The Trials and Tribulations of Hermann Duncker

 

Hermann Duncker was born in Hamburg on the 24th of May 1874 and died on the 22nd of June in 1960, he was buried in the Friedrichfelde Central Cemetry in Berlin. That was a turbulent time for most and especially politically active Germans. In summary Duncker was an active participant in the 1918 German Revolution, WWII and the Cold War, and was often in the middle of the action.

Hermann's introduction to socialism came from his wife Kate Doell who was a teacher and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The Duncker were from the SPD's first generation of Marxist activists after the Marx wing of theoreticians established a hold on the party leadership. He became an fervent supporter of the Marxist wing of the SPD, and in the run up to the First World War supported the anti-war minority alongside Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. He followed them in founding the Spartacus League and alongside his wife Kate were on the first Central Committee of the Communist Party (KPD). 

When the Nazis came to power Herman spent a year in a Concentration camp, caught in an early crackdown on political dissidents, but luckily he was released. Soon after the Duncker family went into protective exile, eventually settling in France. While supporters of the Soviet Union Stalin's growing paranoia and political maneuveres caused the Duncker family great distress. The Duncker's had become close to Nikolai Bukharin who was destroyed politically and then executed in 1936 during the Great Purge. The purge also targetted Herman's son Wolfgang was also attacked and persecuted while in the Soviet Union. Wolfgang died in the Vorkutlag Gulag in 1942, Herman and Kate found out about their son's fate years later. Things got worse for the family when the Soviet Union signed a pact with Hitler in 1939 with the support of the remaining KPD leadership in Moscow. The Duncker's found themselves again in an oppositional minority within their party. 

When France fell to the Wehrmacht Duncker fled through Vichy France to Casablanca before finally reaching the United States of America in 1941 after his wife Kate was able to obtain travel papers for him. While in the USA Herman joined the anti-Nazi Council for a Democratic Germany, a group that sort to unite the German diaspora in the United States in their efforts to oppose the Third Reich. Duncker's membership of this body demonstrates the extent of the rift between him and the Communist movement at this time, the Council was set up in 1944 in opposition to the Communist party dominated National Committee for a Free Germany which was founded in Moscow in 1943.

After the war in 1947 Herman and Kate returned to Germany and settled in the Soviet Occupation zone which became the German Democratic Republic (DDR) more commonly known as East Germany. They joined the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), which was created out of a merger of the SPD and KPD, echoing a position Duncker had advocated in his time in the KPD during the Weimar Republic. Duncker returned to academics occupying several prestigious teaching positions, Professor and Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Rostock, Rector of the academy of the Free German Trade Union Federation etc. And in his last years was awarded several high honours including the Patriotic Order of Merit in 1955 and the DDR's highest honour the Order of Karl Marx in 1953. When he passed away in 1960 his body was interred in the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetry, a graveyard reserved for high officials of the DDR and located close to a memorial dedicated to German Socialists.

His views and his circumstances would change often throughout his life which isn't surprising or unique, time and experience change us all. His life is interesting, and at time of writing getting easier to look up, more of his articles are being translated into English on the Marxist Internet Archive, and more biographical information is slowly popping up on wikipedia and an eclectic mix of socialist blogs and webpages. 

Personally speaking though, I think the main lesson to be learnt about the life of Herman Duncker is in his relationship and evolution through Marxism. I first became aware of Duncker when getting into a friendly disagreement with a Marxist who was making some pretty tall claims about Marxist cannon. I read the article that was sent my way, looked Duncker up, read what I could find about him, then started reading through a selection of the articles that had been translated and uploaded and found him an interesting fellow but was confused as to why he was being presented to me as evidence for the argument being made. Duncker was being held up as an example of "proper" or "real" Marxist thinking. The article in question was Duncker's What is Socialism? published in 1909. If you're wondering why I used quotation marks, its because what he meant by real Marxism was Marxist writing that tallied with his views on Marxism. Marxism is a fundamentally incoherent field of thought with over a hundred schools and doctrines all competing with each other. For what it's worth I agree that What is Socialism? did tally fairly well with his particular Marxism, (Socialist Party of Great Britain if you're curious) but sectarian arguments no longer really interest me.

What did catch my eye though, was the timeline of his life and political career and another article written in 1925 attacking his former mentors in the SPD called Ferdinand Lassalle's Centenary

 The leaders of social democracy, which pretend to be Marxist, indeed concealed both condemnations from the mass of their members for many years. The marginal notes were only published 16 years later, the letter to Kugelmann 17 years after the other letters had been printed.Even in the Marx-Engels correspondence certain very harsh expressions against Lassalle seem to have been suppressed by the publisher. This is how the socialist party of Germany guards against any wrong being done to its party saint Lassalle. As a matter of fact, the socialist party of Germany has much more in common with Lassalle than with Marx, although now it is far behind Lassalle in "practical politics" and can no longer claim to be heir to his views, for he was at least always a bitter opponent of the bourgeois party.

 Again the text isn't breaking new ground for me, but the passage quoted above did get my gears working. Duncker is discussing a little known fact about the history of the works of Karl Marx. While Marx was a live and for a number of years after his death the vast majority of his works were completely unknown to the world. It's known that his private correspondence remained private and that the last three volumes of Capital were published posthumously, but many including most Marxists I've met do not know that the majority of his published work remained in his study or at most received one or two very limited print runs before disappearing. And a number of those that did see some circulation while Marx was alive survive in history as edited versions republished by Engels after Marx's death. Here, Duncker is accusing the leadership of the SPD who took over the works and archives of both Marx and Engels after their deaths of using this access as leverage.

And its true that for much of the early days of Marxism the only people who had access to the majority of Karl Marx's works and ideas was a small group of intellectuals with the German Social Democratic movement. This changed in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union successfully bought the complete archives from the SPD leadership in exile, the Soviet Union then started printing and translating and releasing them. If you're wondering where I'm going with this I'll cut to the point. Herman Duncker an avid reader of theoretical works who took his knowledge seriously went from a Marxist Social Democrat to a Leninist, to a Stalinist at the same time his access to the works of Marx and Engels increased significantly.

There's a very alarming tendency in left wing circles to treat texts like holy relics and theoretical work like revelations. The argument being that through intensive study and reaching the "correct" interpretation of the learning will make one a better Marxist/Communist/whatever. However, Herman Duncker was a man who dedicated his life to this study and ending up supporting a brutal regime that murdered his own son! And the well from which he drew most of the material for his studies was the Soviet Union which at the time was led by Joseph Stalin. Popularising the works of Marx and Engels didn't cause a massive wave of anti-Stalin communist reaction, the dissident Marxists remained small and isolated.

So, this raises some questions, either the works of Marx and Engels lead logically to the Berlin Wall and the Gulag Archipelago, or the study of texts in a vacuum are insufficient for the task of building a movement of conscious revolutionaries aware of the dangers and the task of building a better world. I don't think the first option is quite true, you can certainly take bits and pieces from both to stitch together an argument for it, that's what Stalin and Marxism-Leninism i.e. Stalinism with pretensions does after all. Its also what most of the other Marxists do for their own ends, the Socialist Party of Great Britain member was happy to claim Duncker's early work when he felt it backed him up in an internet disagreement but didn't seem to bother knowing more about the man then that, or if he did know about Duncker didn't really care that his ideas and trajectory took him into the arms of the heretics.

The point of theory like all educational materials is that you're supposed to engage with it and not submit to it. One of Herman's articles that has been translated into English touches on this subject, How Should One Read? published in 1931. It sounds like an exploration of how to approach knowledge but is largely about how to access information quickly and often. The task of the reader (apparently) is not to evaluate the work being read but to try and fully absorb the authors argument in outline. Most of the advice is physical on how to build your own library and indexing system, he advocates reading and re-reading works and constantly adding notes and summarises on the key points of each passage. At no point does he talk about using critical thinking or checking the work you've been reading, the assumption is made that "important literature" which seems to mean Communist party approved literature is ultimately correct and the issue lies with the reader to work out the argument. There's a section on how to set up a study group whose sole purpose seems to be to make sure that each individual member can learn the correct argument being made by the text with the assistance of the others. 

The explanation for this frankly obsessive manner of rote learning is that Karl Marx did it, so the implication being that if it's good enough for him its good enough for you. 

It will be seen how one "grows into" a really good book and how it gives one new rays of light all the time. As for books one can only borrow, one should copy the important passages from them. At the age of seventeen, Marx wrote to his father "I have made a habit of making excerpts from all the books I read... and jotting down reflections underneath."Among the papers left by Marx there are 200 notebooks full of such excerpts. In this connection one should not forget to make a note of the origin of the passage extracted and possibly also the date of the excerpt

 

It will be seen how one "grows into" a really good book and how it gives one new rays of light all the time. As for books one can only borrow, one should copy the important passages from them. At the age of seventeen, Marx wrote to his father:"I have made a habit of making excerpts from all the books I read... and jotting down reflections underneath."Among the papers left by Marx there are 200 notebooks full of such excerpts. In this connection one should not forget to make a note of the origin of the passage extracted and possibly also the date of the excerpt.

 And then further supports this argument with a quotation from Lenin,

There will certainly be no lack of reading material as long as there is a genuine will to study. Serious and steady intent will help on to get over a single ruined evening and the technical difficulties. After all, what did Lenin say in his great speech to the Young Communists in October 1920:

"But you would be committing a great mistake, if you attempted to draw the conclusion that one can become a communist without acquiring what human knowledge has accumulated. It would be a mistake to believe that it is sufficient to learn communist slogans, the conclusions of communist science, and that it is not necessary to acquire the sum of knowledge of which communism itself is a consequence."

(Lenin's Selected Works: Vol. 9, p. 470, "Tasks of the Youth Leagues".)

The practically advice for taking notes isn't bad, it can help quite a few readers, I use a different system myself but if Herman's works for you than that's fine. My issue with Herman's advice is the end for his means, he wants Communist party members to read like this so they can obtain the "correct" message, its an argument for theoretical orthodoxy. The beginning of the article has a very interesting passage,

 When even so vain and affected a bourgeois scholar as Prof. Sombart does not feel embarrassed to admit, in a booklet, that he had read the "Communist Manifesto" a hundred times and yet still finds new stimulus in it, then a worker thirsting for learning cannot regard it as "beneath his dignity" to study over and over again writings like the "Manifesto" and many more by Marx, Engels, Lenin and others.

He wants his audience to read from an approve canon over and over again. That is how doctrine's form and I find the Lenin quote chosen to be very curious because in that passage he's saying  "But you would be committing a great mistake, if you attempted to draw the conclusion that one can become a communist without acquiring what human knowledge has accumulated." But Herman appears to have taken human knowledge and replaced with the knowledge promoted by the Communist party printing presses. The rare occasions he references literary work outside of this in the article he is always dismissive and hostile.

I did wonder why the Duncker's went to East Germany after the fallout of World War II and the Great Purge and the death of his own son. But I stopped wondering after reading How Should One Read? The main points of disagreement with the two parties he dedicated his life to, the SPD and then the KPD/SED were spurred by events that were largely unexpected and didn't have much theoretical preparation. The SPD participation in the German war government was surprising, the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 came after three years of intense support for anti-fascist agitation, and the Great Purge not only targetted the Duncker family directly, it too arrived with little preparation. Outside of these major events he had been a loyal supporter of Lenin's and then Stalin's Communist movement which was never free of repression and power squabbles. If How Should One Read? is genuinely autobiographical it makes a lot of sense why he turned out the way he did.

Herman Duncker was a clever and brave man, he was not afraid to oppose the majority when he believed them to be wrong, but in the end he submitted and became another functionary in a repressive system that claimed many lives. Herman is a warning to us not to let our fixations become tools to ensnare us and betray the things that make us human. 

The Order of Karl Marx, I wonder if it was worth it?

War on Christmas, the Agacher strip clash

 

President Sankara in front with beret visits Agacher during conflict in December 1985

 

On Christmas day 1985 the West African nations of Mali and Burkina Faso found themselves in a military conflict. The dispute was called by some African leaders as "the war of the poor" due to the economic conditions within both countries and became known commonly as the Agacher strip War. The Agacher strip was a territory bordering both nations, in the furthest north of Burkina Faso and as part of Mali's southern border. The clashes lasted five days before the International Court of Justice arbitrated. Casualties are had to accurately but are estimated as high as 300 including civilians and military. 

The situation was essentially powder keg next to an open flame. Agacher was a porous border, people living their often crossed what was suppsoed to be the recognised border. Cattle farmers would trespass to graze their cattle on the best lands in the area. And the territory was beleived to be rich in natural resources. Both nations had been pursuing their claims to the territory for many  years with sporadic shooting in 1974. But relations between Mali and Burkina Faso were especially poor by 1985. Burkina Faso's leader Thomas Sankara had publicly urged on revolution in Mali during a period of unrest 

“The other peoples who are on our borders also need a revolution […] I want to talk about Mali. […] The revolution of the people of Burkina Faso is available to the people of Mali who need it. Because he alone will allow him to fight against hunger, thirst, ignorance; and to fight above all against the forces of neocolonial and imperialist domination”.

Speech from September 1985, machine translated from French

Meanwhile Sankara suspected Mali's leader Moussa Traore of working with Burkinabe exiles and the Ivory Coast against him. Further aggravating the situation was the Burkina Faso census being conducted at the time which included the communities in Agacher and border settlements claimed by Mali. Burkina Faso also deployed soldiers to the area without notification resulting in confrontation with Mali authorities. Burkina Faso announced it would withdraw its soldiers but had not done so by the time the conflict had started.

On the 25th of December Mali launched its offensive, over five days its forces successfully occupied a large part of the strip with the Burkinabe forces lead by Blaise Compaore forced to disperse and resort to ambush and delaying tactics. On December 30th a truce sponsored by African leaders was struck and held. In January 1986 the two countries began desecalting, prisoners were exchanged and eventually a time table for withdrawing forces was agreed. Both governments accused each other, Burkina Faso stated it was the victim of aggression while Mali maintained that its operation was to protect its territorial integrity. By that December the International Court of Justice had decided to split the territory roughly in half with Mali taking the West and Burkina Faso the east. Both nations accepted this proposal and that was the end of hostilities between the two countries.

The reason I'm outlining this short conflict is the connection to Thomas Sankara. Thomas Sankara was Marxist revolutionary and statesmen who came to power through a coup d'etat in the former French colony of Upper Volta in 1983. In 1984 as part of Sankara's reforms the country was renamed to Burkina Faso. Sankara's charisma, interventionist policies and lack of readily available information about him or his time in government (in English anyway) and his tragic end, deposed and killed in 1987 in another coup d'etat by his close colleague and fellow band member Blaise Compaore, created the perfect conditions for a posthoumous cult of personality. Sankara is extremely popular today amongst certain left-wing circles and while its difficult to find information about in English, its almost possible to find even mild criticism.

So, I think the Agacher Strip, both the long running dispute and the conflict it birthed are an excellent demonstration of reality. It is possible that Thomas Sankara was truly as selfless and brilliant as he is presented by his admirers. But he was also the leader of a government and a nation state and an active participant in the international community. This means that ultimately his personal qualities aren't of much importance because both he and the Burkinabe revolution he promoted had to work within a system that constrained and limited them. 

As seen by the dispute over territory in Agacher. Two nations wanted to augment their security and natural wealth fought over a territory both had claimed. While Sankara had encouraged Malians to oust Muossa Traore in speeches and print there was no serious attempt to link the struggle for control of Agacher to a revolution in Mali. And Mali despite gaining the upper hand against the armed forces of Burkina Faso made no attempt to deliver a serious blow to Burkina Faso, its forces remained within the territory that was disputed. And after the International Court of Justice recommended splitting the territory both sides agreed and scaled back their aggressive measures. Both governments came to an agreement they could live with at the cost of a few hundred of their citizens. 

Furthermore, despite Sankara being an open Marxist with close co-operation with Cuba the Cold War dynamics of East vs West played no role in this conflict. Moussa Traore had taken steps to improve relations with France but his regime and especially its military relied heavily on the Soviet Union. The air force that bombed Burkinabe positions and villages flew Mig-21s and its tanks and equipment were also from the Soviet military. There were at least 50 Soviet military advisers present in the country at the time of the conflict offering support as well.

MiG-21 in the service of the Malian air force

Ultimately it didn't matter that Sankara was in power at all. The tensions between the two nations predated him and they were fought by means that trump ideological postures and by diplomacy and force, the tools available to all states and endorsed by the international authorities so long as they occurr in the proper manner.

Joseph Dejacque pioneering man of mystery

 

Man is an essentially revolutionary being. He cannot immobilize himself in one place. He does not live the life of boundaries, but the life of the stars

Joseph Dejacque was a man of many talents, a wall paper hanger, journalist and editor, philosopher, poer and social critic. He was also an early Anarchist-Communist and the first person to publicly proclaim himself a Libertarian through the newspaper Le Libertaire. Born in 1821 in humble beginnings as the fatherless son of a linen maker. He served in the French Navy briefly from 1841-43 and returned to civilian life as a store clerk. A few years later he became active within French socialist circles, he contributed to the Albert the Worker's newspaper L'Atelier (The workshop).

During the revolutionary upheaval of 1848 Dejacque was arrested for his support of the insurrection of Paris workers. He was released but then arrested again in 1851 for the publication of politically subversive poetry, though he escaped and fled France for London during the chaos of the coup that brought Napoleon III to power. He spent some time moving between London and Jersey where he associated with several French exile Anarchists like Gustave Lefrancais[1] and published La Question Revolutionnaire (The Revolutionary Question) an explicitly Anarchist text.

In 1854 he moved to the United States of America he remained active in the workers movement that was being established by exiles and immigrants from Europe. He was involved in the International Association[2] established in 1855 and managed to publish Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social (The Libertarian, Journal for the Social Movement) which was the first Anarchist-Communist publication in the USA and the first journal to use the term Libertarian. In 1861 the beginning of the American Civil war caused a depression that caused a slump and destroyed his finances. Le Libertaire folded, its last issue carried an appeal urging victory against the Confederacy.

Dejacque returned to France, a general amnesty had been passed which meant Dejacque didn't face prosecution for his previous political actions, though his prospects did not improve, he died a few years later in 1864. His last years were spent in extreme poverty.

The above text is a rudimentary biography, there is more information easily available in French, and while the English speaking world has shown less interest his life has been noted and his works are slowly being translated by Shaun P. Wilbur of the site Libertarian Labyrinth, and there is a twitter bot[3] that tweets out selected passages and links to his texts. The reason Dejacque is being rescued from the obscurity of his peers partly his association with the word Libertarian. In English especially its North American flavours the label Libertarian and Libertarianism have become associated with the most extreme philosophies of private capitalism and a callous disregard for human needs and social activity. Privately owned police and corporation run prisons. The American Libertarian Party, has put out statements denouncing the concept of civil rights and lamenting that women can now vote in the USA. 

Elsewhere in the world these words have maintained their original associations with Anarchism and socialism that rejects authority. Think the collectives of the Spanish Revolution and the Greek Anarchists reclamation of the Exarchia district. For English speaking supporters of these ideas the association with the former is to put it mildly extremely annoying. It's difficult to advocate for an alternative society when you have to battle associations of tyranny and turbo corruption. So being able to point to Joseph Dejacque the originator of the designation is obviously appealing. And from personal experience I know the pro child labour crowd do not appreciate the this bit of history being dragged up.  

But for me the importance of Dejacque goes deeper than satisfying victories in rhetorical disputes. Joseph Dejacque was a genuine working class intellectual and totally committed to the cause of freedom for all. He did not let poverty, political persecution or social pressures prevent him from openly declaring that the overthrow of exploitation even through violence was just.

Every insurrection, be it individual, be it vanquished in advance, is always worthy of the ardent sympathy of revolutionaries, and the more audacious it is, the more worthy it is as well.

While in America he was an ardent defender of John Brown's failed assault on Harpers Ferry, a stance which was not popular with much of that country. And beyond defend Brown and his small band he further defended their cause, publishing articles advocating a mass uprising of all serviles, the Black slave and White worker. Despite wishing to return to France he maintained his criticism of the actions of Napoleon's Empire including denouncing the military intervention in the second war of Italian independence. And despite having respect for the works of Pierre Proudhon he was so appalled by the open sexism of Proudhon's work that he penned an early open letter arguing for full equality between men and women[4]. 

And he was a opponent of dictatorship even in the service of noble causes. At the time socialism especially in France was dominated by the heirs of the Jacobins, who dreamed of establishing disciplined projects for societal rejuvenation. This was also true in the smaller explicitly communist socialists whose main proponent was Auguste Blanqui. In many ways he seems to have been nearly a hundred years ahead of many of his contempories. This of course was not the case, his views were based on his experiences and events at the time and in his recent past. 

Dejacque is an inspiration in words and in life, however there is one final bit of trivia. We know a surprising amount about Joseph Dejacque, but we don't know what he looked like. This may surprise you, a websearch will provide editions of his texts with old photographs on the covers. But not only are they not photographs of Joseph Dejacque, they aren't even photographs of the same person. By my count I have seen at least three different men confused with Dejacque, most commonly its a young Ravachol[5] or Imre Madoch[6]. This seems strange to us in the modern day, but it's perfectly understandable. Photography was still new and very expensive, Dejacque was poor and had to keep relocating to avoid repression so its not surprising he did not find the time or the money to have his portrait taken. As to how and why these men have come to be mistaken for him I do not rightly know. I can see how Ravachol could be mistaken for Dejacque given the obvious overlaps, but Madoch and the others?

Imre Madoch

Ravachol, I have also seen different photos of Ravachol being used for Dejacque

Will Europe always be enslaved, or will it finally be free?
Are we dogs or wolves?
Will you children be men or subjects?
Proletariat! It is up to you to respond; it is up to you to speak and act for the destinies.

___________________________________________________________

1: A Communard and supporter of Bakunin in the International Workingmen's Association. The poem that provided the lyrics to La Internationale the famous anthem of the labour movement was dedicated to him, he passed away in 1901.

2: The International Association was a international grouping linking French Socialists, German Communists, English Chartists and Polish revolutionaries. Its considered a forerunner to the International Workingmen's Association. 

3: Dejacquebot https://twitter.com/Dejacquebot

4: On the human being male and female, published in 1857.

5: Francois Claude Koenigstein, known as Ravachol was another French Anarchist famous for his bombing campaign against politicians and judges, in reprisal for the brutal repression of French workers. He was guillotined in 1892.

6: A Hungarian writer and aristocrat, he also has a very distinguished moustache.

The Revolutionary Called Nestor (no not Makhno, the other one)

 

The Russian revolution catapulted a Ukrainian peasant to world fame. Nestor Makhno the anarcho-communist military leader whose campaigns in Ukraine secured the survival of a federation of collectives across a territory large than England, and a population estimated in the millions. This federation became known as the Free Territory and its been an inspiration and a warning to many revolutionary minded groups and individuals ever since.

This is not that story. No, this is instead a commentary on the other Nestor active during the Russian revolution, Nestor Alexandrovich Kalandarishvili, born in Georgia on the 8th of July 1876, and killed in an ambush on the 6th of March 1922. Nestor Kalandarishvili isn't as well known as Nestor Makhno, but he is not totally forgotten. Wikipedia has an article about his life in several languages, including English. And the Anarchist historian Nick Heath included a short biographical sketch of him in a three part series on former Anarchists who joined the Bolsheviks. 

It was Nick Heath's work where I first discovered this other Nestor. I think his life is deserving of a wider recognition as it may have strong relevance for the movement today. Nestor Kalandarishvili seems to have been a bit of a `joiner` as over a period of 22 years he moved from one revolutionary group or party to another. He appears to have become active in the revolutionary underground of the Russian Empire in 1900 when resuming his studies after completing military service. Initially he fell under the Social Revolutionary party, and then later joined the Georgian Socialist-Federalist Revolutionary Party, before moving onto Anarchism after taking part in Batumi revolt, a local Georgian uprising that was part of the unrest during the 1905 Russian Revolution. Kalandarishvili also took part in an uprising in 1907 in the Gurian republic which was crushed by the Tsar during a campaign to roll back the gains of the 1905 Revolution. Kalandarishvili was imprisoned in Siberia, he would remain in Siberia for the rest of his life.

In 1917 when the February Revolution succeeded in toppling the Tsar an amnesty for political prisoners freed both Nestor Makhno and Nestor Kalandarishvili. Kalandarishvili built a small military unit of Anarchists which defeated a local counter revolutionary force made up of land owners and minor nobility. His forces grew to the equivalent size of a division and was recruited mainly from local peasants and workers and anarchists who had been exiled to Siberia for political crimes. During the civil war Nestor Kalandarishvili's forces operated throughout Siberia, and battle White Army forces led by Semenov, Kappel and Baron Ungern. His many victories made him famous under the nickname Grandpa, though a defeat in late 1918 forced him once to retreat into Mongolia with several hundred men. He was such a thorn that Admiral Kolchak the nominal leader of the White Army put a bounty of 40,000 roubles on his head. In 1919 as Nestor's band moved to the vicinity of Irkutsk and attack White forces in the area local Bolsheviks approached him with offers of an alliance. 

By 1920 this alliance had driven the White Army and their Japanese support out of Irkutsk and established a Soviet administration with the creation of the Far Eastern Republic. In 1921 Nestor Kalandarishvili was invited to a meeting with Vladimir Lenin. After the meeting Kalandarishvili publicly renounced Anarchism and became a Bolshevik, he was at the same time given supreme military command of the Far East Republic with the power to appoint or dismiss officers of the units under his command. He also became head of the Korean War Council, a body that was supposed to be the supreme body for Korean revolutionary fighting groups. He clashed with Korean Anarchist fighting units when they refused to accept officers he had promoted to lead them, including former officers of the White army.

He used his influence to impede and disarmed units that wouldn't accept his authority until his death in an ambush in 1922 while fighting the Yakut rebels, one of the last actions of the civil war. After his death he was elevated into a hero of the Soviet state, many streets and factories and collective farms were named after him.

This ends the brief biography of the life and death of Nestor Kalandarishvili, a fuller account can be found with Nick Heath. 

So, to come back to the present day, I believe that the life and death of Nestor Kalandarishvili is a useful demonstration of the dangers of the popular talking point "Left unity" in practice. Much of the modern discourse at the state of what's commonly called the "left" is a lamentation that unlike the enemies in the right, the left just can't put its differences aside and unite against a common foe. This argument mostly rests on assumptions that have little foundation. For a start I don't believe the right are as united as is commonly believed, the civil war in Austria between the Fascist and Nazi parties, the bloody feud between the Romanian monarchy and the Iron Guard, and the bitter presidential campaigns between Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour are just a few brief examples. Furthermore I don't really see how much of the left as its commonly understood can actively work together in a way that doesn't mean many of the constituent parts give up fundamental elements of their theory and practice.

Nestor Kalandarishvili represents this. Its easy to read his conversion to Bolshevism as motivated purely by opportunism, it did coincide with funding, gifts and praise and awards from the Bolshevik government. But even if it was a genuine change in convictions, the effect was the same. This was a conflict where the Anarchists and Bolsheviks had co-operated for over a year, and yet as soon as one faction moved to establish itself as the government in the area it quickly provoked conflict where previously there seemed to have been accord. By appointing Nestor Kalandarishvili supreme commander and establishing military bodies like the Korean War Council all other military organisations lost their autonomy and were functionally rolled into the Bolshevik military and political program. Units that had fought effectively for years against the counter revolution were denied the right to choose their own staff and were expected to accept the promotion of former enemies without complaint. The unity of the Russian revolutionaries effectively died in Siberia the moment the Bolsheviks gained enough strength to assert dominance a phenomena that happened in Ukraine and Georgia at the same time and has been repeated since in Spain, the Greek underground and the post war Hungarian and Czechoslovakian states.

If unity between different groups for a common good is the true desire then I don't believe we would see this clear pattern, that groups in common only seem to be viable while no one group is strong enough to assert itself over the others and once that happens either a civil war erupts as happened in Kronstadt or the other groups cease to function in a way that matters and are subsumed and replaced by the dominant force as happened in the Popular Front government where the other forces were either liquidated or converted with the sole exception being several CNT columns who were too big to risk an open conflict over their continued acts of resistance like giving membership cards to POUM members. 

The Workers Union by Flora Tristan

 

The Workers Union is a book written by Flora Tristan a French Socialist and early feminist. It was published in 1843 after she managed to raise enough donations to pay for its first printing. It proved popular, so much so that it had two more printings in its first year of circulation. In a way Tristan was also a pioneer in crowdfunding. The book is an odd creation, or rather its become odd thanks to the passage of time. 

It was written during the last years of the July Monarchy, where radical voices were scrutinised and spied upon by the police, and gatherings of a political nature were limited to seven people at most. So it can be hard to put hindsight aside while reading it. But the effort is worth it. I believe Tristan's thought is a sort of mix and transition from the old co-operative and guild socialism of the early 1800s, the ideas of Fourier, Owen, St Simon etc, who are usually written off with the pejoratives Idealists, and Utopians, and the later socialist ideas. The translator of the book is keen to stress the connections and relevance her ideas have to the socialism of Marx and Engels, and I can see connections. But I was also strongly reminded of similarities with the Mutualist ideas of Proudhon who has a book La Celebration du dimanche, included in Tristan's recommended reading list for a hypothetical learning library for workers. And certain passages in the Workers Union could've been recycled into many a pamphlet on the merits of the One Big Union popularised by early syndicalists.

Tristan is open about her inspirations, St. Simon, Robert Owen and Fourier among others are acknowledged and praised, but also criticised for their shortcomings. The socialism of Flora Tristan represents a unique combination from a time of change and transformation. The American Anarchist Tom Wetzel believes Tristan to be a forerunner to International Workingmen's Association (IWMA) and this Workers Union is indeed an early proposal and rough blueprint for an international workers organisation. Its a flawed one mainly advocating that combination of all workers will empower and fund important projects including representation, welfare and educational enterprises (the workers palaces) and compel governments to grant the rights of work and organisation. 

I don't believe such a program was viable especially given that a key part of this Union was the appointment of a sole individual as its defender and champion in open copying of the Irish masses subscriptions for O'Connell in his work for constitutional reforms for Ireland. There is at least an acknowledgement that a dictatorial figure would be less than ideal and an attempt to control this hypothetical workers advocate with an idea of setting up a committee to examine their conduct and use of funds, and who can revoke their mandate if not satisfied. It's difficult for modern readers to understand the fixation on a singular great man but in the 1840s and long after even the socialist movement was dominated by powerful individuals. 

There is also a section dedicated to a series of draft appeals to the powerful in society, including the King and the Catholic church which are unthinkable in this day and age. But there is at least some method to this madness, the appeals were essentially politely worded charges of hypocrisy and in Tristan's own words would serve the dual purposes of soliciting support from the few progressives in society and the lack of response or critical rebukes to such appeals would serve as proof of general antagonism to the workers and their initiatives. 

So I don't think this work should be read seeking a practical strategy. It is an historic document. The longest appeal by far is addressed to women. Although called the Workers Union many pages are dedicated to the plight of women in 19th century society and advocating for improvements and inclusion within the working class. A modern feminist would have much to criticise, it leaves intact the family and a women's role within it, i.e. carer, but it does demand and advocate for education and condemns unequal pay practises in work. It also repeats Wollstonecraft's demand of a declaration of the rights of woman to be paired with the rights of man declared during the French revolution. 

It is an odd document that deserves to be read with open but critical minds. 

Women as Sex Vendors; or Why Women are Conservative

 

 A marxists' confused attempt to argue that women are a petits-bourgeois class in society, both reactionary and privileged when compared to men.

The propertyless woman today is rarely reduced to starvation. If the price (or wages) offered for the sale of her laboring power are unsatisfactory, she may always supplement them through the barter or sale of her sex. That there are no women hoboes in the civilized world today is incontestable proof of the superiority of the economic status of woman over man.

The arguments are diverse and often contradictory, and there is absolutely no acknowledgement nor attempt to grapple with the contemporary women's movement, whose very existence rebuked most of his points. At the beginning of the book, the author mentions that there are few women revolutionists, so I suspect he was using this as an excuse not to engage with it. The Women's movement in particular the campaigns for suffrage and full civil rights were overwhelmingly reformist, but they involved a very diverse coalition of women from all backgrounds and political lineages, including revolutionaries like Sylvia Pankhurst. But even though for many political and social reforms were the end point of the movement it was an international movement that mobilised thousands of women to intervene socially and politically with an incredible diversity of tactics, from respectable petitioning to acts of terrorism, one Suffragette -Mary Leigh- threw an axe at the Prime Minister Asquith. 

 

And in response to this demand for reforms the suffrage movement was met with systematic violence, that included police beatings, arrests and torture by force-feeding hunger strikers.  

And he weakens any revolutionary purity grounds by comparing men to women and concluding that men are serious minded and talk and discuss things of importance like civil engineering. So I suspect this refusal to even acknowledge the existence of a mass and diverse movement of committed political reformers willing to make extreme sacrifices is less to do with purity and more to do with cowardice.

Also, largely ignored was the related movement by women to enter the workplace, thus giving up their beneficial sex commodity privileges in favour of the far inferior selling of labour that men must suffer through. I say largely because the author does grudgingly acknowledge women work but it's sparse and highly revealing. Apart from references to stereotypical jobs for women like stenographers there's a speculative passage on the First World War leading to massive social upheaval if it continues and forces more women into industry, and a criticism of women bringing down wages, which lays the blame not on the bosses or the weakness of the labour movement but on women themselves.

Women compete for jobs with men today, force down wages to a lower level and demand more from men before they will marry. And yet we see $25.00 a week stenographers giving up their positions to barter themselves, presumably for life, to $35.00 a week clerks or salesmen, rarely because of the mating instinct, but usually because of the personal triumph this means in the competition between members of the sex, and the social approbation which marriage brings.

Why compete for jobs and then ditch them as soon as they can attract a man with even a slightly higher salary? Selling labour power in this book is a negative, inferior way of survival in class society according to this book. This is not explained, the fact that women were increasingly pushing for access to work should be recognized as a major issue for the overall "biological and economic" argument, but instead it's just brushed aside because many of these women were still marrying. And where on earth is the evidence for why these relationships happen to come from? Either the author is thinking of one specific woman who earned $25.00 a week as a stenographer who married a clerk on $35.00 a week and told them it was for the "personal triumph this means in the competition between members of the sex, and the social approbation which marriage brings" or they're making assumptions.

Furthermore, several points can only stand up if you ignore or weren't aware of men in the sex industry. A key argument is that women are better off in the 1910s America because they can sell their sex in both marriage and prostitution, whereas men apparently could not. This is simply incorrect, men do in fact sell their sex commodities, both in sexual work and in courtship and marriage. Ultimately the approach being used in this book is the shotgun technic, the author lacks a killer argument to be the foundation, so it moves from one point to another but the relationship between them is rarely made clear and is only assumed, and  in numerous cases contradict one another.

One passage assures the reader that women are as capable as men at everything, and it's the economic system we live in that is to blame. But then a few pages later it advises only hiring male stenographers because they're smarter than women in that role. Another passage claims that listening to boys is always intellectually stimulating because they talk about serious topics like civil engineering, careers and politics, whereas girls only talk about boys and dresses. Another section relies heavily on Engels' Origins of the family to make its points for it. Most of the quotes concern the decline of maternal societies with the advent of industrial capitalism, one quote even refers to this as the "historic defeat of the female sex". But after that, the book makes the argument that women as a sex are superior to men because there are laws to protect women and in capitalist society laws are only made to protect the propertied, ergo women have more economic power. So Engels is correct that maternal society has been abolished and the key feature of this society was that women occupied privileged positions of power over men, turn the page and this non-maternal society we live in has as its key feature women occupying privileged positions of power over men. Unless Engels and the other historians named in that section were being brought up simply as an appeal to authority, this actually raises many questions over the orthodox marxist approach to stages of development.

The legal framework argument would also make the outlawing of child labour prove that it is the adult population who serve at the beck and call of the youth. Indeed, quite a few of the arguments in this book could be taken and altered slightly for "Why Children are Conservative".  

The book maintains a detached tone, arguing that the conclusions of the author are the result of economic and biological analysis and the attempt to get at the root of the issue. There are a few moments where this slips, usually when the author attempts to generalize from anecdotes or make absolute statements about things that have very obvious counter examples. But when the issue of divorce comes up, this falls away completely. The entire section is just a highly emotive tirade about how the courts and public opinion always sides with the woman and never the man.

If she be discreet, she may entertain lovers galore; she may refuse to perform any of the theoretical duties of the home; she may refuse to bear children or to surrender to her husband, without censure, and often without the knowledge of the world. If she be addicted to drunkenness, people will divine that her husband must have treated her brutally; if she be seen with other men, folks suspect that he neglects her.

If her husband seeks satisfaction for his desires elsewhere, she may divorce him and secure alimony; if he deserts her the law will return him to her side, if it can find him. If he fails to bring home the wherewithall to provide for her, she may have him sent to jail. If she discovers that he is getting the affection and the sex life which she has denied him, outside of his home, and if she buys a revolver and murders him in cold blood, the jury will exonerate her.

If a wife deserts her husband and her children, the law does not make her a criminal; for wife abandonment, the husband is held criminally liable.

No matter what the offense of the woman, custom and public opinion demand that every "decent" man permit his wife to accuse him on "just grounds" and to secure the divorce and call on the law to force him to pay her alimony for the rest of their natural lives.

No matter what the provocation, legally or sentimentally, no man can be exonerated for killing a woman. No matter how little the provocation, legally or sentimentally, any woman may kill almost any man, and the jury will render a verdict of Not Guilty. She has only to say that he "deceived her."

I looked it up, and it's not true, until the 1970s the easiest way to get a divorce was to move to Nevada because its requirements were less stringent, and you only had to live in the state for six months to qualify. Failing that, another Western state would do. These `divorce mill` states as they were called wouldn't have been needed if the tirade above were true. Until no-fault divorce was made legal in the US, you had to prove one spouse was at fault, if both were found at fault the divorce request was denied. During the period that this book was written, the majority of divorces were given to the wife 

During the whole period under study the over-
whelming majority of divorces were granted to the
wife, and this majority increased slightly through-
out the period. There is a definite territorial
pattern: The proportion of decrees granted to
women in the South, particularly the South Atlantic
Division, was always lower than in other areas.
During the early years of divorce statistics the
overwhelming majority of decrees in several
southern States were granted to husbands, but
this majority disappeared about the turn of the
century. On the other extreme, wives have ob-
tained about three-fourths of all decrees in the
West and, since 1916, in the North Central Region

 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_21/sr21_024.pdf

However, this still shows the dishonesty of the author's framing, husbands could obtain divorces if they wished and could prove the fault. 

To be perfectly honest, I suspect this pamphlet was authored as an attempt to promote a conservative conception of the socialist movement. During the war, the suffrage movement was making progress and women were entering the workforce in large numbers. It was only a matter of time before the number of women agitators and revolutionists increased significantly. Of course since it can't even acknowledge the existence of these currents its ability to head this off was doomed from the beginning.

Notes on the life of Eduardo Vivancos 1920-2020; Almost a century in the Libertarian and Esperanto movements

A version of this article first appeared in Liberte Ouviere un Journal Anarcho-syndicaliste

 

Notes on the life of Eduardo Vivancos

1920-2020

Almost a century in the Libertarian and Esperanto movements

Reddebrek

2021

 

“Paroli Esperanton estis iam esenca parto de anarkiismo.”

(There was a time when speaking Esperanto was an essential part of being an anarchist.)

On the 30^th of December 2020 Eduardo Vivancos passed away at the age of 100. He leaves behind a family and nearly a century of dedication to a number of causes, from athletics, Anarchosyndicalism, and minority languages, especially Catalan and Esperanto. I think his life is worth remembering, and while in the Spanish speaking world his death was marked with numerous tributes and retrospectives, including a feature in Corredor a popular magazine dedicated to running, and a lot of friends mourned him in Esperanto texts, he is largely unknown in English. A short blog post I wrote to mark his passing is the first hit when his name is searched in English, though there was also an article in Fifth Estate #400 written in 2018 by his fellow Esperantist Xavier Alcade that serves as a short introduction. Personally speaking, Vivancos’s writing was some of the first I read in Esperanto that I could mostly understand that wasn’t written as a teaching tool, though Vivancos did dabble in that as well. I suppose I should credit Vivancos with pushing me from viewing the language as a hobby into something to be taken seriously.

The son of Domingo Vivancos, Eduardo Vivancos was born into a working-class family in Barcelona on the 19^th of September 1920. In 1934, shortly before his fourteenth birthday, Vivancos left elementary school and became an apprentice. In September of that year Vivancos had also enrolled in a worker’s school (Escuela del Trabajo) which held classes in the evenings. While at the school he mixed with a group of young workers who were members of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL) an organisation that he would join along with becoming a member of the Student Federation of Free Thinkers (Federacion Estudiantil de Concienecias Libres).

A year later Vivancos would join the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), he would remain a member of the CNT for the rest of his life. In 1936 Vivancos looked forward to the People’s Olympiad that was being prepared in Barcelona as an alternative to the official Olympics that were being hosted in Berlin. The first piece of writing I read by Vivancos were his recollections of those days when he would go to the training grounds and practice and mingle with hundreds of foreigners from dozens of nations. The enthusiasm of the time made a big impact on him, unfortunately there preparations for the games coincided with the beginning of the bloody civil war and the appearance of Franco as a political leader. The games were not only called off at the last minute by news of the revolt of the Spanish army, but the preparations for the games had also been targetted by a campaign of fascist sabotage and intimidation.

During the Spanish Revolution and Civil War Vivancos initially focused on his studies, enrolling in the Ateneo Enciclopedico Popular, where among other subjects he was taught Esperanto. He would remain an active Esperantist for the rest of his life, often combining it with his activism with the Libertarian movement. In 1937 the Spanish Republic created a number of Worker’s Institutes (Institutos Obreros) a high school system for workers, Vivancos passed the entrance exams in December 1937 and enrolled. However the war situation continue to get worse for the Republic and so in 1938 Vivancos and some fellow class mates from the institute volunteered to serve in a battalion of the 26^th division of the Durruti Column and served at the Montsec front and saw combat at the battle of Lleida, and participated in other operations.

Whilst serving in the 26^th division Vivancos was part of a small teaching and correspondence circle of Esperantists which included Gines Martinez the battalion commander. At the time most of the Spanish left and Libertarian movements had embraced Esperanto and were publishing Esperanto newspapers. From the Communist Party of Spain, to the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) the CNT and other Anarchist groups, and even the General Government of Catalunya, all were actively using the language to broadcast news to the outside world and establish contacts with sympathetic foreigners. In response to this the Esperanto movement was singled out for bloody persecution within Fascist zones. An example of this repression was the fate of the Esperanto club in Cordoba, the Fascist Falange party organised a firing squad and murdered its entire membership.

Unfortunately as we’re all aware, the war continued to go badly and the revolution continued to retreat, by February 1939 Vivancos along with thousands of other committed anti-fascists had to escape Spain to France. Vivancos did this on foot, crossing the Pyrenees in winter. While in France the Vivancos family were separated and sent to concentration camps that had been built by the French government to house Spanish refugees. He was moved from one camp to another over several years, at one point in 1940 he was billeted in the same barracks as the famous Catalan author and poet Jaume Grau Casas, the author of Catalan Anthology and many other works. The two communicated almost exclusively in Esperanto, if anything the incarceration and constant transferring seem to have boost Eduardo Vivancos’s studies and teaching of the language.

The Vivancos family were not reunited until after the Second World War in 1947, by that time Eduardo had met and fallen in love with fellow Spanish exile Ramona Comella, the two married in Paris on the 5^th of December 1945, they had two children, Floreal (1947) and Talia (1948). While in Paris Eduardo Vivancos joined the World Anational Association the Sennacieca Asocio Tutmonda or SAT, and organisation of left-wing Esperantists of many tendencies from around the world.

Also in the aftermath of WWII the Spanish Libertarian movement began to reorganise itself and planned out strategies to resist the entrenched Franco dictatorship. As part of this process, the FIJL had decided to build an international federation for Anarchist youth. As part of this project Vivancos was made a delegate of the Spanish section. Unfortunately, this plan did not progress much further due to the global weakness of the Anarchist movement at that time. A more substantial attempt at international networking was the founding of two Esperanto language newspapers the Nigra Flago (Black Flag) and Senŝtatano (Without a State), Vivancos was a contributor to both and editor of Senŝtatano. This activity would bear some fruit, the correspondance service of Senŝtatano sucessfully exploited a relaxation in hostility to Esperanto by the Spanish government to send letters to Spain, this reconnected many exiles with family and friends still living under Franco. And the contact with foreign Libertarian minded Esperantists like the Chinese anarchist Lu Chen Bo and the Japanese anarchist Taiji Yamaga led to increased co-operation in many ways. In 1963 Eduardo Vivancos and Taiji Yamaga worked together to produce a Spanish translation of the famous Chinese philosoper Laozi’s Dao de Qing, it was titled “Libro del Camino y de la Virtud”, Book of the way and Virtue in English.

In 1954 Vivancos emigrated to Toronto Canada and would remain a resident until his death in 2020. He maintained his commitment to his two life causes Esperanto and Anarchism and his opposition to Franco while living in Canada. He joined the Asociacion Democratica Espanola Canadiense ADEC, a group for anti-francoist Spanish migrants and exiles living in Canada. As a member, he attended demonstrations and organised meetings. Eduardo Vivancos would return to Spain in 1976 after a 37-year exile, when the Francoist regime crumbled and a stilted democratic transition was taking shape. He would make many visit to Spain and the Catalunya region throughout the remainder of his life. In 1986 he gave a lecture to the 59^th Congress of SAT in San Cuget on the 5oth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, the lecture drew heavily from his recollections of the atmosphere and conditions on the streets of Barcelona and the Spain in 1936.

At the end of his life Eduardo Vivancos received many honours from SAT and the wider Esperanto community, and with nearly a hundred years of dedicated activity including on the front-lines on a mountain range it’s not hard to see why. But I also find his writing and the way he was able to use Esperanto to support the goals of international solidarity and libertarian resistance very inspiring too. I said at the start that Eduardo Vivancos is little known in the Anglosphere, I hope to correct this. In addition to writing up this short memorial, I am also translating his Esperanto texts in English and working on an English language wikipedia article to complement the already existing versions in Spanish, Catalan and Esperanto. By doing this, I hope others will learn of him and an be inspired.