Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Counter-Power vol. 1)

Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Counter-Power vol. 1) is a book written by Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt which deals with “the ideas, history and relevance of the broad anarchist tradition though a survey of 150 years of global history.”

Content

The book takes an approach which, while also analysing Western Europe and North America, nonetheless takes the history of anarchism and syndicalism in Latin America, southern Africa, and East Asia seriously.

The book also states that “‘class struggle’ anarchism, sometimes called revolutionary or communist anarchism, is not a type of anarchism … it is the only anarchism,” and so it does not deal with individualist anarchists such as William Godwin and Max Stirner, nor with mutualists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Regarding the “philosophical, individualist, spiritual and ‘lifestyle’ traditions,” the authors say “we do not regard these currents as part of the broad anarchist tradition.”

Having removed a large portion of self-proclaimed anarchists from their analysis, the authors then divide the anarchist movement into two traditions, those are “mass and insurrectionist anarchism”. The book itself is argued from a mass anarchist perspective. For the authors, “[m]ass anarchism stresses that only mass movements can create revolutionary change in society, [and] that such movements are typically built through struggles around immediate issues and reforms.” They go on that “[t]he insurrectionist approach, in contrast, claims that reforms are illusory, that movements like unions are willing or unwitting bulwarks of the existing order, and that formal organisations are authoritarian. Consequently, insurrectionist anarchism emphasises armed action – ‘propaganda by the deed’ – as the most important means of evoking a spontaneous revolutionary upsurge.”

External links

• A blog on the book
• Exchange on Black Flame with Anarchist Studies between Spencer Sunshine and Lucien van der Walt
• A Flame to Extenguish Capital: Review of Black Flame by Deric Shannon
• Review of the book by M. Bookunin

References

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