Covering the first democratic elections in 1994

Freedom at last! At a voting station in the rural Transkei, 1994

[Extract from A Taste of Bitter Almonds]

Northern Transkei, 30 April 1994

Griqualand East against the mountains and hilly Pondoland towards the coast are the heartland of the PAC, and boasts an entrenched radicalism built on the ashes of the Pondoland Revolt of 1960, the last significant black revolt before the 1976-1977 uprising, during which the Pondo résistants ‘went to the mountain’ – a physical and symbolic gathering in their mountain fastnesses, where, in order to speak, one put aside any trappings of leadership and spoke as one among equals, a tradition that resonates strongly with me. I overnight each night at the Mount Currie Inn just outside of Kokstad, with its old-world heavily starched sheets and square dinner of roast beef, potatoes and vegetables, then each morning venture forth again, deeper and deeper into Pondoland – either along the N2 highway which runs paved, yet narrow and unfenced, along the ridge of the emerald-green hills from Kokstad, forcing drivers to dodge wandering cattle, through Mount Ayliff, Rhodes, Mount Frere, Tina Bridge, Qumbu, Sidwandweni and down to the old Transkei capital of Umtata; or into the more arid far north-east, along the tarred R56 and then the untarred R396 in the shadow of the Drakensberg – and start exploring the dirt tracks spidering off to the sides, searching for evermore remote voting stations.
Wearing the flak-jacket has become uncomfortably sweaty; on the very first day, I stopped at the roadside and, watched by a lazy cow chewing the cud, removed it and dumped it in the boot. The open, polite and even rather friendly engagements between black and white at the polls make me feel I’ll not need to put it on again. The voting has been extended for three days because many rural voting stations still lack basic materials – ballot papers, ink to mark who has voted, etc – and I suspect deliberate sabotage by the government of the PAC because similar problems are not being reported on the radio from the hastily-erected voting stations in IFP territory. The roads are full of people travelling to the voting stations. I throw my doors open and take on board as many as I can carry. I ask them who they are voting for, and with a fierce pride they tell me, ‘My vote is my secret!’, showing that at least the notion of the anonymity of the ballot has taken root; I laugh and tell them to incredulous looks that I’ve just voted PAC.
Today, on the last day of extended voting, I’m venturing ever further into the foothills of the Drakensberg. The dirt road I have taken is rocky and has obviously long last since been graded, with deep eroded channels cross-cutting it and slowing my progress. The white hired car is muddied up to eye level and coated in a thick layer of dust. The road snakes along the contours of the hills, quadrupling travelling time, then sinks down into a river valley; it’s a long time since I’ve long last seen a road sign and I’ve totally lost my bearings. I cross an old concrete bridge and wave at the women washing in the crystal waters which ripple over the boulder-strewn riverbed; they beam at me and wave back. The road climbs deeper into the hills; then suddenly the terrain changes, flattening out into a desolate and rocky plain, with the Drakensberg, which the Basotho call the Maluti, looming low on the horizon. I drive for what seems like an hour through this Martian landscape, amazed that I can see not a single living thing – and there, ahead of me, like a mirage, stands a lonely voting station. It is a simple school: a single long, brick classroom building, three thatched rondavels, and a school bell, suspended from a rickety and weathered wooden frame several metres tall. The Independent Electoral Commission’s blue-and-white plasticised canvas banner hangs between the bell tower and a stand of euphorbia cactus, the only green anywhere in sight.
Sitting in a row on a large and ancient log from a forest that appears extinct, are three Basotho women, wrapped in their traditional colourful blankets and headdresses, thoughtfully puffing on their slender clay pipes. I draw the car to a halt and climb out. White faces must be a rarity in these parts, but long-haired men are another thing altogether: the women take one look at my sweep of waist-length hair and literally fall off the log guffawing and hullaballooing! I am seized by a fit of reciprocal laughter; doubling up, I hang onto the car door for support, tears of laughter streaming down my face as the three women hoot, roll about on the ground and slap their thighs in delight. 

Underberg District, Natal, 1 May 1994

The elections are over, and the ballots are now being counted, but the mood of jubilation is at an all-time high in expectation of an ANC landslide, which will signal the defeat of apartheid. My task is done and I have the weekend to recouperate, so I decide to head off to the Splashy Fen music festival in the Drakensberg outside Underberg. The car is so dirty it’s hard to tell it was ever white; my flak-jacket lies forgotten in the boot. I’m tired, but invigorated by all I have seen, though I’ve barely read a newspaper this week and have no way of telling how my copy, filed before deadline at 6 pm each day to a dictate typist on the news desk, has been used.  
On the side of the road I’m driving along, at the junction of a farm road, I see a young black woman standing, waiting for a lift. I stop for her and she climbs in hesitantly. She smells subtly yet pungently of wood smoke, the definitive scent of poor rural folk, and is not accustomed to speaking in the white man’s tongues, so we travel in silence. Eventually, she gathers the words – and the courage – to speak: 

‘You’re not going to murder me, are you?’ 

Snow starts to fall, mottling the black mountain peaks with white. 

[ENDS]

My favourite passage in A Taste of Bitter Almonds

Excelsior, Free State, November 2007 

For me, the great untold story of South Africa is how we are, despite three-and-a-half centuries of  segregation, almost all interrelated. I’ll never forget a coloured girlfriend of mine, tall, svelte and graceful, though she lived in a gangland ghetto, telling me how in her youth, if anyone in her family bore a child that was fair of skin and eye, the baby would be passed on to the white side of the family because they knew that as a ‘white’ the child stood a greater chance of leading a privileged life. What stands out for me in her tale is not only the emotional sacrifice of parents willing to surrender their child in the hope of giving it a better future, but that as late as the 1970s, some interracial families still maintained links – no doubt very clandestine – between their differently-toned wings, despite anti miscegenation laws aggressively enforced by  the police. These linkages, which connect the South African population across all its hues by bloodline, is are more often obscured and ignored than admitted, let alone celebrated. Those who crossed the race line were treated as ‘race- traitors,’, their audacity carrying an indelible stain of shame which endures to this day. 
Though as an anarchist I am no fan of bourgeois democracy, one has to recognise the good when one sees it, and giving credit where it is due, and James Selfe, an MP of the liberal Democratic Alliance (DA), has submitted to Parliament what I think is a brilliant Private Member’s Bill: under the rules, individual Members of Parliament are allowed to submit such Bills  if given the green light by the Speaker. Selfe’s Bill, if passed into law, would see all convictions under apartheid laws that would be unconstitutional today expunged from the records. The positive effects of such an Act are easy to underestimate. Not only will it affect prominent figures such as hugely respected veteran journalist Max du Preez, who would have his ‘terrorism’ conviction for merely writing articles expunged, allowing him at long last to travel to countries such as the United States, but I imagine that literally thousands of poor blacks, coloureds, Indians and indigenous people whose careers have been stymied by their ‘criminal’ pass law violations back under apartheid, would be able to breath a sigh of relief. 
But of all the iniquitous laws on the apartheid books, none was quite as pernicious and as sure to injure the human heart as the Immorality Amendment Act of 1950. Designed to achieve the government’s aim of maintaining white race- purity, it tore families apart and nipped great love affairs in the bud. I well remember my former Sunday Times Durban Bureau colleague George Mahabeer,who had given up the his rock ‘n roller lifestyle as guitarist for The Flames to settle down with Lily and raise their girls, telling me tragic tales of storieshe’d covered for the old Golden City Post about Immorality Act trials, of Security Branch raids on people’s bedrooms in their most intimate moments, of the callous display of underwear as evidence of ‘immorality’ in the courts – stories of heartbreak and suicide.
Sadly, and for reasons I fail to fathom, the Speaker of Parliament, an ANC member,  did not allow Selfe’s Bill to be debated and possibly passed into law. It is a huge missed opportunity and as the ‘crime’ that cut closest to the human condition, of lovers pitted against the state, I wanted to investigate Immorality Act violations up close and personal. And yet, when I trawled through the newspaper archives, I found precious few reported cases, for convictions visited ras-skande, race- shame, not only on the lovers, but on the state which convicted them as well, for it showed the permeability of apartheid’s social walls, and the failure of the racial state to contain the power of love. Yet the trials were so traumatic and personal, that unlike political trials, where the accused had the support of a movement fighting for democracy and where those convicted of ‘crimes’ wore their convictions as badges of pride, the star-crossed lovers had had their hearts torn off their sleeves, and few cared to speak of the pain.
The one landmark case that I do find in the archives, one that has made it into the displays at the Apartheid Museum too, is the one which cost the country some of its top talent when world-renowned anthropologist Professor John Blacking, classified white, of Johannesburg was convicted in 1969 of having an affair with a young Dr Zurena Desai, classified Indian. A photograph taken outside the court shows a handsome couple in tailored winter coats, but their eyes are averted. Blacking and Desai emigrated to Britain to escape the torment, but their love did not survive the trauma of the race stigma and of exile. Blacking excelled in his field, yet Desai dropped off the radar and I am not sure where to begin searching for her. 
But there is another way into the story, and it lies in the small Free State town of Excelsior. In those dark times – ‘evil days with stupid laws’, as one white town official from that era potently recalls it for me on the phone – the dorp of Excelsior, in what was then called the Orange Free State, with a white population of only 7, 000 and a tiny township of about 150 homes, became the most infamous town in the world.
Five white men, staunch pillars of the community from solid National Party families, appeared in the dock alongside 14 black women, accused of having broken apartheid’s race-sex law. The world’s press had a field day over the hypocrisy of the men, and the scandal flickered across TV screens in faraway Britain. But back in Excelsior, there was no TV. Instead, the dolorous tones of the pipe organ inside the Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK, the Dutch Reformed Church) echoed the gloomy sermons preaching of shame.  I’m an atheist, but as in other small towns, it is to the church that I turn to find a starting- point for my investigation and get some direction as to whom to speak to about the old scandal. I chat in Afrikaans to the woman organist about the history of the church and its organ, and then about the trial that put the town on the map. Having established a rapport, she is not shy to direct me to the home of congregant Magrietha Bezuidenhout, who lives nearby in a house as neat as a pin, with a small, well-maintained garden. 
I call at the gate, introduce myself with old-school style, using the formal term of address ‘U’, for ‘you’, as I was taught to do as a boy. Bezuidenhout is clearly not pleased to have me there; I am an unwelcome guest, summoning up ghosts from a past she would rather had remained buried with her late husband Adam, a farmer, whom she committed to the earth seven years ago. But her Christian hospitality forbids her from turning me away, so she lets me inside her voorkamer, the front room of most traditional Afrikaner homes in which guest are entertained. The place is immaculate, with polished wooden floors and furniture, and china in glass display cabinets with carved claw-and-ball feet. Bezuidenhout sits ramrod straight with tension in her chair, her steel-grey hair neatly coiffed and her eyes unblinking as she stares at me through round spectacles that are twenty years out of date. Gently on my side, suspiciously on hers, we delicately negotiate her story; she doesn’t want to say anything at all, but we soon agree that I’ll be allowed to convey the main points she wants to get across, because of her children.  
There was a time, almost four decades ago, when the outside world – in a cacophony of flashbulbs and TV cameras – callously intruded on her placid life as a farmer’s wife, whose days were spent eyeing the eroded horizon for signs of rain. For Magrietha’s heavy-drinking husband was among the white accused in the Immorality Trial. Both he and one of his co-accused, a butcher named Calitz who had fathered a child with one of his black workers, tried to take their lives. Calitz died, but Adam Bezuidenhout surviving the suicide attempt, shooting his eye out in the process. Nursed back to health by a forgiving Magrietha, he sobered up and rebuilt his life as a good husband, father and farmer. Still, four decades later, the aftermath of Adam’s indiscretion is clearly etched in the lines around Bezuidenout’s pursed mouth. She is very proud of her children, that they succeeded despite the stain on their father’s name – for it is this last that concerns her most, that her children can make their way in the world untainted by the sins of their father. 
Maintaining her composure through sheer force of will, she tells me: ‘It’s very heartbreaking. I don’t want to reopen old wounds. It’s all in the past now. As a Christian, God has helped me to make peace with it.’ But with some 12 children having resulted from those illicit liaisons 37 years ago, true peace has proven elusive for those residents of Excelsior with tangled bloodlines. On the phone, local farmer Johnny van Riet, the son of Alan Paton’s friend Jean Baptist van Riet, who died last year aged 101, tells me that back in 1970/71, shamefaced residents of Excelsior changed their vehicles’ OXE number- plates to OT for Thaba’Nchu – anywhere but the town that had become nicknamed ‘Sexcelsior’.  
The township population of Excelsior’s township, Mahlatswetsa, has now swelled to about 25, 000, while the dorp’s white population has dwindled. Most of the accused are long gone. But some, like Calitz’s former lover and their child, still dwell there. And so does the pain. Strangely, the Excelsior trial – which was halted in mid-stream by Orange Free State attorney-general Percy Yutar in order to try to stop the media circus – did little to curb cross-race sexual relations in subsequent years.  
I travel to Mahlatswetsa, just outside of town, where I ask librarian Michael Tladi where I can find Senki Mokgethi, on whose mother Corina the writer Zakes Mda based the character Poppie for in his 2002 book The Madonna of Excelsior. The book, which conflates Corina’s true story with the 1970s trial, is in great demand in the township, says Tladi, but is barely spoken of in the white dorp. In the 1970s, Senki’s father was a post office worker who came home twice a year. Corina worked as a maid in the home of a local white man who let out a room to an Afrikaner policeman. When Senki was about 12 or 13 years old, Corina would give him letters to take to the white policeman. The man in turn gave him money for his mother.  
‘I realised something was going on when my sister Kedimetse was born in 1978,’ Mokgethi, now 44, tells me when I find him at home, after a long negotiation to get him to speak. ‘She was a white person, with light skin and straight hair. Lots of people here had relationships with white guys. Excelsior was a poor town. Most of our men were working in the mines, and there were all these women around who were suffering. These white guys used an opportunity. It was abuse. If you love someone, you marry them.’ But racially mixed marriages were outlawed in 1949 and all sexual relations between the races the following year; the black women and their illegitimate babies were abandoned. ‘That white guy who abused my mother, where is he? The last time I saw him was in 1978 during my mother’s expectancy. I heard he had died, that he had committed suicide.’  
People convicted under the Immorality Act are still, outrageously, regarded legally as criminals and socially as outcasts. I agree to put Mokgethi in touch with Zakes Mda, who is now lecturing in the US. Mda’s book and a 2004 TV retrospective also ensured the pain never went away, Mokgethi tells me bitterly: ‘Some people don’t think before they say things.’

[ENDS]

Upcoming Translations

My manipulation of an image illustrating Japanese anarchism from a Spanish-language anarchist journal

With Black Flame already published in English and German and with Spanish and French in the pipeline, and Cartography already published in French and English, there are more translations on the horizon: discussions have been held over the translation of Black Flame into Chinese and Greek, with offers for Polish and Serbo-Croat received and debate about a possible Arabic edition; preparations are under way for the translation of Cartography into Spanish and Arabic, with offers for Portuguese, Farsi and Amazigh (Berber) received, and discussions begun on a possible Japanese edition; and meanwhile, I am looking at getting Drinking With Ghosts and A Taste of Bitter Almonds translated into Afrikaans and possibly Zulu or Tswana. So stay tuned to this blog for more news in the new year!

[ENDS]

Black Dragon Rising: The Forgotten Revolution in Manchuria

This is is the English translation of my foreword to Argentine anarchist historian Emilio Crisi's incredibly valuable and groundbreaking 2015 study in Spanish of the sorely understudied Manchurian Revolution, which I predict will entirely overhaul anarchist ideas (and North Atlanticist prejudices) about the supposed centrality to their praxis and uniqueness of the Spanish Revolution. I am currently integrating Crisi's work into my 16-years of research and writing on global anarchist movement history, which will form Volume 2 of Counter-Power.

Korean and Chinese (Manchu?) anarchists in Manchuria in 1927.

Black Dragon Rising: The Forgotten Revolution in Manchuria

There are parts of the world such as Paraguay, Central African Republic and Kyrgyzstan, that, because of their relative poverty and sheer remoteness are almost unknown to the world, even in this day of instant global telecommunications. And there are nations such as Brittany, Western Sahara, and Baluchistan, that, because they have so long laboured under colonial occupation, are barely recognised as the ethno-geographic entities they are, even in this day of an (official) international framework of national self-determination. 
The borderlands of Far East Asia are such places, but Manchuria, the homeland of the Manchu people, so long under the dominance of the Han Chinese, bears the additional burden of being deliberately forgotten by mainstream historians - because suppression of the study of its remarkable Revolution of 1929-1932 became key to the dominant statist narratives of the red fascist dictatorships of Manchuria's neighbours, the USSR, China and North Korea. 
Book-ended to its west by the high plains of Mongolia and to its east by the mountainous northern border of North Korea, and the swamps of the Maritime Provinces of Russia, to the north by the immense bow of the Amur (Black Dragon) River and to the south by the South China Sea, Manchuria is a massive territory, home to around 47-million people in the 1930s, and comprises 1,3-million square kilometres, larger than France and Germany combined. 
And yet knowledge of this vast terrain is fantastically occluded. In popular culture, Manchuria features only as the location of the brainwashing of a US Army major kidnapped during the Korean War and turned into an involuntary assassin, in John Frankenheimer's 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate. In conventional histories of the region, exotic Manchuria is merely the setting of the "Manchurian Incident," a 1931 false-flag dynamiting by a Japanese Imperial Army lieutenant of a section of track of the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway, which was blamed on Chinese militants as an excuse for Japan to invade Manchuria, the spark, in the Far East at least, for the conflict that escalated with the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 blending seamlessly into World War II.
What is entirely neglected is why Imperial Japan invaded remote and rural Manchuria in 1931 at all, a full six years before it marshalled its full resources against its main strategic objective, the Chinese capital of Peking and its prized industrial heartland of Shanghai. The reason for the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria lies in two intertwined histories: that of the independence movements in Korea and Manchuria, and that of the region's anarchist movement, both of which the Japanese would have to crush in order not to have revolutionary Koreans in their rear.
The accepted trajectory of the Far Eastern anarchist movement is currently under serious revision, with internationalist works such as my own and Lucien van der Walt's organisational and ideological history [Wildfire: Global Anarchist Organisational and Ideological Lineages (in process)], transnational studies such as Benedict Anderson's history of the Philippine independence movement, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (Verso Books, USA, 2005), and country-specific studies such as Dongyoun Hwang's, Korean Anarchism before 1945: a regional and transnational approach (in Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, Hirsch and van der Walt, editors, Brill, The Netherlands, 2010).
Convention has it that anarchism - revolutionary, horizontally-federated direct democracy of the working class, peasantry and poor - and its unionist offspring, syndicalism, first entered the Far East via Japan in about 1906 along two trajectories, one from Japanese students in Paris, and the other from Japanese workers in San Francisco. From Japan, conventions holds, it spread to China, in particular the port cities of Guangzhou and Shanghai (where it became a minority tendency that briefly allied with the Guomindang nationalists in the mid-1920s before succumbing to the communists), and thence into Korea where it led an ephemeral existence, much of it in exile because Japan had annexed Korea in 1910.
But new studies have revealed a more complex picture - and a far more significant movement. The earliest anarchist influences in the region appear to have come either via Portugal into the south China port city of Macau from at least 1900, or via Catalonia into Manila where the first anarcho-syndicalist union was established in 1903. From these ports (and also from Australia and New Zealand), the movement was spread by anarcho-syndicalist seafarers into Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Yokohama - and further afield into Fiji and Burma. 
It was rather the Chinese movement than the Japanese that became the "mother" movement of the region, with the first modern Chinese trade union established in Guangzhou by anarcho-syndicalists in 1918 with 11,000 members, whereas Japan's first anarcho-syndicalist union was formed only in 1921 - by which time the anarchists led some 40 unions in Guangzhou alone, plus a 5,000-strong union in Changsha, and even ran the city of Guangzhou as a federalist commune under the anarchist General Chen Jiongming (1878-1933) as governor from 1920-1923 (by comparison, the nascent Chinese Communist Party had only 300 members in 1922). When Japanese anarcho-syndicalist labour consolidated in the formation of the Zenkoku Jiren federation in 1926, it represented around 8,400 workers in printing, textiles, rubber, engineering and other areas, and was slightly smaller than the two other labour federations, the moderate Yūaikai with 20,000 members, and the communist-led federation which claimed 12,500 members. In contrast, in 1925, anarcho-syndicalists dominated the powerful Confederation of Labour Associations (GLH), based in Shanghai, though they split from the GLH later that year after bitter disputes with the Bolsheviks.
But while south China seeded the anarchist movements in Vietnam and Malaya, the movement in Korea was seeded by Korean anarcho-syndicalists working in Japan where they formed trade unions and "black societies" in the mid-1920s, a binary strategy that was implanted within Japanese-occupied Korea itself, where, despite implacable repression against such initiatives, the Wonsan General Trade Union in the port city of that name and several black societies survived into the post-1945 era and even helped reconstruct the movement in its brief spring before the Korean War broke out in 1950, plunging the peninsula into fratricidal conflict. 
And yet it was in exile in Manchuria that the Korean movement surpassed the achievements of even the Guangzhou Commune, establishing and defending a popularly-organised liberated zone against Japanese, nationalist and communist incursion for three years in a remarkable libertarian socialist Revolution that remains the most under-studied revolution of the 20th Century. As Emilio Crisi shows in this groundbreaking new study of the "Forgotten Revolution," this zone in Heilongjiang (Black Dragon River) province, a triangular territory bounded by the Amur River to the east, the Sungchangho River valley to the west and the Harbin-Hunchun road to the south, comprised an area of some 350,000km², which Crisi notes is about three times the size of the free zone controlled between 1918 and 1921 by the Makhnovshchina in south-eastern Ukraine. Moreover, the Koreans and Manchurians appear to have managed to have established a far more stable free zone than the Makhnovists, whose battle-lines veered wildly over the map during the ebb and flow of the Ukrainian Revolution. It is crucial to note that this area is not entirely rural: the revolutionary capital of Harbin had more than half a million residents and was an important railway juncture and industrial city.
The Manchurian Revolution, which Crisi calls the "Commune of east Manchuria", drew strength from various quarters. Although Outer Manchuria became de facto Russian from the 1850s and was lost to the record in its own name, Inner Manchuria (Manchuria proper) had experienced a brief period of independence following the defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905 - a seminal event that rocked the colonised world because a "yellow" power had defeated a "white" power - which lasted until it was absorbed by China in 1912. On Korea's annexation in 1910, hard-pressed Korean revolutionaries looked for inspiration to both Manchurian independence and the anarchist-influenced Mexican Revolution of that had broken out the same year (perhaps this is reflected culturally in the sporting of magnificent Zapatista moustaches by the likes of General Kim Jwa-Jin and Yu Rim), and probably also to anarchist assassination plots against figures of authority in Japan (1911 and 1923) and Malaya (1925). They also drew heavily on the decentralist village anarchism of Pyotr Kropotkin and on the anarchist anti-colonialism of Shin Chae-Ho, both of whom were intellectually very influential in the region, as well as on the libertarian socialist experiments in China itself, on the successful urban experience of the Guangzhou Commune and on the half-realised rural experience of Fukien Province in south China. But the Black River Commune was ultimately upheld by the Korean, Manchu and Chinese peasantry whose faith in the experiment gave it form and heart.
The initial inspiration for research into the Manchurian Revolution is the work of former Korean Anarchist Federation militant Ha Ki-Rak (1912-1997), whose account History of [the] Korean Anarchist Movement (Anarchist Publishing Committee, Korean Anarchist Federation, Taegu, Korea, 1986), drew heavily on the reminiscences and works of survivors of the Commune such as Lee Eul Kyu (1894-1972), the "Korean Kropotkin". Unfortunately, Ha's work is poorly structured, meanwhile in academia, the subject of the Commune is either airbrushed out of history or deliberately distorted by communist and nationalist historians. So we owe Crisi a huge debt for his detective work in piecing together the core elements of the "Forgotten Revolution" from a range of hostile sources, both bourgeois and Stalinist. 
Thanks to Crisi's work, historians of the anarchist movement which dominated organised labour in the developing world from the 1870s to the 1920s now have more solid ground on which to do further research. For instance, what were relations like between the Commune and the Jewish Autonomous Oblast across the Amur River in the USSR, given that although the Bolsheviks suppressed the Maritime Provinces anarchists in the mid-1920s, there were significant numbers of anarchists among the Jews? What were the actual structures and lines of operation of, and interactions between, the Korean Anarchist Federation (KAF), Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF), Revolutionists League and other organs such as the Korean Provisional Government and the Korean People's Association in Manchuria (KPAM)? How did the KPAM differ in nature in cities like Harbin, from its presence in the agrarian communes on the river plains, or in isolated forest, mountain or swampland hamlets?
A key question relates to the impact of the Commune on Korean anarchist praxis: whether the later wartime Korean anarchist movement indeed perverted and abandoned its ideals when KACF leading light and Commune veteran Yu Rim (1898-1961) entered the powerless Korean Provisional Government in Exile in 1941, then subsequently in 1946 unified the ex-KAF, ex-KACF and syndicalist movements under the aegis of the electoralist Independent Workers' and Peasants' Party (IWPP) - or whether this "auto-governmentist" majority tendency in fact aimed at recreating the KAF's and KACF's glorious past experiences in the administration of the Black River Commune?
The fact that a parliamentary tendency arose out of the ex-IWPP in the 1970s including the likes of Ha Ki-Rak in the increasingly dictatorial conditions of South Korea (the movement was destroyed in the North) does not mean that we can read the IWPP of 1946-1961 retroactively as what I'd call libertarian reformist. The ideological and strategic difference between a libertarian socialist "administration of things" in which the common people determine their destiny, as was manifested under the Black River Commune, and a conventional statist government, by which the common people are subordinated to an elite which extracts profit from them, is key. This question remains the most controversial aspect of the post-war Korean anarchist movement - but although it is beyond Crisi's scope, it demonstrates how far-reaching the implications of his research could be. 
With his crucial maps, Crisi locates the Commune in its proper geo-strategic context, and with his text, he has illuminated the fact that far from the Commune originating in a weird top-down imposition of libertarian socialism under General Kim Jwa-Jin's Northern Division of the Korean Independence Army, anarchist militants spent eight months walking the villages and fields of the Shinmin (New Popular Society) district to hear the peasants' views and promote their ideas of self-managed life - before the multiparty agreement to establish the Commune.
Here is a movement that honourably fought an uninterrupted anti-imperialist war from 1910 to 1945 (even rescuing downed Allied airmen during WWII), that worked without any apparent prejudice alongside Chinese, Manchurian and even Japanese workers and militants, that had very clear strategic objectives yet was non-dogmatic enough to build a de facto Makhnovist-like multiparty movement that liberated a huge territory and embarked on years of pragmatic self-managed constructive work, and which arguably maintained those ideals under the very dire circumstances of the Cold War on the Korean peninsula in organisational form until at least the mid-1970s as the Autonomous Village Movement which had been founded by the old KAF and the syndicalists in 1945. 
Here is a movement deserving of restoration to its historic central role within the Korean liberation movement, to its core place in the revolutionary canon of the anarchist movement, and to its credit in the 20th Century revolutionary gymnastics of Far East Asia more broadly. Crisi's text is not only of value for students of anarchist and syndicalist movements and milieus, but of anti-imperialism, of guerrilla warfare, of interbellum Far East Asia, and even of the emergence today of anti-statist, decentralist socialist revolution in places such as Rojava (Western Kurdistan). It enables us for the first time to make a start on proper comparative analyses with those better-studied anarchist Revolutions in Ukraine and Spain - and urges us to examine the equally obscured Guangzhou Commune with urgency, let alone the more ephemeral anarchist attempts at decentralising power in Mexico, Argentina, Paraguay and elsewhere. 
Because of the stranglehold the current red fascist dictatorships have on state archives and free inquiry, we don't yet have the desired level of access to Chinese and North Korean primary documentation of the relevant period in Manchuria and its borderlands (while the author himself has noted with concern the highly unlikely absence of women anarchists in the narratives of his own sources). Although the definitive study of the Manchurian Revolution has yet to be written, with this carefully considered volume, Crisi has given us the first real tools to embark on that immense task.

Michael Schmidt, co-author of Black Flame: the Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (USA, 2009), and author of Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism (USA, 2013), and of Korean Anarchism Armed: the Anarcho-Communist Mass Line Part 4 (forthcoming).

[ENDS]

Syndicalism Against and Within Mexican Nationalism

A review of Norman Caulfield, Mexican Workers and the State: From the Porfiriato to NAFTA, Texas Christian University Press, USA, 1998.

Anarchists sleep well at night because they don’t have too many weighty things on their consciences. Not that they never get things wrong or never make some grievous strategic blunders, tactical errors or ethical misjudjements. But mass betrayal of the popular classes usually doesn’t feature in anarchist history, so taking a nap as an anarchist sure is easier than for a Marxist having to try to wriggle out of the nightmares created for the poor and hard-working by Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or, hell, even the Shining Path’s Abimael Guzmán. That is, except for the betrayal by the anarcho-syndicalist House of the World Worker (COM) of the Zapatista peasantry in revolutionary Mexico in 1915.
It was a shocking reversal of the ingrained ethics of urban anarchist respect for the insurgent peasantry which, unlike under Marxism, is a central feature of Bakunin’s thought. After all, the Mexican peasantry had taken up arms time and again under anarchist banners during the agonizing three-and-a-half decade-long reign of General Porfirio Díaz – the “Porfiriato” of this book’s title: the mestizo anarchist Chavaz López organised a rural insurrection in 1869 among the indigenous and mestizo peasants in the state of Chalco; and the anarchist Francisco Zalacosta organised a second uprising from 1878 to 1880. 
The López movement seized haciendas and redistributed land across Chalco to peasant communities – who were to hold it in common, and farm it under self-management through village structures – before being suppressed by the army. Zalacosta’s uprising in Chalco spread into the states of Morelos, México, Querétaro and Hidalgo, sacked haciendas, non-peasant towns, and redistributed land, and promoted self-management and free peasant “municipalities,” but was crushed after eighteen months. 
The anarchist ideas of López and Zalacosta were subsequently incorporated into the agrarian programme of Colonel Alberto Santa Fé, who associated with Zalacosta: Santa Fé’s proposals, the Ley del Pueblo (Law of the People), which inspired a serious rebellion in 1879-1881 in Puebla, Chalco, Morelos and Guerrero, by the radical General Miguel Negrete. 
Meanwhile, urban anarchists built the Mexican labour movement in the 1870s, establishing a leading influence: the Workers’ Grand Circle (GCO) was formed in 1870, and had a significant anarchist faction among its 10,000 members, in touch with Bakunin’s movement; by 1878, there were sixty-two active Mexican anarchist groups; by 1882 – when Marx’s tiny 1,000-member rump of the First International was long dead – the main workers’ central, the Mexican Worker’s Grand Circle (GCOM), was distinctly anarcho-syndicalist and boasted 50,000 members.
Facing repeated repression, the anarcho-syndicalists nevertheless kept re-organising and in the wake of the Revolution which overthrew Díaz in 1911 being sparked the December before by an anarchist raid lead by Práxedis Guerrero, they organized the COM in Mexico City in 1912. Known simply as the Casa, the combative confederation was the closest thing to a national labour central and swiftly spread to the oil-fields of Tampico and Veracruz on the Gulf Coast, and to the cities of Guadalajara and Monterrey.
So it beggared belief that in 1915, the Casa turned on its natural allies in the anarchist-influenced peasant movement of Emiliano Zapata and his Industrial Union of North and South America (UIANS). During the Revolution, the UIANS divided up the large haciendas in Morelos into communes and co-operatives, and organised the sugar, cotton, beef and leather industries under their workers, sometimes on a large scale: one sugar refinery was run by 25,000 workers, while a shoe factory was run by 3,000 workers. So the peasant nature of the movement should not be overestimated as it had syndicalist elements too.
Caulfield writes that the decision to form a temporary alliance with Carranza’s Constitutionalist army and betray the Zapatista Liberating Army of the South (ELS) and the northern Villaista peasant army was precipitated in February 1915 by the Casa leader and painter Geraldo “Dr Atl” Murillo who argued against the peasantry’s alleged provincial and backward views. “After three days of heated debate,” Caulfield writes, “the Casa directorate convened a general assembly of the membership and approved the organization’s participation in the armed struggle against the ‘reactionary’ peasant forces.” 
This involved the Casa forming seven “Red Battalions” of nearly 9,000 volunteers in the Constitutionalist army, which were provided with arms and supplies. The Casa also had a further 6,000 workers organised in an informal militia, whilst the Red Battalions were supplemented by a women’s brigade – essentially, a nurses' formation – called the Anti-Authoritarians (Acratas). In return for militarising, the Constitutionalist government promised to allow the Casa to set up sections in all conquered areas and to enact labour reforms.
But – and Caulfield fails to adequately delineate this – the betrayal split the Casa down the middle. Also, reading Mexican Revolution expert John M. Hart, it is apparent that at this point, Casa membership nationally had passed the 100,000 mark and was heading close to 150,000, while Caulfield gives a Mexico City membership alone at the time of the crisis of 52,000. Read together, it dawned on me that the Mexico City Casa only accounted for a third of membership – and it had been this minority, isolated by the war and the mountainous geography of central Mexico from the majority, which backed the fatal decision. 
Looking closer, while the capital’s Casa streetcar workers all joined the Red Battalions, the unions of electricians, of commercial employees, and of teachers split over the issue; while the other two thirds of Casa membership, in the Tampico and Veracruz oilfields and the cities of Monterrey and Guadalajara, sided with the IWW against the minority reformist Casa leadership. 
This in no way absolves the Mexico City Casa sell-outs for their monstrous betrayal, but it does reveal the organization to be an ideologically uneven organization of class, and one that had grown too rapidly for anarcho-syndicalism to take deep root, rather than one of more coherent political tendency, and it takes much of the sting out of the reformists’ treason – though the damage done to the Revolution by dividing its proletarian forces remained fatal. 
The relationship, especially in Tampico, between the IWW and the revolutionary Casa, Caulfield does satisfyingly explore, and he shows how the city remained a syndicalist stronghold even past the nationalisation of the oil industry in 1938, with petroleum worker militancy for union autonomy and democracy lasting well into the post-WWII era. He performs a similar duty with the Wobbly strongholds of the northern state’s mines and smelters.
Despite its sub-title, the book actually covers the period from the formation of the Casa in 1912 to the “Great Rebellion” of 1959 when independent unionism on the railroads was finally defeated by charro (cowboy) vigilante unionism in the Jimmy Hoffa vein. The final chapter which runs up to a critique of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) – against which the modern Zapatistas took up arms – is really a look at the aftermath and decline of charrismo in the modern era.
Caulfield’s great use to anarchist historians is his location of the anarcho- and revolutionary syndicalist movement at the coal-face of the battle between elite Mexican nationalism and working class Mexican anti-imperialism, and how it continually reinvented itself in facing modernisation, centralisation, mechanisation and co-optation, as well as the ideological challenges of communist, yellow, and reactionary unionism. 
He does not discuss the influence on syndicalism of anarchist political organisations such as the “Mexican Liberal Party” (PLM) founded in 1905, the Light (Luz) group founded in 1913, the Anarchist Federation of the Centre (FAC) founded in 1936, the Mexican Anarchist Federation (FAM) founded in 1941 and surviving into the 1970s, or the Anarchist Federation (FA) founded in 1995 – but then organised labour is his focus.
His text is particularly strong in its transnationalism, both in the positive sense of detailing the experiences of Mexican miners north of the border in states such as Arizona, and of Wobblies south of the border in the northern mines and smelters and Gulf oilfields, and in the negative sense of the imperialist meddling of reformist US unions in helping combat revolutionary unionism in the Mexican labour scene, first the business-friendly American Federation of Labor (AFL), then the marginally more radical Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
Intriguingly, the book has a picture of CIO chief John L. Lewis at a Mexican Labourers’ Confederation (CTM) congress in Mexico City in 1938 in the company of another leading reformist, Léon Jouhaux of the French reform syndicalist General Confederation of Labour (CGT). Consolidated in 1895 as an anarcho-syndicalist central, the CGT in the pre-WWI era was an inspiration to syndicalist organisers across Latin America but had capitulated to join the French war effort in 1914 and though it had peaked in 1922 with a membership of 2,46-million, most were white-collar – far removed from its blue-collar mining origins – and the revolutionary minority of 488,000 split away that year. Caulfield doesn’t say so, but presumably Jouhaux was there to trade the CGT’s pre-war reputation in an effort to convince Mexican workers to drop their accustomed revolutionary syndicalism and embrace reforms.
And that is the overarching theme of Caulfield’s work: how the inveterately insurgent Mexican industrial working class, deeply impressed by a genuine revolutionary experience, was wrangled to heel over an extensive process lasting from the Casa’s general strike in 1916 until its comprehensive (yet not final) defeat in 1959. 
Along the way, workers who believed fervently in the pro-worker gains of the 1917 Mexican Constitution – intended by the state to cap the revolutionary process – were able to exploit the gap between the revered document’s claim of national ownership of Mexico’s resources and the “revolutionary” state’s continual capitulations to foreign capital. 
And even after the nationalisation of many foreign industries in 1938, the Constitution’s other key “workerist” claim of the right to organise, to strike and to be treated equally to the gringos continued to play out in the foreign-owned maquiladoras as well as domestic industries of the 1990s. This is why the intransigent Emiliano Zapata remains such a powerful figure, even in a millennial Mexico of space and nuclear tech. 

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The Italian Season in South African Politics

Michael Schmidt

With the new pattern of coalition rule now established in several of its municipalities including the metros of Tshwane, Joburg and Nelson Mandela, South Africa has now fully entered its “Italian Season,” a period of dramatic realignment in the face of state inertia, ruling party atrophy, and social unrest.
The season in Italy that I am speaking of occurred four decades ago, in a very different time and space, heavily inflected by the Cold War, but nevertheless, to compare Italy over 1962-1969 to South Africa over recent years is instructive, for the similarities are startling.
In 1962, Italy gained its first centre-left government since 1947. The Italian political spectrum had been dominated in the post-war era by the centrist DA-like Christian Democrats (DC), but possessed powerful ANC-like Socialist (PSI) and Communist (PCI) parties.
The PCI, though declined to 1,540,000 members by 1966, remained a mass party (the SACP probably peaked at only 30,000 in the 2000s). Unfettered to a nationalist movement, unlike the SACP, the PCI nevertheless held strong sway within the COSATU-like CGIL union confederation, alongside the Socialists, which, like the ANC, had also suffered two splits in the previous two decades (its United Proletarian splinter, the leftist PSIUP, can stand in here for the EFF).
Where the PCI and the SACP are similar is that, though the SACP is in power via the ANC, and the PCI remained outside of power except in the cities of the “Red Belt” of Emilia-Romagna, they were both, in their relative ages, riven by internal conflict between traditionalists and social democrats, and had become viewed by the young working class as dead letters because of their integration into the system.
The year 1962 heralded what is termed “the opening to the left,” in which a coalition of the Social Democrats and Republicans pushed DC rule to the left with several attempts at modernising structural reform, in a similar sense to the quasi-socialist RDP under Mandela. 
As with democratic South Africa’s golden age, this was a boom period for the Italian economy, but the Socialists signally failed to make hay while the sun shone, and their structural reforms were soon replaced with watered down policies over 1963-1968 by coalition governments dominated by the Socialists that dissatisfied the newly-urbanised proletariat who had stood most to gain by the “opening” (one is reminded here of GEAR, then ASGISA). 
In the 1960s, the Italian state was prey to practices that tended to curtail initiative and efficiency. Firstly, there was lottizzazione: governments ensured that key civil service posts were occupied by party members; here, we call it cadre deployment, and as in Italy, it occurs right through the ranks (it is instructive that COSATU membership has shifted significantly from private to state employees).
Then there was the sorry condition of the Italian state-owned enterprises. Inefficiency meant heavy reliance on public funds, which were all too readily obtained, yet most SOEs experienced heavy losses over the 1960s, with the marginal exception of hydrocarbon giant ENI. 
The confluence between lottizzazione and SOEs resulted in the emergence of what then Bank of Italy governor Guido Carli termed a “state bourgeoisie,” with Italy specialist Paul Ginsborg writing that “a new generation of public managers and entrepreneurs, very closely linked with the dominant political parties, not only wielded considerable power, but also diverted substantial amounts of public funds into private channels.” 
Ginsborg cites the chilling case of ENI’s Eugenio Cefis, who used ENI funds to secretly purchase for himself a controlling shareholding in electrical-chemical SOE Montedison, to which he then relocated, to preside over an empire with 15% of the European market, and which by the 1970s included “the ownership of major newspapers, … the financing of political parties, and close links with the secret service.” I hardly need to draw comparisons here, but the term state capture comes to mind.
Lastly, there was the pervasiveness of clientalism in Italy where the Mafia were particularly successful in exploiting the cities’ developmental agencies to divert funds intended to develop SMMEs into construction speculation, which eroded public space, the public interest – and public confidence. 
Over 1967-1968, Italian universities overcrowded with newly-urbanised working class and aspirant middle class students erupted with protest, as occurred here over 2015-2016. In both cases, the immediate concerns around fees, exclusion, and a lack of transformation – stemming from the antiquity of the Italian academy, and the corporatisation of the South African – were rapidly overtaken in the eras of the Cultural Revolution and the Arab Spring with broader concerns. 
In both countries, the students rejected conventional politics, including those of the ossified Communist parties, in favour of more militant and directly-democratic politics, though flawed in practice, and radical new currents arose: in Italy, the operaista of the varsities, housing projects and factories; here, the populists of the #fall campaigns, townships and platinum mines. Both countries were wracked by unprecedented strike-waves over wages and conditions and community protests over service delivery, with the socialists and communists losing control of the unions to new formations (witness the fragmentation of COSATU, and NUMSA’s new initiatives). In Italy, even the DC-linked CISL unions radicalised, and in 1972 federated with the leftist CGIL and conservative UIL (take heed of SACOTU’s aim to unite with COSATU if it sheds the ANC). Radicals repeatedly clashed with a remilitarised police force: the Carabinieri had undergone the process in 1962, and the SAPS in 2010. 
From 1969-1982, a crisis-riven Italy fell into what is called the Anni di Piombo, the “Years of Lead,” in which bullets ruled in a zero-sum “strategy of tension” between reactionaries and revolutionaries, resulting in waves of ultra-left and ultra-right terrorism and even two coup plots. The 2012 Marikana Massacre was a worrying sign that this course is already a possibility for South Africa, while this year’s integration of the EFF into municipal governance at ANC expense (as with the United Proletarians in Italy at Socialist expense) somewhat defuses the threat. So now we stand on the cusp of where we might diverge from our “Italian Season” – or continue with unforseeable results.

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Neither God Nor Master: A History of Anarchism

This documentary on anarchist history (in the original French Ni dieu ni maître: Un histoire de l’anarchisme), directed by Patrick Barbéris and scripted by Tancrède Ramonet, and to which my book Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire contributed ideas of historical structure and for which I was interviewed in Paris in 2013, is currently being screened on TV to acclaim by anarchists in Sweden. The Temps Noir film has been edited into three versions: 1. DVD 3 x 90 minutes; 2. Arte France (French TV) 2 x 70 minutes; and 3. International version 5 x 52 minutes. 

The historians interviewed include Kenyon Zimmer (USA), Normand Baillargeon (Canada), Jean-Yves Mollier (France), Gaetano Manfredonia (Italy), Jean-Christophe Angaut (France), Mikhail Tsovma (Russia), Robert Graham (Canada), Marianne Enckell (Switzerland), Michael Schmidt (South Africa), Matthew Carr (UK), Alain Dobouf (France), Giampietro Berti (italy), Servando Rocha (Spain), Frank Mintz (France), Eric Aunoble (Switzerland) and Édouard Waintrop (France).

The trajectory of the shorter (2.3-hour) French version is interesting if pretty conventional for Francophone audiences: Proudhon, Bakunin, the Paris Commune, the Chicago Martyrs, the Mexican Revolution, the Russian & Ukrainian Revolutions, the Kronstadt Revolt, anarchist repression in Russia, Ukraine, Germany, China, Japan, and the USA, the anti-fascist resistance... and it then breaks with convention by going into detail on the Platform, before continuing with the Spanish Revolution. I'm really keen to see the longer (4.5-hour) DVD in English so that I can give a proper estimation, as my French is poor!