5W IV: The "Revolutionary Junta" pushes for a fresh revolution

Part 4 of a 7-part article on the history of anarchist communism.

The Conservative Counter-revolution of the 1920s generated anarchism's greatest challenge, fascism both brown and red, which would proceed for the decades to come to crush the autonomous, militant working class in a deadly vise. Bolshevism was in many ways more insidious than fascism, by establishing a similar style of totalitarianism, but colouring it red by posing as the liberator of the working class.

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FIVE WAVES: A BRIEF GLOBAL HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ANARCHIST COMMUNIST MASS ORGANISATIONAL THEORY & PRACTICE

THIRD WAVE:

THE "REVOLUTIONARY JUNTA" PUSHES FOR A FRESH REVOLUTION

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The Conservative Counter-revolution of the 1920s generated anarchism's greatest challenge, fascism both brown and red, which would proceed for the decades to come to crush the autonomous, militant working class in a deadly vise. Bolshevism was in many ways more insidious than fascism, by establishing a similar style of totalitarianism, but colouring it red by posing as the liberator of the working class.

Disoriented by the propaganda success of the Bolshevik model and silenced in its gulags, anarchism lost ground throughout the world, despite retaining strongholds in Latin America and the Far East, and even helped establish the first communist parties - which were initially noticeably libertarian in orientation - in countries like Brazil, China, France, Portugal, and South Africa.

But it was not all about repression: the second wave also broke against reformism, the new welfare state sugar-coating that defused militancy in countries as diverse as Uruguay and the USA. While many anarchist and syndicalist organisations were forced underground or destroyed in this long slide into darkness, important struggles against fascism and imperialism were unfolding in countries like Bulgaria and Korea.

It is also amid this turmoil that impressive examples of anarchist-influenced worker self-management - like the Shanghai Commune 1927 - arose. Of greater significance were developments in 1928 when two huge continental anarchist organisations were founded: the East Asian Anarchist Federation (EAAF), with member organisations in China, Japan, Korea, Formosa (Taiwan), Korea, Vietnam and India; and the American Continental Workingmen's Association (ACAT), with member organisations in 10 Latin American countries. This continued anarchist resistance lead to the upsurge of a third wave, with the sorely understudied Manchurian Revolution of 1929-1931, the extreme isolation of which limited its impact to Chinese, Japanese, Manchurian and especially Korean resistance.

The Manchurian Revolution was unusual in that it was initially inserted from above - by the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation in Manchuria (KACF-M) and the Korean Anarchist Federation in Manchuria (KAF-M) working in concert with the anarchist Korean Independence Army general Kim Jwa-Jin. But it quickly gained grassroots support because it was based on worker and community self-organisation. It demonstrated how the upliftment of the working class through economic autonomy and education could combine seamlessly with a bottom-up system of decision-making and a militant defensive programme.

However, it was the explosion of the running class war in Spain into full-throated revolution when the fascist-oriented colonial military staged a coup díetat in 1936 that captured the attention of the whole world. Seen as a laboratory of virtually every known competing political tendency from anarchism to fascism, the Spanish Revolution was in many ways the most compelling of the century.

But the compromises of reformists in the anarchist ranks, the outside interference of the fascist imperial powers, the betrayals of the Stalinists and the extremely fragmented nature of the republican camp all lead to Spain being recalled, incorrectly, as the swan-song of anarchism, a song soon drowned in the carnage of the Second World War.

Still, the worker-run fields and factories of Spain provided the best-studied methods for the successful operation of an egalitarian society on a large scale, a lesson that humanity will not easily forget. Sadly, of course, Spain (along with the earlier experiences of the "national anarchists" of Czechoslovakia and China and later of Korea) showed clearly that internationalist anarchism and the interests of the global working class are totally at odds with nationalist government, however so-called "revolutionary".

Although the defeat of the revolution was a great blow for the class, the third wave did not break until the end of the Second World War, when it peaked with armed anarchist resistance movements in France, China, Korea, Poland, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary and of course, Francoist Spain, a resistance that was echoed in the anti-colonial struggles to come. Not only that, but numerous anarchist federations were formed during and in the immediate post-war period as anarchists rebuilt their political presence.

In France, the FAF was revived in 1944 and the UA was reformed as the Revolutionary Anarchist Communist Union (UACR); in Italy, the Federation of Italian Anarchist Communists (FdCAI) was founded in 1944 and the Italian Anarchist Federation (FAI), into which the FdCAI was later absorbed, the following year; the Anarchist Federation of Britain (AFB) was founded in 1945; and the Japanese Anarchist Federation (JAF) in the same year.

The collapse of Spain also sent an anarchist diaspora into the world, from North Africa to Chile. Its greatest impact was felt in Cuba, where the movement experienced a dramatic growth-spurt, coming to dominate both the "official" and the underground union federations after World War Two, and in Mexico and Venezuela where the exile presence was large enough for them to form their own significant anarcho-syndicalist formations: the General Delegation of the CNT (CNT-DG) and the Venezuelan Regional Workers' Federation (FORV).

Other anarcho-syndicalist organisations that sprang up in this period include: the clandestine International Revolutionary Syndicalist Federation (FISR) in France in 1943, followed in 1945 by the revived CGT-SR known as the National Confederation of Labour (CNT); the Syndicalist Workers' Federation (SWF) of Britain; the Federation of Free Labour Unions (FFLU) and Conference of Labour Unions (CLU) of Japan in 1946; and the Federation of Libertarian Socialists (FFS) of Germany in 1947.

Then there was the anarchist tendency in the General Italian Workers' Federation (CGIL), and the "pure syndicalist" Independent League of Trade Unions (OVB) founded in the Netherlands in 1948. Another strong-point of anarcho-syndicalist organising in the immediate post-war period that is usually overlooked was in China where the movement grew to be about 10,000-strong in the cities, despite the difficult conditions of conflict between the nationalists and the communists.

Also, in Korea, the defeat of Japan lead to a rapid reorganisation of anarchist forces with the Eastern Anarchist Federation (EAF), the Korean Youth Federation in South China (KYFSC), the Korean Anarchist Federation in China (KAF-C) and many other organisations combining into the huge Federation of Free Society Builders (FFSB). Here a strong libertarian reformist tendency also developed, with the entry of a few key members of the Korean Anarcho-Communist Federation (KACF) and the Korean Revolutionist Federation (KRF) into the five-party left-wing Korean Provisional Government from 1940 until about 1946.

The same question raised in the 1920s by the Platform, of how to organise in a free, yet effective manner, was faced during the Spanish Revolution, at the height of the third wave. Seeing how the communists and reformists within the trade unions were selling out the revolution, a militant group of anarchists was formed in 1937 to maintain the revolutionary hardline.

The Friends of Durruti (AD) were named after the brilliant Spanish anarchist railway worker and guerrilla fighter Buenaventura Durruti who died defending the capital Madrid against the fascist forces in 1936. The AD was founded by rank-and-file CNT militants, key anarchist hardliners and anarchist militia, in particular from the famous Durruti Column and the Iron Column, which opposed the Stalinist and statist order to turn the militia into an ordinary authoritarian army with its class divisions and its heavy-handed punishment regime.

In 1938, when the counter-revolution, encouraged by the Stalinists, was in full swing in the rear of and at the revolutionary front, the AD published Towards a Fresh Revolution, a strategic document which was a critique of the reformist tendency within the CNT which had lead to anarchist collaboration with bourgeois, nationalist, conservative and Stalinist forces in the Republican government. The document called for a "revolutionary junta" (meaning a "council" or "soviet") to maintain the revolutionary character of the war by means of the anarchist militia, and for the economy to be placed entirely in the hands of the syndicates.

It was in effect a call to dissolve the bourgeois Republican government and replace it by the organised revolutionary working class under arms. Its other demands were: that workers seize all arms and financial reserves; the total socialisation of the economy and food distribution; that there be no collaboration with any bourgeois groups; the equalisation of all pay; working class solidarity; and no peace to be signed with foreign bourgeois powers.

Like the Makhnovist Platform, the AD manifesto was also accused of being vanguardist and authoritarian, this time because of a misunderstanding, mostly among English-speakers, of what was meant by the revolutionary junta. But junta in the AD's usage did not have the connotations of a ruling military clique which the term carries in English. It was not to be an "anarchist dictatorship", supplanting the bourgeois government with an anarchist one. Its task was merely to co-ordinate the war effort and make sure that the war did not defer or dismantle revolutionary gains. The rest of the revolution was to be left in civilian worker hands.

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