This is an extract of a speech called “(De)constructing Counter-power” given at five universities in Canada in March 2010 by Michael Schmidt, co-author with Lucien van der Walt of Counter-Power, a challenging new two-volume study of anarchist theory, tactics, strategy and history. The first, theoretical volume, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (AK Press, USA, 2009), has received largely constructive reviews from the global activist, academic and labour press (see http://black-flame-anarchism.blogspot.com/). Schmidt was kindly hosted by the Wilfrid Laurier University, the Centre for the Study of Theory & Criticism at the University of Western Ontario, McMaster University, the University of Ottawa, and the University of Toronto. His talks were warmly acclaimed – not without comradely criticism – and his audiences consisted in part of anarchist-communists of ZACF sister organisations Common Cause (Ontario, Canada), the Union Comuniste Libertaire (Quebec, Canada) and the North-Eastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists (USA), plus platformists Juventud Libertaria (Mexico), libertarian Marxists such as Gramsci is Dead author Richard Day, members of the hardline Communist Party of Canada and of the (Trotskyist) International Bolshevik Tendency.
Ever since the revolutionary vision that is anarchism gained a foothold in the imagination of the popular classes with the rise of syndicalism within the ranks of the trade unions affiliated to the First International in about 1868, it has provided the most devastating and comprehensive critique of capitalism, landlordism, the state and of unequal social power relations in general, whether gender-based or rooted in racism, colonialism or other forms. In their place it has offered a practical set of tools whereby the oppressed of the world can challenge the dominance of the tiny, heavily armed elites that exploit them. As such, anarchism and syndicalism – together what we have termed in Counter-Power Volume 1, Black Flame, “the broad anarchist tradition” – was not only the most implacable enemy of the rise of the industrialists and landed gentry who were the ruling class antagonists in the state/capitalist modernisation project in most countries, but it unalterably shaped class struggle in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, producing several key effects that we today presume to be fundamental aspects of civilised society.
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