IGNACIO DE LLORENS HAS JUST PUBLISHED THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF THE RUSSIAN ANARCHIST VOLIN, A KEY FIGURE IN THE CREATION OF THE FIRST SOVIET AND LATER PERSECUTED BY THE BOLSHEVIKS ~ David Sánchez Piñeiro, Nortes ~ Ignacio de Llorens is a historian and philosopher. We met with him to discuss his newly published book, a compilation of research conducted intermittently over several decades: Life Will Shine on the Cliff: Volin (V. M. Eichenbaum) published in Spanish by KRK editions. It is the first biography of this Russian anarchist, whose life is as fascinating as it is unknown. The biography is based in part on testimonies from people close to him, such as his son Leo, and on previously unpublished documents. Volin, a pseudonym derived from the Russian word volia, meaning “will,” was the driving force behind the first soviet in Saint Petersburg in 1905. He managed to escape from Siberia, where he had been condemned by the Tsarist regime. He was forced into exile in the United States due to his anti-militarist activism in France during World War I. He played a leading role in Nestor Makhno’s peasant and libertarian revolution in Ukraine. He suffered repression at the hands of the Bolsheviks, and Trotsky even ordered his execution. He was released from prison thanks to the intervention of a CNT delegate, but was expelled from Russia for life; he directed an anti-fascist newspaper in support of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and wrote The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921, his great work published posthumously, in which he developed an implacable critique of the Bolshevik Revolution from an anarchist perspective. As is always the case with the best books, this one by Ignacio de Llorens is also the fruit of a sustained obsession. Where can we begin to delve into the figure of Volin and his biography? Volin was what is usually called a privileged young man, from an educated family, with parents who were doctors and of Jewish origin. As a young man, he belonged to the last wave of the Narodniks [Russian populists], who went to the villages to educate people who had been serfs until recently. In his case, his educational work wasn’t directed at the peasants, but at the workers of Saint Petersburg, where he was studying law. He abandoned his studies to dedicate himself to educating these workers he was beginning to meet in the city. Following the 1905 revolution, his teaching group would eventually become the first soviet. Volin then joined a broad revolutionary political movement that sought to change society and address injustices, and this would become the main focus of his life. Volin began to have contact with the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and later, in a legal process that remains unclear, a pistol was discovered in his possession, and the Tsarist authorities sentenced him to life imprisonment in Siberia. He escaped and went into exile in Paris, where he began to gravitate towards anarchist thought, heavily influenced by his reading of Kropotkin. He played a leading role in the creation of the first soviet in 1905. Yes, indeed. The soviets are an original creation of the Russian revolutionary process. We can say that Volin is the creator of the soviet, along with a group of workers who studied with him. They were adult working-class students who felt the need to take action. The Tsarist regime could be changed, and it was time to get involved. This was done by the people themselves; it didn’t happen through parties or “normal” political institutions, but directly through the actions of those involved, who in this case were the initiators, workers from Saint Petersburg. The soviet would remain a structure of self-participation for the people and would even spread, not only to urban working-class communities but also to rural areas and soldiers’ quarters. It was the logical way for social protest movements to organise themselves. The soviet is a council and has a minimal structure so that it maintains its original characteristic of being the people who resolve their own political concerns. It is the soviets that are truly carrying out the process of overthrowing Tsarism. Trotsky would say that the February Revolution of 1917 took everyone in exile by surprise, and that no one believed it would happen at the time. It was a spontaneous revolution, led and created by the people themselves. How is it that, in such a short time, a revolutionary from the very beginning ends up being persecuted and repressed by the Bolsheviks themselves? The February Revolution was a spontaneous revolution, a revolution of the soviets, which spread like wildfire following a series of strikes. At that point, the main political figures (Lenin, Trotsky, Volin, Kropotkin) began to return from exile to participate in a process that consisted not only of creating a democratic state, but also involved the utopian visions that each of them held for society. Revolutionary struggles began to emerge that went beyond the democratic state that had been born in February. The October Revolution of 1917 was, in fact, a coup d’état and established a power, called Soviet for added confusion, which would end up being the first form of a totalitarian state known in the 20th century. The Bolshevik party, which staged the coup in October, seized power by ignoring the other parties and without the support of the majority of the population, as was evident in the subsequent elections. It established itself guided by an ideology that dictated that liberation had to be imposed on the liberated, even if they didn’t want it, and they didn’t want it because the people, who did not overwhelmingly support them, had an alienated consciousness and were ignorant of the scientific basis of human development. With this ideological “justification,” groups opposed to the new Soviet state were repressed and imprisoned. In Volin’s case, his anarchist activism led to him being particularly persecuted. Volin then moved to Ukraine. How and why did he end up there? Volin became discouraged because the anarchist groups he was involved with were rife with infighting and arguments. He ultimately went to Ukraine. There, a revolutionary peasant movement was emerging, linked to the figure of Nestor Makhno, which would eventually form an insurrectionary army of over 30,000 soldiers. Ukraine had been ceded to the occupying powers of World War I by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed by Lenin and Trotsky against the wishes of most of the Bolsheviks’ own Central Committee. Ukrainian anarchist comrades went to Russia to find Volin and help him create an organisation that would become Nabat. He moved to Ukraine with them, and within this organisation, he tried to defend his conception of anarchism, which he termed the “anarchist synthesis”: avoiding internal disputes and seeking common ground to create a united front capable of driving a successful revolutionary process. In Ukraine, he soon met Makhno. Giuliai Pole, Makhno’s hometown, was the epicentre of a movement rejecting the Austro-Hungarian occupation troops. The peasants began to consolidate their lands, create communes, and a revolutionary process began. At the same time, they armed themselves as an insurrectionary army. Volin joined forces with Makhno, and they worked together. He spent six months within the Makhnovist structure in charge of cultural affairs: creating schools, magazines, books, lectures, and libraries, attempting to organise everything in a libertarian manner. He was only there for six months because he was arrested shortly afterwards. Although initially there was collaboration between the two armies to fight common enemies, the Bolsheviks ultimately decided they had to dismantle Makhno’s libertarian movement. The Makhnovist army fostered the creation of peasant communes that organised themselves. It was a libertarian, horizontal model, independent of any leadership. The Bolsheviks believed they had to destroy this model of anarchist peasants and subject them to the new power structures, hence their becoming enemies. Relations would always be highly conflictive, and the Red Army would never completely crush them, because the Makhnovist army served as their vanguard against the White Army troops, who, aided by international powers, sought the restoration of Tsarism. Makhno’s guerrilla tactics were perfectly suited to attacking these armies, and they proved very useful militarily to the Bolsheviks. At that point, they provided them with weapons. After a couple of years, when the danger subsided, the Bolsheviks were not going to respect the existence of a large area of anarchist communes that did not adhere to their model. They wanted to destroy them, and they did so in 1921. Makhno was almost always viewed very critically and negatively. He is portrayed as a degenerate. There were even Soviet films that depicted him as a kind of mad bandit who terrorised people. He has a great negative legend, which has begun to dismantle in recent times, with the fall of the USSR. Although his figure is always subject to debate due to the publication of the diary of [his former comrade] Gala Kuzmenko, where she recounts excesses committed by Makhno’s soldiers, driven by alcohol and brutality, who also abused the power they acquired, contrary to their own principles. You dedicate an entire chapter to the relationship between Volin and Trotsky, two figures who crossed paths over time in different countries. In April 1917, a premonitory conversation took place between them in a New York printing shop. This sort of intertwined life with Trotsky is one of the most interesting aspects of Volin’s biography. Both were Jewish, intellectually educated, and participated in the creation of the first soviet. Both were condemned to Siberia by the Tsarist regime in 1906 and both escaped, each on their own: Trotsky by sled and Volin on foot. Both went into exile and would meet again in a New York printing shop, each working on his own magazine. During a discussion, Volin told him: “When you come to power, the first people you’ll eliminate are us anarchists. We’ve outflanked you on the left, and you won’t accept that.” Trotsky complained and told him that the Bolsheviks weren’t devils. Later, when Volin was arrested in Ukraine, his captors didn’t know what to do and asked Trotsky for instructions. The telegram that arrived from Trotsky was scathing: “Shoot him immediately.” They didn’t, and he managed to escape, but Trotsky’s intention was indeed to eliminate him. Lenin even went so far as to say that he was too intelligent to be free. Volin was a serious opponent, from the left, and moreover, he had a platform in the social uprisings of Ukraine and Kronstadt, the third great revolution that was aborted by Trotsky and the Soviet army because it would have challenged the foundations of the state the Bolsheviks were creating. The situations were different, both for Lenin and a delegation from the Spanish CNT. Volin was repeatedly arrested and released, depending on the political situation, due to the agreements Makhno made with Lenin, as Lenin still needed Makhno to attack the White armies. On one occasion, Volin was released and immediately rearrested without trial and indefinitely. It was then that Lenin decided he was too dangerous to let go. The possibility of Volin and other comrades being released from prison was thanks to the Third International congresses held in Russia. Delegates from abroad, socialists and some more or less sympathetic to the anarchists, arrived and were aware of the problem: there were many anarchists imprisoned. The one who acted most brilliantly to secure the release of Volin and his comrades was one of the CNT delegates. Four delegates from the CNT had gone: Nin, Maurín, Arlandís, and Ibáñez, who was from Asturias. They were all Marxists and went with the intention of handing the CNT over to the Comintern. At that time, the CNT was underground, and its main members had been killed by employer-backed gunmen or were in prison. There was a kind of organisational vacuum. Andreu Nin was the Secretary and a CNT delegate; this group went to Russia and the CNT did indeed join the Third International. At the last minute, the anarchist groups in Barcelona managed to get a French comrade, Gastón Leval, into the delegation, paying for his trip. This was a stroke of luck for Volin, because Leval was the one who would get him out of prison. Leval visited Volin in prison and was the one who took his release most seriously. He met with Lenin and Trotsky. Trotsky became very agitated, even grabbing Leval by the lapel and hurling insults at him, but ultimately, faced with the potential international scandal these delegations could cause, they decided to release them. Opponents were either eliminated or expelled, and this group was chosen for expulsion. Volin and other anarchists went into perpetual exile. The book includes a chapter dedicated to the Spanish Civil War, in which Volin was also deeply involved, albeit from afar. Exile was very hard for everyone, but especially for those who knew no languages other than Russian or Ukrainian. It’s a very sad subject to study. There are well-known cases like that of Yarchuk, the first historian of the Kronstadt rebellion. He couldn’t adapt to either Berlin or Paris, returned to Russia, and was eventually killed. Or the case of Arshinov, which is particularly painful because he was the leading historian of the Makhnovist movement. Arshinov had mentored Makhno and eventually evolved towards Bolshevism. This evolution is subject to debate because some historians believe it was a maneuver to infiltrate the Communist Party, but this is completely absurd. Arshinov has texts where he renounces anarchist thought, apologizes, and slanders or mistreats the Makhnovist movement that he himself had praised in his book. Volin resisted this malady of exile. One of the most curious and regrettable things that happened during that exile was the confrontation between Makhno and Volin. Volin was always critical of the Makhnovist movement itself. He considered it an excellent libertarian revolution, but it had a number of aspects that needed to be criticised, such as the excessive leadership surrounding Makhno and certain violent, aggressive, and authoritarian attitudes exhibited by members of the Makhnovist army. Makhno died young in 1934, and Volin remained one of the few remaining resistance fighters from those groups that had been expelled. He continued to participate in all the anarchist initiatives of the time. He became a Freemason to persuade other Freemasons, contributed to the Encyclopédie anarchiste (Anarchist Encyclopedia) edited by Sébastien Faure, and wrote for numerous magazines. In 1936, the CNT (National Confederation of Labour) appointed him editor of a newspaper, L’Espagne Antifasciste (Antifascist Spain), so that he could report from France on the events of the Spanish revolution. But the CNT soon cut off its support for the newspaper because Volin did not support the CNT’s policies of participation in the Republican government. Volin’s son fought in Spain with the Republican side and revealed important information about Durruti’s death. Leo Volin, with whom I had a long interview over three days in 1987, volunteered in the anarchist columns and was with Cipriano Mera during the capture of Teruel. Leo told me that when he returned to France after the war, he spent a few days in jail in Cerbère, just across the border, and there he met a friend of his, a certain André Paris, who was a communist. Paris was traumatised by Durruti’s death and told him, “Leo, I assure you I didn’t fire,” implying that the group he was with was the one that had killed Durruti. Perhaps one day a historian will be able to verify this. Volin’s criticisms of the Spanish anarchists, which led the CNT to stop funding his newspaper, are quite telling regarding the rigidity of his political positions. Volin was certain that the revolutionary process had to lead to the disappearance of the state, not the creation of a new one. In Russia, a new state structure had been created that had ultimately become totalitarian. He had written a pamphlet that became somewhat famous, titled “Red Fascism.” Fascism is two-headed, with the communist head having been created by Lenin and the Bolshevik party. The fascist head was already on the rise in those years with Mussolini and Hitler. According to his analysis, in the Spanish revolution, the strength of the CNT-FAI made it possible to dissolve the state structure and organise a new form of society. Do you see parallels between the Ukrainian libertarian movement led by Makhno and the anarchist movement during the Spanish Civil War? It’s a very interesting topic to study in detail. The fundamental difference is that the Makhnovist movement had to develop these collectivisation and cooperative projects in a tremendous war context. They barely had a few months of peace, because then an army would enter and destroy everything. The libertarian collectives in Spain were more stable, especially those in Aragon. The Aragon front didn’t move for more than two years, and they had enough time to draw some conclusions from their experience. This experiment was ultimately crushed, first and foremost, by the communist army of the Karl Marx Column, led by Enrique Líster of the Communist Party. They stormed the Aragon collectives to destroy them because they didn’t approve of a revolution not subject to communist dictates. In a way, what had happened with Makhno was also being repeated. The main enemies will be the communists, who cannot tolerate any type of social experimentation different from their own and that could surpass them from the left. Lister’s column abandoned the front to destroy the libertarian collectives of Aragon. In the collective imagination of some on the left, there is the idea that the Russian Revolution went more or less well in its first stage, but Stalin’s rise to power initiated a totalitarian drift. You propose, following Volin, an alternative interpretation that emphasises continuity: Stalin merely followed in the footsteps of Lenin and Trotsky. Stalinism is an ideological invention created by left-wing Marxist authors to save Lenin and Trotsky, because Stalin is beyond redemption. That is the thesis that Volin refutes. Lenin and Trotsky had created a brutal authoritarian state. The Gulag began with Lenin in 1918, and the Red Army and the tactics of mass annihilation of dissidents began with Lenin and Trotsky. From 1991 onward, when the archives were opened, terrible things were discovered. I’m reproducing one of those handwritten messages from Lenin recommending that peasants be executed and their corpses hung up, for everyone to see, and that it be a cruel act. The creation of extermination and internment camps for dissidents began in 1918, and Lenin and Trotsky supported it. Stalin simply continued, taking it to its extreme, the model of repression. When Trotsky complained that Stalin was persecuting him, Volin laughed and told him that they were doing to him what he had done to others. When Trotsky was being persecuted and expelled from every European country, and a campaign was launched to allow him to settle in France, Volin joined that campaign. He believed that Trotsky should be given the freedom he denied others. Throughout the book, you emphasise the importance of not losing sight of the moral principle that, in politics, not all means are justified to achieve a desirable end. I wanted to trace this issue back to its tactical and ethical origins, which would be the case of Nechaev. Nechaev was a scoundrel who created a group in Moscow to assassinate and carry out terrorist acts. One of the members wanted to leave the group, and Nechaev then had all the other members killed to make them complicit in the murder. It was a shocking story, which served as inspiration for Dostoevsky to begin writing the novel Demons. Nechaev left Russia and ensnared Bakunin to use him for his own revolutionary purposes. Bakunin allowed himself to be seduced by this young man who arrived from Russia with an aura of a revolutionary and even participated in an abject text called “Revolutionary Catechism,” which justified any action as long as it served the revolution. Finally, Bakunin saw the light. In the 1960s, a historian found a letter in the French National Library in which Bakunin rejects and criticizes Nechaev, calling him an arbek, a bandit. Bakunin redeemed himself from that model of revolution in which everything is subordinated to the end goal, and the end goal saves everything. The one Nechaev did seduce was Lenin. Lenin vindicates Nechaev, a fact that is often forgotten. Andrei Siniavsky, a Russian writer of the 1960s who is credited with coining the term “dissident,” recounts in his book how Nechaev was behind Lenin. If the libertarians were different from the others, they had to prove it. Prove it in victory, when they won. They needed to display their magnanimity, their great soul, by avoiding executions, atrocities, and everything they opposed. Volin himself recounts his disappointment that harsher measures weren’t taken to prevent the atrocities committed by the Makhnovist soldiers themselves. Ideology doesn’t justify morality. The old anarchists of the International in Spain used to say that before being an anarchist, you have to be just, only to find out that being just makes you an anarchist. It’s in each action itself that you have to demonstrate your principle. The difference isn’t in what you say, but in how you do it. This is what was rightly criticised about Luther: justification by works, not by faith. Morally speaking, Volin comes quite close to that ideal. I’ve tried not to write a hagiography of Volin in the book, because the character is very appealing. At most, you can say he’s an outdated, incorrigible idealist, but morally there’s little that can be said against him. He’s a very upright and hardly questionable man. To conclude: Volin had a relationship with two of the leading figures of international anarchism in the first half of the 20th century: Kropotkin and Emma Goldman. What can you tell us about that? Kropotkin’s writings were crucial in his drift toward anarchism. In his decision to abandon his law studies in his final year and dedicate himself to educating workers, the young Volin was fulfilling Kropotkin’s proposal in his text “To the Young.” Volin rigorously applied the renunciation of privilege to work for justice. During one of his periods of freedom during the revolutionary process, he visited Kropotkin; they talked, and he left feeling strengthened. Kropotkin was always a guiding light for him on his journey. Emma Goldman arrived in the Russian Revolution from the United States. She had less contact with Volin because there were many periods when Volin was imprisoned. But she always referred to him as one of her most valuable comrades and also did everything possible to secure his release. Emma Goldman tried to prevent the authoritarian drift of the Soviet regime. At first, she seems to justify the measures taken by the Bolshevik state, but little by little she realizes they are creating a Jacobin terror, opposes it, and leaves Russia with her partner Alexander Berkman. They can no longer prevent the authoritarian and repressive drift of the communist regime. They go to England and try to campaign against it, but she herself recounts in her book, My Disillusionment in Russia, the little resonance her opposition to the authoritarianism of the Soviet regime finds among intellectuals of the 1920s. The prestige of the Bolshevik regime will extend into the 1930s, when the Stalin trials begin and it becomes more difficult to defend it. Then begins the ideological maneuver of rescuing Lenin and Trotsky and not identifying them with Stalin. Solzhenitsyn said that Stalinism is an invention of communist intellectuals to unleash all sorts of filth against Stalin. Stalin does not betray Lenin; the revolution betrays the soviets themselves. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machine translation. Photos: David Aguilar Sánchez The post “Stalinism is a Marxist invention to save Lenin and Trotsky” appeared first on Freedom News.

THE LEGENDARY WOBBLY AND SONGWRITER, EXECUTED 110 YEARS AGO, WAS CELEBRATED WORLDWIDE FOR HIS RESILIENCE AND HUMOUR ~ Owen Clayton ~ Born Joseph Emanuel Hägglund in Sweden in 1879, Hill was brought up amid hardship after his father died when he was still a child. Without formal training, he imbibed a love of music from both parents, his father having played the organ and his mother being a talented singer. As he grew up, Hill sharpened his musical and lyrical skills by creating parody songs, something for which that he would eventually become famous. His talents also extended to cartoons, a popular working-class medium. Hill emigrated to the USA in 1902. There is patchy evidence of what he did for the next 5 years, but it presumably involved moving around the country as a transient worker, otherwise known as a hobo. These workers moved around by illegally hopping freight trains, working in mines, mills, laying railroad track, and generally building up the American capitalist West. We know that Hill was in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake because he wrote about it for his boyhood paper back in Sweden. By 1908 he was in Portland, where he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or ‘wobblies’), the only union that did not exclude people on the basis of ethnicity and which also tried to organise all workers, instead of just those in more ‘skilled’ positions. The wobblies believed that if all workers were in ‘One Big Union’ then this could lead to a general strike and, from there, seizure of the means of production. They eschewed party politics and the ballot box in favour of a revolutionary stance, which made them public enemy number one in what would later become America’s ‘First Red Scare’. Hill was present during the famous 1909-1910 free speech fight in Spokane, Washington. This was a struggle over a ban on the rights to free assembly and speech. The IWW called on hundreds of activists to descend on Spokane with the deliberate intention of being arrested for public speaking. Spokane’s jails were soon filled with an army of rambunctious wobblies, about whom one governor despaired that he could not get them to stop singing. The cost to the State was astronomical, and so the prisoners were eventually released and the ban lifted—an event that echoes in the ongoing Palestine Action mass arrests. Around this time, Hill and fellow wobblies began using street music to combat the Salvation Army bands that deliberately tried to drown out IWW speakers. It was a pivotal moment for the IWW, which has ever afterwards been known as a ‘singing union’: putting out regular editions of its ‘Little Red Songbook’, also known as ‘music to fan the flames of discontent’. Hill went on a prolific songwriting spree. His most famous song is ‘The Preacher and the Slave’ (also known as ‘Long Haired Preachers’), which criticises the ‘Starvation Army’ for promising ‘pie in the sky’ (a phrase that Hill invented) instead of giving more immediate help. As he had done in Sweden, Hill often adopted religious or popular melodies, partly because his songs were often parodies, but it also because this made his songs easier to learn. Hill said that ‘if a person can put a few cold, common sense facts into a song, and dress them (the facts) up in a cloak of humour…he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers’. And his music was immensely popular: of 12 songs in the 1913 edition of the Little Red Songbook, 10 were by Hill. Valuing his music as a form of propaganda, the IWW sent him to a strike location in Canada so that he could write a new song on the spot. Hill believed in the importance of reaching female workers, who were, he wrote, ‘more exploited than the men’. He wrote one of his most famous songs, ‘The Rebel Girl’, in honour of wobbly organisers like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (the term Rebel Girl is probably a pun on ‘Gurley’), Katie Farr, and Anges Thecla Fair. He also wrote letters arguing that the wobblies were spending so much time organising male workers that they were neglecting to organise women. It goes without saying that in making these arguments he was well ahead of his time. In 1911, Hill manifested his revolutionary sentiments in a more practical way. With many other wobblies, he joined the Mexican revolution that successfully deposed the US-backed dictator Porfirio Diaz. The revolution was soon betrayed, as so often happens, by its one-time Liberal allies: who, once Diaz was out of power, turned the Mexican army on the rebels. Hill was fortunate not only to escape with his life, but also to successfully return to the US. In 1913, however, his luck ran out. As is well known, he was shot in what he claimed was a dispute over a woman on the same night as a murder took place of a grocer and his son. Though the evidence was extremely flimsy, Hill’s trail judge, Morris L. Ritchie, was so biased that Hill was found guilty of those murders and sentenced to death. The IWW launched a mass public campaign about his unfair trial, though Hill expressed misgivings about becoming a martyr, or a ‘Tin-Jesus’ as he sarcastically put it. When the time finally came, he was stoic and not a little ironic: reportedly gave his firing squad the order to shoot. Just before his execution, he dashed off a poem called ‘The Last Will of Joe Hill’, which proclaims that ‘my will is easy to decide/For I have nothing to divide/My kin don’t need to fuss and moan/Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.’ The poem also expresses a wish to be cremated, which the IWW honoured. His ashes were divided into six hundred envelopes and sent around the world, so that a part of Joe Hill could inspire future generations. In one of his most famous final letters, Hill told IWW leader ‘Big’ Bill Haywood: ‘Don’t waste any time in mourning—organize’. But really it seems more appropriate to do both. Hill’s influence only grew after his death. This was in part because of the popular 1936 song-poem ‘Joe Hill’ by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson, in which Joe returns in a dream, claims that he ‘never died’, and says that he is present ‘In Every Mine and Mill/Where workers strike and organize/There you’ll find Joe Hill’. Musicians such as Joan Baez, Tom Morello, Billy Bragg and the Finnish hiphop star Paleface have all cited Hill as an inspiration. His name was even taken in homage by the horror writer Joseph Hillstrom King, the son of Stephen King (who had himself given his son the middle name Hillstrom). And most importantly, his songs are still sung in marches and on pickets lines worldwide, as workers and activists seek to fulfil Joe Hill’s promise of a better world. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Image: Joe Hill, ‘Oh You Hoboing’, sent by letter to Charles Rudberg, 2 September 1911 The post Remembering Joe Hill appeared first on Freedom News.

A PRINCIPLED ANARCHIST WHO FACED DEATH WITH BRAVERY, FUMIKO KANEKO IS A MODEL OF UNWAVERING DEFIANCE IN THE FACE OF OVERWHELMING ODDS ~ Jay Arachnid ~ Fumiko Kaneko is not a well-known figure in Japanese history, primarily due to her adherence to anarchism; she is also not a well-known figure in anarchist history, primarily due to her adherence to the more nihilist tendency. Prison Memoirs is her incomplete autobiography, requested by the presiding judge at her trial for treason; he wanted to know what led to her thoroughgoing rejection, not just of the judicial process, but of the entire Emperor System. The result is a memoir of her formative years, starting out as a non-person in the bureaucracy of the Meiji Period—her parents were not married at the time she was born, and she was not officially registered as the daughter of her aunt (then living in recently occupied Korea) until she was nine years old. The physical and emotional abuse by her aunt and grandparents was accompanied by an enforced penury that could be described as Dickensian. The oppression she felt as a child was reinforced both inside and outside her home by her family’s mistreatment of Koreans they encountered, as well the Japanese occupiers’ mistreatment of Korean people more generally. I say her autobiography is incomplete because it’s only in the final thirty pages or so that the exciting part starts, when, after a brief stint as a devotee of The Salvation Army, she gets involved with Korean anarchists in Tokyo. But the preceding two hundred-plus pages are a fascinating narrative of class differences, poverty and middle-class pretension, the rigidly hierarchical Emperor System, and how it all intertwines to crush the yearnings and desires of a clearly intelligent child and young woman. She writes: “But all the while I was leading this aimless, listless life, I never abandoned my true goals and hopes. What were these? To read all kinds of books, to acquire all kinds of knowledge, and to live life to the absolute fullest.” Fumiko, however, is not crushed, merely bruised. Her experiences of poverty and hierarchical oppression (as a female child, as a bastard, as a comrade of Koreans) clearly primed her for an attraction to anarchist ideas. She says, “Socialism did not have anything particularly new to teach me; however, it provided me with the theory to verify what I already knew emotionally from my own past… the feeling, almost as for a comrade, toward the poor dog my grandparents kept; and the boundless sympathy I felt for all the oppressed, maltreated, exploited Koreans I have not written about here but whom I saw while at my grandmother’s – all were expressions of this. Socialist ideology merely provided the flame that ignited this antagonism and this sympathy, long smoldering in my heart.” A classic anarchist coming of age story, similar to so many others (cf, Paul Goodman, Emma Goldman, and others). Once she found her place among other like-minded individuals, she was able to read everything she could get her hands on. She mentions the influences of Bergson, and Hegel, but the books that had the greatest influence on her “were those of the nihilists. It was at that time that I learned of people like Stirner, Artsybashev, and Nietzsche.” A true rogue’s gallery! Is it any wonder that she says later, “What is revolution, then, but the replacing of one power with another?” The memoirs end with the beginnings of her relationship with the Korean anarchist-nihilist Pak Yeol, with whom she was brought to trial. Unfortunately, for readers interested in the specifics of Fumiko’s political leanings, or the Japanese anarchist movement of the 1920s more generally, there’s nothing in her memoir about the trial, the absurdity of the charges, or the anti-Korean pogroms that had taken place in the wake of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. Fumiko and Pak had been arrested along with hundreds of other Korean and Japanese radicals in the wake of the powerful tremblor. Naturally they were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. The so-called mercy of the Emperor led to their sentence being commuted to life imprisonment. Her defiance during the court proceedings—nicely recreated in the film Anarchist From Colony—calls to mind other famous anarchists who defied judges, like Louise Michel (“I have finished; if you are not cowards, kill me.”) and Louis Lingg (“I despise your force-propped authority. Hang me for it!”). This rejection and contempt continued when she received the letter of commutation: she ripped it to shreds in front of her warders. Fumiko Kaneko was found dead in her cell in 1926. She had written a nearly 700-page manuscript, but left no suicide note. And there was no autopsy. The introduction to the English translation, written by Mikiso Hane, states categorically that she hanged herself from a rope she made in the prison workshop, but that seems like a convenient tale told by a historian nominated to the National Council on the Humanities by the first President Bush. Regardless of the truth, the fact remains that Fumiko Kaneko was an example of a principled anarchist who faced death with bravery and deep contempt for the state and all its institutions. Her story, both the Prison Memoirs and the larger context of early 20th century Asian anarchism, deserves to be more widely known among contemporary anarchists. Not as a footnote of defeat, but as a model of unwavering defiance in the face of overwhelming odds. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman, by Fumiko Kaneko. Detritus Books, 2025 The post Book review: Prison Memoirs of a Japanese Woman appeared first on Freedom News.

HOW THE RUSSIAN ANARCHO-SYNDICALIST BECAME A POLITICAL JOURNALIST, ENDED UP IN THE RED ARMY, AND HELPED ORGANISE KROPOTKIN’S FUNERAL ~ Nikolai Gerasimov ~ In the 1930s, Chicago was the capital of American gangsters. The mafia gang of Paul Ricca and Tony Accardo successfully continued the work of Al Capone—they controlled the entire shadow economy of the city and most of the criminal business of the northwestern United states. The American government did everything possible to destroy organised crime, but did not forget about another threat to national security—left-wing radicals. Since the late 1920s, Chicago police regularly conducted raids in places where Russian immigrant workers congregated. The secret services were afraid of the “Red Threat” and saw every “leftist” as a potential agent of Soviet intelligence. Russian anarchists fleeing Bolshevik terror and fascist concentration camps were persecuted by the FBI. Among those who attracted the unwanted attention of the authorities was the leading theorist of anarcho-syndicalism, Gregory Maximoff. Gregory Petrovich Maximoff (1893–1950), a journalist and revolutionary who stood at the origins of the anarchist labour movement, having survived two World Wars, Red Terror, and emigration. Before his eyes, the revolution turned into a reaction, and the liberation movement died out, faced with a new enemy—the totalitarian state. Even before Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt, Maximoff began to study the origins of totalitarianism and the reasons why the good, progressive undertakings of revolutionaries lead to the creation of inhuman political regimes. His biography is inseparable from the history of the development of anarchist thought. Gregory Maximoff was born on November 10, 1893, in the village of Mityushino in Smolensk province. After finishing school, his parents sent the future revolutionary to the Vladimir Seminary to study theology. Maximoff had an ideological conflict with the seminary administration, and he realized that theology was clearly not his calling. Maximoff met the beginning of the First World War in Petrograd, where, under the influence of Kropotkin’s writings, he carried out revolutionary agitation. In 1915 he entered the Higher Agricultural Institute, studying to be an agronomist. But the war required new human resources—Maximoff was mobilised. However, even in the army, he continued to spread anarchist ideas. The February Revolution freed Maximoff from service. From that moment on, he took an active part in revolutionary events—in particular, he became one of the organizers of the Petrograd student group of anarcho-syndicalists and the group Golos Truda [The Voice of Labour]. In the summer of 1917, Maximoff was a representative of the newly formed Union of Anarcho-syndicalist Propaganda (SASP), from which he was elected to the Central Council of Factory and Plant Committees of Petrograd. Under the pseudonym “Mr. Lapot,” he wrote articles for the newspaper Golos Truda, in which he examined issues of a socio-economic nature: the organisation of labour collectives, the economic reorganization of society on the principles of anarchism, as well as ways to support grassroots social initiatives. Collaboration with Golos Truda became one of the most important stages in the life of the thinker. The periodical was organised in 1911 in the USA by Russian émigré workers who closely interacted with American anarcho-syndicalists and exchanged experiences with them. In 1917 the editors took advantage of the general amnesty and moved the publication to Petrograd. Maximoff did not know that in less than ten years he would again have to publish in émigré journals. In 1918 the first large-scale repressions against anarchists began: the authorities closed printing houses, arrested activists, and significantly limited the distribution of political literature. Publication of Golos Truda was temporarily suspended. In the autumn of 1918, Maximoff was elected secretary of the Executive Bureau of the All-Russian Confederation of Anarcho-syndicalists. In the same year, the organisation was liquidated due to both internal (political disagreements among anarcho-syndicalists) and external (Bolshevik repressions) reasons. Despite a series of arrests, Maximoff agreed to join the Red Army. However, his service did not last long: in 1919, in Kharkiv, he refused to carry out an order to suppress an uprising of peasants unhappy with Bolshevik policy. In 1950 the anarchist M. Gudel recalled this episode in Maximoff’s biography: > > > [In] 1919, he was in the ranks of the Red Army and fought against the counter-revolution with revolutionary zeal, but when his unit was called to pacify the Ukrainian peasants, Maximoff, having learned of the appointment, declared to the head of his unit: "The Red Army is organised to fight against the enemies of the Russian people, and not against the peasants and workers, I will not go to pacify the peasants." He was well aware of the meaning and consequences of this protest. He knew that in the Red Army, as in any other, refusing to obey and carry out an order was punishable severely.  He also knew that the head of the unit had enormous powers and could shoot him without any trial. He knew the consequences of the protest and nevertheless went through with it. He acted this way because he knew, he was convinced, that the suppression and disarming of revolutionary peasants was one of the government's steps that was dangerous for the revolution. He did not want to be a participant in this crime. Maximoff was indeed sentenced to death, but was pardoned and released thanks to the efforts of the All-Russian Union of Metalworkers. After all that had happened, Maximoff became an implacable opponent of the Bolsheviks and even rejected the very idea of the Soviets. The power of the Soviets, in his opinion, is no different from any other form of power and does not lead to the withering away of the state, but to its strengthening. In 1919, Maximoff wrote for another anarcho-syndicalist journal, also called Golos Truda. He reviewed works on the theory of anarchism and discussed the possible directions of development of Russian anarcho-syndicalism. While criticising the Bolsheviks, Maximoff did not forget about the theorists of anarchism, many of whom, in his opinion, distort the traditional socio-political meaning of anarchist doctrine. In particular, Apollon Karelin and his community of mystical anarchists came under fire. Maximoff in 1921 In opposition to the anarcho-mystics, pan-anarchists and many other thinkers, Maximoff proposed to create a “program” of anarcho-syndicalism understandable to the general public, where the actual philosophical part would be an outline of political ideas from William Godwin to Kropotkin. It is noteworthy that philosophy in his project is subordinated to the political program of building an anarchist society. Maximoff was not interested in metaphysics, aesthetics, or ontology. He allowed people of different philosophical views into the ranks of anarcho-syndicalists, as long as these views did not contradict the practice of revolutionary struggle. At the end of 1920, the Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, defeated the rebel army of Nestor Makhno. Already in 1921, along with the “Makhnovshchina”, all anarchist institutions on the territory of Ukraine were liquidated, including the Confederation of Anarchist Organizations “Nabat,” many of whose members (Volin, Mark Mrachny-Klavansky, Aron Baron, Alexey Olonetsky, and others) were under arrest. In January 1921, the prisoners were transferred from Kharkov to Moscow. The general atmosphere of anxiety was aggravated by the fact that the health of the 79-year-old Kropotkin, whose authority had long prevented mass repressions against anarchists, had deteriorated sharply. In an attempt to establish a dialogue with the Bolsheviks, a delegation of anarchists (Maximoff, Alexei Borovoy, and Alexander Shapiro) went to the Cheka, but the initiative did not bring any results. Meanwhile, a bulletin on Kropotkin’s health was published in Izvestia, and Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman went to see the sick man. The Bolsheviks showed the utmost possible care for Kropotkin, but the arrested anarchists continued to be kept in prison. When Kropotkin died (8 February, 1921), the Soviet authorities decided to arrange a funeral for the great revolutionary at the expense of the state. Obituaries were published in Izvestia and Pravda. Maximoff became one of the main initiators of the campaign aimed against the Bolsheviks’ attempts to use the memory of Kropotkin in their own interests. Through the efforts of Maximoff, Borovoy, and many others, the Commission of Anarchist Organizations for the Funeral of P. A. Kropotkin was created. Maximoff recalled its activities as follows: “By energetic actions, the Commission discouraged the Bolsheviks from burying P. A. at state expense and thus once again advertising themselves to the international revolutionary proletariat, for which the Bolsheviks, in turn, tried to cause the Commission a number of difficulties, which the latter wrote about in its report. “The Cheka was waiting for the moment to deal with everyone who actively spoke during Kropotkin week, and at the same time to settle scores with some members of the Funeral Commission. This moment soon arrived”. TRANSLATOR’S NOTE BY MALCOLM ARCHIBALD This is a translated excerpt from the new book To Kill in Oneself the State – How rebels, philosophers and dreamers invented Russian anarchism, published in Russian by Moscow philosopher Nikolai Gerasimov. The phrase “I killed in myself the state” is a refrain from the popular song “The State” by the Russian anarchist poet Yegor Letov. This survey includes chapters on such familiar figures as Peter Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Emma Goldman, as well as such diverse thinkers as Alexander Sviatogor (biocosmism), Georgiy Chulkov (mystical anarchism), and Andrey Andreyev (neo-nihilism). The Red Terror of the early Soviet state, followed by the Great Terror of the 1930s, physically eliminated those proponents of Russian anarchism who had not fled abroad. Gerasimov points out that in post-Soviet Russia the Communists could still rely on nostalgia for their former political culture. But for anarchists, instead of a living tradition there was only a void. Nevertheless, he has some hope for the future because anarchists, with their willingness to take bold measures, can thrive in an era of crisis such as the one we live in now. The excerpt is from Chapter 9, pp. 279-286. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Top photo: Maximoff at Kropotkin’s funeral (top left, behind Emma Goldman) The post The adventures of G. P. Maximoff appeared first on Freedom News.

THE GREAT ANARCHIST HISTORIAN AND ACTIVIST LEFT US A MESSAGE FOR THESE DIRE TIMES ~ Natasha Walter ~ How do we keep hope and faith alive? People keep asking that question as we watch the climate slide into crisis, war crimes stream across our social media platforms, and authoritarian leaders take power. While our problems may feel newly pressing, a pamphlet published in 1969 was already discussing how easy it is in dark times to fall into a state of permanent protest — “the practice of many active anarchists who keep their beliefs intact and carry on as if they still hoped for success but who know—consciously or unconsciously—that they will never see it”. From this point of view, “there is no hope of changing society… What is important is not the future… but the present, the recognition of bitter reality and constant resistance to an ugly situation”. Still, the writer continues, “it is just as dogmatic to say that things will never change as to say that things are bound to change, and no one can tell when protest might become effective and the present might suddenly turn into the future”. And so, those who resist are “scouts in a struggle which we may not win and which may never end but which is still worth fighting”. These words come from About Anarchism, by my father, Nicolas Walter (1934-2000). This combination of cynicism about the present together with a continuing commitment to a better future is characteristic of his work. Today, on what would have been his 90th birthday, I feel the absence of his voice ever more keenly. At the recent undercover policing inquiry hearings I was amused to hear that Roger Pearce, the undercover police officer who spied on Freedom in the 1980s, gave this assessment of Nicholas Walter to his superiors: “a cautious, alert individual whose sardonic temperament is met with respect or intense dislike, but never indifference”. True enough, but he inspired a great deal of affection and love among those who knew him best. Pearce also shared his judgement of Nicolas’s key work: “This well-written pamphlet, produced by probably the most prominent of today’s intellectual anarchist genre, is of inestimable value to anyone seeking a survey of the anarchist scene which is both comprehensive and concise. It is cited time and again as the publication which guided the political and apolitical alike to espousal of anarchism”. Front page of The Sun, 10 July 1967 While an undercover policeman is hardly an objective reviewer of anarchist philosophy, that does seem a fair assessment. About Anarchism still bears re-reading, as does much of the rest of Nicolas’s output on anarchist history and ideas, which ran like a steel thread through Freedom – and related publications such as Anarchy, The Raven and Wildcat – all the way from 1959 to 2000. While so many of these articles and reviews were keyed into the historical legacy of anarchism, rather than its contemporary practice, his own ideas and writing now come into ever sharper focus. Whenever I go back to Nicolas’s work now I’m struck by how current, unfinished and probing it still seems. Although Nicolas had such unparalleled grasp of the history of anarchism, his work grew out of his activism as much as out of his research. Richard Taylor chose to end his recent book English Radicalism with an essay on Nicolas, whom he has described as “the most erudite and eloquent anarchist historian and analyst in post 1945 Britain. He was, moreover, a leading civil disobedience activist in the peace movement”. For Nicolas, there was no distinction between theory and practice. It was in the rise of the Committee of 100, the nuclear disarmament group dedicated to civil disobedience, that he found the chance to put the ideas that he had been exploring into practice in the early 1960s, and he seized that moment. This was the time when he came to the insight that he himself thought was central to his political philosophy, the idea that there can be no distinction between means and ends. He first explored this in a discussion of Gandhi’s philosophy in his 1962 pamphlet on civil disobedience, Nonviolent Resistance: Men Against War. “In the Indian dharma, as in the analogous Chinese tao, the way and the goal are one”, he wrote, and went on to state that this leads to “a healthy refusal to make any convenient distinction between ends and means”, as opposed to the views of western philosophers who “have tended to believe that if one takes care of the ends, the means will take care of themselves. This line of reasoning leads to Auschwitz and Hiroshima”. Nicolas returned frequently to the moral and political importance of remembering that the means and the ends are one. In one article published, unusually for him, in the Guardian (collected in David Goodway’s Damned Fools in Utopia), he laid it out with particular force. “Everyone says something should be done – we say do it yourself. The politicians say: If you want peace, prepare for war. We say: If you want peace, prepare for peace. They say the end justifies the means – we say means are ends”. The great force of this insight helped Nicolas and others to steer the political culture of the Committee of 100 and other groups that flowered at that time (such as the Spies for Peace and Solidarity) away from the hierarchies and discipline of the old Left and into the anarchist way of organising that attempts to build the non-hierarchical society we want, here and now. Committee of 100 sitdown in Whitehall, April 1961. Walter on far right, sitting down. In his 2023 book If We Burn, a study of recent resistance movements across the world, Vincent Bevins examines that key political insight and blames it for such movements’ inability to build conventional power structures. In doing so Bevins states that the idea that “means are ends’ was first enunciated by David Graeber in 2002. “In the 1960s, the New Left had insisted that means also mattered in addition to the ends. David Graeber… went even further. In a 2002 essay for New Left Review, he explained that … the means were the ends”. But Bevins and other observers of social movements need to look well further back for this idea — certainly 40 years earlier to Nicolas Walter, as well as to the anarchists and proto-anarchists who influenced him. As Nicholas said in 1962, when he saw to his irritation that people were putting forward anarchist ideas as totally new: “Are Winstanley, Rousseau, Godwin, Fourier, Owen, Proudhon, Bakunin, Morris, Kropotkin, Cole and all the rest really nothing more than names? Has the anarchist stream really been driven so far underground?” Too often our radical histories are ignored, our personal and political roots are pulled up, and it is hard to hear the roar of those underground rivers of dissent. When I hear protesters today stating that their prison sentences for protest are unprecedented, I remember that when my parents and their friends set up the Spies for Peace group in 1963, which broke into government nuclear bunkers to publish the secrets of the warfare state, they knew they were running the risk of much longer sentences than protesters risk today. In my recent book Before the Light Fades, in which I tell the story of my parents’ involvement in the Spies for Peace, I quote my mother Ruth Walter: “We knew we were risking twenty years imprisonment, and that was scary but we knew it was the right thing to do. I was quite prepared to do it”. The Spies for Peace got away with their illegal actions, but Nicolas went on to be arrested for protest throughout his life, and was imprisoned for heckling a politician in 1968. He did that in protest at the Vietnam War, and in hindsight no serious commentator would argue that the protesters had got it wrong and the warmongers had got it right. Just as few would argue that the British government was right to keep secret from the people the plans for surviving nuclear war in the 1960s. Anarchists are so often doing the work that needs to be done in order to challenge the free operation of authoritarian governments, and yet now just as then, their reward is mockery and imprisonment. Nicolas Walter in 1996, in his wheelchair (he was disabled by side effects of radiation for cancer) We cannot afford to keep losing the histories of our movements, when we so badly need them, not just to understand the past, but to help us consider the possibilities of the present. We need to understand that there were always other forks in the road, and that those paths may still be rediscovered now. Nicolas Walter’s understanding of the anarchist past was a key to his continued faith in the future. As he once stated with disarming confidence, “It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion”. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Natasha Walter is an author, journalist, and founder of Women for Refugee Women The post Still worth fighting: Nicolas Walter remembered appeared first on Freedom News.