Favorite Obscure Leftists?

[Susurrus]

Post your favorite obscure leftists, and why.

[Susurrus]

For me, it's the anarchist Kim Jwa-Jin
http://www.estelnegre.org/fotos/kimjwajim01.jpg

Fought the Japanese, established and led the Shinmin Autonomous Region, assassinated while repairing a rice mill.

[NoOneIsIllegal]

http://www.ephemanar.net/imagesdeux/cafiero_carlo.jpg

Carlo Cafiero.

Originally a Marxist. Assigned by Marx and Engels themselves to help convert the Italian section of the First International from anarchism to Marxism. He ended up dropping Marxism and becoming a follower of Bakunin. He himself became a good leftist on his own after Bakunin's death. He was friends with Kropotkin, and one of Malatesta's closest friends. He championed anarchism all across Italy, helping set up newspapers, and was in-and-out of prison constantly for pissing off the authorities. IIRC, he also took part of a failed insurrection that fellow Italian anarchists tried to spread from town to town.
However, he converted to late 19th century Social Democracy just before losing his mind.

He had a series of unfortunate events later in his life. He started to become mentally-drained by an illness in the early 1880s. He saw spies everywhere, became frightened of the telephone, and tried to kill himself while imprisoned. He started to experience violent outbursts, and once was found in a cave half-naked sitting in a puddle of water. As a person who was hounded by the police and State his entire adult life, along with many other personal and social struggles and disillusionment, I don't blame him for losing it :blink: He ended up dying in a mental asylum.

Also,
he wrote a book called "A Compendium of Das Kapital," in which even Marx himself praised (praise to an anarchist?!) "The Compendium was written in order to bring the theory of Capital to students, educated workmen and small proprietor" - It must be good, because typically books like this are terrible.

[Tim Finnegan]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/John_MacLean_passport.jpg

John Maclean - leading figure in the Red Clydeside movement, Scotland's revolution-that-almost-was. A prominent opponent of the First World War, for which he was jailed for a number of years, and in 1917 was appointed as the Bolshevik consul in Scotland. He was later a leading figure in the faction which attempted to form a left-wing Scottish Communist Party to retain a revolutionary counterpoint to the centrist Communist Party of Great Britain. His legacy has been unfortuanately monopolisd by the INLA-sympathising pukes of the Scottish Republican Socialist "Party", who see in him only the desperate left-nationalism of his final year, and not the left-communist internationalism that actually defined his activism in the 1917-1922 period.

[ed miliband]

This dude seemed swag as fuck

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severino_Di_Giovanni

[Искра]

http://phys-merger.physik.unibas.ch/%7Easte/benito_mussolini.jpg

Benito Mussolini. Kicked out freemasons from PSI.

[NoOneIsIllegal]

http://phys-merger.physik.unibas.ch/%7Easte/benito_mussolini.jpg

Benito Mussolini. Kicked out freemasons from PSI.
Never heard of him. Sounds like a nice chap.

[Olentzero]

He likes to hang at gas stations.

[Искра]

I know that you gonna now spam, because I mentioned B. Mussolini, but here's interesting book to read ;)

Drake, Richard: Apostles and Agitators - Italy's Marxist Revolutionary Tradition (http://www.mediafire.com/?u49fqg1yb1w1ai0)

[Ravachol]

http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/PerlmanFredy/fredy1962med.jpg

Fredy Perlman, anarchist and publisher, author of the reproduction of daily life (http://libcom.org/library/fredy-perlman-the-reproduction-of-daily-life-treason-pamphlet), Letters of Insurgents and Against his-story, Against Leviathan (http://noblesavagery.blogspot.com/2007/03/fredy-perlmans-against-his-story.html). Heavily influenced by situationism and later went on to become a founding theorist of primitivism.

http://procedura.net1zen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Camatte.jpg

Jacques Camatte, former Bordigist and author of 'The wandering of humanity' (http://www.marxists.org/archive/camatte/wanhum/index.htm). After leaving the Bordigist International Communist Party founded the journal Invariance (the pun amongst critics being that 'nothing varied more than invariance') and eventually retreated to a survivalist commune in the french mountains.

http://www.luchalibro.cl/wp-content/uploads/2011/2011/09/1288305143633_f.jpg

Pierre Clastres, French anthropologist and anarchist being a primary critic of the notion that the State is the destiny of all societies, of the myth of the 'noble savage' and of the linear progressivist notion espoused by orthodox historical materialists.

http://www.leparisien.fr/images/2008/12/23/352094_image-49900307.jpg

Julien Coupat, founder of the French journal Tiqqun who lived in the 'Tarnac Commune' and presumed co-author of 'The coming insurrection'. Tiqqun is a major influence in the so-called 'insurrectionary communist' milieu.

[Rowan Duffy]

http://www.marxist.com/images/stories/ireland/james_connolly.jpg (http://www.marxist.com/images/stories/ireland/james_connolly.jpg)

James Connolly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Connolly)

[Os Cangaceiros]

LOL how the hell is James Connolly "obscure"?

[A Revolutionary Tool]

Jacques Hebert, leader of the left-wing during the French Revolution. Favorite obscure leftist because he's just so fun to read. Just a snippet:

I make pamphlets, he tells me.


What, I said. Pamphlets? What kind of fucking trade is that?


Yes, he said, pamphlets that try to win over the people, to make them believe that the Assembly’s decrees harm them, that their good friends the patriots take them down the wrong path, and that they themselves must help us return them to slavery.


Oh I was fucking shaking. I felt the urge to knock out this fucking maker of pamphlets. Nevertheless, I held myself back, and I said to him, let’s see what these fucking pamphlets are.


Here, he said, here’s one called “I'm losing my estate, give me a living.”
What does that mean? I said. Well, he said, what that means is clear; all my family has hit bottom. France is unfortunate enough to no longer have a gabelle, nor Bernardines, nor subdelegates, nor capitaineries, nor squealers, nor people living off benefices, nor bishops who receive a pension of 200 livres. They took all our estates from us and I tell the Assembly to give us a living. You must feel how just this is, and the people should swallow it.


Oh, you villain. I say. I don’t know what’s preventing me from ramming your fucking words down your throat. You must be crazy to think that the people are mad enough to be upset that a bunch of fuckers who lived off them have lost their estates. What are the fucking estates that the National Assembly has destroyed? It was those things that weighed upon the people. According to you, should we have let all the people be pestered by the gabelle for fear of taking their estates from a fucking bunch of fucking brutes? Dammit, let the bastards return to their original trades. They want us to give them a living...Don’t they have two arms to earn a living with themselves? You're a proud fucking beast, my friend. The more you show the people how many have lost their so-called estates, the more you'll prove to them how many rogues there were who lived off them, and the more they'll feel all they won by the revolution.

:laugh:

[DDR]

Jose Díaz Ramos, Argala, Félix Likiniano and Jose Manuel Sevillano.

[hatzel]

I feel like saying somebody totally unexpected, like Kafka. Not obscure by any stretch of the imagination, of course, but an 'obscure leftist' (with the phrase taken in its entirety) inasmuch as I don't expect he'd make many people's lists of eminent leftists. Despite his political and philosophical outlooks being so prominent in his writings that they surely have a place in any leftist library. Also reading fiction has a tendency to be far more enjoyable than reading some long-ass theory crap so yeah...

[Ostrinski]

This guy.
http://images.mylot.com/userImages/images/postphotos/997698.jpg

[Os Cangaceiros]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Sim%C3%B3n_Radowitzky.jpeg



Simon Radowitzky (n. Szymon Radowicki , Stepanice (http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stepanice&action=edit&redlink=1) , Ukraine (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ucrania) , September 10 (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_de_septiembre) or November 10 (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/10_de_noviembre) of 1891 (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/1891) - Mexico (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9xico) , February 29 (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/29_de_febrero) of 1956 (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956) ) was a labor activist anarchist (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarquista) Ukrainian- Argentine (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentino) . He was one of the most famous prisoners Ushuaia prison (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_de_Ushuaia) , where he was sentenced to life imprisonment (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclusi%C3%B3n_perpetua) for the bombing that killed the police chief Ramón Lorenzo Falcón (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram%C3%B3n_Lorenzo_Falc%C3%B3n) , responsible for the brutal repression of the Red Week (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semana_roja_(Argentina)) of 1909 (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/1909) in Buenos Aires. [1 ] (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%B3n_Radowitzky#cite_note-MEDIOS_GR.C3.81FICOS_E_HISTORIA-0) [2] (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%B3n_Radowitzky#cite_note-momentos_37_40-1) pardoned after 21 years, he left Argentina and fought on the Republican side (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bando_republicano) during the Spanish Civil War (http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerra_Civil_Espa%C3%B1ola) . He died in Mexico, where he worked in a toy factory, at 65 years of age.

This is a good article on him and the "May Day Massacre" in Argentina: http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/14531

[Lenina Rosenweg]

Could the writer Thomas Pynchon be considered a leftist? He seems sympathetic to anarchism.

[Os Cangaceiros]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0b/Zo_d%27Axa_portrait.jpg


D'Axa was a cavalryman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalry) but deserted to Belgium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgium) and was exiled to Italy in 1889.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo_d'Axa#cite_note-bertaut-1) There he ran an ultra-Catholic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic) newspaper and seduced the native womenfolk.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo_d'Axa#cite_note-bertaut-1) According to popular myth, d'Axa during his time in Italy was hesitating between becoming an anarchist or a religious missionary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary) when he was accused (wrongfully, he contended) of insulting the Empress of Germany (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusta_Viktoria_of_Schleswig-Holstein) and made an anarchist by the subsequent legal proceedings against him.[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo_d'Axa#cite_note-2) He spent the next few years being pursued from one country to the next by the police, before taking advantage of the general amnesty and returning to France.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo_d'Axa#cite_note-bertaut-1)

At this point, having led in the words of historian Jules Bertaut "a most disreputable life", and being an agitator by temperament, d'Axa gravitated towards the anarchist movement.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo_d'Axa#cite_note-bertaut-1) He founded the famous anarchist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism) newspaper L'EnDehors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EnDehors) in May 1891 in which numerous contributors such as Jean Grave (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Grave), Louise Michel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Michel), Sébastien Faure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9bastien_Faure), Octave Mirbeau (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave_Mirbeau), Tristan Bernard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Bernard) and Émile Verhaeren (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Verhaeren) developed libertarian ideas.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo_d'Axa#cite_note-bertaut-1) D'Axa and L'EnDehors rapidly became the target of the authorities after attacks by Ravachol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravachol) and d'Axa was kept in jail in Mazas Prison (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazas_Prison). After his release, he wrote numerous pamphlets and met Camille Pissarro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Pissarro) and James Whistler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Whistler) in London (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London). He was again arrested in Italy, and transferred at Sainte Pelagie (Paris (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris)) where he spent ten years before his release in 1894.[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo_d'Axa#cite_note-3) He visited Mexico (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico), Canada (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada) and the United States (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States) where he met the widow of Gaetano Bresci (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaetano_Bresci) (the murderer of the Italian king Umberto I (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_I)), before returning to Marseille, France where he committed suicide on 30 August 1930.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo_d'Axa

Despite being kind of a maligned "sub-tendency" on this website, I think that "anarcho-individualism" spawned quite a few interesting/eccentric figures, esp. in Europe, where they were often involved in rather hardcore illegalist and/or anti-capitalist activity.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

ES, where do you know about these guys from? Any online books or references?

[Welshy]

Gavril Myasnikov:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Miasnikov.jpg

http://bataillesocialiste.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/myasnikov002.jpg
(the guy in the middle)


Gavril Ilyich Myasnikov (1889-1945; Russian: Гаврии́л Ильи́ч Мяснико́в), also transliterated as Gavriil Il'ich Miasnikov, was a Russian metalworker from the Urals, who participated in the Revolution of 1905 and became a Bolshevik underground activist in 1906. Tsarist police arrested him and he spent over seven years at hard labor in Siberia. In 1917, Myasnikov was active in factory committees, the soviet, and the Bolshevik party in his hometown of Motovilikha and in Perm.
Gabriel Myasnikov is known as the execution initiator and murderer of the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia (1918).

Myasnikov was a Left Communist in 1918, opposed to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. He was dissatisfied with elements of Party policy toward workers, but he did not support the Workers Opposition in 1920-21. Myasnikov disagreed with the Workers' Opposition's call for unions to manage the economy. Instead, in a 1921 manifesto, Myasnikov called for “producers’ soviets” to administer industry and for freedom of the press for all workers. Leaders of the Workers Opposition Alexander Shlyapnikov and Sergei Medvedev feared that Myasnikov's proposals would give too much power to peasants. Despite their disagreements, however, they supported Myasnikov's right to voice criticisms of Party policy. Along with former members of the Workers' Opposition, Myasnikov signed the "Letter of the Twenty-Two" to the Comintern in 1922, protesting the Russian Communist Party leaders' suppression of dissent among proletarian members of the Communist Party.
In February 1922, Myasnikov was expelled from the Russian Communist Party. In 1923, he formed an opposition faction called “Workers Group of the Russian Communist Party” that opposed NEP. The group included some former members of the Workers' Opposition. Party leaders arrested Myasnikov in May 1923, but then released him and attempted to isolate him from his support base by assigning him to a trade mission in Germany in 1923. There Myasnikov formed ties to the Communist Workers' Party of Germany, a group at odds with the Russian Communist Party. These groups helped him publish the Manifesto of the Workers Group,[1] without permission from the Russian Communist Party. Workers' Group was suppressed and later in 1923 Myasnikov was persuaded to return to Russia, where he was arrested and imprisoned.

In 1927, his sentence was changed to internal exile in Yerevan, Armenia. In 1928, he fled the USSR for Iran. He was arrested in Iran and then deported to Turkey. In 1930, he immigrated to France, where he worked in factories until 1945. In 1945, the Soviet secret police returned Myasnikov to the USSR, where he was executed.
He was rehabilitated on December 25th, 2001.
[edit]

[Os Cangaceiros]

ES, where do you know about these guys from? Any online books or references?

I first learned about Radowitzky from that @news article, actually. There's a couple good entries here about people in the individualist anarchist tradition:

http://individualistanarchism.blogspot.com/

People like (to cite the front page of the site, lol) Miguel Iguelada and Enrico Arrigoni were disciples of Max Stirner, but they also both fought in the Republican side during the Spanish civil war, and Iguelada was a member of the CNT. Stephen Pearl Andrews, and American individualist, was the first person to translate and publish "The Communist Manifesto" in the USA.

This is a good thread, I might post here again. I always like discovering obscure but interesting people from history.

[Ermo Kruus]

A local hero of mine who had a pretty interesting history.

Arnold Hazeland

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/no/thumb/6/65/Arnold_Hazeland.jpg/367px-Arnold_Hazeland.jpg


He was a Norwegian Supreme Court Justice and anarchist (!) in the early 1920s. Originally a member of the Norwegian Labour Party, he became an anarchist after reading Kropotkin. He pissed of the establishment and the press by dissenting in cases regarding class matters. He was apparently a good friend of Max Nettlau, and he wrote several brouchures about Anarchist Ukraine. He also probably had the largest collection of anarchist texts in Norway.

[hatzel]

Oh, how about Süreyyya Evren?

http://i.radikal.com.tr/644x385/2011/09/24/fft5_mf818355.Jpeg

Let it be known that I've decided that anybody writing within so called 'postanarchism' is automatically obscure, and I'd personally hold Evren above the likes of Newman or Call based on what I've read and/or heard from those who have read. But of course if you're not all that enamoured by the concept of 'postanarchism' I guess you'd have radically different ideas of what it takes to be 'favourite.'

[Red Future]

Samora Machel

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_fwjQK_PiyAs/SOptopeoNBI/AAAAAAAAAc8/3LV6-Vp11Ak/s320/Samora+Machel.jpg

Samora Moisés Machel (September 29, 1933 – October 19, 1986) was a Mozambican (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozambique) military commander, revolutionary socialist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism) leader and eventual President of Mozambique (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Mozambique). Machel led the country from independence in 1975 until his death in 1986, when his presidential aircraft crashed in mountainous terrain where the borders of Mozambique, Swaziland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaziland) and South Africa converge.

[manic expression]

Just two from the International Brigades:


http://legacy.oise.utoronto.ca/research/edu20/moments/nbethune.jpg
Norman Bethune, communist Canadian physician who served as a field medic to Republican forces in Spain. Developed the first mobile blood transfusion during his service there. In 1938, he went to China to aid the Chinese Communists in their struggle against the Japanese invasion. It was this role that took his life in 1939. He is revered today as a hero in China.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/17/Herman_Bottcher.jpg
Herman Bottcher, German leftist who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and became one of its most foremost members throughout its deployment in the Spanish Civil War. After his return to the US, joined the US army in order to rejoin the fight against fascism, becoming highly decorated for his service before falling in action in the Philippines in 1944.

[Luís Henrique]

August Thalheimer, Ernesto Martins.

Luís Henrique

[x359594]

Just two from the International Brigades:...Norman Bethune, communist Canadian physician...

Norman Bethune is fairly well known and was portrayed by Donald Sutherland in two movies about his life, Bethune (1977) and Bethune: the Making of a Hero (1992.)

[kurr]

My favorite obscure Leftists don't have pictures or a wikipedia page. Boom.

[ellipsis]

jose carlos mariategui, Peruvian marxist historian/economist/philosopher.

seven essays on the peruvian reality is hes best and maybe only work in english.

[∞]

MaoistRebelNews

too much going on in this pic
http://i.imgur.com/kuA69.png

dHYVBIzSVKg

[o well this is ok I guess]

Julien Coupat Isn't it a little silly to call out a particular name from a group that preferred non-authorship

[blake 3:17]

Norman Bethune, communist Canadian physician who served as a field medic to Republican forces in Spain. Developed the first mobile blood transfusion during his service there. In 1938, he went to China to aid the Chinese Communists in their struggle against the Japanese invasion. It was this role that took his life in 1939. He is revered today as a hero in China.

I don't think of him as obscure -- he's Canada's most famous Marxist. Interestingly, it was his experience of tuberculosis and realizing that poverty was the primary factor in getting and dying of it that radicalized him.

[manic expression]

I'm very glad to hear that Bethune isn't as obscure outside of China as I thought. All I know is that I've never once heard him come up in the US left. I'll definitely be checking out those two movies.

[HEAD ICE]

Fausto Atti
http://www.revleft.com/vb/picture.php?albumid=843&pictureid=7204

Fausto Atti was a member of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy. He, along with Mario Acquaviva, joined the Italian partisans and advocated aiming the guns not only against Nazi occupiers but the democratic state as well. Fausto and Mario were assassinated in their sleep on orders of Palmiro Togliatti, head of the Italian Communist Party.

Max Hoelz
http://libcom.org/files/max-hoelz-moscow.jpg


"Max Hoelz was considered by the social democrats as a dangerous adventurer, by the official communists as an irresponsible and a traitor, by the communist left as an anarchist and by the anarchists as a Leninist."
- Paco Ignacio Taibo II in Archangels.

Max Hoelz was born on 14th October 1889 at Moritz bei Riesa. The son of an agricultural worker, he had to start working from an early age to supplement the family income. After elementary school he worked as a day labourer with different landowners from 1903.

In 1906 he emigrated to England at the age of 16. He worked in various unskilled jobs in London, using this to finance his evening studies in geometry at technical school, which prepared him for railway building and surveying. He returned to Germany, working as a railway technician in Berlin and as a cinema projectionist in Dresden, and renewed his studies at technical school.

Examined for the Army reserve, he was diagnosed as being susceptible to TB and told he should move to a forested area. He got work as a land surveyor in Falkenstein in the Vogtland.

At the start of World War I he volunteered for the King's Hussars of Saxony and fought at both Eastern and Western Fronts. He married Klara Buchheim in 1915, the daughter of a haulage contractor in Falkenstein. The war opened his eyes to the nature of the capitalist system, and he was radicalised by the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and by contact with Georg Schumann, a member of the socialist Spartakusbund (Schumann was to be executed by the Nazis in 1945).

In November 1918 after a stay in a military hospital Max returned to Falkenstein. He first joined the USPD (United Social Democratic Party – an anti-war split from the Social Democrats) and then the Communist Party (KPD) in 1919, becoming active in the Plauen branch. In February he founded the KPD local group in Falkenstein. As chairman of the Unemployed Workers Council he requisitioned food and fuel for the unemployed, poor and distressed. The mayor and councillors were taken hostage in the town hall after the mayor called the unemployed 'work-shy parasites'. On several occasions the Army occupied Falkenstein to crush the risings. Hoelz had to flee, visiting the KPD party school in Walsrode on the Luneberg heath and was active as an agitator in central Germany and Bavaria.

In March 1920 after the right-wing Kapp Putsch, Hoelz returned to the Vogtland and organised workers from Falkenstein and Oelsnitz in a Red Guard. He became famous for his heroic organisation of very effective armed bands against the police, the army and the far-right paramilitary Freikorps. A member of the Communist Workers Party (KAPD - a more radical, councillist split from the KPD) gave the following description:
Quote:
The commando, motorised, counts 60 to 200 men. In front, a reconnaissance group with machine rifles or lighter arms: the heavily armed trucks followed. Then the "chief" in a motorcar, "with the cash" in company of his "minister of finances'. As cover, another heavily armoured truck. All decorated with red flags. From their arrival in a locality, provisions are requisitioned, the post offices and savings banks are ransacked. The general strike is proclaimed and paid for by the employers with a "tax' levied. Butchers and bakers are ordered to sell their merchandise 30 to 60 per cent cheaper. All resistance is crushed immediately and violently…


These groups were very active in Saxony, their actions causing a clash between Hoelz and the regional KPD chief, Brandler, who had him excluded from the Chemnitz section of the party. He then joined the KAPD and started sending some of his plunder to the KAPD leadership. Without really taking on board the politics of the KAPD he found it a more affable party to be in.

Attached to the independence of the armed groups that he led, he collaborated with the KPD or other groups when it suited him.

He became very popular because of his "robbing from the rich to give to the poor". Very often, workers in a precarious position in their factory sought him out. He raised money from employers under threat of reprisals. He liberated prisoners, destroyed deeds and police and legal archives, burnt the villas of the rich and more. He was equally popular because of his constant eluding of capture by the police. In April 1919, a sum of 30,000 marks was put on his head. He was not arrested until after the March Action.

After the crushing of the Ruhr uprising, the Army advanced on the Vogtland. After several days fighting, the Red Guard was defeated. Those not captured or shot fled over the Czechoslovak border. Hoelz himself was arrested by the Czechoslovak police and sentenced to 4 months imprisonment. He returned to Germany, and worked undercover.

http://libcom.org/files/imagecache/article/max-hoelz.jpg

The Worker Communist Daily of the KAPD cheered his destruction of the Victory Column in Berlin, in which he was indirectly involved on March 21st, 1921. On 22nd and 23rd March similar attacks on buildings and offices of the police and legal system took place at Falkenstein, Dresden, Freiberg, Leipzig, Plauen etc carried out by the Hoelz groups and the combat groups of the KPD and KAPD. But in all these towns the workers failed to rise. The only regions where the workers took action were the Ruhr, Berlin and Hamburg.

Captured several days after the end of the actions in Berlin, he was sentenced to life. His defence was first of all organised by the communist left, and then with its collapse by the KPD with personalities of the left in a committee set up by the KPD (Hoelz left the KAPD in November 1921 to immediately rejoin the KPD). They put him forward as a leading candidate on their election list in order to obtain his release, but his nomination was not accepted by the State.

After his divorce from Klara he married Traute Loebinger on the suggestion of the KPD, in order to maintain regular contact with the Party.

In 1926 the anarchist Erich Muehsam brought out his celebrated pamphlet Justice for Max Hoelz. In 1927 the Neutral Committee for Max Hoelz, which included Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein, campaigned for a retrial and the release of Hoelz. Hoelz himself contributed to his own personality cult. The post offices in the towns where he was imprisoned were submerged by mail from all Germany.

In July 1928 the Reichstag decided on an amnesty for political prisoners. Hoelz was eventually freed. The marriage with Traute Loebinger ended. Hoelz spoke at a number of different demonstrations in central Germany.

In 1929 Hoelz wrote his autobiography From the White Cross to the Red Flag.

In August he visited the Soviet Union for the first time. After his return he participated in various KPD events as a speaker. In September he was attacked by the Nazis whilst speaking at Bad Elster in the Vogtland. After several death threats he was advised by the Party to leave for the Soviet Union. The KPD had paraded him around as a star for a while, then when he became too much of an embarrassment because of his outspokenness, wanted to get shot of him.

In Moscow and Leningrad he visited training courses at the International Lenin School.

In 1931 to 1933 he worked in different mines, factories and agricultural enterprises. He remarried. He began to criticise the bad conditions of the workers. He barricaded himself in his room at the Hotel Lux, the Comintern hostel, in 1932 and he threatened to shoot himself after the NKVD (continuation of the Communist secret police the Cheka under different name) invited him to meet with them in their Lubianka HQ. The NKVD temporarily backed down.

He was implicated in the fictional Wollenberg-Hoelz plot against the regime, thought up by the paranoid imaginations of the NKVD (Wollenberg had been a military commander of the workers councils in Bavaria. His criticisms of the Communist Party had led to his exclusion in 1933). The GPU–NKVD thought up a plot in which Zensl, the widow of the murdered anarchist Muehsam, was also later implicated. On 15th September 1933 he died in a "boating accident" - i.e. he was murdered by the NKVD, near Gorky (Nizhniy Novgorod).

Hoelz was no anarchist, as the British Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party theoretician Duncan Hallas has falsely claimed. He had distinct authoritarian trends and was not averse to developing a hero cult around himself. Both the KAPD and the KPD had encouraged this. The Communist Worker Daily, the KAPD paper, had declaimed : "Max Hoelz should be our example! Our symbol! Our chief!"
He was more a man of action than a deep thinker. Nevertheless, his willingness to engage in direct action to defend workers, both in the workplaces and among the unemployed and his courage in criticising the Russian regime under Stalin are admirable.

Nick Heath

max hoelz was a proletarian che guevara

[Rowan Duffy]

LOL how the hell is James Connolly "obscure"?

Ok, fair enough. How about Gracchus Babeuf (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchus_Babeuf).

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Gracchus_Babeuf.jpg
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Gracchus_Babeuf.jpg

[Red Noob]

Oh, how about Süreyyya Evren?

http://i.radikal.com.tr/644x385/2011/09/24/fft5_mf818355.Jpeg

Let it be known that I've decided that anybody writing within so called 'postanarchism' is automatically obscure, and I'd personally hold Evren above the likes of Newman or Call based on what I've read and/or heard from those who have read. But of course if you're not all that enamoured by the concept of 'postanarchism' I guess you'd have radically different ideas of what it takes to be 'favourite.'

This guy looks so much like Lenin

[hatzel]

This guy looks so much like Lenin

If we're going to play the looks-like-Lenin game, we should probably direct our attention to the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4b/Si_L%C3%A9on_Chestov_noong_1927.jpg

Though not an obscure leftist, thought I'd might as well take this opportunity to suggest people read more of his stuff. Because it's brilliant and wonderful and nice.

[Ravachol]

Isn't it a little silly to call out a particular name from a group that preferred non-authorship

Yeah, especially since pamphlets like L'appel and other influentials texts from that milieu most likely weren't even written by Coupat but by other associates. But I wanted to include a nice picture and not just say 'Tiqqun' lol.

[Os Cangaceiros]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Sakae.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sakae_Osugi

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Ito_Noe.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noe_Ito

Sakae Osugi and Noe Ito were Japanese anarchists who were involved in many worthwhile projects in Japan during their lives, in particular anti-militarism, which took guts because Japan at that time was an extremely nationalistic/militaristic society. They were both beaten to death by the Japanese military in the aftermath of the great kanto earthquake, and their bodies were thrown down a well.

They were kind of like the Rosa Luxemburg/Karl Liebknecht of anarchism.

[Susurrus]

Oh yes! I forgot Joseph Dietzgen.
http://marxists.org/glossary/people/d/pics/dietzgen.jpg
A self-educated tanner who came up with dialetical materialism independently of Marx and was lauded highly by Marx.

"For my part, I lay little stress on the distinction, whether a man is an anarchist or a socialist, because it seems to me that too much weight is attributed to this difference."

http://marxists.org/archive/dietzgen/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Dietzgen

[ed miliband]

Just got a book about this fella: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Shifu

anarchists really do have the best obscure "leftists" (don't like that term).

e2a: "Society of Cocks Crowing in the Dark" - best name ever.

[El Louton]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9lder_C%C3%A2mara

Helder Camara. Brazilian Bishop who fought for social justice and equality.

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.".

[ed miliband]

not really that obscure, i learnt about him at school (though it was catholic, so...)

[El Louton]

not really that obscure, i learnt about him at school (though it was catholic, so...)

Oh really? Dam. Okay my grandfather? Beat that.

[Os Cangaceiros]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/09/Carlo-tresca-1910_%28cropped%29.jpg/200px-Carlo-tresca-1910_%28cropped%29.jpg



Carlo Tresca (March 9, 1879 – January 11, 1943) was an Italian (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy)-born American (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States) newspaper editor, orator, and labor organizer who was a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World) during the decade of the 1910s. Tresca is remembered as a leading public opponent of fascism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism), stalinism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism), and Mafia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia) infiltration of the trade union (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_union) movement. Tresca was assassinated by a Mafia gunman in 1943.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Tresca

[eyeheartlenin]

I think I remember reading that Carlo Tresca and James P. Cannon, one of the founders of Trotskyism in the US, were good friends. Thanks for your post, Explosive! I had never seen a picture of Tresca before.

[DaringMehring]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Takiji_Kobayashi.JPG

Takiji Kobayashi

Biography

Kobayashi was born in Odate, Akita, Japan and was brought up in Otaru, Hokkaidō. After graduating from the Otaru School of Higher Learning, which is the current Otaru University of Commerce, he worked at the Otaru branch of Hokkaido Takushoku Bank. His most famous work is Kanikōsen, or Crab-Canning Boat – a novel published in 1929. It tells the story of several different people and the beginning of organization into unions of fishing workers. He joined the Japanese Communist Party in 1931. The young writer was killed during a torture session by Tokkō police two years later, at age 29.
[edit]Life

At the age of four his family moved to Otaru, Hokkaidō. The family was not wealthy, but Kobayashi's uncle paid his schooling expenses and he was able to attend Hokkaidō Otaru Commercial High School and Otaru Commercial School of Higher Learning. While studying he became interested in writing, and submitted essays to literary magazines, served in the editorial committee for his school's alumni association magazine, and also had his own writing published. One of his teachers at school was economist, critic, and poet Nobuyuki Okuma. Around this time, due to financial hardship and the current economic recession of the time, he joined the labor movement.
After graduating school he worked in the Otaru branch of the Hokkaidō Takushoku Bank. In the 1928 general election, Kobayashi helped with election candidate Kenzo Yamamoto's campaign, and went to Yamamoto's campaign speech in a village at the base of Mount Yōtei. This experience was later incorporated into his book 東倶知安行. In the same year his story March 15, 1928 (based on the March 15 incident) was published in the literary magazine Senki ("Standard of Battle" in Japanese). The story depicted torture by the Tokkō police, which in turn infuriated government officials, and would become the trigger for Kobayashi's eventual murder.
In 1929, his story Kanikōsen was also published in Senki, and quickly gained attention and became the standard bearer of proletarian literature. In July of that year it was adapted into a theatrical performance and was performed at the Imperial Garden Theater under the title 北緯五十度以北 (North of latitude 50 degrees north). However the police (in particular the Tokkō police of the time) marked him for surveillance. In the same year his essay "Absentee Landlord" (不在地主 Fuzaijinushi?) published in Chūōkōron magazine became grounds for his dismissal from his job at the bank.
In the spring of 1930, he moved to Tōkyō and became the secretary general of the Proletarian Writer's Guild of Japan. On May 23 he was arrested on suspicion of giving financial support to the Japan Communist Party, and was temporarily released on June 7. After returning to Tokyo on June 24, he was again arrested and in July, due to Kanikōsen he was further indicted on charges of Lèse majesté. In August, he was prosecuted under the Public Order and Police Law of 1900 and was imprisoned in Toyotama Penitentiary. On January 22, 1931 he was released on bail. He then secluded himself at the Nanasawa Hot Spring in Kanagawa Prefecture. In October 1931 he became a member of the outlawed Japan Communist Party . In November he visited the mansion of Naoya Shiga in Nara Prefecture. In the spring of 1932 he went underground. On February 20, 1933 he went to a meeting spot in Akasaka to meet with a fellow Communist Party member, who was in reality a spy from the Tokkō police who had infiltrated the party. The Tokkō were lying in wait for him, and although he tried to escape, he was captured and arrested. He was apparently stripped naked in the freezing winter cold, beaten with thick sticks, and then taken to a hospital where he died at 7:45 pm.
Police authorities announced the following day that he had died of a heart attack. However the next day when his family received his body, they saw his whole body was swollen from torture, in particular the lower half of his body was darkish from internal haemorrhaging. No hospital would perform an autopsy for fear of the Tokkō police. His postmortem face was published in the Communist Party newspaper Shimbun Akahata.
[edit]Best-seller

Kanikōsen In 2008, "A Crab Canning Boat," a 1929 Marxist novel about a crab-canning ship's crew determined to stand up to a cruel manager under harsh conditions, became a surprise bestseller, thanks to an advertising campaign linking the novel to the working poor.[1][2]

====================================

PS I believe the elusive male lead in Satoshi Kon's "Millennium Actress" is based on Takiji Kobayashi.

[Os Cangaceiros]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Voltairinedecleyre.png/160px-Voltairinedecleyre.png



Voltairine de Cleyre (November 17, 1866 – June 20, 1912) was an American (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States) anarchist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist) writer and feminist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcha-feminism). She was a prolific writer and speaker, opposing the state (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_(polity)), marriage, and the domination of religion in sexuality and women's lives. She began her activist career in the freethought movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought). De Cleyre was initially drawn to individualist anarchism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individualist_anarchism) but evolved through mutualism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism) to an "anarchism without adjectives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_without_adjectives)." She believed that any system was acceptable as long as it did not involve force. However, according to anarchist author Iain McKay, she embraced the ideals of stateless communism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_communism).[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltairine_de_Cleyre#cite_note-0) She was a colleague of Emma Goldman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman), with whom she maintained a relationship of respectful disagreement on many issues. Many of her essays were in the Collected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published posthumously by Mother Earth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Earth) in 1914.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltairine_de_Cleyre

[NewLeft]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/Voltairinedecleyre.png/160px-Voltairinedecleyre.png



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltairine_de_Cleyre

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4f/Lucy_Parsons.jpg/200px-Lucy_Parsons.jpg
Yes, we all love Voltairine and Lucy Parsons!


http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e4/Myers-gustavus-1909.jpg/200px-Myers-gustavus-1909.jpg

Gustavus Myers, wrote a volume on Canadian history that I found really helpful. Not sure if he's obscure/hipster enough.