Anarchism in Belgium

Anarchism spread into Belgium as Communards took refuge in Brussels with the fall of the Paris Commune. Most Belgian members in the First International joined the anarchist Jura Federation after the socialist schism. Belgian anarchists also organized the 1886 Walloon uprising, the Libertarian Communist Group, and several Bruxellois newspapers at the turn of the century. Apart from new publications, the movement dissipated through the internecine antimilitarism in the interwar period. Several groups emerged mid-century for social justice and anti-fascism. In September 1872, during the Hague Congress of the International Workingmen's Association, the Belgian delegates spoke out against the exclusion of Mikhail Bakunin proposed by the General Council of London, dominated by Karl Marx. In this founding conflict of anarchism, they joined the camp of the "anti-authoritarians" against the "authoritarians". Like Bakunin, the Belgian delegates refused to achieve their objectives by conquering political power and were in favor of a federalist structure of the International, in which the local groups retained a large degree of autonomy. According to them, the revolution would take place quickly and a new society would be built from below. From this split was born, at the congress of Saint-Imier on 15 September 1872, an "anti-authoritarian" International known as the Jura Federation. It was around this that the anarchist current was born, which then claimed to be called "revolutionary collectivism", wanting to be the promoter of a self-managed economic system outside all authority, all centralization, all states and giving as objective "the destruction of all political power by the revolutionary strike". The majority of Belgian members of the First International joined this anti-authoritarian International. In the mid-1870s, Belgian socialism was made up of a set of workers' associations anxious to maintain their independence and to stay away from politics. The local federation of Verviers was then the center of the anti-authoritarian International in Belgium.