Preliminary Programme

This article examines the ways in which George Woodcock’s sustained engagement with Canadian nationalism and his distinctive cultural politics drew on the intellectual resources of his anarchism. In 1972, in the context of a Cold War power rivalry that had divided the world into hostile camps, Woodcock made a plea in The Canadian Forum for the ‘anti-nation’. As contexts shifted – from anxieties about US hegemony in North America in the 1970s to debates around Canadian patriation in the 1980s – this was a theme to which he returned consistently, a set of ideas informed by his anarchism that saw in these ‘untried libertarian visions’ the potential for a different kind of nation, shaped by a nationalism of the ‘patrias chicas’ preserving local independence, experimentation, and eccentricity. (1972, 7; Woodcock: 1981, 9). By this point Woodcock had emerged as one of Canada’s paramount public intellectuals, and a major actor in the country’s cultural life. A key figure in Britain’s anarchist movement in the 1930s and ‘40s, he became anarchism’s most influential historian with the publication of Anarchism (1962) after his emigration to Canada. This article demonstrates how Woodcock’s ‘anti-nation’ stemmed directly from his reading of this history, and on anarchist critiques of republicanism, seeking to retool nineteenth-century interventions to meet the challenges of the late-twentieth century. Drawing on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s evaluation of republican constitutionalism, and Peter Kropotkin’s anarchic federalism, he articulated a distinctive position in Canadian political life that anarchists had offered the only durable theorisations of autonomy and self-determination, both defined by novel forms of participatory democracy. If Canadians could acquaint themselves with anarchism’s role as a compelling early critic of republican conceptions of the state, and recover its protest that the centripetal state was not the only form of national organisation, Woodcock hoped that the door may be open building an anti-nation that was a ‘prototype of the post-nationalist world’ (1972, 11) (Show less)

Since its origins as a movement with Marxist-Leninist credentials struggling for the creation of a Kurdish nation-State carved out of the borders of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, the PKK underwent, from the early 2000s a drastic change in ideological direction. While still advocating the national liberation of the Kurdish, the movement not only dropped the demand of a separate State -it also rejected the idea as antithetical to their liberation. Influenced by thinkers such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Braudel and Murray Bookchin, they adopted a radical democratic communalist approach which they labelled "democratic confederalism". This system, based on the idea of grassroots democracy, gender liberation, ecology, opposition to capitalist modernity and the State, has developed significant practical and ideological intersections with the historical tradition of anarchism. This ideas have been put to practice at a big scale during the course of the brutal Syrian civil war, when firstly a self-administration in Rojava, the mainly Kurdish populated areas in North Syria, was declared -and many internationalists, among them numerous anarchists, have, indeed, participated in the fight for the defence of this experiment when it was attacked by the jihadists known as ISIS in 2014. With the liberation of mainly Arabic populated areas one after another in 2016 the North Syria Democratic Federation and in 2018 the North-East Democratic Federation has been declared.
This paper will explore the ideological foundations of this shift and its impact over nationalist thinking in the 21st century. We will also explore the practical dimension of the experience and the tensions of creating a non-Statist (con)federalist polity in a world dominated by Nation-States. (Show less)

Over the last couple of years, a new wave of nationalism in Catalonia has broken the immediate tradition of a Catalan conservative nationalism well-connected to the metropolitan elites. Although nationalist leaders talked much about the nation and of a new relation with the State, this discourse had much to do with their own privileges granted by the autonomous status. But the pro-independence mobilisation in Catalonia brought to the fore the Catalan civil society upsetting the political equilibrium prevalent until that moment. This prompted the Catalan government to call for a referendum on self-determination. As the date for the referendum approached, the political situation reached crisis point: The State decided to use naked repression to stop the poll and Catalans reacted with mass civil disobedience. While anarchists took part in the struggle against the police to defend the referendum, their participation was mostly felt in the historical general strike called against the repression on October 3rd. This was the biggest strike in the history of Catalonia, since the famous CNT-led strike in La Canadiense in 1919. This strike was also called by anarchosyndicalists, the CGT and the CNT, and also by anarchist organisations which took a pro-independence stance, such as Negres Tempestes, Heura Negra and Embat.

This cooperation, however, has a long history. Sectors of the Catalan republican movement have maintained close ties with the anarchist movement since 1842. Those relations have, at times, been close and the libertarian movement has adopted the defence of the language and the notion of a Catalan nation. From Josep Llunas to Cels Gomis, Joan Montseny or the positions of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, from the Modernist movement to the anarcho-independentism of the 20th century, or today’s anarchisms, the Catalan question has been present in anarchist reflections.

This presentation will explore the ideological elements which allowed for this close relationship, the ways in which anarchism became ‘catalanised’ and the specific tensions, the debates and the rationale behind the positions adopted by the anarchists during the 1-3 October 2017 events. (Show less)