In Defence of Anarchist Warlords

A harsh reality of liberation

Emiliano Zapata (with the big hat on his knee) sitting next to Pancho Villa, surrounded by fellow revolutionaries in Mexico palace

Warlords have a bad name — but chances are, some of your heroes were warlords.

A warlord is a military leader acting with autonomy in a subnational territory. Their continued autonomy means the state does not have a full monopoly on violent power. A warlord has a military retinue loyal to them and is able to independently enforce their will on political rivals. Generals, bandit chiefs, pirate captains, and leaders of peasant rebellions can all be warlords. Joan of Arc, William Wallace, Boudica, Liu Bei, Spartacus, and semi-mythological figures like King Arthur and Robin Hood were all warlords. Warlordism has been the default state of mankind for most of recorded human history.

Revolutionary leaders are usually military leaders who act with autonomy outside of the state and have a following loyal to them. Che Guevara, George Washington, Leon Trotsky, and Napoleon Bonaparte were all at one time warlords. Who gets to be called the brave revolutionary leader, the bloody tyrant, or the opportunistic bandit may depend on a person’s deeds — but it also depends on whether they win or lose in the end.

On first appearance, one revolutionary ideology you might expect to be against warlordism is anarchism. The consistent anarchist rejects unjust hierarchies and cults of personality. But this in itself does not rule out critical support for specific warlords, and the most successful mass experiments in anarchism have been facilitated through warlords.

Core territory in bright red, loosely-held territory in pale red

From 1918 to 1921 roughly seven million people lived in libertarian communes in the Free Territory in an area now encompassed by Ukraine. Here restrictions on freedom of press and association were lifted and agriculture and industry was worker-managed. This ambitious and widespread flourishing of anarchist organization was only possible because of the collapse of the Tsarist state, and the military protection of armed forces led by the warlord Nestor Makhno. Makhno wasn’t a political leader in the vein of a governor or tyrant — he was the chief military strategist and military commander for the region.

In the summer of 1918, Makhno was an existing revolutionary guerrilla, and the Nabat Confederation of Anarchist Organisations latched onto him as a vehicle to protect them and other anarchists who were fleeing Bolshevik suppression in Russia. They set their headquarters in Ukraine on a platform broadly acceptable to various disparate anarchist strains.

Nabat had in Makhno a sympathetic military leader with his own contingent of soldiers. Here was someone who was ideologically opposed to becoming another petty dictator, and in possession of the required ingenuity to defend a territory (indeed, he invented the drive-by shooting with the tachanka, a horse-drawn machine-gun).

A tachanka

By 1921, of course, things were in a dire spot. The Russian Civil War was drawing to a close, the White Army was defeated, and the Red Army was able to concentrate on defeating their former allies, Makhno’s Black Army.

Warlords are often defeated by rivals who are able to seize hegemonic state power.

Indeed, state-forming requires the destruction, pacification or containment of anyone else who could threaten the monopoly on the use of violence within a territory.

This is seen in another example of large-scale organizing on anarchist principles, that of Morelos under the protection of Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican Revolution was a convoluted series of coups, counter-coups, alliances, splits, repressions and uprisings. At its core, there were three main factions. On the right were followers of the dictator Porfirio Díaz and the succession of strongman generals after him. In the center, there were the Constitutionalists whose stated aim was to uphold the constitution and reinstate elections. On the left were the anarchist Magonistas, briefly successful in Baja California, and the Zapatistas of Morelos.

Emiliano Zapata

Zapata was a virtuoso horseman of mixed Indigenous-Mexican heritage. He came from a region dominated by sugar barons, the hacendados, who held many indigenous peons in debt bondage. Their large estates, the haciendas, encroached on the common land of peasant villages. In 1909, Zapata was elected leader of his village’s defense force. In this role, he led successful occupations of the neighboring hacienda, recovering access to water and grazing.

When revolution broke out against Díaz, Zapata trained a contingent of local men and became a revolutionary general, fighting alongside Francisco Madero’s Constitutionalists. By 1911, Diaz was in exile, and Madero was elected President. But once in power, Madero moved to appease the powerful hacendados. Rather than acquiesce to demands for land reform, he attempted to crush the Zapatistas.

Madero’s most brutal general, Victoriano Huerta, burnt villages and summarily executed peasants suspected of being Zapatistas. The Zapatistas, in turn, stopped demanding reform from the state and began enacting their plans with military force within their territory. Their main demand was the redistribution of a third of every hacienda to the dispossessed indigenous farmers. Or the entirety — if the hacendado didn’t cooperate.

Photo by Richard Saunders on Unsplash

Madero didn’t last long. General Huerta murdered Madero and seized power. The next phase of the revolution followed much the same pattern. Zapata worked with the Constitutionalists, and the ex-bandit Pancho Villa, to oust Huerta. By 1914, Zapata’s forces held the entire state of Morelos and Zapata himself led a column into Mexico City. Huerta fled into exile. For the next year in Morelos, the power of the sugar barons was curtailed and land was redistributed to self-organizing peasant villages. This was similar to what would later happen in Ukraine under the Free Territory.

Of course, like Madero before him, the new Constitutionalist president Venustiano Carranza acted to suppress the Zapatistas. A bloody war was waged in Morelos until Zapata’s assassination in 1919. Like Makhno, Zapata was able to act as a military protector allowing parts of an anarchist program to be implemented in the territory in which he was the elected warlord. Like Makhno, he was defeated and the anarchist experiment crushed. Once again, the winners of a revolution successfully asserted a monopoly on the use of organized violence.

In the modern day, there are projects which might not call themselves anarchist — but are often held up as working examples of anarchist principles. These include the Neozapatistas in the state of Chiapas in Mexico, and Rojava in northern Syria. In these two examples we see the limits of warlordism and possibilities beyond it as a means of protecting an anarchist territory.

The Neozapatistas hold up Zapata as a hero but have a much more developed political philosophy.

Subcomandante Marcos, a former philosophy student and current guerilla, helped form the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in the late 1980s.

They led an uprising in 1994, which the Mexican state could have crushed. But the eyes of the world media were on Mexico. President Ernesto Zedillo eventually came to recognize that if Marcos was killed, he would have to deal with countless more violent successor movements with the inevitable bombings and kidnappings, rather than one movement that could be contained in Chiapas.

Now an uneasy peace is maintained, with the EZLN providing armed protection of the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (MAREZ). Here land is held in common, there is universal healthcare, and local government is by popular assembly. Subcomandante Marcos may have started as a warlord, but like Makhno and Zapata he isn’t the ruler of the territory his army protects.

MAREZ continues to be possible in Mexico where central power is weak and brutal drug barons are locked in a constant low-level war with one another and the state. In a similar way, Rojava can persist in Syria while the civil war continues.

In 2011, Kurdish political parties joined together to form the Kurdish Supreme Committee and established the People’s Protection Units (YPG), as well as the well known all-woman militia (YPJ). Over the next few years, they seized the northern part of Syria. After a split led to the dissolution of the Supreme Committee, in early 2014, the administration was reformed into autonomous cantons along democratic confederalist lines. Swathes of farmland have been put under community ownership and production is increasingly managed by workers’ councils.

Like in the Russian and Mexican Revolutions, the situation is still chaotic internally among different groups within Syria. A stalemate with state forces — as seen in modern-day Mexico — seems unlikely. While an accommodation has been made with the brutal President Bashar al-Assad, conflict is now ongoing with the Turkish state. As elsewhere, we see autonomous military power being used to protect a developing anarchistic project. However, unlike in the other examples, there is not a standout charismatic military leader.

(Abdullah Öcalan, the originator of Democratic Confederalism lives in a Turkish cell — and so is more of an ideological leader, like Volin in revolutionary Ukraine, or Magón in revolutionary Mexico. Subcomandante Marcos is unusual in having been both a philosopher and a commander, though nowadays in the context of a decentralized EZLN and no active military campaigns, he presumably has more time for writing.)

With the lack of singular warlord, Rojava is similar to Revolutionary Catalonia, in which various anarcho-syndicalist measures were undertaken over the course of three years under the military protection of various revolutionary militias.

The Zapatistas were crushed after Zapata died and the Free Territory was annexed when Makno was forced into Parisian exile. But it is not truly the removal of their military commanders that doomed their projects, rather, it was the dissolution of their forces. When Subcomandante Marcos dies, the EZLN will likely continue on in Chiapas. Any number of Kurdish leaders can die and the project will continue so long as it is not crushed.

Anarcho-warlordism is not the only way a libertarian socialist territory can be protected, but it cannot be outright dismissed either. Nobody wants to live in a state of permanent armed standoff. Warlords aren’t a product of a healthy world, but they can be useful in the protection of regions of comparative freedom.