Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism

</image> <label>Author</label> <label>Illustrator</label> <label>Published on</label> <label>Publisher</label> <group layout="horizontal"> <header>Publication order</header> <label>Previous</label> <label>Next</label> </group> </infobox>Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism is a 2013 book by Michael Schmidt (published by AK Press) that covers an 155 year history of anarchism from 1868 to 2013. It presents anarchism as occurring in 5 'waves', focusing on new unique issues in response to technological, geopolitical and cultural changes.

Summary

The First Wave, 1868–1894: The Rise of the Broad Anarchist/Syndicalist Movement in the Era of State and Capitalist Expansion

Events covered include the:

The Second Wave, 1895–1923: Consolidation of Syndicalism and Specific Anarchist Organisation in a Time of War and Reaction

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While the self-described anarchist/syndicalist movement in Russia, barring the critical exception of the PACF and the anarchist tendency within the Kronstadt Soviet, failed to grasp the bull of power by the horns—in part because they never managed to achieve critical mass among the popular classes as in the Ukraine, the Makhnovist strategy of combining flexible military daring with a libertarian praxis of pluralistic internal democracy, and submitting the whole to civilian plenums, thereby liberating (for a time at least) a shifting territory with some 7 million inhabitants, made the Ukrainian Revolution the most holistic of the anarchist social experiments, despite the dire and continually-shifting circumstances of the war, which prevented it from achieving the continuity of the later Spanish Revolution. Both the Ukrainian and Russian Revolutions, defended so bravely by the anarchist forces from the assaults of the imperialists, indigenous nationalists, and pro-monarchist Whites, were mercilessly put down by the Bolsheviks. By the time the Global Revolt finally collapsed, with the last gasp of the failed 1918–1923 German Revolution, during which libertarian councillist praxis—the Munich Soviet in particular—had been tested and found wanting, the world was a totally changed place. The First World War and the Spanish Influenza epidemic had wiped out an entire generation, the Conservative counter-revolution was in full swing, the Chinese, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had collapsed, and had been replaced by a constellation of fragile nation-states in which right-wing nationalism ran rampant, and technological innovations like steamships, tanks, aircraft, the telephone, and the automobile had shrunk the world. All of this took place while Fascism and statist Marxist “communism” (or, rather, authoritarian state-capitalism) were deluding the working class with false alternatives to capitalism.

And yet, the Second Wave transformed anarchism into a truly global phenomenon, with sizeable mass anarchist organisations fighting the class war from Costa Rica to China, Portugal to Paraguay, and Sweden to South Africa. Furthermore, global anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism was drawn together in the International Workers’ Association (IWA), founded in Berlin in 1922, a reformation of the libertarian wing of the First International, and representing between 1.5 million and 2 million revolutionary workers globally.72 In 1922, the IWA’s largest sections were the Italian Syndicalist Union (USI) with half a million members, the Argentine FORA, with some 200,000 members, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) of Portugal, with 150,000 members, the Free Workers’ Union of Germany (FAUD), with 120,000 members, and the Committee for the Defence of Revolutionary Syndicalism (CDSR) in France, which had taken 100,000 members away from the now irrevocably reformist CGT, which had peaked at 2.5–million members, most of them white-collar workers far removed from the blue-collar origins of the CGT (one of the ironies of this period is that when the CDSR founded the CGT Unitaire (CGTU) in 1921 as a revolutionary rival to the CGT, the new federation attracted Senegalese sailors who had abandoned the Marxists in 1919 after a failed strike). Minor anarcho-syndicalist organisations present at the founding of the IWA came from Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Norway, and Sweden, as well as the Chilean IWW (while most other branches of the IWW were closely sympathetic, they never joined the new international).

The Third Wave, 1924–1949: The Anarchist Revolutions Against Imperialism, Fascism, and Bolshevism

Events covered include the:

The Fourth Wave, 1950–1989: Rearguard Actions in the Shadow of the Cold War and Decolonisation in Africa and Asia

Events covered include the:

The Fifth Wave, 1990–Today: The Anarchist Movement’s Resurgence in the Era of Soviet Collapse and Neoliberal Hegemony

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External Links

Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism at anarchyinaction.org