Anarchism is not merely a doctrine that deals with the social aspect of human life, in the narrow meaning with which the term is invested in political dictionaries and, at meetings, by our propagandist speakers: anarchism is also the study of human life in general.
Over the course of the elaboration of its overall world picture, anarchism has set itself a very specific task: to encompass the world in its entirety, sweeping aside all manner of obstacles, present and yet to come, which might be posed by bourgeois capitalist science and technology, with the aim of providing humanity with the most exhaustive possible explanation of existence in this world and of making the best possible fist of all the problems which may confront it. This appr... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
Translator's note: The period following
the Russian revolution was one of great change for anarchists, many of whom fled
to France to escape oppressive regimes. One contribution to the debates of the
time was the Organizational Platform of the
General Union of Anarchists - Project, produced by a group of Russian exiles
including Makhno. Following publication of this, a group of Italian anarchists
founded the 1st Italian Section of the proposed International Anarchist
Communist Federation (1).
The document below, dating from the latter half of the 1920s is the Manifesto of this Italian
group, one of whose members was Giuseppe Bifolchi. Bifolchi later had to leave France and went to Belgium where he founded the monthly journal
"... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
Comrade peasants!
For many years the working peasantry of the Ukraine has been struggling with its ancient enemies and oppressors. Thousands of the best Sons of the Revolution have fallen in the battle for the complete liberation of the Working People
from every oppression. Through the heroic efforts of the peasant Insurgent Army of the Ukraine, the hangman Denikin was dealt a fatal blow. The insurgent Peasants, with their leader
- Bat'ko Makhno - at their head, remaining for long months in the home front of the white guard, surrounded ten times by a strong enemy, exhausted by the worst disease
- typhus, which took from action a hundred of our best fighters daily, frequently lacking
ammunition, together attacked the enemy wi... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
Comrades in the Red Army!
Your commanders and commissars are frightening and convincing you that we Makhnovists are murdering captured Red Army men.
Comrades! This infamous lie has been concocted by your leaders only so that you, like slaves, would defend the interests of the commissars, so that you would not let yourselves be taken prisoner by us Makhnovists and so you would not learn the truth about our worker-peasant Makhnovist movement.
We, comrades, have risen against the oppression of all tyrants. For three years our blood has been flowing on all fronts. We drove out the Austro-German tyrants, smashed the Denikinist hangmen, fought against Petliura; now we are fighting the domination of the commissar authority, the ... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
The people of the Ukraine, oppressed by Your commanders and commissars, and sometimes even directly by You under the leadership of these Commanders and Commissars, protest against such coercion: they waited for You as the liberators of the working masses from the yoke of the Denikinist gang of hangmen; but after Your arrival in the
Ukraine the groans, weeping and wails of the suffering people grew still louder. Executions everywhere, the burning of peasants' huts and even villages, everywhere pillage and violence.
The people have been exhausted and have no more strength to endure such arbitrariness; giving advance notice, they are asking You: will you stop in the face of these nightmares and realize whom, under the leadership of Y... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
To all the peasants and workers of the Ukraine. To be sent by telegraph, telephone or post to all villages, rural districts, and governments of the Ukraine. To be read at peasant gatherings, in factories and in workshops.
Fellow workers! The Revolutionary Insurgent Army of the Ukraine (Makhnovist) was called into existence as a protest against the oppression of the workers and peasants by the bourgeois-landlord authority on the one hand and the Bolshevik-Communist dictatorship on the other.
Setting for itself one goal - the battle for total liberation of the working people of the Ukraine from the oppression of various authorities and the creation of a
true soviet socialist order, the insurgent Makhnovist arm... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
Brothers in the Red Army!
The stooges of Nicholas kept you in the dark and ordered you to fratricidal war with the Japanese and then with the Germans and with many other peoples for the sake of increasing their own wealth; to your lot fell death at the front and complete ruin at home.
But the storm cloud and the fog, through which You could see nothing, lifted; the sun began to shine; You understood and were finished with fratricidal war. But it was the calm before a new storm. Now once again you are being sent to fight, against us, "insurgent Makhnovists," in the name, supposedly, of a "worker-peasant" authority, which is once again dispensing chains and slavery to You and riches and joys to this horde of a million bureaucratic parasit... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
In the wake of the abolition of czarist despotism at the time of the 1917 revolution, prospects of new, free relations between peoples hitherto in subjection beneath the violent yoke of the Russian State, appeared on the horizons of the world of Labor. The notion of complete self-determination, up to and including a complete break with the Russian State, thus emerged naturally among these peoples. Groups of every persuasion sprang up among the Ukrainian population by the dozen: each of them had its own outlook and interpreted the idea of self-determination according to its own factional interests. All in all, the toiling masses of the Ukraine did not identify with these groups and did not join them.
Over seven years have elapsed since, and... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
The 14th Congress of the Russian Communist Party has roundly condemned the notion of equality. Prior to the congress, Zinoviev had mentioned the idea in the course of his polemic against Ustrialov and Bukharin. He declared then that the whole of contemporary philosophy was sustained by the idea of equality. Kalinin spoke up forcefully at the congress against that contention, taking the line that any reference to equality could not help but be harmful and was not to be tolerated. His reasoning was as follows:
"Can we talk to peasants about equality? No, that is out of the question, for in that case, they would set about demanding the same rights as workers, which would be in complete contradiction with the dictatorship of the proletariat.... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
For the past seven years, almost, the enemies of the Makhnovist revolutionary movement have wallowed in so many lies about it that one might marvel that these people do not take a red face, once in a while at least. It is rather characteristic that these shameless lies directed against myself and the Makhnovist insurgents, indeed against our movement as a whole, can unite folk from very different socio-political camps: among them one can find journalists of every persuasion, writers, scholars and laymen who place obstacles in their path, mavericks and speculators, who occasionally have no hesitation in putting themselves forward as pathfinders for avant-garde revolutionary ideas. One can also come across supposed anarchists, like Yanovsky, ... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
1. WHO ARE THE MAKHNOVISTS AND WHAT ARE THEY FIGHTING FOR?
The Makhnovists are peasants and workers who rose as early as 1918 against the coercion of the German-Magyar, Austrian and Hetman bourgeois authority in the Ukraine. The Makhnovists are those working people who raised the battle standard against the Denikinists and any kind of oppression, violence and lies, wherever they originated. The Makhnovists are the very workers by whose
labor the bourgeoisie in general and now the Soviet bourgeoisie in particular rules and grows rich and fat.
2. WHY DO WE CALL OURSELVES MAKHNOVISTS?
Because, first, in the terrible days of reaction in the Ukraine, we saw in our ranks an unfailing friend and leader,
Makhno, whose voice ... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
Within the context of the debate that has taken place among our comrades in many countries regarding the
Draft Platform of the General Union of
Anarchists, published by the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, I have been asked by a number of comrades to write one or two articles specifically on the defense of the revolution.
I shall strive to deal with this serious question most diligently, but, before I do, I think I have a duty to warn comrades that the point regarding the defense of the revolution is not the central issue of the Draft Platform of the General Union of Anarchists… And since this point is not fundamental, I do not feel any pressing urge or necessity to devote time and energy on discussing it to the extent that ma... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
Some comrades have put the following question to me: How do I conceive revolutionary discipline?
I take revolutionary discipline to mean the self-discipline of the individual, set in the context of a strictly-prescribed collective activity equally incumbent upon all, the responsible policy line of the members of that collective, leading to strict congruence between their practice and their theory.
Without discipline in the organization - the vanguard of the revolution - one cannot think of undertaking any serious activity for the cause of the Revolution. Without discipline, the revolutionary vanguard cannot be revolutionary vanguard; since, if it were in a disorderly, disorganized state, it would be powerless to analyze and provide guida... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
As we know, the Bolshevik leaders' shameful betrayal of the ideas of the October Revolution led the entire Bolshevik party and its 'proletarian revolutionary' authority, once in place all across the country, to conclude a disgraceful peace with the German Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Austrian Emperor, Karl, followed by an even more deplorable struggle inside the country against anarchism, first of all, and then against the Left Social Revolutionaries and socialism in general. In June 1918, I met with Lenin in the Kremlin, at the instigation of Sverdlov, the then chairman of the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviets. Citing my mandate as head of the Revolutionary Defense Committee in the Gulyai-Polye region, I briefed Lenin on the uneq... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
Preface
In 1926 a group of exiled Russian anarchists in France, the Dielo Trouda (Workers’ Cause) group, published this pamphlet. It arose not from some academic study but from their experiences in the 1917 Russian revolution. They had taken part in the overthrow of the old ruling class, had been part of the blossoming of workers’ and peasants’ self-management, had shared the widespread optimism about a new world of socialism and freedom ... and had seen its bloody replacement by State Capitalism and the Bolshevik Party dictatorship.
The Russian anarchist movement had played a far from negligible part in the revolution. At the time there were about 10,000 active anarchists in Russia, not including the movemen... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
The times through which the working class world-wide is presently passing requires that revolutionary anarchists strain their imaginations and their energies to the fullest if they are to clarify the most important issues.
Each comrade must be conscious of this requirement, think about it and come to the conclusion that only through a united organizational force can anarchists promptly identify and analyze the issues that concern the masses, and illustrate their responses successfully to them.
Those of our comrades who played an active part in the Russian revolution and who have kept faith with their anarchist positions will be sensitive to the harmfulness that the absence of solid organization has brought to our anarchist movement. Thos... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
Comrades, before I share with you my memories of Comrade Nikolai Rogdaev, I shall allow myself to digress for a minute and say a few words about our heavy losses generally in the last 12 to 15 years.
It’s painful to dwell on this subject – it’s almost impossible not to succumb to overwhelming emotions of grief, of deep pain and sorrow – because of the deaths of a whole series of renowned and steadfast comrades who were totally dedicated to our movement. It’s difficult to speak about this and even more difficult to see it happening and be helpless to do anything about it.
As you are all well aware, only a week has passed since we buried an old, and for all of us, dear and unforgettable comrade &nda... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
It is a long time now since the avant-garde socialist intelligentsia framed, in more or less rounded form, the aims of the historical struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and since proletarians, swallowing that formulation by the intelligentsia whole, entered the lists of that struggle under the intelligentsia's leadership. There is no denying that this was a triumph for the intelligentsia which has thus set itself the target of leading the proletariat on to complete emancipation, by means of the destruction of bourgeois power and the bourgeois State, which are to be supplanted by a "proletarian" State and power.
Very naturally, neither the intelligentsia nor the proletariat itself has been stinting in its efforts and invest... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
Comrade in the Red Army! You were sent by your commissars and commanders to capture the insurgent Makhnovists. Following orders from your chiefs, you will destroy peaceful villages, search, arrest and kill people you don't know but whom they have pointed out to you as enemies of the people. They tell you that the Makhnovists are bandits and counter-revolutionaries.
They tell you; they order you; they do not ask you; they send you; and, like obedient slaves of your leaders, you go to capture and kill. Whom? For what? Why?
Think about it, comrade Red Army Man! Think about it you toiling peasant and worker, taken by force into the cabal of the new masters, who claim the stirring title of worker-peasant authority.
We, the revolu... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)
Several comrades have had their say in the columns of
Delo Truda (Workers' Cause) regarding the question of anarchist principles and organizational format.
Not that they all approached the problem from the same angle. The essence of this matter, as spelled out by the editorial staff of
Dielo Truda, consists of the following:
We anarchists who agitate and fight for the emancipation of the proletariat, must, at all costs, have an end of the dissipation and disorganization prevailing in our ranks, for these are destroying our strength and our libertarian
endeavors.
The way to go about this is to create an organization that might not perhaps enfold all of anarchism's active militants, but assuredly the majority of them, on the ba... (From: NestorMakhno.info.)