France

In Part I we examined the Free Territory, or Makhnovshchina, the revolutionary movement in Southern Ukraine 1918-21. It was neither a peasant counter-revolution as portrayed in Trotskyist and Stalinist propaganda, nor an anarchist utopia. Rather it was part and parcel of the bloody process of the rise and fall of the Russian Revolution, itself a part of the post-war revolutionary wave. In Part II we finally look at The Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists or simply the Platform, and the Platformist tendency that it later inspired.

We translated the following two texts from 1988, because we think that there are still things we can learn from the strike movement back then. Today in the UK we are confronting similar questions: how can we organise the struggle for higher wages in the NHS and defeat the insulting 1% pay offer? How can we overcome divisions into different unions and professional groups and regions (e.g. with the government in Scotland offering a still puny 4% increase)

It is now 100 years since the Tours Congress of 25 to 31 December 1920, when the majority of delegates of the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) voted to join the Third International.

Quevedo said of the Spaniards: "they haven't been able to be historians but they deserved to be". This is still true of the 1936 Spanish Revolution: others have written the history. It's too early to write the history of the insurrection that started in Algeria during spring 2001, but it's not too late to defend it; and to fight the deep indifference as we see it in France.

From Black Flag #222 (2002).