Anarchists and Workplace Organizing

Chapter 5 Class Conflicts: Anarchists and Workplace Organizing

Perhaps ironically, one of the areas of organizing in which contemporary anarchists in the Canadian and US state contexts have been greatly lacking has been around workplace and worker organizing. I say ironically because anarchism emerged as part of the international workers movement against capital- ism and exploitation and was, for a long period, among the leading forces within that movement, including within the First International. And the con- cerns of anarchist activists and theorists alike were very much driven by the pressing need to overcome capitalist exploitation and property relations, with particular attention to the productive power of the working classes and their capacity to withdraw and redirect labor. By the first decades of the twentieth century, however, anarchism has been severely detached from the working class more broadly and from the majority of workplace organizing efforts more specifically. As many commentators have pointed out most self-identified anarchists and the projects they are involved in are decidedly of “middle class” (white collar or professional) backgrounds and/or déclassé in character (that is they are social class dropouts, who have left their familial class location at least temporarily or culturally, or do not hold to any class identity). At the same time there are very real social reasons for the historic separa- tion of anarchists and workers movements in the US and Canada. On the one hand there are the extensive histories of substantial repression directed at anarchist workers and working class organizations. Among the significant state actions were the waves of violence and criminalization directed against anarchist following the Haymarket battles and the bombing of 1886. This included the mass arrests of anarchist union organizers and the execution of anarchist workers for political reasons (in the absence of evidence linking them to the Haymarket attack). The post-Haymarket targeting of anarchist workers really ushered in a period of state directed assaults on anarchists and of repression particularly against migrant communities who were associated in nativist dis- courses with anarchist sympathies (including Italians and Germans notably). By the 1910s these torrents of state repression were given infamous formal ex- pression in the Palmer Raids initiated by US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Under the Palmer Raids, between 1919 and 1920, as many as 6000 people were arrested with many of those arrested being deported. The Palmer

Class Conflicts: Anarchists and Workplace Organizing 65

Raids were preceded by an extended period of repression from February 1917 to November 1919, during which federal agents deported sixty so-called “aliens” from among some 600 arrested for anarchist associations. Additional raids cul- minated in the mass deportation of 249 people on December 21 aboard a single so-called “Red Ark,” the Buford. Among those deported was “the world’s most dangerous woman” Emma Goldman. Similar repressive measures were enacted against anarchists in the Canadi- an state context over this same period. In 1919 the Winnipeg General Strike, in which workers mobilized for an eight hour day, the demand of Haymarket faced the unified response of the Canadian government and corporations. On a solidarity march of workers and veterans of World War One who allied them- selves with their fellow workers was attacked by the forces of the Royal North- West Mounted Police (precursors to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or rcmp) with two workers being murdered by police and 34 others injured. In response to the strike foreign born workers were targeted and the Immigration Act revised to allow the Canadian government more easily to deport people. The cumulative effect of these sustained assaults on anarchist organizers, organizations, and communities was devastating. In some ways it can be said that anarchist movements and politics never recovered from the decades of repression through the first decades of the twentieth century. By the end of the Second World War anarchism was merely a remnant of its former presence in the US and Canada. The other factor in the decline of anarchism from the 1920s was the simulta- neous rise of Leninist Marxism following the triumph of the Bolsheviks in Rus- sia. The ascendance of the Bolsheviks and apparent model for revolutionary success provided in the shape of Leninism meant that the vanguard party would become the organizational form guiding would be revolutionaries and revolutionary movements internationally. The defeat of the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists in Spain during the Spanish Revolution by the combined forces of fascism/Nazism, with an assist from the undermining efforts of the Stalinist machinery, would prove a knockout blow for anarchism that would see the movement, as an element of working class resistance, driven to the margins or underground for decades. The outcome of state and capitalist efforts to stamp anarchist organizing out of working class movements and cultures has been that the current gen- erations of anarchist organizers have lacked direct access to or contact with meaningful anarchist presence within the working class and within workplac- es. It also means that anarchism, rather than being readily recognized as part of the history and heritage of working class movements and communities, is misunderstood, ignored, or unseen by contemporary workers. Thus, there is