Makhno - the anarchist myth

[dangeresque]

www.isreview.org/issues/53/makhno.shtml

very good article. the quality is surprising considering the source. Makhno was little more than a warlord that the anarchists turned into a hero. very good read.

[dangeresque]

But almost ninety years later, Makhno is still revered by anarchists. Explaining the ongoing interest in Makhno, Darch writes:

The Makhnovist movement, because it attracted literate supporters from the anarchist intelligentsia, is the best documented of the [peasant rebellions]. Historically, anarchism has often been the political expression of resistance adopted by social classes whose position is undermined by the historical trend of their times. Typically, anarchist revolutionaries are rural aristocrats—Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tolstoy—or wealthy peasants; rarely are they involved in centralization or industrialization. Anarchists are not so much anti-nationalist as pre-nationalist. They look back to the community that preceded the centralized nation-state. Their future is firmly rooted in an idealized past…. When Makhno began to struggle against the modernizing revolution of the Bolsheviks, a party of great theoretical and practical sophistication with the ability to adapt its strategy to changing circumstances, he failed. It is a measure of his gifts that his resistance to Bolshevism lasted so long. It is hardly an indication of the viability of the anarchist vision.110

LOL!