Proudhon och Rüdiger i blåsväder?

 

Har alltid varit skeptisk till JAK, även när jag själv var syndikalist för många år sedan. Redan då insåg jag (och andra) att den "räntefria" banken i själva verket inte alls är räntefri: låneavgifterna är ju en slags ränta. Samma fusk som inom islam, alltså.

Och så ville jag ju göra revolution förstås. Inte starta några jävla kooperationer.  

Och nu verkar "den goda banken" stå på konkursens rand. Reaktionära proudhonister! Detta är straffet för att era anfäder vägrade stödja kommunarderna!!!   

"God bank" i blåsväder

En dåres försvarstal

SAC:s Centralkommitté i sitt trygga rum

En väldigt smart dåre, i så fall. Särskilt den här meningen: "Den här nya attityden förstår jag inte, där man anammat allt med nyliberalismen utom yttrandefriheten, där man på en och samma gång är extremt känslig och extremt intolerant, och vill kasta ut allt som är opassande. Om de inte ens kan tala med sina egna, hur ska de kunna tala med andra?"

Just det. SAC har sällat sig till den postmoderna pseudo-vänstern, som egentligen är ett slags auktoritära nyliberaler. Om ens det!  

Kajsa Ekis Ekman skriver själv om tiden på Arbetaren

Gyllene Flottan möter Surrealistgruppen

Fan, kamrater, vi kommer försent till vallokalen,
måste ju rösta på Biden!

Blev ganska road när jag såg denna (alltså artikeln jag länkar till i slutet av detta inlägg). Hade jag varit kommunist hade jag garanterat uppfattat detta som ännu ett bevis på att anarkisterna är västimperialismens nyttiga idioter. Nu har de visst grundat en folkfront med Zelenskyj, Biden och Azov-bataljonen. Det verkar handla om inhemska anarkister i Ukraina. För några år sedan stred amerikanska Antifas med "SDF" (det stalinoida PKK) i norra Syrien, som ju fick flygunderstöd av Donald Trump. Sedan var det folkfront med Biden på hemmaplan i form av våldsam svans till BLM. 

Det finns många liknande exempel från anarkismens historia. Hübinette nämner Korea och klagar på att deras anarkister betraktas som nationalister, men enligt den bok jag läst i ämnet (som också rekommenderas av Hübinette själv) stod de koreanska anarkisterna i den kinesiska diasporan närmare KMT och vänster-KMT än KKP. Sedan har vi ju Krapotkins stöd till Tsar-Ryssland under första världskriget, Petritjenkos samarbete med Kozlovskij och "Finska Röda Korset" (dvs vitgardister) på Kronstadt, Cipriano Meras agerande under Madrids belägring av Franco, Bakunins möte med Kron-Kalle, och så vidare, och så vidare i all jävla oändlighet, är jag den ende som inser att "den frihetliga socialismen" är rena bluffen, åtminstone om man tror att den står "till vänster" om kommunismen och representerar ett obesudlat "revolutionärt alternativ". I själva verket är anarkisterna bara allmänvänsterns skrikigare svans. De har ibland hamnat *till höger* om vänsterns huvudfåra.

Det finns förresten anarkos på andra sidan också, vem minns inte hur SAC sket ner sig när deras samarbetspartners i Ryssland, KAC eller KAS, stödde Rutskoj och Chasbulatov mot Jeltsin? 

Makhno har förresten också blivit kraftigt romantiserad av anarkisterna. Han och hans medarbetare var riktiga anarkister, men bondearmén han ledde var det knappast. Jag tror att Makhno de facto fungerade som ett slags hetman eller ataman "ute på fältet". 

Till slut en lite nördig varning. Som synes på Hübinettes blogg så ska den anarko-syndikalistiska flaggan vara diagonalt delad. Eller vad man nu säger. En röd-svart flagga som är horisontellt delad symboliserar nämligen extremhögern i Ukraina! 

Varför strider anarkistiska förband mot ryssarna i Ukraina?

The bureaucratization of the world

Marx believed that the Jacobins and sans-culottes during the French revolution were doomed to defeat, since society wasn´t yet ripe for socialism and workers power. The Jacobins "objectively speaking" acted as a violent battering ram for the bourgeoisie by exterminating the old aristocracy. Then, the Jacobins fell (and so did the sans-culottes), the French revolution being a bourgeois revolution ushering in capitalism. 

In my opinion, the role of the Bolsheviks and the working class during the Russian revolution was similar. The early, internationalist Bolsheviks were like the Jacobins. They used the working class (and themselves) as a battering ram against Czarist absolutism, and also against the bourgeoisie. But on behalf of what class? Answer: on behalf of the future state bureaucracy, which eventually created a new mode of production, based on a centralized planned economy. Thus, the Bolsheviks and the revolutionary workers "objectively speaking" acted as the violent stormtroopers of the "Stalinist" bureaucracy. In other nations, the bureaucracy took control from the beginning, sometimes using peasants as their shock troops, but usually tightly controlled by the bureaucratic center (Mao´s China). The bureaucratic mode of production is an alternative path to modernization (or attempted such) in nations where the national bourgeoisie was too weak to abolish semi-feudal conditions, this task instead falling to a nationalist intelligentsia which created a centralized "socialist" state apparatus. 

In the Western nations, the Social Democrats likewise represented an aspiring bureaucratic layer, using the organized and unionized working class as its lever. In contrast to the Communists, who wanted a bureaucratic revolution, the Social Democrats were seeking to transform the system through peaceful reform. This was eventually succesful, creating the typical alliance between Big Government, Big Labor and Big Business (and, I suppose, Big Banking). Later, the Social Democrats broke their connections to the organized working class, instead fusing completely with the state apparatus, which in its turn hybridized with the PMC version of capitalism (which isn´t hostile to state regulations, as long as it controls the state through "regulatory capture"). This hybrid system is probably going to collapse right before our very eyes during the 2020´s, perhaps replaced by an alliance of populist leaders, angry petit bourgeois, unorganized workers and rogue capitalists. What will come out of it, is anybody´s guess at this point. 

What is clear is that the working class failed to take power in its own name, and that this was (probably) inevitable. Marxism morphed into Social Democratic reformism within capitalism or the creation of a new "Stalinist" bureaucratic mode of production. Marxism "dialectically" transformed itself into the ideology of the new bureaucracy, which claimed to represent "the workers" or "the people", just as the bourgeoisie had claimed to represent the latter. Autistic Trots will tell us that we are "duty-bound to explain whether the new mode of production was historically progressive or not", to which we respond: no, Messr Trotskyites, we are not "duty-bound" to explain anything according to *your* specifications, since we are not Trotskyists nor Marxists! 

There isn´t any "progress" that moves inexorably onwards and upwards, no historical schema where capitalism is replaced by an even more advanced economic system which "develops the productive forces", und so weiter. Empirically (not metaphysically according to the Dialectic), democratic capitalism with a Social Democratic government was often better than Stalinoid really existing socialism, and so was Bukharinite-Titoist Communism (or Dengist Communism minus the economic free zones). This is therefore the "minimum program" worth striving for, not utopian pipe dreams about international Bolshevism or Trotskyism.

Perhaps the working class can´t take power in its own name. Or perhaps it could have done so, but such a system would have resembled anarcho-syndicalism more than Social Democracy or Communism. It´s difficult to see, however, how a modern economy could be "self-managed" in the syndicalist fashion, suggesting that such a system would quickly evolve into a more centralized one, if only to survive. And the moment that happens, the working class "as a whole" or "as a class" is no longer in power. A new managerial elite takes over. Marxists say that ancient slaves or medieval peasants couldn´t take and hold power. Maybe, maybe not, but the working class seems to belong to the same category of "exploited classes" incapable of overthrowing the system once and for all. 

Add to this the massive environmental destruction brought about by capitalism, and it´s no longer obvious if this system really is "historically progressive". Not only didn´t it produce its own grave-diggers, it might actually become humanity´s very own undertaker! 

With that, I close my reflections for today. 

Living Anarchism

I remember the Anarchist Workers Group. In fact, when I visited London years ago, I *almost* attended one of their meetings (don´t remember the name of the borough). 

Be that as it may, I read a few issues of "Socialism From Below", the somewhat peculiar magazine of the AWG. I recently found all back issues (only four were ever published, circa 1989-91) on a website humorously called "Splits and Fusions". It made me realize things I had not seen before. The AWG was curious in that it more closely resembled a Trotskyist group (but with anarchoid rhetoric) rather than a anarchist ditto. Indeed, other anarchists loved to hate it. I wondered why the AWG didn´t simply join the SWP. However, it turns out that there was *another* Trotskyist (or Trotskyist-derived) organization the AWG resembled much more closely. Yes, it was the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). Digression: the British RCP is a different group than the American RCP (which is Maoist or Maoist-derived). 

In fact, the similarities between the AWG and the RCP are so striking, that the former almost comes across as a front operation for the latter! Since several members of the AWG subsequently did join the RCP, I frankly wonder whether some kind of entryism might have been involved? There are certainly hidden codes: several articles in "Socialism From Below" have titles including the words "The Next Step", and an ad for a summer school includes the word "Confrontation". Now, the RCP´s weekly paper was called "The Next Step", and their theoretical journal..."Confrontation". 

More to the point, the political positions of the AWG have a strong family likeness to those of the RCP. The Labour Party is a bourgeois imperialist party and must be completely opposed. While this is also an anarchist position, remember that the AWG sounded Trotskyist-inspired. The RCP was perhaps the only British Trotskyist group which opposed voting for Labour even as a tactic. The correct line towards the IRA in Northern Ireland is a form of military but not political support, and national self-determination is for "the Irish people as a whole", code for a united (Green) Ireland. The established campaigns demanding "troops out" are useless, and should be countered with a more militant anti-imperialist campaign. This is at least similar to the RCP´s positions. Countering homophobia, the Embryo Bill and AIDS hysteria is important. The bourgeois state should *not* ban racist and fascist marches, since this would strengthen the state, ultimately endangering the left. Again, very similar to RCP.  

AWG began as a split from the anarcho-syndicalist Direct Action Movement (DAM). The AWG rejected the DAM´s dual unionism in favor of a rank-and-file opposition within the existing unions. And then, maybe they really didn´t. The rank-and-file committees called for by the AWG are really "politicized" fronts for the AWG itself. The committees should cut across union divisions, and perhaps even the divide between workers and the unemployed, suggesting that they aren´t rank-and-file union caucuses of the typical kind. Their program should not be confined to union issues alone. At one point, the AWG strongly implies that their projected rank-and-file movement might agitate for the AWG´s line on Northern Ireland.

The RCP had exactly the same approach to union organizing. My take is that the RCP and AWG positions is *really* just another form of dual unionism, a kind of "moderate" version of the Third Period, essentially trying to create a dual union within the union! 

The main difference between the AWG and the Revolutionary Communist Party is that the latter group was really "right as to content", despite its ra-ra-revolutionary rhetoric, something the subjectively more leftist AWG doesn´t seem to have understood. Thus, the refusal to let the bourgeois state arbitrate between fascists and anti-fascists was really a libertarian position, while the attacks on the AIDS panic was probably a libertine promotion of "alternative lifestyle choices". The AWG does criticize the RCP´s bizarre pessimism at one point, however.

As already mentioned, the Anarchist Workers Group often took positions usually associated with Leninism and Trotskyism (while nominally sharing much of the anarchist criticism of the same). They are in effect calling for a democratic centralist organization with strong executive committees, but also with faction and tendency rights. The AWG even calls this "a cadre organization"! Such an organization is necessary, not simply for purely technical reasons (swift decisions must be taken when the class struggle moves forward), but for the more fundamental reason that the working class left to itself will never spontaneously develop revolutionary consciousness. Moreover, the working class is split, one layer being a more privileged labor aristocracy. To "politicize" the struggle ("the battle of ideas"), the revolutionary minority must organize itself on a professional basis. This all sounds like an RCP-ish take on Lenin´s "What is to be done". 

The AWG, however, preferred to reference the so-called Platform, a controversial document adopted in 1926 by Nestor Makhno, Peter Arshinov and Ida Mett, three Russian anarchist exiles in France. Since the Platform calls for the formation of a politically homogenous anarchist organization with a strong leadership, it was roundly condemned by most anarchists as "Leninist". From time to time, some anarchists rediscover the Platform, but the AWG seems to have been the only Platformist group that actually became a kind of crypto-Leninists. Or perhaps crypto-Füredi-ites...

That concludes my admittedly somewhat esoteric reflections. 

The labyrinth of neutrality

Ernst Wollweber

"Stora sabotageligan: Kominterns och Sovjetunionens underjordiska nätverk i Sverige" is a book by Wilhelm Agrell, a Swedish historian. It was published in 2016. While the book is well written and presumably directed at a wider audience (not at other historians), it´s nevertheless so filled with facts - page up and page down - that it might confuse the casual reader, not to mention the occasional reviewer. But then, a work about wartime espionage is bound to be complicated, especially if dealing with neutral Sweden, which had a complex relationship to both sides during World War II. Or where they actually three sides? 

The main characters in "Stora sabotageligan" is the so-called Great Sabotage Gang (as they were called in Sweden), better known as the Wollweber Organization, led by the exiled German Communist Ernst Wollweber. Already before the war, Wollweber recruited other Communists, often sailors, to carry out acts of sabotage against Nazi German, Italian and Japanese shipping. He also built up a sabotage network in Norway and Sweden tasked with attacking Swedish railways and other targets in the event of a Nazi German occupation (or Swedish collaboration). Sweden was an important supplier of iron ore to Germany. When the Nazis occupied Norway but not Sweden in 1940, Wollweber fled to the later country, only to be apprehended by the police (mostly by chance). The Swedish police and secret police did collaborate with Nazi Germany, but extraditing Wollweber was nevertheless considered a too obvious breach of Swedish neutrality, so the old fox was sentenced to a jail term in Sweden instead. When the Allies got the upper hand in the war, Sweden became more pro-Allied and released Wollweber, who promptly left for the Soviet Union. After the war, Wollweber resurfaced in East Germany, where he eventually became head of the Stasi, only to later lose an internal power struggle and being forced to resign. He died in obscurity in 1967. It´s actually quite amazing that he survived for so long! Stalin´s genocidal regime in Moscow purged even its own people on a semi-regular basis, and secret agents working abroad were no exception.

And then there´s the rest of the book...

It´s obvious from Agrell´s study that the Communist parties were not just politically subordinated to the Soviet Union, but frequently also micro-managed and financed from that source. Sweden and Denmark were important hubs for Soviet couriers carrying money from Moscow to various European CPs. Even day-to-day political campaigns of the Swedish Communist Party (SKP) were decided upon in Moscow, the orders relayed to the SKP leaders through short-wave radio (sic). After a damaging split in 1929, when the majority of SKP´s membership defected to form a new leftist party, the rump Stalinist SKP became completely dependent on Soviet financial assistance.

The Communist International and its member parties also created clandestine organizations. These quickly became de facto Soviet spy rings, and part of the same vast intelligence networks as the NKVD or the GRU. The Wollweber organization was unusual in that it had relatively few direct contacts with its superiors in Moscow, in order to give the Soviets "plausible deniability" in case of exposure. After all, Wollweber and his group were active saboteurs or "terrorists" in peace time. 

Agrell also describes some aspects of Western Allied espionage activities. It´s interesting to note that the United States actively tried to recruit unionists and Social Democrats to its intelligence services during World War II. The post-war alliance between the US and European Social Democracy seems to have been cemented already during the war itself. Since Sweden was neutral, many anti-Nazi refugees lived in the country during the war, and those who weren´t Communists proved a fertile ground for US recruitment. Assets within the Swedish railway union provided the Western Allies with intelligence about German trains transiting Sweden. 

The British intelligence service was also very active in Sweden, and even carried out a succesful sabotage against a German freight train at Krylbo. Independently of the Soviets, the British also planned attacks on Swedish railways and ports in case of a Nazi occupation of the country. They also created a "stay behind" network together with the anti-Nazi "Tuesday Club". Agrell claims that many of those who joined the network belonged to the "syndicalist party", presumably a reference to the Syndicalist Youth League (SUF), which was openly pro-Allied during the war. (There was no syndicalist "party", of course.) 

I admit that I hate Stalin and Stalinism even more (if that´s possible) after reading "Stora sabotageligan". Every other Communist mentioned in the book seems to have been purged by Stalin, who frequently acted in an irrational manner, decimating the Soviets´ own intelligence networks. The Western intelligence services noted that many Soviet stations abroad stopped transmitting during 1936 and 1937, clearly because many of the agents had been recalled to Moscow and liquidated. This makes me wonder what kind of person Wollweber was, since he survived Stalin, only to be disavowed and declared a non-person (but not killed or jailed) a few years after Uncle Joe´s death. Probably not the most sympathetic guy around! In a way, Wollweber´s life is a recapitulation of Communist history: he started out as a revolutionary sailor, became the head of Stasi, and then...a non-person, eaten by the system he had loyally served most of his life. 

What struck me most when reading "Stora sabotageligan", however, was how primitive much of the espionage seems to have beeen during the 1930´s. Ordinary Communist workers made bombs in their basements, radio transmitters often malfunctioned since the agents didn´t know how to use them, agents frequently got themselves arrested, and many started singing or turned coat. British intelligence was heavily understaffed before the war, and its various agencies were like cat and dog. The Wollweber operation used home-made explosives or stolen dynamite to sabotage fascist shipping, and the charges didn´t always go off. At least the Soviets were good at forging Swiss passports!

Perhaps I´m missing something here, but the technological development of spying must have taken a quantum leap during the immidiate post-war period... 

With that, I end my occasional review.  

Anarchism in Korea: From revolution to reaction?

"Anarchism in Korea: Independence, Transnationalism, and the Question of National Development 1919-1984" is a book published in 2016, authored by Dongyoun Hwang. I can´t say I like it: English clearly isn´t the author´s first language, his "dialectical understanding" of anarchism is just pseudo-erudition, and he is extremely talkative. The book is really an attempted narrative history of Korean anarchism, made extra difficult by the paucity of sources, rather than an "analysis" in the usual sense of that term. And while the author emphasizes the "transnational" character of Korean anarchism, he gives relatively little background on the Chinese and Japanese anarchists the Korean ones were transnationally cooperating with. 

Apparently, the Korean anarchists are usually depicted as "nationalist" in Korean historiography, which explains why the author (as already indicated) rather emphasizes its cosmopolitan aspects. Anarchist and other socialist ideas entered East Asia through Tokyo and Shanghai, two international metropoles. On the anarchist side, the ideas of Kropotkin were particularly popular. Another staple was Esperanto! The Korean anarchists were largely active in Japan and China. A Korean diaspora existed in both nations. In Korea itself, anarchist activity was ruthlessly suppressed by the Japanese colonial police. Somewhat ironically, there was less repression in Japan itself (until that nation became a militarist dictatorship). One group of Korean anarchists was active at the universities in Tokyo, another among Korean immigrant workers in Osaka. The author´s description of the Osaka group in particular is contradictory: was it anti-nationalist, nationalist, syndicalist, individualist, or what? 

In China, most Korean anarchists do strike me as nationalist. At the very least, most of them were closer to the KMT and the left-KMT than to the Communist Party. That is, they cooperated with the Chinese nationalists. During the 1930´s, in response to Japan´s invasion of China, the China-based Korean anarchists adopted a kind of popular front policy, calling for broadest possible anti-Japanese unity between the KMT, CCP, and (later) the Allies in World War II. However, even now, they were closer to the KMT and the so-called Provisional Government of Korea, than to the Communists. 

After World War II, many Korean anarchists returned to Korea - or rather South Korea - and begun a period of more fundamental reorientation. The author points out that while the anarchists singled out Communism as an enemy to be thrown out of the Korean peninsula, they never explicitly opposed capitalism or imperialism in South Korea, instead attacking "feudal remnants". The anarchists formed several short-lived political parties, one of them claiming loyalty to the Socialist International! (That is, the international organization of mostly Social Democratic parties.) Another faction concentrated on rural reform. Dongyoun Hwang may be right that the Korean anarchist movement de facto supported South Korea against North Korea, or at the very least went into a kind of political hibernation, perhaps waiting for the ROK to become democratic. 

The trajectory of the Korean anarchists is interesting, and was traversed by anarchists in other parts of the world, too, not least the Swedish SAC (the independent syndicalist labor union) which abjured revolution after World War II, called for piecemeal reforms of democratic polities through producer cooperatives, and actually supported South Korea during the Korean War! (In 1976, SAC became more leftist again.) Had I been a Communist, I would have considerable fun with "Anarchism in Korea"! 

I´m not sure who could possibly be interested in this narrow topic, but as you know, the Ashtar Command reviews everything... 

Veckans Shachtman

 

Léon Jouhaux, fransk patriot och arbetarledare, medgrundare av Force Ouvrière. 

Everything is possible: The Strange Journey of Georges Valois

"From Fascism to Libertarian Communism: Georges Valois against the Third Republic" by Allen Douglas is a book about Georges Valois (1878-1945), a French political activist with a very colorful career. Valois started out as an anarchist, turned to monarchism and fascism, only to rejoin the far left later in life. Indeed, he is one of the few people I'm familiar with who evolved from right-wing to left-wing activism at a fairly advanced age. Valois died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II.

As a young man, Valois saw himself as an anarchist rebel, but was soon drawn to the more constructive side of anarchist ideology in the form of Kropotkin and anarcho-syndicalism. His first political mentor was Ferdinand Pelloutier, his second (more ominously) was Georges Sorel. When breaking with leftist syndicalism, Valois would join the monarchist and proto-fascist Action francaise headed by Charles Maurras. He also became a Catholic. Sorel, too, expressed some sympathy for Maurras. During the 1920's, Valois founded an explicitly fascist party, La Faisceau, which seems to have clashed with the Action francaise even more often than it fought leftist. I mean that quite literally: both Valois and Maurras had access to impatient young men functioning as stormtroopers... 

During the 1930's, Valois went back to a form of revolutionary syndicalism and libertarian communism, while maintaining an ecumenic outreach to all leftist currents except the most reformist ones. He also left the Church and seems to have become an atheist. 

Douglas is clearly fascinated by Valois, but can't really explain his peculiar political gyrations. Perhaps no explanation is readily available. He describes Valois as a "utopian", constantly working on blueprints for a future society. Did he think too much? Like many other utopians, Valois had a tendency to "take an idea and run with it", in his case currency reform. He was something of a "money freak", obsessed with the gold standard, although I have to admit that I often don't understand what on earth the man was talking about! And while Douglas paints Valois as a fairly conservative family man, he did have a mercurial streak in his personality. Why would a young anarchist travel to Russia and work as a tutor in an aristocratic family? Why did he abdicate leadership responsibility in order to work at a plantation in Reunion, or in order to walk on foot from Paris to Lourdes as a Catholic pilgrimage? His whole approach to politics and coalition building was unpredictable and eclectic. He was also a litigious person, but so where his opponents. Perhaps this is typically French? 

Interestingly, Valois was for the creation of Red-Brown blocs as a right-wing activist. As a leftist, by contrast, he warned against all forms of collaboration with fascism, and perceptively realized that some reformist "neosocialists" (such as Henri de Man) could end up becoming fascists - which they indeed did. Valois thus wasn't a "Red-Brown leftist". He really did change almost his entire worldview when returning to the left. As a monarchist reactionary, he had opposed the French revolution, while extolling the virtues of hierarchy, war and tradition. And yes, he was anti-Semitic. His philosophy had been a pessimistic one. Humans are by nature lazy, and all progress is therefore the result of stern leadership (including the whip) over the mediocre masses. As a leftist, by contrast, Valois was optimistic, dreaming of progress and a coming space age. He opposed war, militarism and hierarchy in favor of a society based on mutual aid. 

Yet, there was *some* kind of continuity even in the mind of this strange Frenchman! One was the fixation with monetary reform. After abandoning the pro-gold "deflationist" position when he turned left, he actually went back to a gold bug position while still a leftist. Another constant was an orientation to winning the working class, something Valois never seem to have accomplished in any of his political incarnations. Still another common theme is the idea that the state shouldn't direct the economy. During his right-wing period, he certainly saw the state as necessary, but economic life should be in the hands of "corporations" (in the corporativist sense). As a libertarian communist, he would rather dispense with the state altogether in favor of syndicates (labor unions), cooperatives, etc. By contrast, state planning was "plutocratic" and opened the door to fascism (and Stalinism). It's also interesting to note that Valois used biological metaphors both during his far right and far left phases. As a leftist, he argued that the human body functions "democratically" due to energetic factors. 

Final point about my copy of this book. It's apparently a print on demand edition, and it seems the printer made a weird mistake. Under the same cover, there are two books, the other one being "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy" by none other than Nikola Tesla! I'm sure Georges Valois would have approved of the sentiment... 

The bankruptcy of ultraleftism

This is a very obscure pamphlet which I review mostly to show that I´m Number One when it comes to obscure pamphlets. Trust me, not even Amazon sells this one! 

“The Bankruptcy of Syndicalism and Anarchism” was published in 1979 by Workers for Proletarian Autonomy and Social Revolution. It was distributed in the UK years later by a mysterious outfit codenamed BM Blob. The pamphlet is very “in house”, even for yours truly, and deals with internal conflicts within the CNT, the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist labor union resurrected after the death of Franco and the reintroduction of democracy in Spain. The CNT split soon after its resurrection (the defectors later adopted the name CGT). 

The authors, an otherwise unknown group of anarchists or Left Communists, oppose both factions. They describe the CNT as a chaotic mayhem of petty bureaucrats, careerists and competing cliques. The intramural CNT polemics seems to have been very acerbic. Factional opponents were accused of being “former” fascists, Trotskyites or “former priests” (sic) as a matter of course. Well, one CNT leader in Catalonia apparently *was* a priest! Little of substance is said about the CNT-CGT split, which concerned whether or not the anarcho-syndicalists should stand in the so-called union elections. CGT was for, the more orthodox anarchist CNT was against (and hence couldn´t really function as a union in the first place). 

The ultraleftists who published this pamphlet might be excused for thinking that Spain would soon see another revolution – I assume the political situation in the years immediately after Franco´s death was still unstable (think ETA and the attempted coup in 1981). Today, ultraleftism is even more bankrupt than syndicalism and I wouldn´t be surprised if these merchants of the ra-ra-revolutionary word are themselves standing in union elections. Or, more likely, work at some college…

Sorelian syndicalists found?

Syndikalisternas Förbund (the League of Syndicalists) was a small left-wing radical group in Sweden. Formed during the 1950´s by Rudolf Holmö, they seem to have become dormant after his death in 1963, only to be resurrected around 1979. Their next date of expiry is unknown, but some members or perhaps ex-members of the group were still around circa 1992. I briefly corresponded with one of them. The publication of SF (or S-F) was called Våra Idéer.

Holmö´s version of syndicalism is most similar to the revolutionary syndicalism of the CGT in France during the decades immediately preceding World War I. Holmö certainly regarded various CGT leaders as the “fathers” of syndicalism. Holmö was more critical of anarcho-syndicalism, seeing it as a breach of the “non-partisan” character of syndicalism, the “party” taking over the syndicates of course being the anarchists. To Holmö, all forms of anarchism save one were incompatible with syndicalism since they didn´t really support full socialization of the economy. The sole exception is Kropotkin´s anarcho-communism. Holmö had a special animus against those anarchists who moved “to the right” after World War II, essentially becoming a kind of Cold War liberals. Or perhaps Cold War libertarians! In Holmö´s worldview, there was no contradiction between being an “anarchist” and working for the CIA. He opposed both. The Swedish syndicalist organization, the SAC, supported the new course and expelled Holmö and the S-F leadership when their factional activities became too annoying. In 1981 (I think), SAC rescinded the expulsions – this was at a time when the organization was moving back towards more leftist positions, albeit a strong Cold Warrior faction still remained. Ironically, the S-F didn´t attract much support among the 70´s radicals who had joined the SAC. The group was seen as strange, anachronistic and cultish. It still insisted that the main inspirator of the Cold War course, Helmut Rüdiger, must of course literally have been a CIA agent…

The pamphlet I´m reviewing contains two articles, “Georges Sorel: Kort biografi” by Leif Björk and “Den syndikalistiska rörelsens historiska bakgrund” by Fritz Jonsson. My copy of the pamphlet was published in 1979, but the two articles seem to be from the 1920´s. Jonsson´s text is a history of the French CGT, showing the CGT-fixation of this group. The real blockbuster is the first article. Yes, it really is a surprisingly good exposition of Georges Sorel´s basic ideas. Indeed, this is what prompted me to procure the pamphlet in the first place. To S-F, Sorel was the leading theoretician of revolutionary syndicalism in France circa 1900-1910, but everyone who knows his intellectual history knows that Sorel, of course, was more than this. Much more. Today, Sorel is often regarded as a forerunner of fascism and Red-Brown blocs, also having strong affinities to Bolshevism, or rather the “left” Bolsheviks who were often criticized by Lenin. Philosophically, Sorel is often paired with Bergson. However, neither Holmö nor the S-F had any fascistic or vitalistic tendencies, being by all accounts a left-wing socialist group which eschewed violence in the here and now, instead concentrating on publishing rather boring theoretical texts (the only “violence” from their quarter being their often acerbic polemics). At the same time, S-F must have been aware of Sorel´s more peculiar ideas, since several of them are mentioned in Leif Björk´s article! I´m not sure how to square this little circle.

Björk´s identity is unknown to me, but based on internal evidence, the article must have been published in some Swedish syndicalist magazine during the 1920´s. The author clearly likes Sorel, at one point calling his works “EPOCHAL IN SIGNIFICANCE” (caps in original). Since Björk is a leftist, he studiously avoids Sorel´s connections to the Catholic conservatives and proto-fascists. However, he does expound on other distinctly Sorelian notions. There is the idea that proletarian violence is good for society since it forces the bourgeoisie to abandon its pacifism and resist, the admiration of the capitalists for developing science and the productive forces, the fear of “degeneration”, and the notion that the general strike is really a “myth”. Björk does a good job explaining these peculiar notions, and I get the impression that he believes in them himself. He also ably summarizes Sorel´s more typically syndicalist ideas. Finally, he mentions Sorel´s qualified support for Lenin´s Bolsheviks after the 1917 October revolution in Russia. The really interesting question is of course how much the S-F believed of this “left Sorelianism”. It would have been piquant to discover a Swedish left-Sorelian group, but as I have already indicated, I don´t think S-F were really Sorelians at all. But if so, why on earth this pamphlet?

Another curious thing is that the pamphlet was printed by Stockholms LS, the Stockholm branch of the SAC which had expelled Holmö and the S-F leaders back in 1953! What that means, is of course an interesting question, too…

The Lenin of syndicalism

Anarchist good guy?

This is one of the most obscure products I´ve reviewed. Unless you are Swedish and very interested in the history of anarcho-syndicalism, chances are you never heard of “Förhållandet mellan syndikalism och anarkism”, with the long subtitle, or perhaps front cover slogan, “Syndikalismens förhållande till anarkismen är ett annat än de olika anarkistiska attitydernas förhållande till syndikalismen!”. First published in 1963, my copy is dated 1981.

The author, Rudolf Holmö (alias Rudolv Holmö or Rudolv Holme) had been a high-ranking syndicalist and member of the Swedish syndicalist dual union SAC during the 1910´s and 1920´s. It´s not clear to me when he left the SAC the first time, but his resurfacing during the 1950´s is said to have been a reentry into the organization. He was expelled from the SAC by its Stockholm branch (Stockholms LS) in 1953 together with some close associates. At the time, SAC had changed most of its traditional revolutionary politics in favor of a kind of Cold War liberalism, or rather ditto libertarian socialism, inspired to take this step by Helmut Rüdiger, a German exile living in Sweden. The twin disasters of Stalinist Communism and Nazism had made the SAC give up its revolutionary goals and methods, instead calling for peaceful change and decentralization through co-operative movements and businesses. Internationally, the SAC supported the West in its Cold War against the Soviets, even going so far as to support South Korea and the United States during the Korean War! Thus, Rüdiger could be seen as the libertarian socialist equivalent of Max Shachtman.

Holmö opposed Rüdiger “from the left”, calling for a return to more traditional syndicalist positions (or maybe not – see further below). His group, Syndikalisternas Förbund (the League of Syndicalists) published the magazine Våra Idéer (Our Ideas). The Rüdigerites were not amused, and unceremoniously expelled Holmö and the other S-F leaders from the SAC. However, it seems the expulsions were declared null and void by Stockholms LS in 1981 (Holmö was already dead by this point) and the S-F certainly existed within the SAC during the 1980´s. Ironically, the more leftist elements within the SAC were *not* attracted to S-F´s often curious positions and rabid polemical style, instead preferring classical anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism. Holmö´s version of syndicalism was more similar to that of the French CGT (pre-World War I), and it could be argued that he adapted himself to both Social Democracy and Communism. Above all, his version of revolutionary syndicalism was specifically anti-anarchist, and he was sometimes dubbed “the syndicalist Lenin” for this fact. The Rüdiger faction had accused him of being in cahoots with the Social Democrats, and it´s certainly interesting to note that Holmö had a prominent position in the ABF during his absence from the SAC, the ABF being a Social Democratic-dominated educational association.

“Förhållandet mellan syndikalism och anarkism” is a curious pamphlet in many ways. Logically, Holmö should attack Rüdiger for being a bourgeois liberal and Cold Warrior. He *does* imply at several points that Rüdiger must be a CIA agent, and he certainly regards him as “liberal”, this being a serious reproach in Holmö´s more classically socialist worldview. However, most of the time, Holmö accuses Rüdiger and his co-thinkers of being *anarchists*, seeing this as the main problem. To Holmö, all anarchist currents save one are inevitably hostile to the interests of the labor movement and therefore also the interests of syndicalism. The sole exception are the anarcho-communists around Peter Kropotkin, who in Holmö´s opinion always supported the revolutionary “syndicates” in an admirable fashion. All other anarchist currents are either confused (such as those upholding Bakunin) or outright reactionaries, such as those harking back to Proudhon. Holmö has a special animus against Errico Malatesta, whose “free communism” he associates with complete decentralization, societal decay and general mayhem, in plain English anarchy! Malatesta´s self-proclaimed disciple Max Nettlau is another object of venom for Holmö, and so are Rudolf Rocker and Augustin Souchy in their respective post-World War II incarnations. Rüdiger was apparently associated with all these people. In some curious way, then, Holmö connects anarchism, anarchy (in the negative sense), liberalism and – surprise – the CIA.

Holmö´s alternative turns out to be a centralized form of labor organization, complete socialization of the economy (albeit under “the self-management principle”) and a strictly uniform society (he is very adamant on this point), rather than the utopian “free communism” of Malatesta, Nettlau and other Agency assets. Holmö believes that syndicalism must be strictly neutral towards all partisan parliamentary politics, and also towards religion, since the only function of a syndicalist labor union is to promote the socialization of production. Like the French CGT, Holmö never really explains how this can work in practice – the CGT, of course, was *not* neutral towards the socialist political parties but *opposed* them, the militant minority de facto acting as a quasi-political party itself (albeit an extra-parliamentary one). Holmö also explicitly states that the goal of syndicalism isn´t to abolish the state. Indeed, the state *can´t* be abolished, since all societies need a centralized organ of some kind to function properly. I get the impression that Holmö is trying to anachronistically resuscitate the “pure” syndicalism of the CGT in 1950´s Sweden, where the political lineups were very different. 

As already indicated, the Holmö group failed to attract much support or interest during the 1980´s, when they had been allowed to work freely inside the SAC. The old guard of Rüdiger must have vomited at every mention of these people, while the new style 70´s radicals considered a “syndicalist” group sounding like a blend of pseudo-Communism and pseudo-Social Democracy very, very strange. And then there was that angry polemical style – the syndicalists I knew (including the ones who were on the anarcho-syndicalist side of things) were sick and tired of the ra-ra-revolutionary sloganeering and dogmatism of the Leninist groups and didn´t react very well to the S-F version either!

Finally, I noticed something very strange about the publication history of Holmö´s pamphlet. At one occasion, it was reprinted by the Anarchist Federation in Stockholm! I´m not sure if this was some kind of bizarre trolling, or if these particular anarchists were of the nice anarcho-communist Kropotkinesque version. Also, my copy of the pamphlet, while published by the S-F, is actually printed by Stockholms LS…

What on earth for?!

Next posting: more S-F high strangeness. Stay tuned, comrades!

In pursuit of socialism

A review of "Socialismens Idéhistoria" by Ronny Ambjörnsson

This is a book by Ronny Ambjörnsson, a Swedish professor of intellectual history. The book's title in translation means “The Intellectual History of Socialism”.

It's a well-written, basic study of all the usual sources of socialist thinking: Greco-Roman ideas about the Golden Age, Jewish-Christian millenarianism and asceticism, speculations about “natural law”, the Radical Reformation, Thomas More and Tomasso Campanella, the radical currents during the English Civil War and French Revolution, and the utopian socialists immediately preceding Marx. We also meet all the usual people, including Wycliffe, Huss, Müntzer, the radicals at Münster, Winstanley, Babeuf and Buonarotti. Marx and Engels are only mentioned in a short section, since the book is intended as a history of pre-Marxian socialism (or proto-socialism).

Not bad, and relatively sympathetic since the author is a socialist himself. That being said, Ambjörnsson is objective, often criticizing the authoritarian and totalitarian tendencies in utopian philosophies. While claiming the mantle of Marx, the author sounds more like a libertarian socialist in the tradition of Kropotkin, syndicalism and guild socialism. He is openly critical of the “vanguardist”, “left-Jacobin” element in modern socialism.

If you're Swedish, finding this book at a library near you might still be possible, and you might actually learn a thing or two from it, regardless of whether you agree with his “woke” conclusions or not.

Lip service

“Lip and the Self-Managed Counter-Revolution” is a rare pamphlet published in 1975 by Black & Red in Detroit, an anarchist press associated with Fredy Perlman, who later became a contributor to the radical magazine Fifth Estate. Black & Red supported the IWW and this publication therefore comes with an IWW union bug! “Lip and the Self-Managed Counter-Revolution” is a translation of an article from an obscure French journal, Négation. The original article probably appeared in 1974. The political philosophy of Négation isn't entirely clear, but they were some kind of ultraleftists. By “ultraleftists”, I mean the political tendencies that came out of the Left Communist tradition (Council Communism, Bordigism, Battaglia Communista, etc). The Left Communists were politically “to the left” of the Russian Bolsheviks (i.e. even more sectarian). Négation's article often quotes Amadeo Bordiga, but otherwise sound more Council Communist in orientation. We are probably dealing with some kind of eclectic hybrid.

Lip (also spelled LIP) was a watch-making company in the French town of Besancon. In 1973, the Lip workers occupied their plant to stop the owner, Fred Lip, from closing it down. The occupation became famous after the workers (supported by the ex-Catholic labor union CFDT) tried to run the plant by themselves, selling watches at solidarity meetings all across France. The high tide of the struggle took place in 1973-74 and included several confrontations with the notorious French riot police, the CRS. Most left-wing radicals, naturally, supported the Lip workers (called “Lips” in the pamphlet). The small Négation group didn't. True to ultraleftist form, they condemned the struggle at Lip as “counter-revolution”. This makes their article an exasperating read, doubly so since it's liberally sprinkled with heavy “Marxist” theoretical jargon. This can't have been easy to translate! Even so, Négation's article might perhaps be of some use if you're interested in Situationism, the neo-Bordigism of Jacques Camatte or indeed Fredy Perlman. It *is* easier to read than Camatte's oeuvres.

Négation divides the evolution of capitalism into three distinct phases. Very briefly and using my own terminology, these are the eras of free market capitalism (which came to an end during the Great Depression), state capitalism and “self-management”. The state capitalist period is characterized by a bloated public sector, constant government interference in the economy, a division between managers and owners of a corporation, and the economic dominance of the credit-giving finance sector. In other words, capitalism as it looked like from the end of World War II until the 1980's. Négation doesn't regard nationalizations or state interventionism as bourgeois concessions to the working class. Quite the contrary, state capitalism is a more pure or advanced form of capitalism than the free market version, and represents “the real domination of Capital”. In the future, capitalism will be transformed one more time. Today, we know that the transformation was towards neo-liberalism and globalism. Négation's prediction was that capitalism would use “self-management” as a universal tool to make workers administer their own exploitation. Making employees and users take over public hospitals or schools is part of this ploy. They also predicted a more aggressive, nationalist and “anti-imperialist” French capitalism. In my opinion, Négation's predictions may come true, but they are still in the future as we speak.

Due to the above analysis, Négation (some members of which had bad experiences with cooperative businesses or hippy communes) condemned the Lip workers for taking over the watch-making plant in an attempt to “self-manage” it. This, Négation argues, is precisely the next wave of counter-revolution from Capital. But what should the Lips have done instead? What concrete advice can the disenchanted hippy Bordigists give them? Négation argues that during the period of “real domination”, the most important forms of anti-capitalist struggle are sabotage and absenteeism. It's not clear what this means in a Lip context. Should the workers have destroyed the machines and then gone home? Négation then writes that a world-wide socialist revolution is necessary to completely transform the human community. Indeed! So the Lips should have rioted inside the plant, absconded and waited for the apocalypse… (How this is different from, say, stoned hippies isn't entirely clear.)

In the end, I would say that “Lip and the Self-Managed Revolution” is a theoretically intriguing but practically worthless pamphlet. Still, I do think this footnote to history deserves at least the OK rating, so I give it three stars.

Chittagong chanting

Amazon sells the flag of the CHT, which prompted me to some comments...

The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) is an area in the eastern part of Bangladesh. The native population is Buddhist and animist, yet CHT was awarded to Muslim East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) when India was partitioned. Ethnic tensions have characterized the area ever since. Many of the natives live on a “primitive” or “tribal” level. The conflict between CHT and Pakistan/Bangladesh may sound obscure in the extreme, but I actually heard about it already during the 1980's. For whatever reason, Swedish leftists wrote about the conflict in their magazines. Don't ask me why. There was a small Fourth World solidarity group in Stockholm which expressed its support for Native struggles around the world (including West Papua, American Indians and CHT) – its leader was a tall old hippie with a penchant for Buddhist chanting – but I never understood why they were interested in Chittagong in particular rather than, say, Nagaland or the Sami in Lapland! Bangladesh was pro-Western during the 1980's, which perhaps explains the situation. Chanting or not, the flag of the CHT shown here is unofficial and associated with the autonomy struggle of the Jumma, the collective name of the disparate tribes in the region. The political organization using the flag is called the PCJSS. I suppose the struggle continues…

When fascists were the rearguard

"Fascism idag" is an old anti-fascist classic from 1979, written by journalist Hans Lindquist and published by Federativs, a small left-wing press in Stockholm. The book is only available in Swedish.

The subtitle means "Vanguard or rearguard", and when the book was published, fascism (except for the National Front in Britain) really did look like a rearguard. Most of the groups mentioned in Lindquist's survey of European and North American fascism were small and frequently bizarre. Many were openly neo-Nazi. Curiously, the author never answers his own question, and has a tendency to portray even small Nazi groups as more significant than they really were. Despite this, "Fascism idag" is remarkably free from tabloid sensationalism and overwrought rhetoric. Indeed, Lindquist might not even have been a left-wing radical, but a more regular liberal.

In 1979, there were only three well-known fascist groups in Sweden, none of which were particularly threatening. There was the "nationalist" SNF, essentially an old boys club for well-heeled paleo-conservatives with covert Nazi affinities and somewhat less covert sympathies for Pinochet's brutal military junta in Chile. Further, there was the openly neo-Nazi NRP, a small band of kooks who lived in symbiosis with the tabloid press, always ready to give interviews dressed in full Nazi regalia. The group's actions sometimes bordered the comic. The NRP's "storm troopers" at one point wanted to attack the synagogue in Stockholm, but for some reason backed down. Instead, they threw a smoke bomb at a cinema showing an anti-Nazi comedy starring Mel Brooks! Finally, there was Per Engdahl's Nysvenska Rörelsen, the closest thing to a "respectable" fascist group in Sweden, with an elaborate corporatist philosophy.

All this changed already during the 1980's, when various fascist groups did recruit new followers and established a permanent, visible presence on the Swedish far right. It seems fascism might still prove to be the "vanguard", after all...

Unless we do something about it, of course.

Chloroform in print

I´m frequently amazed by the books, pamphlets and brochures sold by Amazon. "Centralism och decentralism" is a short, Swedish-language pamphlet containing two immensely boring articles by syndicalist Frans Severin, first published during the 1920's.

Severin explains the syndicalist preference for decentralism, argues that even a democratic state is really centralized and therefore doesn't go far enough, that syndicalists are opposed to a territorial state, that the labour unions should take over the administration of society, etc.

Zzzzzzzzzzz....

This is truly chloroform in print. Thank heavens it's currently unavailable!

Skeletons in the closet

Albert Jensen (1879 - 1957) was a Swedish syndicalist or libertarian socialist. From 1928 to 1950, he was the main editor of "Arbetaren", the newspaper of the syndicalist labour union SAC. Jensen was also a frequent delegate at various international syndicalist or anarcho-syndicalist conferences. He was married to Elise Ottesen-Jensen (Ottar), a famous Swedish feminist and sex educator.

"Syndikalisten Albert Jensen", a small book only available in Swedish, is a collection of Jensen's writings, edited by Evert Arvidsson, another editor of "Arbetaren" and important SAC leader. The collection gives a haphazard impression. SAC started out as a militant, revolutionary organization influenced by anarchism, but steered towards a more "reformist" position already during the 1920's. After World War II, under the influence of one Helmut Rüdiger, SAC became virtual "Cold War liberals". The anarcho-syndicalist international IWA responded by expelling them!

Jensen's role in this long march to the right is never fully explained by Arvidsson, who nevertheless hints at some kind of differences of opinion between himself and the older editor. Arvidsson seems to have been a firm ally of Rüdiger. Even a causal reader can see that the oldest articles by Jensen are super-revolutionary (including one titled "Let the Russians take us"), while the articles of his "middle period" sound more reformist, albeit without clearly spelling out all the implications. Jensen believed that the workers must acquire the skills to run the economy and society already within present-day society, and that the self-managed labour unions should gradually take over society and squeeze out the employers and the state. Of course, this (utopian) scenario requires a super-stable, ultra-liberal democracy to be even partially implemented. Therefore, Jensen should logically support the "bourgeois" liberals against the Communists and perhaps even the Social Democrats (who want a strong state).

Jensen never drew these conclusions during the 1920's. 30 years later, Rüdiger would draw them for him. But what about the late Jensen? Did he also become a Cold Warrior, or did he have some qualifications? How did he feel about SAC's (bizarre) support for South Korea during the Korean War? South Korea, of course, was a right-wing, military dictatorship... None of this is discussed by the editor.

When will the libertarian socialists, who constantly harangue the Communists and Social Democrats for various real or perceived historical sins, come to terms with the skeletons in their own closet?

Annie Besant before Theosophy

"Essays on socialism" is a book published in 1887 by British political activists Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, containing pro-socialist essays by the former. Besant is best known for her leading role in the Theosophical Society and the Indian independence movement, but this was still in the future when "Essays on socialism" were published. In 1887, Besant was an associate of the explicit atheist Bradlaugh, the founder of the National Secular Society (which still exists). Interestingly, Besant and Bradlaugh didn't see eye to eye on socialism, and the original edition of "Essays on socialism" (available free on-line) contain ads for Bradlaugh's anti-socialist pamphlets! Well, at least they had free speech within the free-thinkers movement...

I admit that "Essays on socialism" isn't particularly interesting, except perhaps for Besant's biographers. I read some of it, and skimmed the rest. Besant's arguments are Socialism 101. Three things stand out. One is Besant's strong orientation towards Parliament, electoral reform and legislation. The more riotous forms of class struggle are hardly ever mentioned in the essays, except as negative examples of what happens when social reforms aren't enacted. It's not clear whether this was Besant's actual position, or a clever tactic to avoid state prosecution (Besant and Bradlaugh had been in trouble with the law on several previous occasions).

Apparently, Besant was involved in more militant struggles, including "Bloody Sunday" in 1887 and the London matchgirls' strike of 1888. On the other hand, her tactic included a close alliance with the Radicals, the "left" wing of the Liberals. In her essays, Besant skillfully points out that the Radicals advocate many measures which, if taken to their logical conclusion, should lead to socialism: bills interfering with the "rights" of employers (such as bills prohibiting child labour), the creation of a national education system, the nationalization of public communications, etc.

The other thing that struck me was a "syndicalist" or "anarchist" tendency, with Besant calling for trade union ownership of each branch of industry. Thus, the mineworkers' union should own the mines, and so on. In one essay, she proposes that the local community should own the means of production within its area. This is contradicted, however, by Besant's constant insistence on state ownership and control over all land, with the peasants leasing the land rather than owning it themselves. At one point, Besant emphasizes that no blue-prints for a future socialist society are possible.

The third thing that struck me is that Besant calls for population control, and seems to accept the argument that overpopulation is at least partly to blame for poverty and low wage-levels. The socialist community will decide on the desired number of births.

To be perfectly honest, I found "Essays on socialism" to be a boring read, but since everything written by Besant is somehow intrinsically interesting, I will give it the OK rating.

Another Petersen extravaganza

"W. Z. Foster: Renegade or Spy?" is an Arnold Petersen special, a veritable guilty pleasure for sect-watchers like myself. Petersen, who was national secretary of the U.S. Socialist Labor Party from 1914 to 1969 (!!), has written a number of pretty curious pamphlets, dutifully devoured and reviewed by yours truly.

This one is no exception.

The super-sectarian SLP frowned at the Communist Party USA, or the "Anarcho-Communists" in Petersen speak (he also loved to call them "burlesque Bolsheviki"). William Z. Foster was the leader of the Communist Party when this brochure was first printed in good ol' Third Period 1932. Naturally, Petersen's quasi-aristocratic contempt is therefore directed at poor Foster, a "deadly microbe assailing the revolutionary organism", an agent provocateur and spy (Petersen never says on whose behalf), and - the worst thing of all - an "Anarchist" with a capital A. By "Anarchist" the cultured Danish-American Petersen, who often quotes Goethe and Shakespeare in his pamphlets, meant something like lumpen barbarian enemy of civilization as we know it, and then some. But perhaps there *are* worse things than being top dog Anarchist, since Petersen also believes that Foster is a potential Napoleon III, Mussolini or Hitler, due to his support for veterans' pensions!

Petersen's people's exhibit A against the microbe (Foster, remember?) is that William Zebulon wasn't a pure-bred socialist during World War I, instead collaborating with "Sammy" Gompers of the AFL, even to the point of buying war bonds. In Red Scare 1919, both Gompers and Foster were summoned before a congressional committee, before which Foster repudiated a revolutionary work ("Syndicalism") he had written years earlier, while "Sammy" told the congressmen that Foster had became a respectable trades unionist. Thus, most of "W Z Foster: Renegade or Spy?" deals with Foster's testimony in Washington, an event which transpired *before* he even became a Communist.

Naturally, Petersen expresses surprise that the great Stalin have made this "adventurer" his sole official representative in the United States. While rejecting the burlesque Bolshevik microbes on his home turf, Petersen still admired both Lenin and Stalin, which may or may not tell us something about his unrealistic worldview and personal psychology. This Petersen pamphlet therefore ends with the usual "proofs" that Lenin admired Daniel De Leon, the chief theoretician of the Socialist Labor Party and Petersen's foremost cultic hero.

But hell, I'm starting to sound like A.P. myself, so I think I have to stop here. Once again, thanx for da entertainment.