been anarchists engaged in such struggles, but that they all predated WWI, and their actions and ideas were superseded by the Cold War. history is not static, and neither is anarchist theory and practice. Wayne would prefer to have anarchists continue to believe that the legacies of Malatesta and Bakunin in their national struggles of subordinate people phases to be frozen in time. as if Malatesta never wrote anything about imperialism in the 20th century, or Bakunin never said anything about internationalism after he became an anarchist and abandoned the pan-Slavic ideas of his earlier years.

there's a difference between being ignorant of history and having a different understanding of history. there's a difference between being an anti-militarist and being a pacifist. there's a difference between being an anti-imperialist and an Anti-Imperialist. there's a difference between the anarchism of 1922 and the anarchism is 2022. but Wayne insists there isn't. who's he kidding?

is it pompous and obnoxious of him? certainly!

does it "bother" me? nah ... nothing we bicker about here matters much imo.

it's just for fun and maybe sharpening analysis but usually not even that haha

(1) You attack me for supposedly denying the "anarchism" of those who disagree with me. But, as you know, I have been repeatedly denounced for supposedly not being a real anarchist, since real anarchists supposedly do not believe in wars, nations, and national liberation. In your own post, right here, you call me "a (temporary) non-anarchist. like when Wayne acts as a shill for the Ukrainian state..."

(2) You argue, as you have before, that the world has so changed that support for national self-determination (held by Malatesta and other anarchists before WW I) is no longer relevant. To which I respond that, yes, there have been great political changes but that we still live under world capitalism, imperialism,, nations, some nations being oppressed by others, and so on. The war in Ukraine is happening now, not in 1912. The Kurds are being attacked by Turkey right now, which is not before WW I.

(3) You point out that " Anti-Imperialism is the legacy of Lenin (and of course Stalin), but is distinct from the anti-imperialism of Malatesta (for example) or that of the various other anarchists who engaged in anti-colonial struggles." Right. The anti-imperialism and support for national self-determination of the Marxist-Leninists and the nationalists is not the same as that of revolutionary anarchists. I am glad we agree on this point.

(4) You write that " anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist anarchists.... have been...engaged in such struggles, but that they all predated WWI, " Oh really? If I believed that, I would have to conclude that anarchists stopped opposing imperialism and aggression once WW I was over! However, this is not remotely true. See my essay on how French anarchists supported the Algerians in their war for national liberation against French imperialism (after WW II).

(5) You end by insisting that the world has changed, that anarchism as a movement and set of ideas must also change. You accuse me of not recognizing this. I accept that there have been enormous social,, economic, and political changes since the mid-1800s. But I maintain that the basic system, with its class exploitation, its national states, its patriarchy, and its alienation from nature, has NOT changed--not fundamentally. It still needs a world revolution of the working class and all the oppressed, as Bakunin thought. This is our difference.

I'm sick of your lexicon Wayne, all those industrial communal terms which reak of power hierarchies and sheepish obedience.
I prefer the term The Multiple Doctrines of HiveThink, starting after the clan and entering human history as the tribe and through religious empires, medieval monarchies, capitalism, communism and all the quaint little gatherings of timid peoples forming sattelite colonies, all of them in hive thought.

Sweat Watcher is just "sick" of my "lexicon." My terms "reak of power hierarchies."

But I use these terms to describe the reality of a society which is organized in power hierarchies. You may prefer some other way of describing modern society, but they would only cover up the stink.

temporary is a whole lot different from "would-be" and you know it. you've been called fake precisely because you've consistently been a shill for the Ukrainian state and its military, completely ignoring the tactic of revolutionary defeatism toward the Russian invaders, and never once calling into question the Ukrainian state's outlawing of emigration for military-age men. all you can do is offer support for some idiotic notion of "national self-determination" that's opposed to the Russian invasion -- as if the Ukrainians don't have a strong state and a robust international economy based on the usual exploitation of the working class and oppressed.

i strongly disagree that nations oppress other nations. what they do is compete with each other on an international stage (through the UN, NATO, and other alliances). sure, some nations are weaker militarily or economically, but they all have the same standing in terms of how/why/where they exploit their own workers and immigrants. because capitalism and imperialism. that the Kurds want their own state (like many other ethic minorities who are second and third class citizens in the countries that claim their territories) is fine for them. they are allowed to do what they want without my support. i'm not fighting against their desires for their own states, but i'm not going to campaign for them, or dare to declare that their struggles are fully compatible with the internationalist principles of anarchism. you want to support "the Kurds" (as if there were no conflicts internal to the struggles for Kurdish liberation), knock yourself out the same way you support "the Ukrainian people" (as if there were no conflicts between Ukrainian workers and bosses). but since the Ukrainians (at least) have their own government with full international recognition, your support of "the Ukrainian people" has always amounted to support for the Ukrainian state. i'm not impressed with your sub-Leninist Anti-Imperialism.

*some* French anarchists supported the FLN. others did not. in fact, the war in Algeria was a focal point of schisms and sectarian bickering among French anarchists that still echoes today, and was far more destructive to Francophone anarchism in the late-50s/early-60s than the Rojava nonsense has been among international anarchists over the past 20 years.

if you really believe that international capitalism and colonialism and imperialism haven't changed fundamentally between 1884 (the Scramble for Africa and the beginnings of hypercapitalist colonialism) and 1945 (the end of WWII and the beginnings of decolonization), then you haven't read enough on the subject of new international political alliances/alignments after successful national liberation struggles that brought the native bourgeoisies into political and economic power in the so-called third world during the Cold War. imperialism and national self-determination and anti-imperialism all look a hell of a lot different today than they did a hundred years ago.

and you have to recognize that you're constantly using the appeal to authority by referencing and citing Bakunin and Kropotkin and Malatesta. it's a pity you don't think that your arguments can stand -- or in this case fall -- on their own. again, very unimpressive.

A few responses: (1) I am only for "revolutionary defeatism" by the Russian working population and military ranks. I am not for "defeatism" by the Ukrainians, whose side I want to win their just war of defense.

(2) You "strongly disagree that nations oppress other nations." Well, you live in your world and I live in the real world. This does not deny that there are class splits within every nation, which internationally are reflected in forms of imperialism.

(3) You believe "international capitalism and colonialism and imperialism have... changed fundamentally." The key word here is "fundamentally." In fact you apparently believe that there is no more "colonialism and imperialism." Again: you live in your world.

(4) So I am the one who is constantly appealing to anarchist authority? If you look back on previous exchanges on this list, you will find a great many posters who denounce me for not being a real anarchist because I believe in the existence of nations, support national self-determination, accept the possibility of just wars of the oppressed, support the oppressed in war while opposing their ruling class and state, etc. No real anarchist would say these things, I was repeatedly told. So, I responded by citing anarchists from Bakunin and Malatesta onwards who did support all these. In fact, I have "won" this argument and not even you raise it again.

But now I am denounced for citing previous anarchists! My anarchism is built on the work of previous activists and thinkers and does not stand on today's whims alone.

How disappointing that thecollective deleted my comment.
What I had said was that Wayne's use of so many logical fallacies in so few paragraphs is amazing. I admit defeat in the face of straw man, imputation, appeal to authority, plus deflection, deliberate misreading, and general incoherence.

The dissolution of Leviathan begins in automous mimicry as a learning tool. Infant humans learn to recognize emotions and empathize with others.
These daysWayne, in the 21stC, there is no ideal society, they are sick from the foundations upwards, and all revolutions by force and arms are now futile recuperative operations for corporate interests. Get onto the page Wayne.
Mimicry induced emotional contagion as a neuro-cognitive teaching method is one way of producing rapid social change in mass values and actions.

Le Way writes, "These daysWayne, in the 21stC, there is no ideal society, they are sick from the foundations upwards, " I fully agree. From this Le Way apparently concludes, " and all revolutions by force and arms are now futile recuperative operations for corporate interests.

One does not follow from the other.

Anarchy is a god of blood and sacrifice not of ceremony and ritual. Your age has grown you too far from us, Wayne Price. A time of tribulation has come. A test is at hand. The final test.

In a dream Anarchy did come to me and it was a shape. And I did fall on my knees in terror and hide my eyes unless the fierceness of its face struck me dead. Anarchy told me all required! The New Anarchy Covenant will welcome true anarchists into the dark embrace of Anarchy in the first night of their fiftieth year. No longer will their old flesh pollute the new anarchy.

Praise Anarchy!

This is not a joke. This is a warning. The olds had their chance and they either tried and made it worse or did nothing and made it worse.

Anarchy requires blood. However, since we are feeling generous, will appease anarchy by first reappropriating your wealth for the New Anarchy Covenant.

Expect us.
PRAISE ANARCHY!

I'm a gentle type, I don't know if I have the mettle for this powerful force you are invoking! If it ever gets to the blood sacrifice stage, could I start with mouse sacrifices and work my way up to hampsters, and still be considered an anarchist?

Lol, we all know that "rebel" , "freedom of speech", "liberty" are catch phrases for corporate Randian mavericks, jeez, every corporate "anarchist" wears blue denim jeans for those publicity shots, see Elon Musk.
The question should be --- Why does the passage of time and the evolution and metamorphosis of human values and conditions make political history a boring and irrelevant read?
Its like reading a newspaper from the 19th century to get a weather report.

"rebel" , "freedom of speech", "liberty"

Nobody used any of those words. Who are you even talking to? You seem very confused with what an anarchist is and what website you're on if you think Rand or Musk are at all a part of it. Breathe slowly, 14:55.

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