Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism (Counter-power, 1)

Black Flame is the first of two volumes that reexamine anarchism's democratic class politics, its vision of a decentralized planned economy, and its impact on popular struggles in five continents over the last 150 years. From the nineteenth century to today's anticapitalist movements, it traces anarchism's lineage and contemporary relevance. It outlines anarchism's insights into questions of race, gender, class, and imperialism, significantly reframing the work of previous historians on the subject, and critiquing Marxist and nationalist approaches to those same questions.

An indispensable conceptual and historical road map, with close attention to Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, looking at its opposition to hierarchy, capitalism and the state; strategy of revolutionary counter-power; history in labour, community, anti-imperialism; participatory, cooperative economics; revolutions in Spain, Ukraine, and Korea; and revival in today's struggles.

Lucien van der Walt works at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa.

Michael Schmidt is a Johannesburg-based senior investigative journalist and journalism trainer.