Upcoming Translations

Currently in the works are the publication of Black Flame in Spanish as Fuego Negro: La Política Revolucionaria de Clase del Anarquismo y el Sindicalismo, and its translation into French as Flamme Noire: La politique de classe révolutionnaire de l'anarchisme et le syndicalisme. 

The German-language edition of Black Flame, Schwarze Flamme: Revolutionären Klassenpolitik des Anarchismus und Syndikalismus, with Lucien van der Walt, translated by Gabriel Kühn & Holger Marcks, Edition Nautilus, Hamburg, Germany, 2013.

In planning are a Spanish translation of Cartography of Revolutionary Anarchism as Cartografía del Anarquismo Revolucionario, and an Arabic translation as رسم الخرائط من الأناركية الثورية.

The French-language edition of Cartography, Cartographie de l’anarchisme révolutionnaire, translated by Alexandre Sánchez, Lux Éditeur, Montreal, Canada, 2012. This book is in a series called Instinct de Liberté that includes writings by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, David Graeber, John Holloway, and others.

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Stay tuned for an announcement shortly on a planned new book, "Unexploded Ordinance: Unexplored Southern African Stories"!

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At the Movement/Society Interface

A review of Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women, Martha Ackelsberg

Okay, shoot me now because this book had been sitting on my shelves for at least a handful of years before I got around to reading it. I am bone-deep ashamed at my delay – replicating in my own dumb way the reactionary “why are you dividing the movement?” response of Argentine anarchist men to the founding of La Voz de la Mujer (The Voice of the Woman) in Buenos Aires in 1896, one of the world’s first durable feminist j0urnals. I am ashamed because this book is about far more than an “anarcho-feminist” view of the crux of the 20^th Century in the fight to the death between the left and the right, the Spanish Revolution of 1936-1939, a battle that anticipated but was ultimately obliterated by World War II: it is by far the best study in English of one of the world’s most important revolutionary organisations – one that was run and staffed by uncompromising libertarian women.

Because anarchism is at its heart prefigurative politics, the anticipation of the ways of tomorrow in the practices of today, Akelsberg has more than adequately guaranteed the deserved place of the often-ignored outrider, yet clearly aligned, Free Women (ML) at the libertarian table of the organisational triumvirate of the National Confederation of Labour (CNT), its youth wing, the Iberian Libertarian Youth Federation (FIJL), and its political parallel organisation, the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI).

From now on, historians of the period need to talk about a quad of the CNT-FIJL-FAI-ML, for in Mujeres Libres, the Spanish Revolution arguably found its fullest articulation, not only as Ackelsberg displays, within the (somewhat unreciprocated) alignment of ML with its anarchist, syndicalist and youth organisational fellows, but because it took an independent line within the broader anti-fascist front – yet was far more progressive than the “feminine” wings of the republican, Communist, Poumist, peasant and other organisations involved in the resistance to Franco. And she shows that ML outdid them all in greasing the wheels of the intersection between the revolutionary forces and the proletarian masses.

Ackelsberg, after introducing us to lively ML veterans, performs a coup de main that few leftist historians have managed so succinctly – a clear overview of the development of one of the most complex and ideologically disputed dirty wars of the 20^th Century. For this alone, her book deserves kudos aplenty, and as a historian it took my breath away. Out of this background, however, flows one of the most erudite discussions of the intersection that has intrigued me for the past decade: the way in which the anarchist ethic managed to transmit from a militant minority to become the practice of mass organisations of the oppressed classes.

This articulation has been suggested and explored in new works by Chris Ealham on Barcelona, Geoffroy de Laforcade on Buenos Aires, and others, but this book makes it clear: that the linkages between both formal (movement) organisations such as the CNT and the FIJL’s Catalan-language corollary in Catalonia, the Libertarian Youth (JJLL), were hugely dependent on somewhat informal (class) organisations, from rationalist schools for children and after-hours ateneos for adults, to prisoner-support groups, street markets and other innovations of the class. Ackelsberg demonstrates that these social linkages between the syndicalists and society arose well before the Revolution, but matured during the conflict into what became the preserve largely of Mujeres Libres, which peaked at 30,000 members in 1937. It was, truly, a *social* revolution.

As Aklelsberg shows, ML’s achievements in the liberated zone, but in Catalonia and Castille in particular, were remarkable, and can be divided into the fields of: syndicalism (ML “work sections” in factories dealing in metallurgy, mechanics, textiles and other skills); education (ML primary and secondary schools on the rationalist model, ataneos and libraries for adults, vocational colleges for metalworkers, drivers and other skills, and fully-fledged universities such as the Autonomous University of Barcelona); social work (refugee assistance, nursing and the stillborn project to rehabilitate prostitutes); and the military struggle (shooting training in Barcelona; rearguard support such as tailoring uniforms; frontline support such as providing food, medicine and morale; and the provision of nurses within republican hospitals and the CNT-FAI guerrilla columns).

In just about all of these fields, the fighting corps of Mujeres Libres exercised in real life a revolutionary praxis for women (and men – because their foundational inspiration arose from the sexism *within* the ranks of anarchist men which they demanded to transform rather than abandon), that was far in the vanguard of the traditional subservient gender roles consigned to women in the Revolution by the Communists, Poumists, Catalan separatists and others.

If this seems all rather obscure to todays’ reader, Ackelsberg grounds the 1930s debates in the necessities of today’s feminism and so locates “anarcho-feminism” – an innovation that her veteran ML interviewees see, somewhat rightly, as a post-modernist nonsense in that it divides working class compañeras from compañeros – within a truly revolutionary praxis. Her heroines – now assuredly ours – were the ones who, as with Juana Rouco Buela, Virginia Bolten and others in Argentina in the 1890s-1910s, successfully battled the sexism of their own comrades to envisage, and build, a new word in their hearts and on the streets.

Although ML co-founder Lucía Sánchez Saornil was a lesbian, and this aspect of sexuality was deliberately occluded by her and her compañeras even within the libertarian milieu (something that requires deeper study), this book is an invaluable resource not only for students of the Spanish Revolution, but also for contemporary feminists (including men), trying to devise a viable means for the sexes (in triplicate) to coexist and be mutually-supportive, with a revolutionary, game-changing end, being the liberation of all humanity.

A positive review in Sunday Times 6 March 2016

The People Armed: a teaser

These two images are just a teaser for the international, multilingual film, text and photographic project, The People Armed: Anarchist Fighters Verbatim, of which I am the convening editor. This multimedia project will be contributed to by anarchist historians from across the world and will produce an online research tool consisting primarily of lengthy, unedited raw interviews with anarchist veterans from Europe, Latin America, North Africa, the Middle East and North America. At the top, I have just finished interviewing Marcello Ferrada de Noli, the anarchist theorist who laid down the military-political line for the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria / Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) of Chile in 1965; the MIR went on to fight against Pinochet. Below, is the cover of Ferrada de Noli's memoirs, Rebeldes Con Causa, due out by Libertarian Books in Sweden later this year.

Will The Bomb shed new light on the 1979 Vela nuke test?

The Bomb: South Africa's Nuclear Weapon Programme, a new book on the apartheid nuke project - by an insider - will no doubt shed more light on this shadowy subject which I covered in detail in Part 1 of my third book, Drinking with Ghosts (BestRed, Cape Town, 2014), titled "Unhale Radiance: The African Atomic Bomb." 

I can't wait to read this - especially regarding what the authors have to say about the 1979 "Vela" atomic test that I stated was almost certainly a clandestine Israeli test (with South Africa assisting and observing), shot on an Israeli ballistic missile from the Overberg Test Range in the Cape downrange towards South Africa's remote South Atlantic island possessions where the detonation was picked up by a US Vela spy satellite.

For decades, the world speculated about South Africa and the Bomb. The country possessed six nuclear bombs developed in secret, but then destroyed. No other country in the world has ever dismantled its own nuclear weapons. This book is so far the most complete statement of South Africa's nuclear weapons capability, written by a nuclear physicist who was involved directly in the process since 1975. Together with his daughter Lydia von Wielligh-Steyn, Dr. Nic von Wielligh has written a highly readable and compelling story about the atomic particle, and how it was tamed.  

Dr. Nic von Wielligh obtained his DSc in Nuclear / Atomic Physics in 1963. Among his achievementns, he was chief of the Department of Physics at the University of Durban-Westville and chief scientist at the South African Bureau of Standards. In 1975, he was appointed to the Uranium Enrichment Corporation (UKOR), and in 1985 in a management capacity at the Atomic Energy Corporation of South Africa (AEC).

After South Africa's entry in 1991 into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, von Wielligh was given responsibility for the implementation of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) guarantees in South Africa, and in 1999, he was consultant and technical adviser at the South African embassy in Vienna, Austria. There he liaised with the IAEA on issues such as warranties, nuclear and radiological security, promoting the peaceful use of nuclear energy, technical assistance programs to developing countries and other issues. Since 2002 he has done technical consulting for government departments on issues involving international guarantees and related matters. He was for many years a member of the IAEA's international advisory committee on nuclear power and the implementation of guarantees, as well as board member of the South African Council for the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Von Wielligh is the author of numerous classified scientific publications. Among his international publications can be counted the experience for (de facto) ex-nuclear weapon states with applications for post-Iraq safeguards, presented at the 1994 Safeguards Symposium in Vienna, Austria.

Lydia von Wielligh-Steyn is an accredited translator, experienced researcher, public relations tour guide, a published novelist and article writer and a member of the South African Academy for Science and Art. Since 2000 she has worked for an international perfume company in Johannesburg.

PEN South Africa showcases my new book

A Taste of Bitter Almonds by Michael Schmidt: http://pensouthafrica.co.za/a-taste-of-bitter-almonds-by-michael-schmidt/

When Nelson Mandela took the oath as South Africa’s first democratically-elected president in 1994, it symbolised the triumphal defeat of almost three and a half centuries of racial separation since the original corporate raiders of the Dutch East India Company planted a bitter almond hedge to keep indigenous people out of ‘their’ Cape outpost in 1659. 

The subsequent expansion of Dutch, Batavian, then British settler colonialism over the territories that centuries later were forced by Britain to form a sub-imperialist corporate entity called ‘South Africa’ has usually been retro-projected as a simplistic tale of white-over-black – but this ignores the multiracial nature of both the colonial elite and its underclass of servants, soldiers and slaves. The dispossession by genocide at the hands of Boer, British, Bantu and Griqua of the indigenous Bushmen – a term they themselves prefer to the pejorative ‘San,’ meaning vagrant – has been airbrushed out of the South African consciousness, as has the certain knowledge that all South Africans, including the author, are racially interrelated, creating blind spots that were viciously exploited by white, and now increasingly, black racist nationalists with the rise since 2014 of right-wing populism.

The Mandela moment had deep global resonance and for a few years thereafter the ‘Rainbow Nation’ was the world’s darling with the stories produced by journalists signalling in a breathless flood the dramatic changes of the transition – but in the world’s most unequal society, for the majority of its people, being excluded from a dignified life remained the rule over 1994 to 2015, and a taste of bitter almonds remained. Some of the most obvious – yet usually ignored – elements of continuity from the colonial, dominion and apartheid past in the democratic era include the intolerable official burdening of all young children by insisting on classifying them by race, the cynical unwillingness of the political elite to adequately redistribute to the hard-toiling poor the ill-gotten gains of the past especially land and corporate wealth, and the weird mimicking by today’s town planners of separatist apartheid urban geography.

In the year of South Africa’s troubled coming-of-age, veteran investigative journalist and anarchist activist Michael Schmidt brings to bear 21 years of his scribbled field notes to weave a tapestry, employing veteran war correspondent Martha Gellhorn’s ‘view from the ground’ technique: here in the demi-monde of our transition from autocracy to democracy, in the half-light glow of the rusted rainbow, you will meet neo-Nazis and the newly dispossessed, Boers and Bushmen, black illegal coal miners and a bank robber, witches and wastrels, love children and land claimants.

About the author

Michael Schmidt is a field reporter with 26 years’ experience, having worked for 19 years at South Africa’s leading print titles including ThisDay and Sunday Times before going into journalism training in 2008. He has worked across Africa, Central and South America, the Middle East and elsewhere. He has an interest in extra-parliamentary politics, free media activism, and conflict reporting in transitional societies. He is the author of four non-fiction books including Drinking with Ghosts: The Aftermath of Apartheid’s Dirty War (BestRed, South Africa, 2014), and has been published in Germany (2008, 2010), the USA (2009, 2013), Brazil (2009, 2014, 2015), Canada (2012) and Argentina (2015). He is currently working on six more books, and a multimedia project on massacre and memory, with Lebanese writer Rasha Salti.

Date of Publication: November 2015

ISBN: 9781928246060

Website: drinkingwithghosts.blogspot.co.za

Publisher: BestRed