The Fourth Wave, 1950–1989

Rearguard Actions in the Shadow of the Cold War and Decolonisation in Africa and Asia

 

The anarchist movement is widely seen as being at its lowest ebb in the 1950s, when capitalism was in a post-war boom, and the Cold War between the alternate capitalisms of the USA and USSR was at its height. To a large extent this is true. In 1955, the IWW was at its weakest in 50 years of existence, neo-fascism was still ascending in most of Latin America and the Mediterranean, Bolshevism was ascending in the Far East, the revolution in China had largely been lost to “Maoist” Marxist totalitarianism in 1949, and Korea was permanently carved into red and white totalitarian camps by 1953, closing the door on both revolutionary anarchist and libertarian reformist options.

This view, however, ignores the key role played in Cuba by anarchists within the Second Escambray Front, the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE), the state’s Cuban Labour Confederation (CTC), and even within Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement itself.89 The anarchists had their own organised presence, as well. The Federation of Anarchist Groups of Cuba (FGAC) had been founded in 1924 and reorganised as the Cuban Libertarian Alliance (ALC) in 1939; reconstituted in 1944, during the Cuban Revolution, the ALC had sections in all Cuban provinces, with wide influence in both the cities and in the rural areas, among industrial workers and plantation workers, miners and craft workers, fishermen and journalists, dockers and transport workers. The clandestine anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Labour (CGT) had been founded in 1931 under the US-backed Gerardo Machado dictatorship as an underground union federation, taking with it many sections of the formerly anarcho-syndicalist CNOC (founded in 1925) which had been transformed under Marxist leadership into the “yellow” Cuban Labour Confederation (CTC), run by the Batista regime. By a twist of fate, when Fulgencio Batista had been defeated at the polls in 1944 (before his dictatorial return in 1952) and his Marxist allies were kicked out of the leadership of the CTC, the vacuum was filled by the anarcho-syndicalists, meaning that at the time the Revolution erupted, they ran both the underground CGT and the official CTC.

Given that the Cuban Revolution remains, to this day, the touchstone of diverse tendencies arising from the New Left, the centrality of the anarchist movement to the anti-Batista Revolution, and the fraudulent, counter-revolutionary role played by the Castroites who militarised and impoverished Cuban society, destroyed free labour, and corporatised the unions along Fascist lines, building a traditional Latino strong-man personality cult around Fidel Castro, a close friend of Nazi sympathiser Juan Perón of Argentina and of Franco’s interior minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne (whose former bodyguard was the leader of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, “Triple-A,” death-squad), cannot be overemphasised—but is beyond the scope of this book to detail.90 Suffice to say that from 1961, when Castro established a USSR-backed populist dictatorship on Perónist/corporatist lines, the CGT was outlawed and many of its members either jailed or driven into exile while the CTC was absorbed into the state.

So the common suggestion that the Swedish Workers’ Central Organisation (SAC)91 was the sole remaining lighthouse of large-scale anarcho-syndicalism, until its withdrawal from the IWA in 1959, not only occludes the experience of the Cuban CGT and CTC, but ignores the fact that the Chilean IWW, the anarcho-syndicalist General Confederation of Labour (CGT), and the anarcho-syndicalist National Workers’ Unity Movement (MUNT) of Chile combined to establish the powerful Chilean Workers’ Central (CUT) in 1953, along with the Marxist and socialist unions. The CUT’s national leadership included nine socialists, four anarchists, two Marxists, two Christian democrats, an independent left-wing Christian, and even a right-wing Phalangist; its statement of aims and principles was, in fact, drawn up by three anarchists. Within the CUT, the anarchists controlled the maritime workers, shoemakers, and printers. The CUT built up membership among students, manual labourers, peasants, intellectuals, and professionals, and started making demands that were political and social, as well as economic. As a result, in 1956, the CUT declared a general strike and shut down the entire country for two days. The Paco Ibáñez regime offered to hand over power to the CUT, but the Marxist and socialist parties agreed to back down and end the strike, against the strong objections of the anarchists. The meddling left-wing politicians had sabotaged the first real chance to establish workers’ control in Chile and, in fact, Latin America.92

The view that this period saw the end of anarchist organisation also ignores other evidence of anarchist/syndicalist presence: the massive six-month strike by the FORA-led Ship-building Workers’ Federation (FTB) in Argentina in 1956, the country’s largest strike in the 20th Century; the five-month resistance by some 100,000 syndicalist-influenced workers on the docks, mines, and freezing plants of New Zealand in 1951;93 the guerrilla campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s in the southern Yunan province of China, near the border with Burma and Vietnam, carried out by the anarchist guerrilla Chu Cha-pei and modelled on those of the Makhnovists and RPAU;94 the continued anarchist domination of the FOL’s successor, the Bolivian Regional Workers’ Confederation (CORB) and its powerful Feminine Workers’ Federation (FOF) under the leadership of Petronila Infantes, which lasted until 1964;95 and the survival of the revolutionary syndicalist-influenced Industrial and Commercial Union of Southern Rhodesia (ICU yase Rhodesia) into the mid-1950s.96 Still, it was largely a period of hibernation, in which much of the syndicalism in evidence was “spontaneous” and divorced from its anarchist origins.

That started to change with developments like the founding of the hugely influential Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU) in 1956, an organisation that despite possessing a mere 500 official members built a 10,000–person Worker-Student Resistance (ROE) network and a syndicalist National Convention of Workers (CNT) that was 400,000 strong by 1972, and which set the scene for Latin American continental resistance in the years to come.97 Despite operating in the most difficult of conditions, anarchist guerrillas plagued the authorities in “Maoist” China and Francoist Spain, while there were reformist libertarian resistance organisations in Allied-occupied South Korea: the clandestine Autonomous Workers’ League (AWL) and the Autonomous Village Movement (AVM), both creations of the synthesist FFSB, the latter managing to maintain a twilight existence into the mid-1970s.98 Still, anarchism, and the working class as a whole, with which it has always been closely associated, was in dire straits. It was only resuscitated on a global scale by the “jolt” of 1968, which initiated a wave of working class resistance to the various forms of capitalism, with youth revolts in Czechoslovakia (bloodily repressed by a Warsaw Pact armed invasion), France (where 10 million striking workers almost toppled the Charles de Gaulle regime), Italy, Japan, Mexico (where the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s forces committed the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City against protesters), Pakistan, Poland, Yugoslavia, the US, West Germany, and in the former French colony of Senegal where the National Union of Senegalese Workers (UNTS) came close to seizing control of the state. In the old anarcho-syndicalist stronghold of Hunan province, China, a group called the Federation of the Provincial Proletariat (Shengwulian) emerged from the “Red Guards” that broke with both sides of the Chinese Communist Party, and upheld the grassroots, federalist traditions of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Petrograd Soviet of 1917. The jolt, spurred on by the neoliberal contraction of capital, which started dismantling the West’s welfare states and further eroded working class conditions in the Soviet bloc, unleashed a Fourth Wave of anarchist organisation and guerrilla warfare, centred primarily in the southern cone of Latin America, but also in the Middle East, a new field of anarchist operations.

During this wave, anarchism and the libertarian strains of autonomism that sprang up in Western Europe in the 1970s usually played second fiddle to Maoism and Trotskyism, with many Western anarchists influenced by the insurgent doctrines of the authoritarian Marxist rural guerrilla strategist Ché Guevara, rather than by the libertarian communist urban guerrilla strategist Abraham Guillén, whose ideas dominated in the Southern Cone of Latin America among the anarchists and “Trotskyists.”99 In Chile, the armed Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) had an anarchist faction which existed from its founding in 1965 until most of them left in 1967, and its military-political line was laid down by libertarian communist Marcello Ferrada-Noli. Several former MIR guerrillas were later involved in the post-Pinochet founding of the Anarcho-Communist Unification Congress (CUAC), later renamed the Libertarian Communist Organisation (OLC). Explicitly anarchist guerrilla organisations of this period in the global south included the FAU’s Revolutionary Popular Organisation 33 (OPR-33) of Uruguay, powerfully influenced by Guillén’s theories, and which defended the FAU-founded syndicalist National Convention of Workers (CNT), and other class formations during the Juan Bordaberry dictatorship; and Libertarian Resistance (RL) of Argentina, which defended the factories during the murderous Rafael Videla dictatorship.100

In Iraq, in 1973, the 300–strong Workers’ Liberation Group (Shagila) split from the Iraqi Communist Party because of its rapprochement with the quasi-fascist ruling Ba’ath Party—adopted a self-described “anarchist-communism” and waged a bitter campaign against Ba’athist secret policemen. Shagila’s entire membership illegally crossed into Iran in 1978 to help the indigenous Iranian anarchist movement, The Scream of The People (CHK), which had splintered off the “Maoist” splinter of the leftist Fedayeen, support the autonomous neighbourhood shorahs and worker’s kommitehs of the genuine Iranian Revolution which ousted the dictatorial Shah, the most recent revolution in which anarchist guerrillas played a role. The outstanding Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński—who personally witnessed 27 revolutions and coups in the “Third World”—was in Tehran in late 1979, and his book on the causes of the revolution, Shah of Shahs, refers to “opposition combat groups” including “anarchists” but in contradiction to his evidence, former Iranian Fedayeen guerrilla turned anarchist exile “Payman Piedar” claimed in a 2005 interview with me that this description was probably politically inaccurate. When the Ayatollah Khomeini’s French-backed counter-revolution rolled forward in mid-1979, most Shagila and CHK members were massacred, yet both organisations remain important for our understanding of anarchist praxis in that they developed a form of anarchism virtually in total isolation from the rest of the anarchist movement, giving an indication of the universal validity of revolutionary anarchism.101

In the global north, anarchist guerrilla organisations included: the Angry Brigade (AB) of Britain, which focused exclusively on sabotage; Direct Action (AD) of France, members of which later took a “Maoist” Marxist turn; Direct Action (DA) of Canada; the Movement 2 June (M2J) of Germany, several of whose members later joined the Red Army Faction (RAF); and the Anti-capitalist Autonomous Commandos (KAA) of the Basque country. Between 1979 and 1984, eight KAA militants were killed in action, 14 were jailed and others fled into exile in Latin America.102 An important pole of revolt in Europe in this period was a trio of guerrilla organisations that arose from the Spanish exile MLE’s Interior Defence (DI) organisation established in 1961 to assassinate Franco: the First of May Group (GPM) founded in 1965, the Iberian Liberation Movement—Autonomous Combat Groups (MIL-GAC) founded in 1971, and the Groups of International Revolutionary Action (GARI) founded in 1974, which ended its actions only several months before Franco died in 1975.103

Other important developments during the Fourth Wave were the re-establishment of the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC) in 1968, initially to deal with the issue of anarchist political prisoners in Francoist Spain, especially those condemned to death by garrotte, and the founding of the synthesist International of Anarchist Federations (IAF) at a congress in Italy the same year. The IAF built on the international network of the CIA, which had become moribund in approximately 1960. It drew in young militants and older groups, and played a key role in breaking the pro-Castro sentiment of sectors of the anarchist movement, though it was to lose its own Cuban section over this question. Its key section at the time was the FAF in France, but the 1968 congress drew in regional anarchist organisations from Argentina, Australia, Britain, Bulgaria (the exile Bulgarian Libertarian Union), the Cuban Libertarian Movement in Exile (MLCE),104 Italy, Japan, Mexico,105 Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the underground Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) of Spain and Portugal—as well as anarchist groups in Greece and Germany. In 1971, the IAF held its second congress in Paris under more difficult circumstances, but reaffirmed its libertarian communist principles. Later, the Cuban MLCE withdrew in a dispute over the IFA’s failure to adopt a hard line against the Castroist counter-revolution. Of particular interest are evidence of links with groups in regions where an anarchist presence would not normally be expected: a Neutralist Tribune from Vietnam; and an Anarchist Federation from China, which was perhaps based in Hong Kong. In the 1970s, in addition to its member organisations, the IFA had contacts with anarchist federations in Australia, Chile, Denmark, Baden (Germany), Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, Québec (Canada), Scotland, Sweden, and the underground Uruguayan Libertarian Alliance (ALU), the IWA affiliate that split from the FAU in 1963.

This mushrooming of anarchist organisations across the world was matched by the resurgence of anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalism, as well as autonomous worker organising that paralleled syndicalism in many ways, in varied circumstances. For example, there was the establishment of an IWW Marine Transport Workers’ Industrial Union (MTWIU) section in Sweden. One of the key spurs to the resurgence of anarchism was the end of the quasi-fascist regimes in Portugal in 1974, and Spain in 1975, which saw the dramatic re-emergence of the CNT, with a membership of 200,000. In this period, however, the real harbinger of things to come was the re-emergence of anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism within the Soviet Empire.106 This was evidenced by the presence, in 1970, of an anarchist pirate radio station in Russia; the anarchist Left Opposition (LO) group in Leningrad between 1976 and 1978; and the Movement of Revolutionary Communards (MRC) that sprang up in the same city between 1979–1982 in the wake of the LO’s suppression. In 1979, the Free General Workers’ Union (SMOT), the first Russian syndicalist-influenced organisation to emerge in decades, was founded, and the MRC affiliated to it. Also in 1979, anarchists at the State University of Dnepropetrovsk in the Ukraine were arrested for attempting to establish a Communist League of Anarchists. Meanwhile, changes were afoot in other Soviet satellite regimes of Eastern Europe with the foundation of the clandestine Polish Anarchist Federation (FA) in 1988, and the Anarcho-Syndicalist Federation (ASF) in Czechoslovakia in 1989, just before the Marxist regime there collapsed. This was followed by the founding in 1991 of the Anarchist Federation (AF) which defiantly renamed itself the Czech and Slovak Anarchist Federation (CSAF) after the division of the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Undoubtedly, there were anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist influences on unions elsewhere in this time. For example, syndicalism was an influence, although not predominant, on the Federation of South African Trade Unions (FOSATU), founded in 1979.107

The Fontenist Response: The “Vanishing Vanguard” advances Libertarian Communism

The ideas of the Platform, which were expressed in essence again by the Friends of Durruti, have maintained the anarchist hard line time and again, especially when the movement has been in crisis. Following the defeat of the Spanish Revolution in 1939, many anarchist militants were disillusioned and a deathly anti-revolutionary liberalism that focused on “personal liberation,” rather than class struggle, crept into the movement. In 1953, just after the anarchists had played a key role in initiating the Cuban Revolution, the French anarchist-communist militant George Fontenis wrote the Manifeste du communisme libertaire  (Manifesto of Libertarian Communism) for the platformist Libertarian Communist Federation (FCL). The FCL’s origins were clandestine, as the platformist tendency had arisen within the FAF in 1950, as a secret caucus called the Thought-Battle Organisation (OPB), of which Fontenis was the secretary. Fontenis later regretted this clandestinity, even though the synthesists had their own similar network within the FAF. The existence of the OPB only became known two years after it dramatically captured and overhauled the FAF at its 1952 Congress, transforming it into the FCL, with a minority of dissident synthesists leaving to reform the FAF the following year. The unaccountable secrecy of the OPB faction, which was apparently designed to attract the left flank of the French Communist Party, tarnished the debate over the Manifesto.

As with other platformist-style manifestos, the Manifesto caused an uproar, attacking the “synthesist” form of anarchist organising that included extreme individualism, alongside anarcho-syndicalism, and a mish-mash of libertarian ideas. It also rejected the usual Bolshevik theories of the dictatorship of the proletariat (actually the dictatorship of the party) and the two-stage revolution (actually the revolution put on hold forever). It affirmed anarchism as a class-struggle, revolutionary theory, and practice, and called for a disciplined “vanguard” to push the revolution forward. By vanguard, Fontenis did not mean the Marxist-styled, self-appointed “leaders” of the people, which he said “leads to a pessimistic evaluation of the role of the masses, to an aristocratic contempt for their political ability, to concealed direction of revolutionary activity, and so to defeat.”

Instead, the Manifesto‘s “vanguard” was defined as a revolutionary organisation tasked with “developing the direct political responsibility of the masses; it must aim to increase the masses’ ability to organise themselves.” As its final aim, this group of activists was “to disappear in becoming identical with the masses when they reach their highest level of consciousness in achieving the revolution.” It would work within established mass organisations like unions, educational groups, mutual aid societies, and others, and actively propagate its ideas. Its basic principles would be ideological and tactical unity, collective action and discipline, and a federal, rather than centralised, structure.

In Italy, in the 1950s, hardline “organisational” anarchists founded the Proletarian Action Anarchist Groups (GAAP) within the synthesist Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI), and were later expelled. The GAAP did not survive for long on its own, but in its brief existence, the GAAP united with Fontenis’ FCL and the North African Libertarian Movement (MLNA) of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, to form a Libertarian Communist International (ICL) that was more of a Western Mediterranean organisation, and which collapsed with the simultaneous suppression of the FCL in France and the MLNA in Algeria in 1957. Despite the disappearance of a specific platformist tendency in Italy, veterans of the GAAP and the memory of its practice formed the backbone of today’s Federation of Communist Anarchists (FdCA), founded in 1985.

Fontenis is a controversial character in France, but as an obituary states, he was “one of the leading figures in the postwar revolutionary movement in France. He played an important role in the reconstruction and reform of the French anarchist movement, and in supporting those fighting for Algerian independence in the 1950s and 60s; a prominent activist in May 68, he would go on to help (re)create a libertarian communist movement in the 1970s; he was also in later life one of the pillars of the Libre Pensée (Free Thought) movement; having joined the Union of Libertarian Communist Workers (UTCL) in 1980, he would subsequently become a member of Alternative Libertaire, and would remain a member until his death at the age of 90,” in 2010. While platformism in France suffered from the suppression of the FCL in 1957—until its ideas were revived in 1968 with the founding of the Anarchist Revolutionary Organisation (ORA) tendency that split from the FAF in 1970—it remained a minority tendency within the Western anarchist movement. Its strong anti-imperialist credentials, which had been proven in the Algerian Liberation War, meant that it did find a powerful resonance within the Latin American anarchist movement, where it would again manage to establish mass organisations.

The ORA called itself “a federation of territorial or trades groups and not a gathering of individuals” and its Organisational Contract (1970) stated that “anarchism repudiates all authoritarianism: that of pure individualism with its repudiation of society, and that of pure communism which seeks to ignore the individual. Anarchism is not a synthesis of antagonistic principles, but a juxtaposition of concrete, living realities, the convergence of which must be sought in an equilibrium as elastic as life itself.” While hailing the platformist principles of ideological and tactical unity, collective responsibility, rank-and-file decision-making, and libertarian federalism, the Organisational Contract stated that the ORA “has no pretensions to a rigid ideological unity generating dogmatism [or, what it named ‘stodgy uniformity’]. But on the other hand, it refuses also to be merely a motley collection of divergent tendencies, the frictions between which would inevitably lead to stagnation.”

An Addendum to the Organisational Contract stated that the ORA “is to be the driving force behind mass movements against authoritarian systems” and it appears, in part, to have achieved this. The ORA inspired the creation of platformist organisations with the same acronym in Denmark in 1973 (since dissolved), Britain in the mid-1970s (since dissolved), and Italy in 1976, the last of which became the FdCA of today in 1985. The French ORA became today’s French/Belgian Libertarian Communist Organisation (OCL) and its Libertarian Alternative (AL) splinter. The longevity of the FdCA and ORA/OCL/AL lines help put paid to the idea that platformism is a disguised intermediary stage in a rightward capitulation towards Bolshevism.

In Latin America, as stated, platformism renewed its strength. Known as especifismo (specifism), in the southern cone of the continent, it developed the most powerful challenge to state-capitalist revolutionism, especially after the 1956 founding of the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU), which harkened back to an earlier federation of the same name, between the years 1938 and 1941. In 1972, the FAU produced the seminal text of especifismo, Huerta Grande (Large Orchard) which stressed the need to avoid “voluntarism” driven merely by good will, in favour of a political line informed by a sound analysis of the real conditions in Uruguay. In rejecting the creation of a new theory of action from scratch, Huerta Grande automatically rejected bourgeois and “fashionable” analyses out of hand, in favour of revolutionary socialist analyses that were directly applicable to the situation in Uruguay. Those analyses would then be linked to the ideological objectives of the FAU, in transforming Uruguayan society by its political praxis, although “only through it [praxis], through its concrete existence, in the tested conditions of its development, can we elaborate a useful theoretical framework.”