Popular Neo-Bakuninist Proven To Be Racist, Anarchists Panic

[QueerVanguard]

I don't get what all the outrage is about. This Schmidt character is only demonstrating behavior that has a deep history in the Anarchist movement, from Proudhon to Bakunin.

http://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-1-1a6fa255b528

[The Feral Underclass]

What's a neo-Bakuninist?

[Sasha]

You know bakoenin was famous for being a platformist... Can we leave the stupid sectarianism and just debate the case on its own merits? Sheesh

[Sasha]

Also lol at the " deep history from proudhon to bakunin" so thats 30 years of a 150 year history and at that back when it was still just called socialism...
You can just as well say that bakunins racism is the deep history of socialism, he was a member of the 1st international afterall...

[Rudolf]

Has anyone been reading that internal document? It's not even that subtle. Somehow i don't think Schmidt is on his own in ZACF.


"our black members have never fully integrated with us over the past 16 years"

I can see why what with the assertion black people can be good militants if they followed the lead of whites. No doubt this "full integration" is doing what whitey tells them.

[Qayin]

This Schmidt character is only demonstrating behavior that has a deep history in the Anarchist movement

LOL oh god, here we go.

[John Nada]

Supposed comrades latter proving to be reactionaries isn't just an anarchists thing. Marxism is littered with seeming solid revolutionaries turning into revisionist reactionaries and even outright fascists.

Considering that South Africa is a Black supermajority country, if this white "anarchist" views people from the vast majority as "not up task" to this "White Savior", there's something wrong with Schmidt, not black people. He's not a better "revolutionary" if his idea of liberation ignores damn near everyone else. Of course he likely never had the liberation of black people on mind in the first place.

Part 2 is out: https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-2-1849e232b943?source=latest---------1 Apparently he's a user at ScumFuck. Supposedly for "research", but the posts do seem consistent with the views espoused in his internal document. Sometimes reactionaries do have a change of heart, but it does seem like he's trying to hijack and steer others towards his national "anarchism".

[The Feral Underclass]

You know bakoenin was famous for being a platformist... Can we leave the stupid sectarianism and just debate the case on its own merits? Sheesh

Yeah sure. I still don't know what a neo-Bakuninist is though, so if someone could enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.

[Heilmann]

Has anyone been reading that internal document? It's not even that subtle. Somehow i don't think Schmidt is on his own in ZACF.

the fact that this was left untouched for several years also speaks for this.

at this point, schmidt's case looks damning, and he's obviously a racist. however, i don't think the fact that he spouted racist shit on stormfront and kept a "national anarchist" blog qualifies the claim that he's a fascist infiltrator. i also think this is poorly handled by reid-ross/stevens, as well as ak press, when they announced their cutting of ties with chmidt without having the proof to show for over two weeks. serious allegations like this (that at this point are proven to be at least partially true - i stress this in case it looks like i defend schmidt here, which is not my intention at all) should be handled seriously as the political case it is, with all facts on the table from day one the allegations are made.

[Tim Cornelis]

How can he not realistically be called a fascist infiltrator though? It may be that 'fascist infiltrator' conjures up the image of a 'classic' Nazi pretending to be anarchist and then joining anarchist groups to gather information or something. But he is a national anarchist (arguably a form of fascism), and he participated in an anarchist group in order to steer them into a national anarchist direction. "Fascist infiltrator" seems fair enough. I only don't understand why he bothered with a small, marginalised anarchist group. It's like a small Trot group of 4 entriysm-ing a larger Trot group of 10 or something.

[Counterculturalist]

One thing I've noticed about people involved in idiotic tendencies like national anarchism and the like is that they are pathologically dishonest about their beliefs. They will disavow racism and deny links with white supremacists while spouting neo-nazi rhetoric out of the other side of their mouths. It's all about confusion and obfuscation. Arguing with them is pointless because they'll just lie about their affiliations and convictions, but dog whistle terms like "cosmopolitan" tend to give the game away. What makes little sense to me is what they hope to accomplish by intruding upon a leftist milieu that is fundamentally opposed to them.

[#FF0000]

the fact that this was left untouched for several years also speaks for this.

at this point, schmidt's case looks damning, and he's obviously a racist. however, i don't think the fact that he spouted racist shit on stormfront and kept a "national anarchist" blog qualifies the claim that he's a fascist infiltrator. i also think this is poorly handled by reid-ross/stevens, as well as ak press, when they announced their cutting of ties with chmidt without having the proof to show for over two weeks. serious allegations like this (that at this point are proven to be at least partially true - i stress this in case it looks like i defend schmidt here, which is not my intention at all) should be handled seriously as the political case it is, with all facts on the table from day one the allegations are made.

This was my opinion up until Part 2 was published. But now the evidence is pretty damning and as poorly as AK Press handled this, it looks like they were right.

[BIXX]

I mean, I guess if you knew him or whatever this could be a big deal but for literally everyone else, why do we care? I feel like this is just scene drama that we elevate to make ourselves feel important.

"oh look we caught the fascist infiltrator and now we're gonna denounce him! "

[#FF0000]

Folks care because he was a pretty prominent figure cuz of his book Black Flame.

[Heilmann]

This was my opinion up until Part 2 was published. But now the evidence is pretty damning and as poorly as AK Press handled this, it looks like they were right.

Of course, but conversely, even as they are right, it was handled poorly.

[Zoop]

What's a neo-Bakuninist?

Something QueerVanguard pulled out of his arse.

[BIXX]

Folks care because he was a pretty prominent figure cuz of his book Black Flame.

Which a lot of people read admittedlyadmittedly, but you know, that's amongst leftists which doesn't really mean shit. It's a tiny irrelevant community inflating it's self image through drama.

[Heilmann]

to clarify, once again: my remark was simply made in regards to the documentation process, and AK press's handling of recieving the news. vis-a-vis the damning case against him, this might of course seem irrelevant.


I mean, I guess if you knew him or whatever this could be a big deal but for literally everyone else, why do we care? I feel like this is just scene drama that we elevate to make ourselves feel important.

"oh look we caught the fascist infiltrator and now we're gonna denounce him! "

except, of course, "the scene" here is the anarchist milieu world wide, as schmidt's the co-author of what's viewed by many as the definitive book on anarchism in later years. it's as if you didn't bother to read about this at all before posting.

[ChangeAndChance]

Bakunin was an anti-semite like most people of his day who weren't Jews, therefore all of anarchism was founded upon racism. QueerVanguard isn't fan of logic , but they do love their delusional dogmatism.

[Sasha]

Never likec blackflame, but I guess lots of ppl will say that. But I didnt, way to narrow focus on only syndicalism/platformism, a suspecious fetish for that platformism edging into vanguardism/centralism and looking back I understand why the book was obviously and shockingly white centric....

[Tim Cornelis]

I liked it when I was an anarchist -- I was a platformist. Having read the parts about Marxism recently, oh, horrid. Don't remember it being white-centric, its focus on the entire globe was refreshing, the opposition to 'Spanish exceptionalism'. I wonder how much siphoned through of Schmidt's white supremacy. That he had to work with Lucien van der Walt probably blocked it. Wonder what Van der Walt thinks of all this.

[BIXX]

Wonder what Van der Walt thinks of all this.

That is actually a question I'd be interested in.

[#FF0000]

Which a lot of people read admittedlyadmittedly, but you know, that's amongst leftists which doesn't really mean shit. It's a tiny irrelevant community inflating it's self image through drama.

I don't think anyone's saying this is some earth-shattering revelation to anyone outside radical circles tho.

[BIXX]

I don't think anyone's saying this is some earth-shattering revelation to anyone outside radical circles tho.

It's not really shattering of anything in any circles is what I'm saying, and people are card g way more than I can see reason for.

[The Feral Underclass]

It's not really shattering of anything in any circles is what I'm saying, and people are card g way more than I can see reason for.

I kind of sympathise with this view, but also we have to remember that there are people who knew him and worked with him who are going to feel really betrayed. Naturally it's going to be fairly upsetting for them. I think we have to respect that and be aware of it. It's not particularly supportive to dismiss it as irrelevant. Finding out someone you liked and worked with and potentially even loved is actually not who they say they are must be quite devestating.

[noble brown]

I'm just curious whether this has changed people's opinion about Black Flame. I'm tempted to go back through it with a fine toothed comb but, "ain't nobody got time for that shit".
I don't remember it being overly white centric, either, and I'm usually pretty sensitive to that shit.

[Comrade Jacob]

You know bakoenin was famous for being a platformist... Can we leave the stupid sectarianism and just debate the case on its own merits? Sheesh

He had no merits.

[#FF0000]

It's not really shattering of anything in any circles is what I'm saying, and people are card g way more than I can see reason for.

Nah that's wrong because Black Flame was pretty popular in anarchist circles.


I'm tempted to go back through it with a fine toothed comb but, "ain't nobody got time for that shit".
I don't remember it being overly white centric, either, and I'm usually pretty sensitive to that shit.

There are some things in it that look sketchy in hindsight, but only in hindsight imo.

[Sasha]

What was this "neo Bakuninists" goal in doing this?


like said elsewere i dont think Schmidt was a "fascist infiltrator" as such and i think it is not helpful to the analyzing what happened here to use these terms.
i suspect he started out as a sincere leftwing anarchist who drifted slowly towards racism and national anarchism but hid that to not loose his good standing in anarchist circles, esp since i doubt he would be making any money any more not only as a anarchist historian but also not as a journalist if his racism was known. i think an racist national anarchist in current day south-africa is even more lonely than a revolutionary leftist anarchist.

and while i on one hand have a uncomfortable feeling about all the personal stuff about his divorce, his Rwandan PTSD and his boer family background that is brought up in the articles i understand why they included it, it does offer an insight how he could drift towards this shit.
as i grow older and take a more critical look at the anarchist scene here and at the same time grow more interested in my family roots i can, esp back when i was in the blackest days of middle of my burnout feel the pull of both the judeaist zionism of one side of my family and the reactionary Catholicism of my other. I'm stable enough to not take that pull serious in any shape or form but i can imagine if you have PTSD, and a divorce and have to live through the failure of the ANC take over how one could go off the deep end.

[Sasha]

chapter 3: https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-3-7d288d84b170

[Os Cangaceiros]

Split off topic conversation, which can be found here

http://www.revleft.com/vb/anarchist-interpretations-makhnos-t194368/index.html?t=194368

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

Yeah sure. I still don't know what a neo-Bakuninist is though, so if someone could enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.
It's just QueerVanguard's pet term of abuse. I don't think it means anything concretely.

[Asero]

It's just QueerVanguard's pet term of abuse. I don't think it means anything concretely.

I don't know. I don't think I've seen QueerVanguard abuse it like tuwix does 'Leninist'.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

I don't know. I don't think I've seen QueerVanguard abuse it like tuwix does 'Leninist'.
I have. I remember last year when she was using it as an insult against anyone who disagreed with her.

[John Nada]

I just noticed the title is a pun on a Jack Nicholson movie about an old man writing to an orphan in Africa he sponsors about how his life is crappy.Part 4: https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchist-movements-throughout-the-world-chapter-4-8ff357d222e3#.nesf4esly

Isn't funny how he rails against that "Maoist" white privilege theory, yet he sounds like a Bizzaro version of the type of Maoist Third-Worldist that usually gets banned on here, with white people as an oppressed nation. And now all his shit looks obviously racist reading it after this came out. "South Asia" anarchism, what the Aryans?:lol: Wikipedia links to an article of Schmidt's for justification on why national "anarchism" is totally not fascist like national "socialism".

[BIXX]

I have. I remember last year when she was using it as an insult against anyone who disagreed with her.

I always thought that was what they called anarchists

[Trap Queen Voxxy]

I don't get what all the outrage is about. This Schmidt character is only demonstrating behavior that has a deep history in the Anarchist movement, from Proudhon to Bakunin.

http://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-1-1a6fa255b528

STFU, seriously, just stahp. That whole debate is stupid af bruh

[blake 3:17]

The little bit of writing by Schmidt I've read and following this story, I'm kind of struck by a hyper masculinity.

It's not that uncommon for people to go Left to Right (and sometimes the other way), but I've found a really weird bully energy in the Anarchist and Trot scenes I've been part of, and when the immediate dreams fail, it's pretty easy for some of these dudes to transition smoothly into fascism. There seems to be something about macho boss man energy that just has to legitimize itself.

The stuff about the black comrades being disorganized and being disappointing, while Schmidt is out on binge drunks -- like wtf?

I was about to spout a bunch of nonsense about nations and culture, but I'll forget that, I do find this very interesting:


There are eleven official languages of South Africa: Afrikaans, English, Ndebele, Northern Sotho, Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu. Fewer than two percent of South Africans speak a first language other than an official one.[1] Most South Africans can speak more than one language. Dutch and English were the first official languages of South Africa from 1910 to 1925.

...

The most common language spoken as a first language by South Africans is Zulu (23 percent), followed by Xhosa (16 percent), and Afrikaans (14 percent). English is the fourth most common first language in the country (9.6%), but is understood in most urban areas and is the dominant language in government and the media.[6]

The majority of South Africans speak a language from one of the two principal branches of the Bantu languages represented in South Africa: the Sotho–Tswana branch (Sotho, Northern Sotho, Tswana), or the Nguni branch (Zulu, Xhosa, Swati, Ndebele). For each of the two groups, the languages within that group are for the most part intelligible to a native speaker of any other language within that group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_South_Africa

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

^^I think it's clear that there is sometimes a psychological element those activist radicals who make predictions of imminent revolution. Whilst it's often overplayed by the mainstream media (for example in films like The Baader Meinhof Complex reducing complex political actions to the whims of a mentally unstable group of outcasts), there does seem to be something pathological in those individuals and groups that proclaim revolution to be right around the corner. Not only are said predictions a little obsessive, not to mention plucked out of people's arses, they also obviously lead to immense psychological distress when the predictions aren't realised.

[John Nada]

Part 5 discusses the left to right defection phenominon
According to Mathieu Desan, a political sociologist at the University of Michigan studying French socialists who moved to fascism in the 1930’s, Schmidt’s trajectory isn’t terribly unique. “It’s not so much a conversion. That’s a specific, and highly loaded term, and I don’t use it,” he explained to us. “The moment when these people flipped from left to right, wasn’t ever a single moment. It was more like a series of steps.”

For Desan, Schmidt’s story recalls that of Jacques Doriot, a major figure within the French Communist Party in the early 1930’s. “The French Communist Party of this time was much like contemporary anarchist circles, in that it was somewhat self-enclosed milieu, had its own culture, its own language, its own standards of status,” Desan explained. Doriot was a metalworker by trade, owing his entire political identity and career to the very party that wound up disowning him for advocating an unorthodox strategy not unlike the Popular Front, which would be adopted the very next year by the Comintern.

His ensuing move away from the left was a direct result of this exclusion. As if channeling Schmidt’s interview with us, in which he staked out good and bad anarchists, Desan explained that “being in a milieu where political arguments take an absolute form, where you’re either right or completely delegitimized, that kind of milieu lends itself to pretty radical reversals of political allegiances.” For Doriot, this meant going on to create the most important fascist party in France, but not immediately. “He tried to create a sort of alternative left wing, but he was consistently labeled a fascist, if only because he was a kind of populist figure. And very quickly, he ended up embracing that label.”
“All of these people who move from left to right — they’re people who lose,” Desan explained to us. “[T]hey lose out in a fight within their circles about the definition of what the correct line or strategy or what have you should be. But there’s also something about those circles, where to lose out is consequential. It’s a delegitimizing, marginalizing experience.” https://medium.com/@rossstephens/about-schmidt-how-a-white-nationalist-seduced-anarchists-around-the-world-chapter-5-a6ae0f471e9e?source=latest---------1 Is there anything comparable in reverse? Someone going from the far-right to the far-left, and actually accepted in that circle?

[Os Cangaceiros]

Is there anything comparable in reverse? Someone going from the far-right to the far-left, and actually accepted in that circle?

Yeah. Ironically he's mentioned in the thread title. Bakunin went from being a right-wing Bible thumper obsessed with the Orthodox Church to being, well, Bakunin.

[RedKobra]

I do remember reading that a decent amount of former members of the National Front in Britain, in around the mid to late 70's saw the error of their ways and became dedicated anti racists and lefties. Actor Ricky Tomlinson was one such example. He described himself and his peers as young, poor, angry and stupid. Can't remember where I read it now, though.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Yeah. Ironically he's mentioned in the thread title. Bakunin went from being a right-wing Bible thumper obsessed with the Orthodox Church to being, well, Bakunin.

He became an advocate of something he himself compared to Jesuit rule in Paraguay. It's usually pointless to belabour the point because modern anarchists have little in common with Proudhon or Bakunin, but the founding fathers of anarchism - except Kropotkin - were very far from any "libertarianism".

The fascist novelist C. Malaparte became a Maoist in his old age, btw. The proto-fascist G. Valois ended up becoming an anarcho-syndicalist.

[Sasha]

aware of the danger of resurrecting this shit thread, may i remind our dear Leninists that Bakunin was at least an pretty important influence on Nechayev (and probably ghost wrote some of his work). And Nechayev and his nihilist fellow travelers (and also Bakunin directly) where in turn a pretty damn big influence on the Bolshevistic ideas and praxis. Lets not pretend Marx and Engels where your only forefathers, you are children of Bakunin when he was still in the first international just as contemporary anarchists, one could argue in some aspects, like vanguardism, maybe even more.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

aware of the danger of resurrecting this shit thread, may i remind our dear Leninists that Bakunin was at least an pretty important influence on Nechayev

Obviously. "Our Committee" and "Jesuitical dictatorship" are pretty much the same thing.


And Nechayev and his nihilist fellow travelers (and also Bakunin directly) where in turn a pretty damn big influence on the Bolshevistic ideas and praxis.

This part is wrong, though. The only connection between the RSDRP (not even the Bolshevik faction) and Nechayev was that Vera Zasulich knew the man personally. Bolsheviks always repudiated individual terrorism, clandestine action etc.


Lets not pretend Marx and Engels where your only forefathers, you are children of Bakunin when he was still in the first international just as contemporary anarchists, one could argue in some aspects, like vanguardism, maybe even more.

The vanguard of the proletariat is literally the inverse of the "invisible dictatorship" of Bakuninist fantasy. For one thing, the vanguard party is open about its goals.

[Guardia Rossa]

The vanguard of the proletariat is literally the inverse of the "invisible dictatorship" of Bakuninist fantasy.

Only if it is the other side of the same coin.

[blake 3:17]

The last part of the 5 part article is a little less blow by blow but I found this context very very revealing and not all that atypical for parts of the macho man Left:
Similar warning signs screamed from between the lines of the 2008 ZACF discussion document circulated by Schmidt, in which he declared blacks in South Africa incapable of living up to the “exacting standards of platformism.” Although it was a federation after its founding in 2003, the ZACF’s chapters were very small. One group in Soweto was composed largely of one man — a young black South African named Philip who went by the name of Karl Marx before joining the ZACF. He was unemployed, living in Motsoaledi, a poorer area of Soweto, and he was interested in cultivating urban gardens. His main project was a community garden in the dilapidated area behind Baragwanath Hospital, which he sought to transform into a social center.

Through this project, Phillip became dependent on ZACF, which used him as the “face of anarchism,” according to three long-time activists. Sooner or later, the ZACF decided that he had become an encumbrance to the image they sought to cultivate. After paying him to keep the garden up, the ZACF finally cut its ties with Phillip and the social center project.

Schmidt did not support the multiracial constitution of the ZACF, but attempted to work with Phillip. When Phillip began to spiral into personal crisis, Schmidt became angry, and used the incident to cast broad speculations about the general shortcomings of black comrades.

So the failure of Black anarchists in South Africa was being disappointed in one Black anarchist who sounds like he was doing what he could do? Like WTF?

This could be easily discounted if it this kind of lousy behaviour weren't so common.

[Sasha]

Bolsheviks always repudiated individual terrorism, clandestine action etc.


uehhh, Lenin's brother tried to assassinate the tsar and was a big proponent of "individual terrorism, clandestine action etc", sure he was technically not a Bolshevik as the bolsheviks where not around yet but it sure left a mark on Lenin, Trotsky himself said Lenin was a supporter of such terrorism until the early 1890's.
anyways, i'm not saying "bolsheviks equals nihilist terrorists equals bakuninists", that would be daft, i'm saying that the bolshevik ideas about many subjects can be traced to many sources, not all being Marx or Engels.
to say Bakunin is only one of the fathers of anarchism and not other lines that grew out of the first international is disingenuous.
much current anarchist thought has been formed through both support and opposition of Bakunins ideas, so of those of marx, and so are many Leninist ideas formed through both support and opposition of some of Bakunins ideas. we are, again, all children of the first international

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

uehhh, Lenin's brother tried to assassinate the tsar and was a big proponent of "individual terrorism, clandestine action etc", sure he was technically not a Bolshevik as the bolsheviks where not around yet but it sure left a mark on Lenin, Trotsky himself said Lenin was a supporter of such terrorism until the early 1890's.

Sverdlov's brother served in the French military. This is just psychological speculation. By the way, the claim that Lenin supported terrorism until some vague point in the nineties seems to come from Wikipedia. What Trotsky actually said was that in university, Lenin was part of the same democratic milieu as Alexander had been, and would have been drawn into terrorist conspiracies if it hadn't been for the paralysis of those years. And all of this concerning the period before Lenin joined the Marxist movement. In fact, in the same work Trotsky clearly states:

"Die Versuche der offiziösen sowjetischen Historiker, die „terroristische Fraktion“ gewissermaßen als Brücke zwischen der atten Bewegung und der Sozialdemokratie zu schildern, um auf diese Weise die Möglichkeit zu haben, Alexander Uljanow als Bindeglied zwischen Sheljabow und Lenin hinzustellen, werden durch die Analyse der Tatsachen und der Ideen in keiner Weise gerechtfertigt. Auf dem Gebiet der Theorie huldigte die Gruppe Uljanows eklektischen Anschauungen, die für die achtziger Jahre als Periode der Depression bezeichnend sind. Praktisch muß sie den Epigonen des Narodowolzentums zugezählt werden, dessen Methoden sie ad absurdum führte. Das Unternehmen des 1. März 1887 trug keinerlei Keime der Zukunft in sich und war seinem Wesen nach die letzte, wahrhaft tragische Konvulsion der bereits verurteilten Prätentionen der „kritisch denkenden Persönlichkeiten“ auf eine selbständige historische Rolle. Und gerade darin bestand auch seine so teuer bezahlte Lehre."

Which denies any link between Alexander Ulyanov and the Bolsheviks.


anyways, i'm not saying "bolsheviks equals nihilist terrorists equals bakuninists", that would be daft, i'm saying that the bolshevik ideas about many subjects can be traced to many sources, not all being Marx or Engels.

Obviously.

The dispute is whether Bakunin was one of them. There is really no reason to conclude he was, in fact there is no reason to conclude Lenin and other Bolsheviks ever gave much thought to Bakunin. Already at that point, he was irrelevant to Russian socialism, including Russian anarchism. In fact the only mention of Bakunin I can think of, in Lenin's entire corpus, is a short note "complete fiasco".


to say Bakunin is only one of the fathers of anarchism and not other lines that grew out of the first international is disingenuous.
much current anarchist thought has been formed through both support and opposition of Bakunins ideas, so of those of marx, and so are many Leninist ideas formed through both support and opposition of some of Bakunins ideas. we are, again, all children of the first international

No, I don't think that's the case. I think Bakunin has been oversold as the "father of anarchism", much like Proudhon. Modern anarchists don't owe much to Bakunin and are better off for it. One doesn't find much in the way of calls for an "invisible dictatorship", for example (perhaps they just figured out the first point of an invisible dictatorship is not to be seen). Likewise, when Leninism engaged anarchism, it engaged concrete anarchist movements, not the long-dead and pretty irrelevant Bakunin.

[Ricemilk]

Never likec blackflame, but I guess lots of ppl will say that. But I didnt, way to narrow focus on only syndicalism/platformism, a suspecious fetish for that platformism edging into vanguardism/centralism and looking back I understand why the book was obviously and shockingly white centric....
I remember being a little puzzled by the book's popularity, and bored to death by the time I finished the back cover of a display copy at the LA Bookfair when it came out. In retrospect, I wish I had realized the importance of looking into it and taken at least symbolic action beyond keeping my distance. Part of why this whole mess is important to me is to take some lessons for upholding antiracism as a key component of revolutionary struggle in the future, especially identifying racist threats and apologetics.


like said elsewere i dont think Schmidt was a "fascist infiltrator" as such and i think it is not helpful to the analyzing what happened here to use these terms.
i suspect he started out as a sincere leftwing anarchistI think I must be missing something here. Wasn't he a gleeful participant in apartheid military operations decades before Black Flame? Did he move left and then back right, or am I misreading his history?


I'm just curious whether this has changed people's opinion about Black Flame. I'm tempted to go back through it with a fine toothed comb but, "ain't nobody got time for that shit".
I don't remember it being overly white centric, either, and I'm usually pretty sensitive to that shit.

I didn't pick up on it either at the time. Excerpts dug up in te course of this investigation make it clear where the book was trying to push leftists to accept reactionary social attitudes and marginalize people who have identity politics foisted upon them/us. I think Schmidt had a vile talent for presenting racist opinions in overtly non-racializing ways, and that his South African experiences (including hiding his complicity in apartheid, and white comrades allowing him to poison the well and intimidate/alienate Black members in the first place) gave him opportunities to practice, and his very work on the book gave him opportunities to temper his spin for the anarchist movement in other countries. I didn't know him but I'm struck by his ability to keep the ruse going so long even while being sort of impulsive and not as good at hiding his identity as he seemed to think.



What makes little sense to me is what they hope to accomplish by intruding upon a leftist milieu that is fundamentally opposed to them.
To be fair, acculturating left wingers to accept outspoken fascists and bigots of all stripes sharing a platform with them is the exact project of CounterPunch and it seems quite successful so far. Though I agree that an action on the scale of Schmidt's reads like absurdism at first glance, it makes more sense if his goal was to fracture and demobilize the ZACF- theoretically a potential organization for resisting white terrorism as part of a larger front- rather than to recruit people to his own ideology. It's like a destructive rather than subversive form of entryism, I think.

To me it is telling that he proposes more and more outlandishly racist things until the group is forced to either accept racism, marginalize him or implode. I would argue that they imploded, based on the way the nature of the organization changed as it shrank to a tiny white core of six, though some people here argue that they chose to accept racism at large, which you could say I am struggling to follow given the precipitous decline in membership. Whether white fellow members should have done more to resist internal racism before abandoning the organization is another question (though I would have a hard time finding them blameless in all this as Schmidt became bolder and/or sloppier).


He became an advocate of something he himself compared to Jesuit rule in Paraguay. It's usually pointless to belabour the point because modern anarchists have little in common with Proudhon or Bakunin, but the founding fathers of anarchism - except Kropotkin - were very far from any "libertarianism".

The fascist novelist C. Malaparte became a Maoist in his old age, btw. The proto-fascist G. Valois ended up becoming an anarcho-syndicalist.
Orwell reported Spanish fascists converting to revolutionary leftists because the leftists offered warm bread and fresh olive oil when the fash ran out- bread and oil being basically the entire point of the Civil War for a lot of fascist grunts in the first place. I don't think the likes of Durruti or Santillan took kindly to them, still. Your observations about anarchism moving away from Proudhon and Bakunin are interesting and I think have merit; evolving outside of the control of any particular bourgeois thinker is a positive aspect of anarchism, I think. Bakunin's conceptualization of leadership was not entirely dictatorial and aspects of it remain viable anarchist politics, like appreciating or cultivating 'natural' (technical and limited) authority even while rejecting the authority of State and Party as such. I do agree that Bakunin would be displeased at the compromise as it stands today, and that this is no argument against it.


Which a lot of people read admittedlyadmittedly, but you know, that's amongst leftists which doesn't really mean shit. It's a tiny irrelevant community inflating it's self image through drama.
I guess this posturing about a "tiny irrelevant community" which can still somehow include "a lot of people" as a minority faction is something other than self-important dramatics.