Neither anarchism nor marxism can be defined as wholly eurocentric, white/western-only traditions. (Which is not to say that discussions of eurocentrism with regard to both of them are not relevant: on the contrary they’re important but it’s not “either” vs “or”). Both are global and heterogenous movements! And it’s especially important to stop the erasure of non-Western marxisms and anarchisms, independently of whether we – individually – like or dislike either marxism or anarchism as wholes (though again, this seems pretty meaningless to me, since there’s so much internal diversity within each, so in my opinion if you think you’re rejecting “marxism” or “anarchism” you’re rather rejecting forms of it you don’t like).
Anarchism
@LiberationPill:
In Eastern Europe, Anarchists played an active role in the in 1873 uprisings in Bosnia and Herzegovina against Austro-Hungarian imperialism. They also fought against the Ottoman Empire in the 1903 revolt.
In Africa, Malatesta had lived in Alexandria as a political refugee and fought alongside Egyptians against British colonialism. Sail Mohamed was an Algerian anarchist active in the anarchist movement from the 1910s until his death in 1953.
The Spanish anarchists (specifically the CNT) held strikes and riots against the Spanish war against Morocco. They also had influenced Cuban and Filipino anarchists, and were often imprisoned alongside each other.
When the anarchist Michele Angiolillo assassinated the Spanish President Canovas in 1897, he declared that his act both in revenge for the repression of anarchists in Spain and retribution for Spain’s atrocities in its colonial wars.
Additionally, Leon Czolgosz cited the atrocities of American imperialism in the Philippines as a motivation for his assassination of William McKinley.
Octavio Alberola was a Spanish anarchist who made acquaintances with Fidel and Che and initially enthusiastically supported their cause, only to grow disillusioned with Fidel’s alliance with the Francoist regime. He also attempted to assassinate Franco.
Greek anarchist Plotino Rhodakanaty was active in the Mexican campesino movement, and Peter Kropotkin was highly influential to Ricardo Flores Magon, a key figure in the Mexican revolution, who would later inspire the contemporary Zapatistas.
While in America, Kōtoku Shūsui became an anarchist, writing to Kropotkin who gave him permission to translate his works into Japanese. He also wrote a book called “Imperialism” over a decade before Lenin.
https://twitter.com/LiberationPill/status/1485323137541554176?s=20&t=a7OqcLYhCJ_JYYraaYOkvg
@Reddrebrek:
Louise Michel [see: Louise Michel in New Caledonia] and Malatesta both supported anti-colonial revolts. Malatesta was part of a group of Italians who went to join the combat but where intercepted by British forces. [see: What? Anarchist in Egypt! [Before 1916]]
Bakunin who is often deliberately mischaracterised as a Pan-Slavist (a movement which sort union under the Russian Empire) came to prominence in the 1840s as Slav-Federalist who advocated the dismantling of all Imperial powers oppressing the Slavic peoples and
Should unite in free and fraternal relations with all the other peoples of the world. Dejacque denounced French Imperial ambitions in Italy. And was kicked out of Louisiana for telling an audience including some slaves that black people should violently overthrow slavery.
Then there’s the Spanish anarchist movements agitation and encouraging of mutinies of Spanish soldiers sent to fight in its colonies including the Rif. And during the Civil war the CNT had worked with Moroccans to start a war of independence. And thats just off the top of my head [Source: Carrying the war info Africa? Anarchism, Morocco, and the Spanish Civil War]
https://twitter.com/Reddebrek/status/1485344477548060685?s=20&t=4k118o4DHnisXf1cpaWTyg
From Anarchopac’s reading list:
- Cappelletti, Angel – Anarchism in Latin America
- Fernandez, Frank – Cuban Anarchism: The History of A Movement
- Zimmer, Kenyon – Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America
- Crump, John – Hatta Shuzo and Pure Anarchism in Interwar Japan
- Dirlik, Arif – Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution
- Hwang, Dongyoun – Anarchism in Korea: Independence, Transnationalism and the Question of National Development, 1919-1984
- Tierney, Robert – Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kotoku Shusui and Japan’s First Anti-Imperialist Movement
- Black Rose Anarchist Federation (ed) – Black Anarchism: A Reader
- Hirsch, Steven and van der Walt, Lucian (eds) – Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World 1870-1940 (the best overview of anarchism as a global movement)
This is a useful introduction by @joeyayoub to the early 20th anarchist movement in China, with a list of sources/links at the end: A look at the Chinese Anarchist movement between 1905 and 1930.
Another list on anarchism in Asia: Black Rose Anarchist Federation – Resources on Anarchism in Asia.
Marxism
As Ashley Bohrer says in her book Marxism and Intersectionality:
While in many leftist circles, Marxism is caricatured as an essentially white and Eurocentric perspective, this characterization systematically neglects the generations of anti-colonial revolutionaries who considered a Marxist critique of capitalism to be central to any liberation project. This is true not only in countries that adopted socialism as the form of their national governments, but also of multiple revolutionary organizations and movements in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. It is precisely because of capitalism’s deep structural imbrication in colonialism, imperialism, and war that Marxist critique has been so powerful within movements for national liberation, and why some of the strongest, best organized, and longest lasting communist parties have been located inside the Global South. While it is true that this element of capitalism’s emergence is, in some Euro-American Marxists, downplayed, much of the Marxist left the world over understands that “any serious materialist critique… [cannot] bypass the colonial encounter, because it is constitutive of the historical development of modern society and capitalism.”
Ashley J. Bohrer (2019) Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality Under Contemporary Capitalism, p. 144-145.
She provides a brief bibliography:
- Latin America:
- Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America”
- Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1995)
- José Aricó, Marx and Latin America (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014)
- Bruno Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis and Religion in Times of Terror (London ; New York: Verso, 2012)
- Sheldon B. Liss, Marxist Thought in Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984)
- The Caribbean:
- Paget Henry, “Caribbean Marxism After the Neoliberal and Linguistic Turn,” in New Caribbean Thought: A Reader (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2001)
- Anthony P. Maingot, Race, Ideology, and the Decline of Caribbean Marxism (University Press of Florida, 2015)
- Trevor Munroe, Jamaican Politics: A Marxist Perspective in Transition (Kingston: Heinemann and Boulder, 1990)
- C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2 edition (New York: Vintage, 1989)
- Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973)
- Africa:
- Abdoulaye Ly, Les Masses Africaines et l’actuelle Condition Humaine (Éditions Présence Africaine, 1956)
- William H. Crawford and Carl G. Rosberg, African Socialism (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 1964)
- Blum, Françoise, et al., ed. Socialismes en Afrique/Socialisms in Africa. Paris : Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2021.
- Adam Mayer, Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria (London: Pluto Press, 2016)
- Thomas Sankara, Thomas Sankara Speaks (Pathfinder Press, 2007)
- Walter Rodney, “Marxism and African Liberation,” in Yes to Marxism (Georgetown, Guyana: People’s Progressive Party, 1975)
- Amilcar Cabral, Resistance and Decolonization, trans. Dan Wood (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)
- Asia:
- Petrus Liu, Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Durham ; London: Duke University Press Books, 2015)
- Amiya Kumar Bagchi and Amita Chatterjee, Marxism: With and Beyond Marx (Delhi: Routledge India, 2014)
- Tania Barlow, New Asian Marxisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002)
- Bidyut Chakrabarty, Left Radicalism in India (London: Routledge, 2014)
- Kamran Asdar Ali, Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947-1972 (I.B. Tauris, 2015)
- Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, 1 edition (London: Verso, 2013)
- Sudeep Chakravarti, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (London and New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008)
- Li Onesto, Dispatches from the People’s War in Nepal (London: Pluto Press, 2005).