From Radon Journal | Anarchist Sci-Fi
Read the latest emerging talent in anarchist science fiction.
In print for the first time!
These 20 stories will enthrall you and bring up a black mirror to modern capitalist society. We're be bringing you 10 short stories and 10 poems that each captivate, challenge, and course through your mind at night, long after you're done reading. The perfect mix of subversive and emotional.
Print edition is being held for processing and will be available soon. Read the digital version now free: www.radonjournal.com/issue-8
Here is our infograph for Issue 8 to unpack together. At 1,350 submissions from April 16 to Aug 15, we had 50 fewer submissions than our record 1.4k for Issue 7. We had a flat 10 poems and 10 stories accepted this Issue which gave us 1.5% acceptance rate. This is about in-line with previous Issues and what we expected. A very science fiction-forward Issue, which isn't surprising. Only two stories are not expressly sci-fi in some manner. Dystopia kicked it up this Issue coming in at 65%, which is its record. The 40% anarchist metric is perhaps a bit misleading, as it tracks only stories that have that genre expressly in its words. Most of the other 60% all espouse some sort of rebellion or commentary, but anarchist praxis/thought/actions aren't necessarily the forefront of things. Transhumanism remains our lowest as always. Because it is often relegated to a niche sub-genre of sci-fi itself, it is unlikely to be a majority of any given Issue.
Contents
Fiction
Rise of the Hive by Lex Chamberlin
The Friend Who Was Silent by Christos Callow Jr.
Softer Shades of Zap and Blue by Emma Burnett
Motor City by Jonathan Mann
Random Access Memories by Henry Luzzatto
Dreamer, Passenger, Partner by Colin Alexander
What They Named You by Katie Gray
They Remember Faces by Leo Oliveira
Maelstrom by Jay Caselberg
Proprietary Technology by Alexis Ames
Poetry
The Coercive Institutions by Andrew Kozma
Uranium Girl by Grace R. Reynolds
the time travel body by Angel Leal
Every robot has a switch she can't reach by Marisca Pichette
10 Reasons Why the AI Predicted American Salvation by Steve Wheat
The Last Voyage: Island Relocation Program by Steve Wheat
Gaia Sings the Body Electric by Jie Venus Cohen
I Was a Post-Doc Once by Joel Glover
If They Get Their Way by Keira Reynolds
The President's Inaugural Speech in 2031 by Abdullah O. Jimoh
Download Issue 8 | September 2024: https://www.radonjournal.com/_files/ugd/3231b0_cc512397d867426ab492a6b96...
Radon is a triannual journal publishing prose and poetry relating to science fiction, anarchism, transhumanism, and dystopia. We pay semi-professional rates.
We publish quality literature every mid-January, May, and September.
At Radon, we know what we love and hope you will share in our revelry. We strive to be a professional community for a unique blend of passions. Our goal is to amplify the voices of writers who see the world differently, who use story and verse to expose injustice and investigate our impending futures.
It is our vow to remain non-profit and transparent. We are here to embody the wholesome values of anarchy (direct democracy, equality, free association, mutual-aid) and provide an avenue for writers to join the conversation.
If you envision writing on Mars before you die, gleefully run toward the technological singularity, or want to fight back against the world, then you've found home. Welcome.
From Třídní Válka
August 12, 2024
About the Action Week and Anti-War Congress / Prague / May 20-26, 2024 /“Together against capitalist wars and capitalist peace.”
First brief attempt of balance sheet of an experience full of promises… but that turned out to be an organizational fiasco
BY WAY OF “PREAMBLE”
First, let’s set the scene. It was an autumn evening, we were several comrades gathered around a table, enjoying a few dishes that had been simmering for hours, savoring a few local beers or other non-alcoholic beverages (according to everyone’s tastes and choices), and we were chatting away about the last developments in the war in the Ukraine, about the events in Israel and Gaza, and more prosaically, about the increasingly marked course towards generalized war. Outside and against all the geostrategic analyses peculiar to the bourgeoisie and the far left of capitalism, what we were putting forward above all, for our part, was the need to get organized and coordinated – in short, to centralize at international level a genuine revolutionary and defeatist activity against capitalist war and peace!
We were therefore considering an international meeting between several groups and comrades whom we already know and with whom we already had the opportunity to take on a series of practical tasks: international discussions, translation of various programmatic materials as well as agitation and propaganda materials, editing and distribution of numerous contributions, etc., without any sectarian or partisan spirit. A maximum two-day meeting, over a weekend, seemed to us not only appropriate for this kind of gathering, but also in keeping with the weak militant forces we and other comrades have in this period, when the proletariat is not yet globally in the driver’s seat, and consistent revolutionary minorities are few and very isolated in relation to the rest of our class.
But very quickly, the comrades who were going to organize this event in Prague began to think “bigger” – too big, as we’ll find out later… The initial international meeting was now joined by a (“small”) anarchist bookfair and a “concert of welcome”. So here we are, already with three events – one evening and two full days.
Very quickly too, we tried to react and emphasize what seems to us essential, for us and for the militant needs we want to meet. Here’s what we wrote to the comrades who initiated the organization:
“What’s most important for us in your proposal is the “non-public conference”, i.e. a practical discussion on how to organize defeatist revolutionary activities.
From this discussion, we hope the following:
We believe it is necessary that only those individuals and groups who not only support the points of the program proposed, but above all implement them in their practice, take part in this “conference”. We are not concerned with theoretical agreement on particular points, but with the practical activity of individual participants.”
What is clear, and today more than ever we criticize ourselves for this, is that we were not firm enough to impose what was necessary and to refuse the superfluous, the non-essential; we let too much be done and let the comrades’ structure continue on its “freewheeling” way. Then came the plan for an “Action Week” with various activities spread over several days, and always a “non-public conference” to round things off. As a bonus, the organizers even wanted to call for a street demonstration. We told ourselves that if we (our small militant structure) weren’t capable of organizing such events, no doubt (more than likely, we thought) these comrades in whom we had every confidence were… The way events turned out proved we were wrong…
We won’t go into detail here about the doubts that began to grow within us as we approached the fateful date for the start of the “Action Week”. Alarming echoes of the organizers’ meetings were reaching us, and comrades who believed we were organizing the event (since we had published the various invitations, calls and clarification texts on our blog and spread them via our mailing-lists) were contacting us to ask for an answer to their questions about the welcome on site, for example, and about security, as well as the promises of accommodation these comrades had received. All we could say was that we will contact the organizers, push the latter to get in touch with them and speed up the organization process. Although it may not seem like it, all this also took up a lot of our time and energy, which we could have devoted to other central activities.
To conclude this “preamble”, we’d also like to silence the countless rumors that have been circulating about us, mainly from certain circles of the so-called “Left Communism” (but not only, some “anarchists” have also taken part in this gossiping!), both before and during the “Action Week”, claiming that our group (Tridni valka) was the organizer of the Prague events. Some even claimed to have seen the “manipulative invisible hand” of our structure behind “the organizers”… All this is totally and unmistakably FALSE and is sheer bloody phantasmagoria, which finally grasps the practical movement to abolish the old world, and to divide it, by using the categories of our enemies: on one side the manipulated and on the other the manipulators, or on one side the masses and on the other the leaders, etc. ad nauseam.
The icing on the cake of stupidity in this respect can more than likely be awarded to the IGCL (the self-proclaimed “International Group of the Communist Left”), which in its review boasts about the “Anti-War Congress” that the “driving force seems to be the revolutionary group Class War – also known by its Czech name, Tridni Valka – more or less descended from or influenced by the Groupe communiste internationaliste (GCI-ICG)”. Thank you for all this information, which history will certainly judge as very “important” but which doesn’t advance the practical organization of revolutionary activity at all; we sincerely and actually see no point in spouting such one-sided assertions and fantasies, except feeding the police version of history and thus denouncing those they imagine to be behind every action of our class in the gigantic struggle for its self-emancipation.
WHAT ABOUT THE “ACTION WEEK”?
But let’s get back to the “Action Week” itself and the “Anti-War Congress”. If, from the outset, we never considered ourselves to be the organizers of these events (for the reasons already expressed above), let’s be clear about our role in their organization, what did we do? Nothing more (or so little), and nothing less either, than what constitutes our everyday militant tasks and activities: reading and critique of the various contributions, discussions at international level, translating and/or distributing the documents in question, helping in the on-line publishing, helping to set up mailing-lists in preparation for discussions at the congress, etc. In short, nothing very exceptional if we consider what we usually do and which constitutes, in our view, the minimum of what needs to be done today.
From the outset, we had warned the organizers, given our limited resources, that they were not to count on us for anything more than what we have just briefly recalled here, that our presence on site during the “week” would be limited to the weekend, essentially for the non-public session of the “Anti-War Congress” on Sunday. And when we arrived, the dice had already been cast, as it were, following the announcement that the organizers no longer had the premises rented for the activities of the week-end… And what we then witnessed was such a level of disorganization that we were stunned, or at the very least, frightened.
We’d like to make it absolutely clear that, from our point of view and that of many other comrades, the “Action Week” was a total disaster, a fiasco, in terms of the organization of events. The organizers, or rather the misnamed “organizing committee”, were playing lousy ball and were incapable of really assuming their responsibilities. For the moment, we’ll focus on a probable overestimation of the real capacities of the comrades who gave themselves perspectives they proved incapable of assuming.
What’s more, various structures of the so-called “Left Communism” – which were not invited, by the way, but self-invited (which we won’t criticize here!) – clearly did nothing to “save the day”, more interested as they were, on the one hand in seeing an “anarchist” experience of internationalism fall flat on its face, and on the other in trying to recruit militants in search of coherence. Not to mention the villainous denunciations worthy of the dirty work of the Okhrana and Cheka combined (see our postscript below)!
A group of internationalist comrades, who had not participated in the “joyous events” of the previous few days, comrades who already knew a part of the “organizing committee” and had their full confidence, set about the task of trying to right the ship – “invisible pilots in the thick of the popular tempest”, as Bakunin said. And all this, amidst uproar and invectives that came from all sides during what some participants pompously called the “self-organized assembly”, which in fact seemed to us to be nothing more than a kind of scarecrow created out of thin air under the principal and essential leadership of a few groups claiming to belong to the so-called “Left Communism”, a bunch of Leninists and other Bolsheviks… and some of their more or less anarchistic cronies, who pretended to be organizing a parallel congress. At one point, after the events, some even talked about the fact that “two congresses” were taking place!
In short, these internationalist comrades, we initially referred to, despite the insults and invectives, despite the lynch-mob atmosphere that prevailed, made it possible for part of the program of the public session of the “Anti-War Congress” to take place the following day, Saturday, in a venue that was admittedly small but nonetheless secure – or so we thought. Two presentations made by comrades from the Balkans (Antipolitika) and Germany (AST) enabled to develop interesting discussions against capitalist war and peace; meetings between comrades who didn’t always know each other personally were very warm and enthusiastic; perspectives for future activities were outlined…
We must now also return for a moment to the “excuses” and “pretexts” put forward by the “organizers” for the “sabotage” perpetrated by pro-Ukrainian Czech governmental “anarchists”; “pretexts” which did not satisfy us at all. First of all, from a semantic point of view, the word “sabotage” derives from “sabot”, i.e. the wooden shoes worn by workers, which they threw into machines in order to destroy them. Therefore, from a programmatic point of view, at the highest level of abstraction, the “saboteurs” are not them, but us! It’s the revolutionary proletariat that sabotages the economy through its uncompromising struggles; it’s us who will sabotage the capitalist war (and its peace!) when the balance of forces will turn in our favor, as a result of the subversive action of our class. Of course, these so-called “anarchists” have already demonstrated their true essence on numerous occasions: they are the reformers of capital, the “alternative” social democrats who are more “radical” than the official ones, the far-left and even ultra-left fractions of capitalism and its democracy… ad nauseam! And they already had the opportunity to prove time and again in the past, and even in the very recent past, their true capacity for nuisance towards any expression, manifestation of the genuine internationalism that explodes in the face of all the defenders of this old rotten dying world (not so much dying as we hope for the moment, alas!). But it would be to fall once again into the trap of the myth of democracy to imagine that we could organize, coordinate and centralize genuine revolutionary and defeatist activity against capitalist war and peace on an international level, without the capitalist forces (its State, its police, its unions, its social democracy, ad nauseam…) reacting, repressing us, banning us from our meeting places and so on. The “organizers” were not prepared for this, and somehow neither we were, despite all the strong reservations we had expressed beforehand. A word about democracy is necessary here…
MYTH AND FETISHISM OF DEMOCRACY
Here, we’d like to address a fundamental point: that of democracy and its dictatorship over our lives and activities, or rather the permanent lack of rupture with democracy. Democracy can by no means be reduced to those forms and categories vulgarly accepted by all: the right to vote, the right of assembly, freedom of the press, legalized parties and trade unions, ad nauseam. Democracy, from the point of view of the communist historical critique, is first and foremost the social dictatorship of capital, of the commodity, of the world market, of the value valorizing itself… it is the negation in action of the irreconcilable antagonism between two social classes, the owners of the means of production and those dispossessed of the means of existence… Democracy is also the toxic poison that infiltrates each of our struggles, our activities, and even our militant structures. Finally, democracy is the establishment of false communities: the nation, the “sovereign people”, money… against the one and only liberating community: the community of proletarian struggle, heralding the genuine human community, the Gemeinwesen! This is to say that the struggle against democracy will be “permanent”, i.e. as long as capitalist social relations exist, and will only end with the definitive destruction of what is destroying us on a daily basis.
Going back to Prague, as soon as we arrived there and faced with the “mess” made by both the “organizers” and the so-called “self-organized assembly”, some of us pointed directly to this crucial issue: the fetishization of democracy. We get organized against capital and its wars, so we cannot count on capital and its democracy to let us quietly structure our activities, to guarantee us “freedom of expression” or the “right of assembly”, to respect “signed contracts” and so on. On the one hand, these are concepts that are alien to the communist movement, and on the other hand, capital only applies them à la carte when it suits it to confirm its domination, but never when it is (or feels) threatened. The “organizers” relied too much on democracy (and its soporific atmosphere) to let the action take place as it was, they relied too much on the fact that democratic forces would not act against us, whoever they might be: the various repressive forces, the police, the secret services, the Ukrainian (or Russian, as well) embassy and its avatars, NATO, the defensist and warmongering “anarchists”, ad nauseam. In short, the “organizers” were too open, too democratic, too compliant, too naïve, giving unfriendly forces a chance to intervene. For the future and the development of subversive activities to come, we must be more aware than ever that this is indeed a social war, a class confrontation, and choose the means, forms and measures accordingly…
One example, among many others, of this (at the very least) naivety on the part of the “organizers”, which we must point out and criticize here, is the security of these events. In addition to the inability of the “organizers” to organize anything eminently practical, such as simply welcoming and accommodating the participants (while they claimed to be able to solve the logistical problems), there was a major problem with the security of participants throughout the “Action Week”. We’re not going to talk about the identity checks by the Czech police at Monday’s demonstration, as we weren’t there. But posting slogans such as “No photography” and “No video recording” on the walls and on the blog is obviously not enough to ensure that this is indeed the case. The “getaways” made by a Czech pro-Ukrainian think tank at the very heart of the “Anti-War Congress” is the very example and evidence, firstly, of the ineffectiveness of grand proclamations on “security” without giving ourselves the real and practical means to assume it, and secondly, of our current incapacity (in the state of our weak forces and as a result of the situation of the class struggle in the Czech Republic, and even in Europe) to organize or participate in such a public event, open to all, more or less.
WHO TO INVITE AND WHO NOT TO INVITE!?
We’d like now to address an issue of a relative importance. In the process of preparing the “Action Week” as a whole, and especially, for our part, the non-public session of the “Anti-War Congress”, the question of who to invite and who not to invite obviously arose. Organizers often turned to us to ask what we thought of particular groups and organizations, and whether it was worth inviting them to this or that level of the event. There’s a thing we’ve been criticized for: why the “big” structures and organizations of the so-called “Left Communism” weren’t welcome at the “Action Week”, and why they weren’t invited at all? First of all, we’d like to make it clear that we’re generally opposed to ALL ideological families (“anarchism”, “Marxism”, “communism”, “councilism”, etc.), but here in this chapter we’re particularly critical of the self-proclaimed “Left Communism”.
First of all, we do not agree with the terminology “Left Communism” used to designate the revolutionary forces that emerged from the 1917-21 period, even though it is a historical denomination that embraces the historical materialization of ruptures with social democracy. Those designated by the counter-revolution as “Left communists” are, for the most part, the genuine and only authentic communists of that period. Programmatically (despite the common terminology imposed by revisionist history), they have nothing in common with those they have in fact continually opposed throughout their struggle.
The fact that Lenin (and behind him other red-painted social democrats using a “communist” rhetoric), persisted in denouncing communist practice as an “infantile disorder” and communists themselves as “anarchists”, “leftists”, “anti-party” elements, etc., is but a demonstration of the growing and clearer distinction between the Bolsheviks’ counter-revolutionary policies and the revolutionary expressions that continued to struggle against the current of centrism.
The definition of the term “communist”, as Marx said, is not determined by what a militant says about himself, but rather by what he’s doing, i.e., by his actual communist action in historical perspectives.
There is no such thing as “Left” communism, or “Right” or “Center” communism. Communism is defined in and by the revolutionary practice of men and women who struggle for the destruction of the State, and therefore stand from the point of view of the destruction of the army, nations, capitalist management bodies, capital and work, etc.
It’s no coincidence that social-democratic leftists were so keen to denounce as “infantile” and “diseased” those who opposed their policy of State reconstruction and management, those who advocated revolutionary war against peace agreements with the bourgeoisie, those who fought against entryism in the trade unions and against revolutionary parliamentarianism. The social democrats – and we’re talking here in historical, not formal, terms, in terms of forces which, beyond their name, practically assume responsibility for reforming the world! – the social democrats intended to appropriate the title of “communist” (without further qualification), because this was the best way, at a time when revolution was on the agenda, to protect themselves from all those who would denounce their practice of State reconstruction as counter-revolutionary.
And since they couldn’t deny the revolutionary character of the actions of those who opposed them, they attributed to communist militants the adjective “Leftist”, to designate them as “diseased” and “infantile”, as well as to stand on a political line, where no qualitative rupture appears, not even in the terminology.
If we sometimes use pleonasms like “revolutionary communists”, “internationalist communists” or even that distortion expressed by “Left Communism”, whereas we don’t accept the terminology of our enemies, it’s only because the weight of history rewritten by the Stalinists and other right-wing or left-wing bourgeois, is, like all ideologies, a force that has materialized throughout these decades of counter-revolution. We have to resort to such language tricks to distinguish ourselves from all those – and there are many! – who have indeed violently plundered our flags, banners and mottos.
This being said, and to make it very clear, our historical programmatic references are obviously to be found in all the militants, groups, organizations and structures that have made the most determined ruptures with the ideology and practice of social democracy, including its “extremes”. Whether these ruptures are called “Left communism” or “revolutionary anarchism” or whatever… But we love communism too much, as a project, as a movement, as a dynamic, as a total subversion of this world and what exists nowadays, as a human community… to claim to be part of any “Left” that is only a sad and dreary mirror of it…
Going back to more “concrete” aspects of the question, we affirm clearly and unequivocally that none of the organizations openly belonging to any of the ideological families has been invited – families which aren’t internationalists in deed (in the sense we understand it!) but nevertheless get organized on an international level, constitute de facto “internationals”, and claim to frame the struggle of the proletariat (be it the aforementioned “communist” or “Marxist” or “anarchist” family): neither the ICC (International Communist Current), nor the ICT (Internationalist Communist Tendency), nor all their offshoots, nor the various PCInt (International Communist Party), nor the IWA (International Workers’ Association), nor the IAF (International of Anarchist Federations), ad nauseam…
For us, it was not a question of sectarianism, but of setting criteria to enable constructive discussion and progress in the task of promoting revolutionary defeatism and encouraging its development as an integral part of the proletarian movement. We want to stress that we need a real discussion, not just listening to each other’s contributions without being able to reach a common point.
We saw the “Action Week” (or rather the non-public session of the “Anti-War Congress”, and even originally the international meeting as we expected it) not as D-Day, but as a moment in the process of strengthening, developing and consolidating the defeatist revolutionary community, which is not to be built, but is already historically pre-existing, emerging from the fertile soil of class societies and the need to abolish them. A process that includes the exchange of texts and critiques, discussions, the organization of concrete actions, the continuity of the community, and so on… in short, the very opposite of what the left and far left of capital has accustomed us to in its conferences and congresses… A ruthless critique of “conferentism” and “congressism” is more necessary and fundamental than ever…
What we hoped for (and continue to promote) is the building of stronger relationships within the camp of revolutionary defeatism and, if possible, achieving a certain level of programmatic centralization while retaining a certain decentralization of actions.
Unfortunately (or more prosaically, hic et nunc!), we cannot interpret the “defeatist” practices of so-called “Left Communism” groups as being aimed at this objective.
Based on the activities of certain groups, we get rather the impression that their aim is not to build a genuine community of struggle (centralized programmatically, but not necessarily practically), but to build a “party”, and a mass party furthermore. By way of example, we can see in the activity of the “No War but the Class War” collectives and platform an attempt to create a kind of “minimum program” to which as many people as possible can adhere without exacerbating the particularisms of those various elements; in this way, we can consider them as nothing less than recruitment offices. We can see in these practices certain concessions to those who are programmatically unclear, so that they can bring the mass dimension to their activities. For our part, we want to do exactly the opposite.
Of course, we didn’t expect all the groups invited to the “Action Week” to be on the same programmatic level, and we’re well aware that some organizations’ critique of capitalism is not developed and deepened in the same way. But our hope was to enable them, through discussion and common practice, to reach a higher, more dialectical and therefore more radical level of understanding of the reality of the world based on exploitation, and thus to open up the possibility of a common struggle.
Another thing we cannot endorse is the effort of so-called “Left Communism” groups to prefer so-called “theoretical” discussions to discussions about the real, practical struggle of the defeatist revolutionary movement. Their methodological approach is certainly based on the assumption that we should first agree on the origin of the war – which for most of them seems to be the decadence of capitalism, before discussing anything else.
For us, there should be no separation between a so-called “theoretical” discussion and a “practical” one. What we’re interested in is a discussion of how we can concretely struggle against capitalist war and peace, and what we can practically do about it. And within such a discussion, theoretical and programmatic questions will necessarily arise and be addressed. In short, we prefer to go from practice to theory, whereas for all these groups, it seems to be the other way round.
But this didn’t prevent most of these “big” organizations of the so-called “Left Communism” from inviting themselves and wreaking havoc in the mess left by the “organizers”, in short adding a serious layer of disorganization to the disorganization inherent in the “organizers” themselves. As one comrade, very active on site, put it: “their activities aimed at taking control or at least setting their agenda were significantly consolidated by the chaos caused by the disorganization”.
Shortly before the “Action Week”, on May 1st to be precise (you can’t make that up!), the ICT published an article on its blog announcing that they will come to Prague, either directly or via their satellite structures such as the “No War but the Class War” collectives. Among other things, it was asserted that “the call of the Prague Action Week is not different in essence from the five basic points which those of us in the No War but the Class War (NWBCW) initiative adhere to. […] None of the eight points in the description of who the Prague call is aimed at contradicts the basic aims of NWBCW. Indeed we could quite happily expand those five points to encapsulate the Prague eight.”1
Some, claiming to be from the so-called “Left Communism”, pointed out that none of the “anarchist” groups invited corresponded to the criteria developed in those “eights points”, while the groups from the so-called “Left Communism” did! “The original list of invitees contained about 60 names, most of them anarchists, anarcho-communists, communization, black bloc, who could fit one or more of the criteria. Missing were the names of left communists, both Italian or German-Dutch communist left, Leninists with internationalist positions, who fit all the criteria.” To this type of argument, we reply, as we did it previously by letter, that while “theoretical positions” may correspond to these criteria, it is rather the actual practice of organizations claiming to belong to an ideological political family (in this case, and as a reminder, the so-called “Left Communism”) that does not coincide with the points put forward in the document in question.
For example: it is above all their “position” (and actual practice) regarding Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and their whole policy of rebuilding the State and the national economy in Russia, and of repressing strikes and proletarian struggles, that does not correspond to both the fourth and seventh points, namely:
On the whole, all the groups of the so-called “Left Communism” are calling for, or more prosaically are advocating, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which was a real stab in the back for proletarians in Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, a “betrayal” some would say!), which is in total opposition to what we mean by revolutionary defeatism (in the sixth point):
In order to deepen somehow the issue of Brest-Litovsk and the agreements/relationships that the proletariat could develop/build with its class enemy, let’s just say that any “proletarian power”, as the Bolsheviks falsely claimed to be in Russia from October onwards, could never remain so if it negotiated, parleyed or signed agreements that contravene our class interests. If a “proletarian power” sits down at the negotiating table with the bourgeois State (whatever its formal representatives may be), the latter has already won, and the “proletarian power” loses its subversive substance, if it has any at all. If the capitalist State is “negotiating” with the proletariat, it’s because our struggle, our offensive, is already very much in decline, that we’re on the defensive, on the ropes, that we’ve already lost… The bourgeois State is “negotiating” with us only to crush us definitively…
And we won’t go into the other disagreements we have with groups of the so-called “Left Communism”, such as their claim to the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915. Overall, this meeting of pacifists was essentially aimed at organizing outside official social democracy, but not against it; it gave rise to spectacular speeches and sensational statements, but not to a real rupture with the methods, practices and programs of social democracy.
And as for the so-called “Zimmerwald Left”, the presence of communist militants in this mess ultimately served only as a radical guarantee, as a recruitment office to bring genuinely proletarian expressions back into the ruts of a social democracy whose facade had simply been cleaned. It’s hardly surprising, then, that almost all organizations of the so-called “Left Communism” now wants to do “a new Zimmerwald” – it fits them perfectly. Finally, to paraphrase Rosa Luxembourg (!!!), we can basically sum up the activity of the so-called “Zimmerwald Left” as follows: “Better a bad Zimmerwald than no Zimmerwald at all”!
The Bolshevik Party and Lenin himself actively promoted the counter-revolutionary, pacifist program of the International and its various member parties. This is in opposition to the fifth point:
What’s more, the so-called “Left Communism” defends (more or less, depending on the shades favored by each of these organizations) the position of the Third International on the colonial question. This is not in line with the third point either:
LET’S SUMMARIZE THE EVENTS IN PRAGUE
There were two different levels with two equally different contents.
On the one hand, there was the “Action Week”, with demonstrations, happenings and other “festivities”, which remained in the sphere of the spectacle. The organizers’ basic idea was to make revolutionary defeatism more visible, to compete with pro-war anarchists, to offer themselves as a “pole of attraction for the undecided”. But all this proved illusory and, above all, counter-productive in the light of our weak forces. We criticized the organizers in this sense, and made it clear that such an event could not be a demonstration of the existence of the anti-war movement, of the movement against capitalist exploitation more generally, since this movement exists only in embryonic form and is currently limited to a few scattered minorities around the world. We have also stressed that revolutionaries cannot create such a movement. They cannot (and don’t want to) bring any kind of consciousness to the proletariat, because this can only arise from the material conditions in which the proletariat stands, and from struggle of our class against these conditions. The task of the communists is to expose the invariant content, the real immediate struggle of the working class against exploitation, which lies behind the more or less clear manifestations of the proletariat, to link it to other struggles in the present and in the past, and to generalize it. We also reminded them that our task and our only interest is the potential consolidation of the defeatist revolutionary forces that already exist, which are willing and able to oppose the war both programmatically and practically.
We did not participate in these events, and at no time did we promote (on our blog, mailing-lists, etc.) this level of activity; on the contrary, we criticized it (too often “in private”, alas!). At the same time, we weren’t strong enough to impose our point of view on the organizers and persuade them not to hold these more than anecdotal events.
On the other hand, there was the “Anti-War Congress” (or conference, or international meeting), an event we considered extremely important and which we publicly promoted as an attempt to organize and centralize our defeatist revolutionary activities, to strengthen our already and previously existing community of struggle, which is based among other things (and as far as the few minorities who already know each other are concerned) on the practice of different groups, on common discussions, on practical activities. For us, the aim of this international meeting was really to try to set up a certain level of centralization and formalization of existing practices, and to try to direct them towards a certain materialization: a common campaign against war, as we specified in our contribution to the mailing-list. This is also what we tried to develop and encourage in Prague. The future will show whether our attempts have been in vain, or whether they will give rise to something useful for proletarian resistance against war and against social peace.
In a very fraternal critique we received a few days before the “Action Week”, some comrades had this to say about our hope of being able to “overcome our isolation” through this action: “There are no shortcuts, there are no magic formulas, it is the immediate struggle of the proletariat against exploitation, for the defense of its material needs and the development of this struggle that provides the substance which constitutes the process of proletarian organization and determines the actions of revolutionary minorities. The rupture with isolation – at all levels – only develops in this process, as a development of proletarian associationism; everything else belongs to the world of spectacle and serves only to divert and neutralize the various attempts of our class to get organized. It’s like the myth of certain currents of the past who believed that the call for a general strike was the basis for initiating revolution.”
This is absolutely true, and we fully agree with this point of view. We are aware that we cannot create an anti-war movement, nor can we stop the war. But that doesn’t mean we have to wait for the class struggle to develop without doing anything. Insofar as the rupture with capital’s social relations is limited to minorities, we must organize those elements whose practice expresses the ruptures with capital, we must clarify our positions, the lessons drawn from the proletariat’s present and past struggles, we must synthesize the experience accumulated in the development of revolution and counter-revolution. We are an integral part of the proletariat as a class in struggle and an expression of this process, and we must assume the real, practical tasks of the subversive movement, even if we know that the material consequences of our activity are negligible for the moment.
Finally, the events in Prague have shown us (to inversely paraphrase the renegade Lenin) “what’s (not) to be done”!? From the outset, we didn’t want to organize neither a public meeting, let alone a demonstration (to prove what to whom!?), nor a bookfair and various additional and related activities to be grouped together under the label “Action Week”. What we’ve been focusing on (and continue to focus on) is the need to coordinate and centralize our activities with other militant structures, not “simply” against war and social peace, but to actually participate in the vital process, the elementary dynamic, of transforming capitalist war and peace into a world social revolution, a revolution for the abolition of capitalist social relations, a revolution for communism!
And to achieve this, a non-public international meeting between groups and structures that already know each other and are already acting together, remains nowadays a necessity that we continue to emphasize more than ever. Unvarnished and unadvertised, with no prior resounding declarations!!!
AS A POSTSCRIPT
Following this immense organizational fiasco, it was only to be expected: the new Torquemada struck again, or rather they talked shit as it would be more appropriate to say, in this case through that furuncle of the working class constituted by the insignificant little paranoid sect known as the ICC. We can indeed smell the fetid breath of the lesson-giver sermonizers, all those scavengers who chuckled after the events in Prague, and who have come for the antepenultimate time to whisper their dark advices to us, mixed with a few phrases of demagogic admiration, as good “bankrupts of the revolution” (dixit Bordiga) they are. And it’s still the same vultures who, for decades, have been circling around our corpses of proletarians slaughtered by repression, while sneering: “They should not have taken up arms” (Plekhanov).
If these were nothing more than the pitiful, bitter comments of social-democratic hyenas disguised as revolutionaries, they could be ignored and firmly thrown in their appropriate place of destination: the dustbins of history. But once again, and for more than forty years, when the ICC reserves the right to express its sententious rumbling from the heights of its ideological chairs and from the balconies of political spectacle, it’s always the pernicious intrigues, slanders, denunciations, and in fine the police version of history, that triumph. So, let’s quote one last time the venomous bile of these mortifying Kapos, from their recent statements on the events in Prague: “Regarding the official committee’s position on security, we should also make the point that Tridni Valka claims a certain continuity with the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, although there have been some unstated disagreements between them in the past, and the GCI as such no longer exists. But the GCI was a group which had a very dangerous and destructive trajectory – above all a flirtation with terrorism [our emphasis, CW] which posed a serious danger to the whole revolutionary movement. This involved a kind of cloak and dagger [idem] approach which Tridni Valka appear to have taken on, and which certainly contributed to the disorganisation of the week and the distrust that many of the participants developed towards them.” Amen!
The ICC, like other similar sects, can only understand and denounce the activity of revolutionaries as “conspiracies”. But to conspire is to breathe, as the saying goes, and for our part we claim loud and clear, against all attempts to shackle our class, the international conspiracy of the proletariat! Yes indeed, we conspire like “steam and electricity conspire against the status quo” (as Marx said), we conspire “like the sun against darkness” (idem)… In any case, it’s very likely that the Czech (and other) State security services will delight in this kind of “revelation” and “information” about our group’s alleged links “with terrorism”. Thank you to the stoolies of the ICC, that would do better to rename itself ICC-B, with a B for “Bolshevik” but above all for “Betrayer”! Fucking SNITCHES!!!
1 As a reminder, the “eight points” explaining to whom the Prague call was addressed can be read on Action Week’s blog: https://actionweek.noblogs.org/english/ and on our own: https://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/action-week-prague-20-26-may-2024/.
From La Nemesi
The preliminary hearing in the Sibilla repressive operation has been set for October 10th, at 10 a.m. at the Court of Perugia. On that date, the indictment will be requested for twelve comrades, including Alfredo Cospito (detained under 41 bis regime in the Bancali prison, Sassari). In all likelihood, Alfredo will be connected by videoconference. Following the removal of the crime of promoting or participating in a subversive association with the purpose of terrorism, the comrades are indicted on 19 different counts, including the main one, for incitement to commit crimes with the aggravating circumstance of the purpose of terrorism, concerning the drafting and distribution of the anarchist paper ‘Vetriolo’. The other charges (all but four aggravated by the purpose of terrorism) concern seven episodes of wall writings and two posting of banners, the publication of a leaflet by Circolaccio Anarchico (anarchist space opened in Spoleto between 2018 and 2022), two texts by Alfredo Cospito for specific initiatives in Bologna and France, five texts in the first months of Covid-19 and the first edition of the book Quale internazionale?, as well as the damaging of some Poste italiane (Italian post office) vehicles in Foligno during the hunger strike by anarchist comrades against the women’s AS2 section inside L’Aquila prison (2019).
Launched in the early hours of November 11th, 2021, Sibilla operation had the declared aim of targeting the anarchist paper ‘Vetriolo’ (as well as Edizioni Monte Bove, Circolaccio Anarchico and two websites, Roundrobin and Malacoda). Particularly deserving of attention in the eyes of the investigators was the publication of the interview with Alfredo Cospito, then a prisoner in Ferrara prison, which came out in three issues of the paper under the title ‘Quale internazionale?’ (‘Which international?’), later reissued in the booklet of the same name with a long appendix on the history of the Federazione Anarchica Informale. In the paperwork of the magistrates of Perugia, however, went to merge a previous extensive investigation of the prosecutor’s office in Milan significantly named ‘Vetriolo’.
With the Sibilla operation, the repressive forces experimented with the use of the accusation of incitement to commit crimes, with the aggravating circumstance of the purpose of terrorism, in order to affect anarchist publications and possibly distribute pre-trial detention orders among comrades accused of having drafted or edited militant texts, hypothesising non-existent ‘inciting’ and ‘orienting’ capabilities in an ambit like the anarchist movement, which is historically characterised by an obstinate and radical autonomy of thought and action. Also significantly, not least, the two websites involved in the operation were obscured on Italian territory.
To tell the truth, the preliminary investigation phase was not very lucky for the investigators. Faced with eight requests for precautionary detention in prison for a total of sixteen suspects, the GIP (preliminary investigation judge) granted six precautionary measures, excluding the associative crime (one arrest warrant in prison for Alfredo Cospito, already detained, as well as a comrade under house arrest and four with the obligation to stay in the municipality of domicile combined with the obligation to present to the judicial authorities to sign at local barracks). Only five weeks later, however, the Court of re-examination in Perugia annulled all the measures with an order that completely dismantled the charges on the merits. Against this, the public prosecutor appealed to the Cassation Court, which upheld the prosecutor’s appeal and ordered a new re-examination hearing. However, the latter also confirmed with a long motivation that all precautionary measures were null and void.
In the meantime, misfortune continued to turn against the investigators, with the head of the investigation Manuela Comodi being sentenced to one year’s detention for unauthorised access to documents in the public prosecutor’s computer system and transferred to the civil court in Milan.
While, as has already been pointed out, the proceedings set a precedent against the anarchist publications, in a sense acting as a forerunner for further repressive episodes (we think in particular of Scripta Scelera operation against the internationalist anarchist fortnightly ‘Bezmotivny’), it was above all against Alfredo Cospito that Sibilla had the most serious effects.
We cannot and will not overlook the role played by these events in determining Alfredo’s transfer to 41 bis prison regime. Within the motivations that the repressive organs presented first to justify and subsequently – in the plot of institutional contradictions that matured during the hunger strike of 2022-‘23 – to reaffirm the comrade’s imprisonment in this infamous regime of annihilation, appear precisely those writings already under investigation in Perugia (and previously in Milan). Sibilla thus contributes, technically and also suggestively, a supporting function to the legal justifications for the continuation of the torture to which the comrade is subjected.
Evidently, the State’s decision to persevere on the path of an investigation that has so far proved extremely fragile is also to be found in the need to keep Alfredo in 41 bis. It is no coincidence that an eventual trial will most likely end close to the expiry of the four years that the comrade is spending in this prison regime. An eventual sentence and the possible request for an extension of the 41 bis are therefore legally and politically interconnected. As a demonstration of what political will is behind this investigation, following Comodi’s replacement, the role of public prosecutor was taken over by the chief prosecutor of Perugia, Raffaele Cantone.
This trial for us is above all an occasion to continue the struggle against 41 bis and in solidarity with Alfredo Cospito. On the other hand, the very presence of the comrade will represent a living contradiction to those who would like to keep him walled up alive.
Not forgetting the historical context in which this turn of events took place (think of the fact that the decision to transfer Alfredo to 41 bis occurred just a few months after the beginning of the war in Ukraine and was taken by the government of national unity led by Mario Draghi), the season of extraordinary repressive intensity that we are currently experiencing must be qualified for what it really is: a manifestation of real war policies.
For these reasons we urge a solidarity presence on the occasion of the preliminary hearing and during the eventual trial.
[September 2024]
From Freedom News UK
~ Anatoly Dubovik, translated by Malcolm Archibald ~
Maria Nikiforova is perhaps the most famous female anarchist who operated on the territory of the former Russian Empire and Ukraine. This is probably why many legends and outright fictions arose around the personality of this legendary anarchist, some of which we will try to dispel in this article.
Maria Hryhorivna Nikiforova was born in 1888 (possibly 1885). Her precise place of birth is unknown. According to some sources, it was the town of Pechenikovo, Starodubskyi district, Chernihiv province; according to others, she was born in the village of Levshikovo, Oleksandrivskyi district, Katerynoslav province.
There exists a romantic version of her origins that Nikiforova came from the nobility and that at the age of 16, she fell in love with an officer, ran away from home, was abandoned by her lover and was forced to earn a living on her own—as a nanny, a street vendor, and a bottle washer at a vodka factory. In reality, Nikiforova was the daughter of a peasant, and the only education she received, in her own words, was in the home. There is simply no other reliable information about her early youth.
In the early 1900s, while working as a seamstress, Nikiforova joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), then switched to the anarch0- communists. This happened either in Oleksandrivsk city (now Zaporizhzhia) or Katerynoslav (now Dnipro). She was an agitator, then joined a fighting squad and participated in terrorist attacks against the local bourgeoisie and the police. By 1907, Nikiforova lived in Starodub, where she was one of the leaders of a revolutionary group that included young anarchists, SRs and SR Maximalists. They conducted propaganda among the city’s workers and the neighbouring settlement of Klintsy, as well as engaged in armed actions.
In Starodub, Nikiforova was arrested for the first time in 1907 while trying to commit suicide—fortunately, unsuccessfully. Accusations of terror carried the threat of the death penalty, so Maria insisted to the investigators and the medical commission that she was born in 1889. This made her a minor and allowed her to hope for a lighter sentence. And so, it happened. On October 13, 1907, the Provisional Military Court in Chernihiv found Nikiforova guilty of belonging to the anarcho-communists, participating in the murder of a Starodub police officer, and robbing a priest. She was sentenced to hanging, but when the sentence was confirmed, the execution was commuted to 20 years of hard labour due to her falsified age.
A year after the trial, Nikiforova was transferred to Moscow. The accompanying documents noted: “Prone to escape. In the common cell, she is a leader and agitator. It’s a good idea to keep her in solitary. Requires especially vigilant supervision as an important criminal.”
Upon her arrival in Moscow in May 1909, Nikiforova was imprisoned in the Moscow Provincial Women’s Hard Labour Prison. She shared a cell with two other political radicals: Natalya Klimova, an SR Maximalist serving an indefinite term organizing an assassination attempt on Peter Stolypin, the Russian Minister of the Interior; and Ekaterina Nikitina, another Maximalist.
Twenty years later, Nikitina claimed in her memoirs, among other things, that Nikiforova’s “real name” was not Maria but Vladimir and that she was neither a woman nor a man but a hermaphrodite. Nikitina’s salacious story about Nikiforova’s ambiguous gender has gained popularity since the 1990s and is still being retold despite any evidence. Nikiforova’s personal file from the Moscow Women’s Prison archives states: “Distinctive features: none”; “Marital status: unmarried.” The only detail given about the state of her health is anemia. Noticeably, the doctors of the prison department did not notice any “spicy” special features.
Nikiforova spent less than two months in Moscow prison. By the time she arrived, an outside group composed of various revolutionary organizations was preparing an assault on the prison. This motley crew of jailbreakers included the young Vladimir Mayakovsky, soon to gain fame as the most important Russian futurist poet. The main goal of the conspirators was to free Nikiforova’s cellmate, Klimova, but other prisoners also had the opportunity to escape. On the evening of July 1, 1909, the warden opened the cell doors, handed over free clothes to the prisoners, and led them out into the corridor. Having descended from the second floor using knotted sheets, thirteen prisoners escaped into the street. Liberated, they broke up into small groups and, accompanied by escorts, went to safe houses.
After the escape, Nikiforova ended up in Western Europe. She lived in Paris and Brussels, belonged to anarchist groups, and maintained relations with many Russian emigrants. There are several legends about Nikiforova’s life abroad. One of them claims that Nikiforova was a student at Auguste Rodin’s School of Painting and Sculpture in Paris.
Another less plausible myth is that when the First World War broke out, Nikiforova enrolled in an officer school in Paris, from which she graduated in 1916, and then, as part of the French army, participated in battles on the Thessaloniki front in Greece before returning to Russian in 1917. Considering Nikiforova’s activities in 1917, this series of events is more than doubtful. Moreover, it is simply impossible to imagine that a combat officer would be released from active duty in the army during the World War. One way or another, upon returning to Russia, Nikiforova never declared her “officer rank” but identified photography as her profession.
Returning to her homeland in June 1917, Nikiforova settled in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd) and joined the Petrograd Federation of Anarchist-Communists (PFAK), which at that time was preparing an armed uprising against the Provisional Government. From the first days of her life in the capital, she carried out active agitation and propaganda work, delivering speeches to soldiers and workers. She had an undoubted oratorical talent; Kyiv resident Zora Gandlevskaya recalled that she “could speak at rallies for 3-4 hours passionately and captivate the audience with her persuasiveness, passion, and erudition.”
But Nikiforova’s activities were not limited to propaganda alone: on June 18, she participated in an armed attack by anarchists on St. Petersburg’s Kresty Prison and the liberation of her comrades. This action provoked the Russian government into destroying PFAK’s headquarters and arresting a number of its activists. Nikiforova was also detained but was released a few days later, like most of the arrested.
In August 1917, Nikiforova moved to Oleksandrivsk and became the most well-known and respected member of the Oleksandrivsk Federation of Anarchists. Under her leadership, the Federation became a mass organization that enjoyed a strong influence among the workers and peasants of the city and surrounding district. Nikiforova very quickly gained wide popularity in the Ukrainian anarchist movement. She travelled throughout the district, calling for a struggle against all existing authorities and the construction of a free anarchist society. During this period, she first met Nestor Makhno and other anarchists from Huliaipole. But Nikiforova did not limit herself to propaganda alone: by the fall, she had formed a fighting squad (“a detachment of anarcho-terrorists”), which began expropriating the local bourgeoisie. The first victim was the Oleksandrivsk factory owner Bardovsky, from whom the anarchists seized a million rubles. Part of the money was transferred to the city’s Soviet of Workers’ Deputies and other revolutionary organizations.
At the end of September 1917, Nikiforova was arrested by order of the Oleksandrivsk district executive committee, whose moderate leadership she accused of counter-revolution. In response, anarchists, including Makhno, who was in Oleksandrivsk, called on the city workers to stage a general strike. As a result, Nikiforova was released; however, a few weeks later, she was arrested again, this time for organizing expropriations. The second imprisonment also did not last long. Her release was quickened by events in St. Petersburg when, on October 26, the Bolsheviks staged a coup, launching the revolution into a new and bloodier stage.
After October, several regional centers of power opposed to Lenin’s government arose. The most important of them were the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the government of the Don Cossacks, and later the White Army. Russian and Ukrainian anarchists maintained a tactical bloc with the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs, who promised to continue the revolution. The anarchists, in turn, bided their time, waiting for the moment when Lenin’s government “became clearly counter-revolutionary” to oppose it.
The inevitability of civil war was obvious, and weaponry became the principal means of settling disputes between different political forces. Therefore, Nikiforova and her squad of “anarcho-terrorists” began to disarm the military units of the old army, keeping the weapons for themselves or transferring them to like-minded groups in other Ukrainian cities.
In mid-December, the Left Bloc of Bolsheviks, Left Socialist Revolutionaries and Anarchists in Oleksandrivsk attempted to take control of the city. After intense street fighting, on January 4, 1918, local soviet power was established in Oleksandrivsk, with Nikiforova elected as the chairperson of the city’s Military Revolutionary Committee (Revkom). According to Makhno, she was worried that the Revkom would turn into a new government body. To prevent this, and true to her anarchist convictions, she informed the city’s workers about all the Revkom’s decisions and internal workings.
On the instructions and funds received from the Bolshevik government, Nikiforova formed her own armed unit—the Free Combat Druzhina, numbering about 600 fighters with artillery and machine guns—a relatively large military force at the time. In mid-January, the unit went to the Don, where it fought with the Cossacks of General Kaledin and then participated in the establishment of Soviet power in the cities of southern Crimea. At the end of the month, Nikiforova’s Druzhina returned to the Ukrainian steppes, where the struggle between supporters of the Left Bloc and the Ukrainian People’s Republic was in full swing.
Returning to Oleksandrivsk after a month-long absence, Nikiforova and her fighters entered into a new conflict with the Bolsheviks, this time with the leadership of the local soviet, considering its actions a “usurpation of power.” At first, the matter was limited to mutual accusations, but by February 20, disagreements reached a climax: the Free Druzhina arrested members of the city executive committee, and there was a shootout with a group of Red Guards. Those arrested were released on the same day, but Nikiforova refused to continue working with them and, as a principled opponent of the authorities, demonstratively resigned from all Soviet bodies.
During this period, the German-Austrian offensive to occupy Ukraine began. The Free Combat Druzhina announced a new recruitment of volunteers, increasing its number to almost a thousand people. At the beginning of March 1918, Nikiforova’s anarchists fought against the German-Austrian troops for more than a month, slowly retreating along the railways from the Kyiv region to the Northern Azov region. As before, her Free Combat Druzhina practiced requisitions and confiscations on a broad scale, although, in many cases, impostors acted on behalf of Nikiforova and her fighters, no different from ordinary bandits.
The Ukrainian Bolsheviks were dissatisfied with Nikiforova for another reason. As a staunch opponent of statism, she often dispersed local soviets that had arrogated too many rights to themselves or simply sabotaged the fight against the external threat. Nikiforova retained the highest reputation and genuine popularity among two categories of the population: anarchists protesting against “continuous persecution by the Bolsheviks and the bourgeoisie;” and the Red Army military command, who considered the Druzhina one of the most combat-ready units in Ukraine, and Nikiforova herself a talented commander—while being possibly the only female military leader in the country. The commander-in-chief of the Red Army in Ukraine, Vladimir Antonov-Ovseenko himself, stated: “Marusya is a fighter, she is engaged selflessly in combat and keeping her detachment in iron discipline. She has behaved no worse, but in fact better, than many of the vaunted Soviet leaders who fled in cowardly fashion, grabbing their belongings and families, long before the arrival of the Germans.”
On April 17, 1918, the Free Combat Druzhina arrived in Taganrog, the temporary capital of “Red” Ukraine, which the German Army had almost completely captured. On the same day, the Druzhina was disarmed, and Nikiforova herself was arrested by order of the Bolshevik section of the All-Ukrainian Central Executive Committee. She was charged with the destruction of the city Elisavetgrad, unauthorized requisitions and executions, and disobeying military orders. However, nothing incriminating was found after a search of her Free Druzhina: no valuables (“gold and diamonds”), no money, and no expensive items—only weapons, ammunition, food, and other property needed for the army.
The arrest of a popular commander caused unrest among anarchists, Left SRs, and Red Army soldiers. The Central Executive Committee received threats: “For Marusya, we will crush you.” Antonov- Ovseenko himself sent a telegram defending Nikiforova. Under these conditions, the Bolsheviks avoided aggravating the conflict and included representatives of the Left SRs and anarchists in a “court of revolutionary honour” to review Nikiforova’s case. After interviewing many witnesses, the court declared all the charges unproven.
At the end of May 1918, the Soviet authorities organized the disarmament of all anarchist detachments retreating from Ukraine to Tsaritsyn. As a result, the remnants of Nikiforova’s Druzhina were disbanded. With several companions, including Nestor Makhno, Nikiforova left for Saratov, where she effectively lived illegally. The reason for this was renewed threats from the prominent Ukrainian Bolsheviks, who were extremely dissatisfied with her acquittal and again demanded the arrest and execution of the “bandit Marusya.”
On June 20, 1918, Nikiforova was discovered and arrested in Saratov. A few days later, she was sent to Moscow, where she was imprisoned in Butyrka Prison. On August 9, 1918, the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal‘s investigative commission began an investigation into the Nikiforova case.
In August 1918, Moscow anarchists began a campaign to release their comrade-in-arms. The movement’s most prominent figures, as well as the Red Army commander Antonov-Ovseenko, submitted petitions and statements. The campaign was successful: on September 21, Nikiforova was released on bail from Butyrka pending trial.
While awaiting trial, Nikiforova joined the Proletkult studio to study painting. According to the recollections of Margarita Sabashnikova, the secretary of the painting department of Proletkult, Maria often acted as a delegate for students who complained about unsatisfactory study conditions and insufficient attention from teachers.
The First All-Russian Congress of Anarcho-Communists was held in Moscow from December 25 to 28, 1918. Nikiforova participated as a representative of the Ukrainian anarchists and made a report on the activities of anarchists in the insurgent movement. The Congress launched a protest in connection with Nikiforova’s upcoming trial and stated, “that she was being brought to trial only because she had been brazenly slandered.”
The trial of Nikiforova began in the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal on January 21, 1919. Maria was accused “of armed opposition and discrediting the Soviet government and of disruptive actions while defending against external and internal enemies at a dangerous moment for the Revolution” and of massive illegal requisitions and robberies, which “caused disillusionment with the Soviet government in the South.” Nikiforova denied the accusations, insisting on her innocence. Newspapers reported that “in her last words, the defendant declares that the revolutionary movement, and especially the revolutionary honour of the leaders of the South, are dear to her. In all her actions, she was guided only by the idea that workers and peasants should, as quickly as possible, take into their own hands everything they had created over the centuries. Equating her actions with banditry is tantamount to blaming the entire vanguard of the revolutionary leaders of the South for this.”
There were no witnesses for the prosecution (partly because Ukraine was under German occupation)—only rumours and retellings of rumours were proffered as evidence against Nikiforova. However, the Bolshevik court also could not pass an acquittal in such a high-profile case, and therefore, it found a compromise solution. The charges of banditry and robbery were considered unproven. Still, Nikiforova was found guilty of “discrediting the Soviet government through her actions and the actions of her detachment in some cases and disobedience to certain local councils in the field of military operations.” Taking into account the “revolutionary merits” of the defendant, the tribunal decided to prohibit her from “holding responsible positions for a period of six months from the date of the verdict.”
Nikiforova immediately left for Ukraine, probably intending to resume her armed struggle against the counter-revolution. In February 1919, Nikiforova joined the Makhnovist movement, which was soon formed into the 3rd Trans-Dnieper Brigade as part of the Ukrainian Red Army. Makhno, seeking not to worsen his rather tricky relations with the Bolsheviks, obeyed the verdict against Nikiforova and removed her from any military work, instructing her to exclusively engage in cultural and educational activities in the Huliaipole region.
For several months, she started kindergartens, children’s communes and schools and established medical services for the population. At the same time, she conducted anarchist propaganda among peasants and rebels and spoke at rallies, describing the Bolsheviks’ persecution of anarchists in Russia and Ukraine. However, like the entire Makhnovist leadership of that time, she adhered to preserving the “united revolutionary front of all revolutionary parties standing on the platform of real Soviet power of the poorest peasants and workers.” By contrast, her husband, Witold Brzostek, who remained in Moscow, apparently had a different point of view and, in the spring of 1919, began to form a group of underground anarchists to fight against the Reds.
On May 7, 1919, Lev Kamenev, one of the foremost leaders of the Bolsheviks, visited Huliaipole. Judging by his reports to Moscow, he was pleasantly surprised by the state of affairs in the Makhnovist region, including in the fields of culture and education, which Nikiforova was involved in. The personality of Nikiforova herself also made a most favourable impression on Kamenev, and upon returning to Moscow, he achieved a reduction in her sentence to three months. Now Maria could return to military work, which she did.
In mid-May 1919, the headquarters of the Makhnovist brigade sent her to Berdiansk, instructing her to form a new regiment of volunteers. Here, Maria was reunited with her husband, who had arrived from Moscow. In Berdyansk, Nikiforova continued her anarchist agitation, speaking at rallies criticizing the Bolsheviks’ “commissar state.”
However, Nikiforova did not have time to complete the formation of a regiment. At the beginning of June 1919, the Bolsheviks broke their military-political alliance with the Makhnovists and began military operations against them. Maria, her husband, and several other anarchists fled Berdiansk and went underground. At first, she wanted to assemble a partisan detachment to carry out attacks and sabotage on the railways in the rear of the White Army General Anton Denikin. However, due to a lack of weapons, she abandoned this plan. After that, she decided to return to the old proven means of political terror. In mid-June, a meeting of several dozen anarchists who supported her plans was held. Money for work was given to the underground by Makhno. After the meeting, three groups of militants were given assignments: the first made its way to Moscow, where it laid the foundation for the All-Russian Organization of Underground Anarchists; the second to Siberia, to carry out an assassination attempt on the White Army Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak; and the third, led by Nikiforova and Brzostek, planned to organize the murder of Denikin and General Yakov Slashchov.
At the beginning of August, the couple reached Sevastopol in Crimea, where they made contact with Zora Gandlevskaya. Zora was at the head of a small combat group and was preparing an assassination attempt on Denikin, who was expected in the city any day. Judging by Gandlevskaya’s recollections, Nikiforova and Brzostek intended to participate in the murder and then leave for Poland. But the plan failed to manifest, and Nikiforova’s fame led to her death.
In August 1919, by pure chance, Nikiforova ran into two White Army soldiers who had once been captured by her detachment. As privates, they were flogged by Nikiforova’s order and released. Now, the soldiers recognized her, tracked her to her residence, and reported the address to the White counterintelligence.
This unfortunate turn of events led to Nikiforova and Brzostek’s surprise arrest in a store, with no time to offer armed resistance. Brzostek attempted to bribe the arresting officers, who gladly accepted forty thousand rubles but did not release the couple. Gandlevskaya tried to organize an attack on the Sevastopol prison to release the pair, but the anarchists in the city were too weak to launch such an operation.
On September 16, a White military court examined the case of Maria Nikiforova on charges that “while commanding a detachment of anarchist communists in 1918–1919, she executed officers and civilians in Rostov-on- Don, Odesa and Melitopol, and called for bloody and merciless reprisals against the bourgeoisie and counter-revolutionaries.”
Included in the specific charges was a description of Nikiforova’s detachment’s actions in Odesa, which she allegedly captured together with the “Petliurist” (Ukrainian People’s Army) rebels, “and took part in the burning of the Odesa civilian prison, where the head of the prison was burned to death.” The trouble is that Ukrainian troops took Odesa in December 1918, precisely when Nikiforova, as we recall, was in Moscow awaiting trial. As can be seen, legends around “Marusya” were also born in the White camp.
At the trial, Nikiforova “behaved defiantly and after the reading of the verdict began to scold the judges.” She received a death sentence. The same sentence was handed down to Brzostek, who was accused of “harbouring” his wife, that is, of not reporting her crimes.
After the trial, Nikiforova was sent back to prison in a truck guarded by two dozen officers. According to Zora Gandlevskaya, she shouted all the way: “Long live anarchy! Long live freedom! Down with tyrants! Down with the White Guards!”
On the night of September 17, Maria Hryhorivna Nikiforova was shot in the courtyard of the women’s building of the Sevastopol prison. The warden at the execution said that Maria herself commanded: “Fire!”
Anatoly Dubovik is a Ukrainian anarchist from Dnipro. He was a member of the Association of Anarchist Movements (1990–1994) and the Nestor Makhno Revolutionary Confederation of Anarchists-Syndicalists (1994–2014). He is a prolific researcher of Ukrainian and Russian anarchism, having compiled biographical information on some ten thousand anarchists over thirty years of investigation.
Originally published in Russian on Akrateia in a slightly different version.
From Fifth Estate
#415, Summer 2024
by Bill Brown
Why did I translate Raoul Vaneigem’s La Résistance au christianisme: Les Héresies des origines au xviiie siècle, originally published in 1993 by Editions Fayard, into English?
This is a fair question because, after all, the book is more than 600 pages long, not counting the bibliography and the index, and it’s about a fairly esoteric subject: the so-called heresies that were identified (sometimes even fabricated), publicly denounced and ruthlessly persecuted by the Christian Church over the course of nearly 2,000 years.
My answer starts with the fact that Vaneigem, born on March 21, 1934, in Lessines, Belgium, and still very much alive today, was an important member of the Situationist International (the SI). Founded in Italy in 1957 by several small groups of European painters, architects, poets and filmmakers, the SI was unique in that its members believed in the possibility of global social revolution at a time when virtually no one else did.
In the early 1960s, the organization evolved from a Surrealist-inspired avant-garde arts movement into a hardcore political grouping that was primarily concerned with updating Marxist and anarchist theories and practices for the modern era. By 1967, the SI had developed a new critique of modern capitalism (“the society of the spectacle”) and reinvented the theory of proletarian revolution (“the revolution of everyday life”).
The situs propagated their ideas and methods through a journal called Internationale situationniste, several books, and a number of scandalous provocations. The group was deeply involved in the protests, riots, and occupations that nearly toppled the French government in May—June 1968.
In the 1970s, after the organization had dissolved itself, the SI continued to have a profound influence on revolutionary politics and culture in the U.S., France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.
In England, the undiminished power and attractiveness of situationist critique was revealed in a new context when it was adopted, simplified and sharpened by the clothes, lyrics and packaging designs of the Sex Pistols. Other classic punk bands influenced by the SI include Gang of Four, the Clash, and the Mekons. More recent adherents to situationist critique include the punk bands Pussy Riot and the Stone Temple Pilots, the editors of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, Adbusters and the organizers of Occupy Wall Street.
Raoul Vaneigem was one of the most important members of the SI, which he joined in 1961 and stayed with until 1970, when he resigned. During that time, he wrote several key situationist texts, including Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes générations, first published in 1967 and most often translated into English as The Revolution of Everyday Life.
After his resignation, Vaneigem was overshadowed by the SI’s co-founder and last remaining member, Guy Debord, who was an outspoken critic of his ex-comrade’s lack of involvement in the organization post-1967, his eventual resignation and the works he published thereafter. As a result, comparatively few of Vaneigem’s nearly 50 books and more than 20 prefaces, afterwords and articles have been translated into English.
To date, there has been only one major study in English of his life and work: Alastair Hemmings’ The Radical Subject: An Intellectual Biography of Raoul Vaneigem (1934-Present).
Vaneigem’s post-SI work has covered a wide variety of subjects, including the Zapatistas, the Yellow Vests, and the Oaxaca Commune. But there is one subject to which he has returned several times and with great intensity: religion, particularly the Christian religion and the heresies against which it fought. Perhaps this should be phrased the other way around: he has focused on heresies and their resistance to the imposition of Christianity upon the masses and at the point of a sword. Vaneigem has written nearly half a dozen books on this one subject, the longest and most important of which is La Résistance au christianisme. When I began the translation in 2006, none were available in English.
Vaneigem does not have a particularly good understanding of contemporary American society. In his epilogue to my translation, which was specifically written for it, he refers to Calvinism and the Protestant work ethic rather than to white Christian nationalism and the drive toward a theocracy in this country. But his book is very relevant to the religious cult that has arisen around ex-President Trump and his millenarian rhetoric about retribution.
Without help from such a source as Vaneigem, it is difficult to understand the extent and intensity of the zealous support (even adoration) for Trump by people who are in fact victimized by his vicious, fascist policies and actions.
There are other translators who have brought Vaneigem into English, but they are few in number. There’s the ex-situationist Donald Nicholson-Smith, who has translated The Revolution of Everyday Life and several other works into English, and the team of Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson, who collaborated on the translation of Le Mouvement du libre-esprit (The Movement of the Free Spirit), to which La Résistance au christianisme is a kind of sequel and supplement. But when I first got interested in La Résistance, it seemed clear that no one else was going to take it on, and so I decided to translate it myself. I had my work cut out for me.
It should be noted that, for 15 years before I signed a publishing contract with Eris Books, my translation of Resistance to Christianity was available for free on my website (notbored.org). The manuscript was also copied and pasted to several anarchist websites, including the Anarchist Library, by administrators who believed that their readers would also be interested in its contents and relevance to contemporary society.
As a result, I received dozens of emails from attentive and enthusiastic people who had questions, comments, and/or corrections, and so I was able to improve the manuscript as well as be reassured that there was an audience for it. Though I have done so before, I would like to take this opportunity to thank them all for the help I have received along the way.
Bill Brown has been involved in the situationist milieu for nearly 40 years. He has translated numerous situationist texts and reprinted others that were no longer available. He lives and works in New York City.
See Raoul Vaneigem in the FE Archive.