In the internal peripheries of various States in the former Third World, State power cannot fully cohere and territorialize. Usually situated among mountainous formations, these internal peripheries have long defied civilizational imposition. James C. Scott described it in the Zomian highlands of mainland Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, peoples would routinely escape the Spanish colony by practicing *remontar* or escaping to the mountains. Their Indigenous descendants are known as remontados today. Across the Americas, enslaved peoples would also flee to safety of the jungles and mountains to form maroon communities, some of which reconstituted African polities and and some were the size of some small European countries. Across time and space, internal peripheries acted as *refugia* by which peoples could escape and defy State power and all the civilization that it entailed—corvée, taxes, slavery, colonialism, proletarianization, etc. This is the “anarchy of the peripheries.”
The anarchy of the peripheries has also historically been the refuge, bulwarks, and strongholds of guerrilla movements, some of which were Marxist and communist. These peripheries that are the refuge of guerrilla movements is what I would term as “rebel peripheries.” The relationship of the rebel peripheries and the anarchy of the peripheries is marked by what I call as a “heretical” thesis, of which has two components. The first is that many of these authoritarian guerrilla movements survive and even thrive *as a result of the condition* of the anarchy of the peripheries, of the failure of State power to fully cohere and territorialize in the internal peripheries. This is irony: that authoritarian guerrilla persist because of a relative condition of anarchy. The second component is that it is Marxists and other authoritarians, and not libertarians, that have been able to fully take advantage of the anarchy of the peripheries and develop rebel peripheries. This too is irony: the very peripheries where anarchy thrives, where State power is weakest, it is the authoritarians, and not the anarchists that are to be found. Why is this so?
From Infrapolitics to Rebel Peripheries
The anarchy of the peripheries is largely constituted on two components: geography and political power. These are highly interrelated. State power is normally best constituted under specific geographical features like plains, rivers, and valleys—places that are also easier for populations to settle. This is no coincidence. For whatever reason, State power has difficulty imposing its rule of law beyond easily-traversal geographies. A notable exception is the northern Andes mountains in Columbia and Ecuador where State power coheres stronger in the mountains where most of the population lives, but this is due to the fact that the more favorable climate of the Andes allows more people to settle there than in the coasts of those countries. This clear exception also reveals that State power better coheres and territorializes in areas of higher population density, which itself is also conditioned by geographies that are easier to settle.
State power also seems to better cohere in some countries more than others. In the former First World and Second World like in the historical revolutionary situations in Spain and Ukraine, State power was able to cohere and territorialize and supersede whatever anarchy could have existed due to the revolutionary situation. But it is in the former Third World where the anarchy of the peripheries were able to shield and allow the flourishing of Marxist guerrilla movements and other rebel peripheries.
Archaeologists have a formal term for the anarchy of the peripheries during the age of colonization: pericolonialism. Pericolonialism is the condition of peoples and territories in the peripheries of colonial projects. In the Philippines, pericolonial archaeology (through the work of Stephen Acabado) is revealing that the Ifugao and other Igorot peoples of the Cordilleras were not unaffected by colonialism but rather reacted to it and even restructured their societies to defend against colonialism.
During the colonial period of the Philippines, people would practice *remontar*, or returning to the mountain, to escape the colonizers. It is said by Frederic Henry Sawyer (an American colonial anthropologist) that the Pangasinense had a tendency to flee to the mountains to escape the colony, given the proximity of Pangasinan to the mountains of Benguet. James C. Scott described “infrapolitics” or invisible politics much like how infrared is invisible to the naked eye. For Scott, desertion was infrapolitical compared to a mutiny, which is obviously political. In this sense, *remontar*, and related concepts like marronage, was the infrapolitical equivalent to anti-colonial rebellions. Fleeing the colony was less risky that challenging colonial State power. Remontados and maroons alike would flee to the anarchy of the peripheries where they can live without the diktats of State power and the slavery that it entailed.
In the period of creole postcoloniality, or the transferring of control of State power from colonial suzerains to creole bourgeoisies, I argue that pericolonialism transforms into “peristatism,” or the condition of peoples and spaces in the peripheries of State power and territoriality. The anarchy of the peripheries in the contemporary age is marked by the inability of State power to cohere and territorialize in these peripheries. As we have seen throughout history, these anarchic peripheries become havens for *rebel peripheries* by which guerrilla movements set up shop. In this sense, these rebel peripheries are the visibly political form to the infrapolitical practice of *remontar* and marronage.
In the Philippines, there is a colloquial term for joining the communist insurgency led by the New People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). The term is “*mamundok*” and it is a literal translation of the Spanish “*remontar*,” both meaning to go up the mountain. This *mamundok*, however, is an explicit politicization of *remontar*. While Remontados wish to merely desert State power, those who *mamundok* explicitly seek to *challenge* State power. Under the theory of Maoism, the protracted people’s war aims to militarize the whole countryside and “surround the cities” and finally contest and conquer State power.
As mentioned previously, this contention for political power is heretical in the sense that it aims to build revolutionary State power precisely in the anarchy of the peripheries where State power is weakest. Rebel peripheries build power precisely in the long tradition of infrapolitical anarchy of the peripheries. It is in the peripheries where Marxist guerrilla forces converge and wage people’s wars, from the CPP, the Communist Party of Malaya, the Communist Party of Thailand, the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the Naxalites in India, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and many others. Of these, it is only the PKK and the Zapatistas (EZLN) that are libertarian in content. Crucially, the libertarianism of the PKK is still in doubt by many, and the Zapatistas originally started out as Maoist before embracing a unique Indigenous libertarianism after dialogue and collaboration with the Maya of Chiapas.
So we are faced with the obvious fact that most rebel peripheries are led by authoritarians who invariably use assassinations, kangaroo courts, and violent purges to keep power in their rebel peripheries (much has been written on the matter, by myself and others). Anarchist armed struggle has tended to instead be conducted in revolutionary situations or in urban areas. A comparative analysis is necessary.
Historical and Contemporary Anarchist Armed Struggle
In concerted and generalized periods of anarchist armed struggle, the heretical thesis has generally held true. We can consider two cases in the Ukrainian and Spanish revolutions. (While we would like to consider a third in the Korean Shinmin prefecture, the structure of their armed struggle is not well documented.)
Neither Ukraine nor Spain had significant internal peripheries where State power was unable to cohere fully and territorialize. Ukraine is largely a vast open plain, quite ideal for the rapid mobilization of an armed central authority across it. Once, however, Ukraine was part of a vast periphery of empires where Cossack peoples largely retained their autonomy from empires and States through mobility, raids, and mercenary service. As the technologies of the State improved, State power cohered and territorialized in Ukraine, integrating the formerly autonomous cossacks into the Russian imperial system. By the time of the Ukrainian revolution, State power lost its coherence and deterritorialized in the country, allowing for a kind of anarchy. The Makhnovshchina was a “Republic on Tachanka”—always on the move. Like the cossacks before them, the Makhnovshchina used their mobility to their advantage to evade and assault State power. But the specific anarchy of the Ukrainian revolution was conditioned by the chaos of the revolutionary situation and the invasion of foreign powers, not by the inherent anarchy of the peripheries. The anarchy of the Makhnovshchina was not necessarily rooted in the specific geographic structure of Ukraine, but by the political situation and the creative mobilization by Nestor Makhno and his Black Army. Indeed, the “Republic on Tachanka” had no recognizable territorial bulwark—it was rather first and foremost a social movement backed by a guerrilla army. The Makhnovshchina did not present itself as what we now recognize as rebel peripheries today. Eventually, however, the Makhnovshchina was crushed and Bolshevik State power did cohere and territorialize in Ukraine.
In Spain, the situation was similar. State power had cohered and territorialized across the Iberian peninsula for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The collapse and deterritorialization of State power was, again, conditioned by revolution, not by geography. Where anarchists were able to carve out spaces of autonomy or wage armed struggle, it was because they have allied with the Republican State. However, when the political settlement between the Republicans and the anarchists no longer became tenable, the full force of State power was borne on the anarchists. Iberia did have internal peripheries throughout the mountainous and forested regions, the most major of which are the Pyrenees. There the Spanish *maquis* continued the fight against Fransisco Franco and fascism. Some of the *maquis* were anarchist like the Sabaté brothers Quico, Pepe and Manolo. But Francoist State power did eventually cohere completely within the Spanish internal peripheries, forcing *maquis* both anarchist and Stalinist to evacuate, desist, or die in the resistance. Indeed, the three Sabaté brothers all died by the hands of the fascists. Furthermore, the *maquis* guerrilla war in post-war Spain did not have recognizable liberated zones like with rebel peripheries.
In both Ukraine and Spain, as the State power of authoritarians matured, the anarchy of the revolutionary situation was superseded by to cohering and territorialization of State power. In Spain, which did briefly have some anarchic peripheries, the maturation of the Francoist dictatorship eventually superseded whatever anarchy the forests and the mountains provided. This is not the condition of how the anarchy of the peripheries presents itself today, which presents itself as a persistent peristatism where State power cannot cohere or territorialize completely.
However, similar to the rebel peripheries of today, anarchists in both the Spanish and Ukrainian revolutions had the peasantry as a major mass base. Beyond Iberia and Ukraine, classical anarchism in Italy also won the support of the peasantry. Much like the peasantry of the peripheries today, the desire for some level of independence from the market and State system through small-scale land ownership and tilling dovetails with anarchist politics. This is why, for example, that Marxists are wont to slander anarchism as “petty bourgeois” as in a sense anarchism did win mass bases among independent peasants (who could be classified as petty bourgeois).
After the period of classical anarchism, the sunset of which is marked by a world-historical demobilization of anarchism, there were (and are) still periods of post-classical anarchist armed struggle. We can consider three forms, the pro-organizational type of the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU), insurrectionary anarchism, and united front in Rojava.
The FAU’s armed wing of OPR-33 largely operated in the cities and mostly conducted targeted armed offensive meant to support direct action and political efforts. The FAU made a conscious decision to put political forces at the forefront to prevent the militarization of the political arm. Uniquely proletarian in character, the FAU was based on the urban working class of Uruguay. The FAU did not conduct a people’s war in the countryside or make use of peristatism or the anarchy of the peripheries. Rather, they remained proletarian and urban in character.
Attacks by insurrectionary anarchists are usually urban in character and do not seem to generalize armed struggle (not for lack of trying, however). These attacks are conducted across the contemporary world and rarely have some coherent identity like that of a guerrilla communist party. Some names can be described, such as the Mediterranean-based Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI) or the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (SPF). Some theorists such as the late Alfredo Maria Bonanno have been identified with insurrectionary anarchism. Insurrectionary anarchism seems to keep a consistent urban character with their attacks. Similar to the FAU, we do not see insurrectionary anarchists make use of peristatism or the anarchy of the peripheries to their advantage. If they build mass bases among people in the periphery, it is not well known.
In the last case, we have seen is anarchists joining International Freedom Battalion in Rojava—the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES). Three groups are notable here, the Revolutionary Union for Internationalist Solidarity (RUIS), the International Revolutionary People’s Guerrilla Forces (IRPGF), and the Tekoşîna Anarşîst (Anarchist Struggle, TA). This kind of armed struggle was meant to support the existing military campaign in Syria against Daesh and later Türkiye and their Syrian proxies. The war in Syria is largely conventional in character rather than guerrilla. Rojava is not exactly a rebel periphery with the territory having relatively significant urban areas and having (for all intents and purposes) a conventional *de facto* government. While many an anarchist has celebrated the higher levels of autonomy and democracy in DAANES, it is still a relatively conventional rebel State apparatus, if a revolutionary one. This is not to dissuade support of Rojava, but just to show that it is not conventionally a rebel periphery. Nor is it clear if anarchists in North and East Syria build mass bases among peripheral peoples.
As we can see, post-classical anarchist armed struggle had not historically made use of the anarchy of the peripheries or made mass bases among peripheral peoples. Why is this so?
The Defeat of Anarchism
Largely, the reason why anarchists have not been able to make use of peristatism to develop anarchist rebel peripheries is because of the world-historical defeat of classical anarchism which saw the demobilization of anarchism worldwide and the conversion of many anarchist and proto-anarchist milieus to Marxism-Leninism, and later Maoism. Similarly, it was only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and capitalist restoration in most of the former Second World where we see libertarian alternatives like Abdullah Öcalan and the Zapatistas arise.
Where anarchism could have taken root among peripheral peoples, the galvanization of world Leninism and generous funding of communist parties in the wake of the victory of the Bolsheviks crowded out alternative revolutionary formations. The Soviet Union and other Second World states could invite revolutionaries to learn Marxism-Leninism and train for guerrilla war. Anarchist revolutionaries simply could not compete with such resources. Many converted to Marxism.
In the Philippines and China, this was indeed the case. The Soviet Union could provide tutelage and resources, so revolutionaries tended to adopt Marxism-Leninism as a guide for their own revolutionary praxis. Later on, it was Maoist China who supported the export of Mao Zedong Thought to Third World countries.
Where Soviet Marxism-Leninism was increasingly seen as decrepit and stagnant, a revitalization of revolutionary Marxism was done under the banner of Mao Zedong Thought. Revolutionaries across the Third World would challenge “official” communist parties for the development of new people’s wars and rebel peripheries. This was indeed the case in the Philippines where the Communist Party of the Philippines displaced the old party, the PKP-1930.
Anarchism’s place in all this was in the sidelines. Sure, there were localized revitalization in some places, most notably in the May–June 1968 events in France, but anarchism remained to be largely marginal movement internationally. It is only recently after world-historical decommunization in the collapse of the Soviet Union that anarchism returned with a vengeance. This inversely proportional relation between Marxism and anarchism is well known in anarchist emergence literature.
It is Right to Rebel
In terms of the anarchy of the periphery, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movements built their party power on peripheral peoples, mostly peasants of varying kinds and/or Indigenous peoples. Peristatism here is not just a condition where State power is weak, but is also one of poverty. Peripheries are not as well integrated into the world-capitalist system as urban, suburban, and near-urban rural areas are. The condition of periphery also means that the welfare state is not as strong there as in more integrated territories. This localized lack of State power and poverty appeals to Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movements.
In the peripheries, the people there lack access to medicine, education, and law. Communist parties, such as that in the Philippines, have proven their capacity to provide where the State fails. The New People’s Army is not just a fighting force, but a mobile clinic, school, and court rolled up into one. Anarchists do not oppose communist parties because they do these things, however (although we may oppose the law part). After all, in both the classical and post-classical period, much of the social life of anarchists that did provide mutual aid and *ateneos* in health care and education were notably urban in character.
Indeed, the underground governments of Marxist-Leninist parties can and have been quite brutal at times, which is one of the reasons anarchist oppose them. In the Philippines, Peru, Nepal, and India, Maoists committed all kinds of atrocities on their own mass bases from brutal purges, retaliatory attacks, kangaroo courts, and even massacres. (An accounting of which group did what cannot be recounted here.) This is, of course, is not limited to Maoists. The Makhnovshchina conducted a pogrom against the Mennonites and the Spanish anarchists could have been overzealous in the murder of clergy and lay Catholics. The point, however, is not to declaim violence, but rather that violence ought have a specific character, that being against the State, proletarianization, work, and all. (An abolitionist argument on the character of violence can be read elsewhere like in my “Why Socialists Must be Abolitionists.”)
Much of the model of Marxist-Leninist rebel peripheries is due to Yan’an model of the Communist Party of China, that being to create a communist bulwark in a periphery far from enemy State power to construct an underground revolutionary government. From Yan’an, the Chinese communists were able to take the whole of China. This bulwark would then be the temporary capital of the communist insurgency until the Party can take State power in full.
However, anarchists declaim the building of such a government, whether in the peripheries or in a revolutionary situation. Rather, anarchists might take point from the Ukrainian revolution where the Makhnovshchina was able to temporarily eradicate State power and other rivals (nationalists, imperialists, Bolsheviks) to allow the proletariat and peasantry to build what they please. In this way, the Makhnovshchina allowed the flourishing, even for a brief time, of various soviets and communes where workers and peasants experimented in revolution. Similar happened in the Spanish revolution, albeit the anarchist additionally had a disastrous alliance with the Republicans.
Perhaps in the contemporary world, anarchists would point to the Zapatistas, who, starting from a Maoist position, actually did try to serve the people and learn from them and then found that the masses really did want to build something libertarian rather than yet another State—underground or otherwise. So that it is in Zapatista Chiapas that the political form favors bottom-up structures and probably the truest political democracy in the world. Basing themselves in a rebel periphery, the Zapatistas defend their autonomy from States with a combination of creative politics and armed force.
But despite the endurance of the Zapatista model, the general endurance of the rebel peripheries, and the resurgence of anarchism in the past decades, why is it that we have not yet seen an *anarchist* rebel periphery?
Towards an Anarchist Rebel Periphery?
For quite a number of reasons, contemporary anarchism is still very much urban-based with mass bases among workers, students, and other urbanites. But this is not destiny. Quite a number of communist parties, like that in the Philippines, started out as urban and even student movements that eventually established mass bases in the peripheries and started people’s wars. Furthermore, history is not destiny either. Just because anarchists have not made use of the anarchy of the peripheries does not mean that anarchist rebel peripheries cannot exist. But there are still quite a number of reasons why anarchists today are not founding rebel peripheries.
Most of the world is increasingly urban. This is a recurring trend in all countries and may be part of capitalist development. If more of the world’s population is in the urban, then so is the class struggle. A lot of what rebel peripheries actually do is to funnel militancy from the urban to the rural, as is the case in the Philippines. With the brain drain of radicals and militants, those in the urban class struggle are left with less boots on the ground.
In some countries like the Philippines, building rival projects in rebel peripheries will get us killed by guerrillas. It is not as if the communist party will allow some anarchists to go around establishing councils and communes that could potentially threaten their hegemony.
Despite the authoritarianism and the far-right on the rise, conditions are not yet forcing us to do purely underground work. We still have leeway to operate in cities and mostly legally. Unlike the brutal past dictatorships in Nepal, the Philippines, and Peru, we can still still operate mostly openly. While there is State repression, the character is as severe as it could be.
If conditions do worsen that forces our movements underground, then perhaps having an underground railroad towards a rebel periphery might be useful for us. Perhaps then, an insurrectionary strategy grounded in the anarchy of the peripheries would be viable.
Crucially, however, our current world is also one where State power continues to grow stronger. State power is increasingly interfering in many spheres of life. It is cohering and territorializing in the far corners of the world. This has been going on since antiquity as more and more of the world is being territorialized by States. It is increasingly easier to travel to peripheries, making them less peripheral. Perhaps the anarchy of the periphery is a dying breed.
In Myanmar, where liberal-democratic and socialist movements were driven underground and to rebel peripheries in open rebellion, anarchists are rather few and out organized by other groups like the armed liberal-democratic opposition, ethnic armies, and even a reforged Communist Party of Burma. Efforts to found a Black Army there have been smothered in the crib.
Most importantly perhaps, we can and should ask: What are we even building if we build guerrilla fronts and establish rebel peripheries? Ursula Le Guin wrote, “The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.” If all we have are means, is building a rebel periphery something that, as Errico Malatesta urges, allows us to walk towards anarchy always? And even if contemporary anarchism is largely urban in character, do not the people in the peripheries also deserve autonomy and armed self-defense? Would not moving to and organizing in the peristatal peripheries be great acts of anarchist solidarity? After all, there are still many places in the world where State power is weak and where the governments are brutal.
Ultimately, this essay is but preliminary work to understanding the question of the anarchy of the peripheries and what rebellions could lurk there. I do not have answers to the questions I ask. We cannot discount the possibility that anarchists can and will build an anarchist rebel periphery.
Simoun Magsalin is a reader of books about social ecology, abolition, socialism, anarchism and communism. He is a dreamer for a better world, a digital librarian, and archivist for radical sites.