Anarchism and nationalism

A nationalist graffito in Edinburgh exhorting "Free Scotland" coupled with an anarchist response of "Free Everyone". Modern anarchists are largely antagonistic towards nationalism.

Anarchism and nationalism both emerged in Europe following the French Revolution and have a long and complicated relationship, going back at least to Mikhail Bakunin and his involvement with the Pan-Slavic movement prior to his conversion to anarchism and during the first several years thereafter.

There has been a long history of anarchist involvement with nationalism all over the world, as well as with internationalism. Anarchists who see value in nationalism typically argue that a nation is first and foremost a people; that the state is parasitic upon the nation and should not be confused with it; and that since in reality states rarely coincide with national entities, the ideal of the nation-state is actually little more than a myth. Within modern western Europe, for instance, there are well over 500 ethnic groups and only 25 nation states, and in Asia, Africa and the Americas the numbers are even more dramatic. Moving from this position, they argue that the achievement of meaningful self-determination for all of the world's nations requires an anarchist political system based on local control, free federation and mutual aid.

Many modern anarchists, by contrast, militantly oppose nationalism, as they equate the Nation with the State. Some contemporary anarchists therefore consider nationalist anarchism to be a contradiction.

Although anarchism is generally considered a movement of the left, the nationalist and anti-semitic side of Proudhon's and Bakunin's thought would feed into 20th-century parties and movements of the radical right, some of which claimed these early anarchists as their own. Similarly the national syndicalist movement in Italy, a group of a few thousand former members of various anarcho-syndicalist labor unions who split with the larger anarchist movement over their support for Italian nationalism, was cited by Mussolini as a major source of inspiration. Nazis like Willibald Schulze cited Proudhon as an inspiration of national socialism.

An overview

The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli by Carlo Carrà.

In the early to mid 19th century Europe, the ideas of nationalism, socialism, and liberalism were closely intertwined. Revolutionaries and radicals like Giuseppe Mazzini aligned with all three in about equal measure. The early pioneers of anarchism were a product of the spirit of their times: they had much in common with both liberals and socialists, and they shared much of the outlook of early nationalism as well. Thus Mikhail Bakunin had a long career as a pan-Slavic nationalist before adopting anarchism. In 1880/81 the Boston-based Irish nationalist W.G.H. Smart wrote articles for a magazine called The Anarchist.

Similarly, Anarchists in China during the early part of the 20th century were very much involved in the nationalist movement while actively opposing racist elements of the Anti-Manchu wing of that movement, and during the Mexican Revolution Anarchists such as Ricardo Flores Magón participated enthusiastically in what was indisputably a left-nationalist revolution.

More recent fusions of anarchism and nationalism have often been perceived as "outside" of the larger anarchist movement as the perception of nationalism itself has shifted from being a left-wing ideology aimed at liberation (liberal nationalism) to a right-wing ideology. Many modern anarchists denounce nationalism for its statism and linkages to authoritarian ideologies, and position anarchism as an alternative to nationalism which can actually achieve the self-determination that (they argue) nationalism argues for but fails to deliver.

In 2008 "Anarchist Nationalists" were described by Der Spiegel as a new, more violent, element of the German far right. At a riot in Hamburg they adopted the dress and agressive tactics of traditional Anarchist black blocs. The paper states that they "number about 400 people, or roughly 10 percent of Germany's neo-Nazi community" and "constitute the advance guard of a broader violent movement which is making inroads into western Germany." It is not known whether this tendency represents a genuine ideological shift towards anarchism, or simply an adoption of anarchist and autonomist tactics on the part of nationalist activists.

Bakunin and nationalism

Prior to his involvement with the anarchist movement, Mikhail Bakunin had a long history of involvement in nationalist movements of various kinds. In his Appeal to the Slavs (1848), Bakunin called for cooperation between nationalist revolutionary movements across Europe (both Slavic and non-Slavic) to overthrow empires and dissolve imperialism, in an uprising of "all oppressed nationalities" which would lead to a "Universal Federation of European Republics". He also agitated for a United States of Europe (a contemporary nationalist vision originated by Mazzini). Later, exiled to eastern Siberia, he became involved with a circle of Siberian nationalists who planned to separate from Russia. They were connected with his cousin and patron, Nikolay Muravyov-Amursky, the Governor General of Eastern Siberia, whom Bakunin defended in Herzen's journal The Bell. It was not until a full four years after leaving Siberia, however, that Bakunin proclaimed himself an anarchist.

Max Nettlau remarked of this period in his life that: "This may be explained by Bakunin's increasing nationalist psychosis, induced and nourished by the expansionist ideas of the officials and exploiters who surrounded him in Siberia, causing him to overlook the plight of their victims."

Anarchism and nationalism in China

Main article: Anarchism in China

Anarchists formed the first labor unions and the first large-scale Peasant organizations in China. During the roughly two decades when anarchism was the dominant radical ideology in China (roughly 1900-1924), Anarchists there were active in mass movements of all kinds, including the nationalist movement.

A small group of Anarchists - mostly those associated with the early 'Paris Group', a grouping of Chinese Expatriates based in France - were deeply involved in the nationalist movement and many served as "movement elders" in the KMT right up until the defeat of the nationalists by the Maoists. A minority of Chinese Anarchists associated with the Paris Group also helped funnel large sums of money to Sun Yat-sen to help finance the Nationalist revolution of 1911.

After the 1911 Nationalist revolution, Anarchist involvement with the Kuomintang was relatively minor, not only because the majority of Anarchists opposed nationalism on principle but because the KMT government was more than willing to level repression against anarchist organizations whenever and wherever they challenged state power. Still, a few prominent anarchists, notably Jing Meijiu and Zhang Ji (both affiliated with the Tokyo Group) were elected to positions within the KMT government and continued to call themselves Anarchists while doing so. The response from the larger anarchist movement was decidedly mixed. They were roundly denounced by the Guangzhou group; but other groupings that favored an 'evolutionary' approach to social change instead of immediate Revolution, such as the 'Pure Socialists', were more sympathetic.

The "Diligent Work and Frugal Study" program in France, a series of businesses and educational programs organized along anarchist lines that allowed Chinese students from working-class backgrounds to come to France and receive a European education that had previously been only available to a tiny wealthy elite, was one product of this collaboration of the anarchists with nationalists. The program received funding from both the Chinese and French governments as well as raising its own independent funds through a series of worker-owned anarchist businesses, including a Tofu factory that catered to the needs of Chinese migrant workers in France. The program allowed poor and working-class Chinese students to receive a high-quality modern university education in France at a time when foreign education was almost exclusively limited to the children of wealthy elites, and educated thousands of Chinese workers and students - including many future communist leaders such as Deng Xiaoping.

Following the success of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution anarchism went into decline in the Chinese labour movement. In 1924 the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) allied itself with the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). Originally composed of many former anarchists, it soon attracted a mass base, becoming increasingly critical of anarchism. When the Kuomintang purged the CPC from its ranks in 1927, the small group of anarchists who had long participated in the KMT urged their younger comrades to join the movement and utilize it in the same way that the Stalinists had been using it - as a vehicle to gain membership and influence.

Partly because of the growing power of the right-wing within the KMT and the repression of workers movements advocated by that right wing, the Anarchists opted not to join the KMT en masse or even work within it, instead, the result of this last collaboration was the creation of China's first Labor University. The Labor University was intended to be a domestic version of the Paris groups Diligent Work and Frugal Study educational program and sought to create a new generation of Labor Intellectuals who would finally overcome the gap between "those who work with their hands” and “those who work with their minds." The goal was to train working-class people with the skills they needed to self-organize and set up their own independent organizations and worker-owned businesses, which would form the seed of a new anarchist society within the shell of the old in a Dual Power-based evolutionary strategy reminiscent of Proudhon.

The university would only function for a very few years before the Nationalist government decided that the project was too subversive to allow it too continue and pulled funding. When the KMT initiated a second wave of repression against the few remaining mass movements, anarchists left the organization en masse and were forced underground as hostilities between the KMT and CPC — both of whom were hostile towards anti-authoritarians — escalated.

Anarchism and nationalism in Mexico

Main article: Anarchism in Mexico

Ricardo Flores Magón, one of the early leaders of the Mexican left-nationalist movement which eventually culminated in the Mexican Revolution, based his anarchism primarily on the works of early anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, but was also influenced by his anarchist contemporaries: Élisée Reclus, Charles Malato, Errico Malatesta, Anselmo Lorenzo, Emma Goldman, Fernando Tarrida del Mármol and Max Stirner. However, he was most influenced by Peter Kropotkin. Flores Magón also read from the works of Karl Marx and Henrik Ibsen. Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread, which he considered a kind of anarchist bible, served as basis for the short-lived revolutionary communes in Baja California during the "Magonista" Revolt of 1911. In addition to his work with the Partido Liberal Mexicano, Magón organised with the Wobblies (IWW) and edited Regeneración, which aroused the workers against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz.

Har Dayal

In the 1910s Lala Har Dayal became an anarchist agitator in San Francisco, joining the IWW before becoming a pivotal figure in the Ghadar Party. A long-time advocate of Indian nationalism, he developed a vision of anarchism based upon a return to the principles of ancient Aryan society. He was particularly influenced by Guy Aldred, who was jailed for printing The Indian Sociologist in 1907. Aldred, an anarcho-communist, was careful to point out that this solidarity arose because he was an advocate of free speech and not because he felt that nationalism would help the working class in India or elsewhere. The National Bolshevik, Fritz Wolffheim was also involved with the IWW at the same time as Har Dayal.

Völkisch anarchism

A concept of nationalist anarchism independent of anti-semitism or far right input can be traced back to the populist revolutionary nationalisms of the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as the Russian narodniks (themselves a cradle of many political strains and tendencies with anarchistic leanings) and the völkisch movement of Germany and Austria. The latter inherited its Romantic outlook from Johann Gottfried von Herder whose own philosophy, which also inspired Mazzini (Hearder 1966: 44, 46), affirmed both the particularity of national cultures (nationalism) and their value within a universal context (internationalism).

As the völkisch movement developed, sections of it focussed on to theories of anti-semitism and racial supremacy which claimed a foundation in biology. Others, however, repudiated racism and preserved Herder's emphasis upon the equality of all nations. Among these prophets of international nationalism was the German-Jewish völkisch anarchist Gustav Landauer.

Alternative Socialism

A recent revival of völkisch anti-racism can be found in the Alternative Socialist Movement, an alliance of British radicals formed during the 1970s in which Keith Motherson (formerly Keith Paton) and the controversial artist Monica Sjöö were key members. Alternative Socialism sought to synthesise a range of seeming contraries: dissident Marxism with anarchism, socialism with libertarianism, Christianity with paganism, and reformism with revolution.

It espoused the love of homeland and country from a nonviolent and feminist perspective which Motherson dubbed 'matriotism', and drew upon an interpretation of German völkisch thought as an essentially cosmopolitan current of ideas celebrating ethnic and cultural diversity. The movement rejected every form of patriarchal machismo from the left as well as the right, and therefore it advocated countering fascism through dialog.

Black Ram

Anarcho-swastika, symbol of the Black Ram Group

Alternative Socialism is an evident precursor to a similar concept of völkisch anarchism which surfaced briefly in the British anarchist movement in 1982 when the Black Ram Group (formerly Derby Anarchist Group) published the first and only edition of its journal Black Ram. This publication made connections between anarchism, neo-paganism and völkisch nationalist ideas (Landauer in particular), with further exploration of these themes promised. However the group disbanded in the following year without further elaboration.

The Black Ram Group remained within the mainstream anarchist consensus of anti-racism and anti-sexism. Its positive evaluation of nationalism derived not from any roots in far right political organisations, but from the theoretical consideration that:

"the pseudo-'nationalism' of the 'nation-State' - which anarchists unequivocally oppose...must be distinguished from the nationalism of the people (Volk) which in its more consistent expressions is a legitimate rejection of both foreign domination and internal authoritarianism, i.e. the State." - Black Ram

The term 'anarcho-nationalist' is introduced in Black Ram 1: 12 to describe the outlook of American Odinists with whom the paper's editors were in sympathy and, since then, it has been reused as a general term covering nationalist anarchisms. The term national anarchism was also used in the title of an article projected for publication in the second edition, 'Towards an Anarchist Nationalism: provisional manifesto of the National Anarchist Pagan Resurgence', but no further editions appeared and so it was never formally defined. Other material in the first issue leaves no doubt of the direction that was intended. Wotan, 'Fylfots for Freedom', Black Ram 1: 7-8 sets out a programme aiming to subvert fascism by reclaiming symbols and concepts for libertarian ends. The group's emblem was a circled A in the centre of a swastika ('anarcho-swastika').

This use of the swastika was not just about taking back a symbol: it stood for the reclaiming of ideas too. The point, for Black Ram, was that the Nazis stole völkisch language and principles from early 20th-century populists and counterculturalists in the first place; Nazis have no right to them. Alternative Socialism had considered these same ideas important because they signpost the continuation of older currents of socialism concerned with ethnicity, land and culture, which Marxist economic determinism sidelined. As a result, socialists withdrew from activism across a wide range of fronts, and what remained of the old pre-Marxist, utopian socialisms — finding no other outlet — was forced into opposition to the Marxist-monopolised Left. One of the things which they turned into was fascism. But it didn't have to happen that way, and if we don't want it to happen again — the Alternative Socialist and Black Ram analyses concur — then socialists of a more libertarian persuasion have to get back into the broad völkisch, ethno-cultural arena. It is not a case of anarchists aping Nazis; if these concerns now strike us as Nazi, it is because the Nazis misappropriated them from leftists.

Black anarchism or Panther anarchism

Main article: Black anarchism

Black anarchism opposes the existence of a state and subjugation and domination of people of color, and favors a non-hierarchical organization of society. Black anarchists seek to abolish white supremacy, capitalism, and the state. Theorists include Ashanti Alston, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Kuwasi Balagoon, many former members of the Black Panther Party, and Martin Sostre. Black anarchism rejects the traditional anarchist movement.

Black anarchists have criticized both the hierarchical organization of the Black Panther party, and the anarchist movement, on the grounds that it has traditionally been European and/or white-based. They oppose the anti-racist conception, based on the universalism of the Enlightenment, which is proposed by the anarchist workers' tradition, arguing that it is not adequate enough to struggle against racism and that it disguises real inequalities by proclaiming a de jure equality. For example, Pedro Ribeiro has criticized the whole of the anarchist movement by declaring that:

"It is a white, petty-bourgeois Anarchism that cannot relate to the people. As a Black person, I am not interested in your Anarchism. I am not interested in individualistic, self-serving, selfish liberation for you and your white friends. What I care about is the liberation of my people." [1]

Black anarchists are thus influenced by the civil rights movement and Black nationalism, and seek to forge their own movement that represents their own identity and tailored to their own unique situation. However, in contrast to black activism that was, in the past, based in leadership from hierarchical organizations such as the Black Panther Party, black anarchism rejects such methodology in favor of developing organically through communication and cooperation to bring about an economic and cultural revolution that does away with racist domination, capitalism, and the state. From Alston's @narchist Panther Zine:

"Panther anarchism is ready, willing and able to challenge old nationalist and revolutionary notions that have been accepted as ‘common-sense.’ It also challenges the bullshit in our lives and in the so-called movement that holds us back from building a genuine movement based on the enjoyment of life, diversity, practical self-determination and multi-faceted resistance to the Babylonian Pigocracy. This Pigocracy is in our ‘heads,’ our relationships as well as in the institutions that have a vested interest in our eternal domination."

National-Anarchism

Main article: National-Anarchism

The most recent current to fuse nationalism and anarchism is National-Anarchism a position developed in Europe during the 1990s. Among its first advocates were Hans Cany, Peter Töpfer, and former National Front activist, Troy Southgate, founder of the National Revolutionary Faction, a since disbanded UK-based organization which cultivated links to certain far-right circles in Britain and the former Soviet Union. National-Anarchist groups have also arisen worldwide, most prominently in Germany, the United States of America, and Australia. In the UK, National-Anarchists worked with Albion Awake, Alternative Green (published by former Green Anarchist editor, Richard Hunt) and Jonathan Boulter to develop the "Anarchist Heretics Fair". While many mainstream anarchist groups condemned them, SchNEWS ran advertisements for the Fair.

National-Anarchists advocate a society that allows separation to exist along ethnic and religious lines, and even along lines of sexual orientation. Like other anarchists they oppose the totalitarian state typically advocated by stalinism and fascism. Such autonomous zones would allow communities to set their own rules and qualifications for acceptance into permanent residence in a community, and are not necessarily limited to the strict ethnic divisions advocated by white nationalism and black nationalism. Cultural pluralism and the right to self determination are key tenets of National-Anarchism. Genocide, murder, and social conformism (as typical of America and Western societies on the whole) are denounced by National-Anarchists as tyrannical and an affront to libertarian minded people. Each collective would be free to practice the economic or political structure of its choosing as long as it does not interfere with the rights of other communities to follow their own lifestyle choice (excluding the above mentioned crimes); however, National-Anarchists generally believe that environmental protection and conservation are things that all people should coordinate on. Areas without significant human development and borderlands would be maintained collectively and the existence of free zones allowing trade and sharing between communities would be established with the agreement of all parties involved.

See also

• Carlo Carrà painter of The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli.
• National Communism

References

• Aldred, Guy. 1948. Rex v. Aldred. Glasgow: Strickland Press.
• Bakunin, Mikhail. 1848. Appeal to the Slavs. Translated in: Sam Dolgoff, 1971, Bakunin on Anarchy.
• Billingsley, Philip. N.d. "Bakunin, Yokohama and the Dawning of the Pacific Era".
• Hampson, Norman. 1968. The Enlightenment. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.
• Hearder, Harry. 1966. Europe in the Nineteenth Century 1830-1880. New York: Longman. ISBN 0-582-48212-7.
• Knowles, Rob. N.d. "Anarchist Notions of Nationalism and Patriotism". R.A. Forum.
• Motherson, Keith. 1980. "The ice floes are melting: the state of the left". Peace News 5 September, 2127: 9-11.
• Nettlau, Max. 1953. "Mikhail Bakunin: A Biographical Sketch". Reproduced in: The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism 42. The Free Press.
• Puri, Karish K. 1983. Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation and Strategy. Guru Nanak Dev University Press.
• West, Pat V.T. 2005. "Monica Sjoo" (obituary). The Guardian September 23.

External links

• Anarchist Integralism
• Anarchist Notions of Nationalism and Patriotism by Rob Knowles
• Anarchists against nationalism and Anarchists and nationalism at flag.blackened.net
• Are anarchists against nationalism? at Spunk Press.
• Beyond Nationalism, But Not Without It. Nationalism and anarchism from a Black anarchist perspective, from Anarchist Panther by Ashanti Alston.
• Celtic Anarchy. An online journal for Celtic Anarchism.
• Post Colonial Anarchism, by Roger White. Anarchism, nationalism, and national liberation from an APOC perspective.