Recovering the anarchism of the 1921 Kronstadt Rebellion
Alexander Herbert
The anarchist roots of the Kronstadt Rebellion have long been denied, but the plurality of anti-Bolshevik resistance in Soviet Russia harbors important lessons for movements today.
On March 18, 1921, as the young Soviet Government sponsored public celebrations in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, its Red Army moved to suppress a similar revolutionary commune in Kronstadt on Kotlin Island across Petrograd in the Baltic Sea. The sailors in the city were renowned revolutionaries: they helped the Bolsheviks come to power in 1917, and now they were leading their own “third revolution” against the Communist Party who, they argued, imposed repressive, monopolistic policies. The ensuing uprising and its consequences have since become a point of contention between Marxists and anarchists, leaving gaps and unanswered questions in the historiography along the way.
“Seventeen dreadful days”: Emma Goldman on the Kronstadt Rebellion
On March 1, 1921, a citizen’s assembly in Kronstadt approved the Petropavlovsk Resolution listing 15 demands to the Bolshevik government in Petrograd. This date marks the start of the Kronstadt Rebellion in which sailors, soldiers and citizens took a stance against the demagoguery of the Bolsheviks in power.
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1921 uprising, we are republishing Emma Goldman’s account of the material and ideological motivations behind it and her reflections on the government’s repression, which, in her words, “was characterized by ruthless savagery” and led her to break all ties with the Communist Party.
The text is drawn from Goldman’s My Further Disillusionment in Russia, originally published in 1924, which collects her personal observations and experiences of post-revolutionary Russia between the years 1920-1921.
Autonomies has always been much more of a crossroads, and at times, a place of confluence, of thoughts and testimonials of action, of practice and of ways of life, than an ideologically centred collective. If its genealogy harks back to anarchism, the -ism in this case was never orthodox or exclusive.
Its “members” and “contributors”, fixed and passing and with different geographies, do betray personal and political trajectories. How could they not? But even these paths have not congealed into fixed and congealed ideological commitments.
With all of its weaknesses, Autonomies remains an open space for questioning how and why we live as we do, sustained by the belief that authoritarian and appropriating or extractive hierarchies between humans and between humans and other living beings destroy life needlessly and painfully, in a multitude of different ways.
All of this serves as an introduction to a kind of text that has been only rarely posted on the site, an essay originally published with Black Seed (Issue 7), “a publication of an indigenous anarchy” and which has been generously shared with us by its author.
If here at Autonomies, we may not agree with or have questions about what is expressed therein, the idea that anti-capitalist (and “anti-civilisational”) practice must act in capitalist non-spaces – in the same way that “nature”, or life, reclaims space “abandoned” by humans – is something that most of share, however such spaces are interpreted and however such action is imagined. And as a fragment of personal-political experience, the author has no pretensions to offering a universal blueprint for revolution – as if such a thing could exist.
If you would be a poet, discover a new way for mortals to inhabit the earth.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry is insurgent art
Celebrating Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021), anarchist, poet, publisher of the Beat poets, and a founder of City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, who died on February 22, 2021.
From the CrimethInc. collective, news from greece ...
Greece: The Ghost of Junta Past Returns
The Hunger Strike of Dimitris Koufontinas
We are writing from the same lockdown conditions here in Athens that we have reported on for months. Despite stringent measures—or perhaps because of the ways that the government has combined these with policies to promote tourism and consumption despite the pandemic—infection rates continue to soar. Hospitals have reached 89 percent ICU capacity accommodating COVID-19 cases.
But actually history is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it. […] In world history only those peoples that form states can come to our notice.
G.W.F. Hegel, General Introduction to the Philosophy of History
What causes historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the collective will of the people transferred to one person. Under what condition is the will of the people delegated to one person? On condition that that person expresses the will of the whole people. That is, power is power: in other words, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
In a recent text (La guerra e la pace), Giorgio Agamben reminds us that the state, war and history form an unbreakable trinity. There is no state without the violence of sovereignty, the non-legal decision on what lies beyond the law, the permanent state of exception-war that underlies government. And history is the chronicle of state war, “the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed.” (G.W.F. Hegel, General Introduction to the Philosophy of History). Without the state, there would be no history.
History combines in our language the objective as well as the subjective side. It means both the historiam rerum gestarum and the res gestas themselves, both the events and the narration of the events. (It means both Geschehen and Geschichte.) This connection of the two meanings must be regarded as highly significant and not merely accidental. We must hold that the narration of history and historical deeds and events appear at the same time; a common inner principle brings them forth together. Family memories, patriarchal traditions have an interest confined to the family and the tribe. The uniform course of events under such conditions is not an object for memory. But distinctive events or turns of fortune may rouse Mnemosyne to form images of them, just as love and religious sentiments stimulate the imagination to give shape to an originally formless impulse. But it is the State which first presents subject matter that is not only appropriate for the prose of history but creates it together with itself. A community which acquires a stable existence and elevates itself into a state requires more than merely subjective mandates of government, sufficient only for the needs of the moment. It requires rules, laws, universal and universally valid norms. It thus produces a record of, and interest in, intelligent, definite, and in their effects lasting actions and events. To these, Mnemosyne, in order to perpetuate the formation and constitution of the State, is impelled to add duration by remembrance.
G.W.F. Hegel, General Introduction to the Philosophy of History
Following Agamben, the current and much repeated declaration of war on the Covid-19 virus thus extends war into an explicitly permanent state of affairs, an enduring state of crisis and exception which opens onto a new history of non-freedom.
Agamben also reminds us of Leo Tolstoy’s distinction between peace and war. “In his novel Tolstoy contrasts peace, in which men follow their desires, their feelings and their thoughts more or less freely and which appears to him as the only reality, with the abstraction and the lie of war in which everything seems to be dragged along by an inexorable necessity.” (Agamben, War and Peace, ill will editions translation)
Peace is thus to be found beyond or outside of history, beyond the reach of the state. Tolstoy will call this beyond anarchy and will describe it in religious terms as the kingdom of God, that is, the ethical reign of love freed of the law.
In Agamben’s words: “It is possible, however, that the war on the virus, which seemed to be an ideal apparatus, which governments can measure and direct according to their needs far more easily than a real war, ends up, like any war, getting out of hand. And, perhaps, at that point, if it is not too late, men will once again seek that ungovernable peace which they have so unwisely abandoned.” (Agamben, War and Peace)
In memory of a much neglected “anarchist” in these our pandemic times, a selection of Leo Tolstoy’s “political” writings.
Posted the CrimethInc. collective, anarchist reflections from Brazil (22/02/2021) …
Brazil: Epicenter of the Virus of Populism – A Year of Catastrophe and Resistance
In the following analysis, anarchists in Brazil examine how the pandemic and rising far-right populism coincide in a colonial extraction economy, surveying a society headed for catastrophic collapse. In this context, self-organized mutual aid and collective defense projects involving delivery drivers, football fans, Indigenous organizers, squatters, residents of the favelas and the urban periphery, anti-fascists, and other targeted populations may indeed represent our only hope of survival.
Reflections on the Covid-19 pandemic and capitalism, by Gilles Dauvé (posted on trop loin). Without fully embracing Dauvé’s “Marxism”, there is much here for thought …
Until the early days of 2020, when they spoke of “viruses”, Westerners usually meant something was wrong with their computers (Asians were arguably better informed). Of course, everyone knew the medical meaning of the word, but these viruses remained far away (Ebola), relatively silent despite the 3 million annual deaths from AIDS (HIV), even banal (winter flu, cause of “only” 10,000 deaths in France each year). And if sickness struck, medicine worked miracles. It had even done away with space: from New York, a surgeon could operate upon a patient in Strasbourg.
Back then, it was mostly the machines that got sick.
After the imprisonment of rapper Pablo Hasél for a song against the monarchy, after the violent repression of the protests against his imprisonment, after the totally unpunished demonstration of neo-Nazis in Madrid praising the División Azul/Blue Division, after the unleashed police action in Linares, after months of a dusk curfew while every morning we go to work like sardines in trains, or even after the rush to put the Procés prisoners back in prison after the bad results for the regime in the Catalan elections, we are living through a new turn of events in the Spanish state.
With the arrest and incarceration of the rapper Pablo Hasél on Tuesday (16/02/2021) by the spanish authorities for the crimes of offending the crown and promoting terrorism under the country’s law on public security (Ley Orgánica de protección de la seguridad ciudadana), otherwise known as the “Ley Mordaza/Gag Law” (The Guardian; The New York Times), thousands have protested throughout the country with the usual parade of injured, arrested and hospitalised by the police. (El Salto Diario)
Hasél was condemned by spanish courts in 2018, one of over a hundred people condemned for the same crimes since the introduction of the law. (El Salto Diario)
We republish below our statement of solidarity with Hasél of 2018, followed by a letter of solidarity from Alfonso Fernández Ortega (“Alfon”), an anti-fascist activist also formerly condemned and imprisoned under the same law. (Público)
Remembering the Kronstadt Rebellion (II)
From Roarmag (01/03/2021) magazine …
Recovering the anarchism of the 1921 Kronstadt Rebellion
Alexander Herbert
The anarchist roots of the Kronstadt Rebellion have long been denied, but the plurality of anti-Bolshevik resistance in Soviet Russia harbors important lessons for movements today.
On March 18, 1921, as the young Soviet Government sponsored public celebrations in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, its Red Army moved to suppress a similar revolutionary commune in Kronstadt on Kotlin Island across Petrograd in the Baltic Sea. The sailors in the city were renowned revolutionaries: they helped the Bolsheviks come to power in 1917, and now they were leading their own “third revolution” against the Communist Party who, they argued, imposed repressive, monopolistic policies. The ensuing uprising and its consequences have since become a point of contention between Marxists and anarchists, leaving gaps and unanswered questions in the historiography along the way.
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