The long awaited article from Alexander Reid Ross and Joshua Stephens has had its first volume released, and later chapters will come out every couple days for the next couple of weeks to give it time to simmer with those who have a stake in its contents. This volume outlined a little bit about Michael Schmidt’s background, then mostly looking at a 2008 internal document he shared with the South African platformist organization Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Front. The article itself goes into the deeply problematic elements of the paper that essentially says that people of color will never take the lead in revolutionary movements. Instead, white anarchists are essentially the vanguard that will lead these communities who can only serve at a lower level.
The racist implications of this paper are clear, even if people have disagreements about what Schmidt’s intent was. Schmidt himself has chosen not to remain silent about this part of the article as he has taken to social media to speak out in anger.
So it took my former publishers in the US a whole 18 days to come up with a single 2008 internal discussion document in which I ask difficult – and no doubt politically incorrect – questions as to why the ZACF had failed to (at that stage; they have now) attract significant black membership, as their “proof” that for decades I’ve been an undercover white supremacist. I’d say I was devastated if I hadn’t regained my sense of humour about all this buffoonery.
In fact the document was given to them by those who started this whispering campaign against me, so they probably had it 18 days ago; why wait so long? Because they are clutching at straws!
What he is mentioning at the end is that the statement came from AK Press a couple of weeks ago, yet the article itself was not ready at that time. Many expressed frustration that the evidence was not made immediately.
The next volume of the series on Schmidt will be released on Wednesday, October 14th.
Anti-Fascist News 
Having read the three segments of the article thus far made available by Ross and Stephens I think that the case that they present against Schmidt looks pretty damning for him. The second and third segments of the expose in particular demonstrate some pretty amazing detective work on the part of Ross and Stephens. This said, unless they have something else yet forthcoming to back it up I think it is a bit of stretch for them to imply that Schmidt ‘seduced’ anarchist on a global scale with his racist and fascistic ideals. In fact, it seems that Schmidt failed even to seduce them regionally when his proposal to divide ZCAF members by race and mandate white leadership for blacks was rejected by other ZACF members. Following which Schmidt begin distancing himself and then shortly thereafter resigned from ZCAF.
For certain, the book Black Flame has been influential in some anarchist circles but as a recent comment on the AK Press FB page duly noted, Black Flame promotes anarchism historically as being a global movement rooted in class-struggle and the solidarity of the international working-classes and not as a movement rooted in ethnic nationalism or white supremacy .
So the evidence thus far actually demonstrates that far from seducing the anarchist movement that Schmidt’s ambitions to surreptitiously transform ZCAF into a platform for his white supremacist and quasi-fascist ideas largely failed even before getting off of the ground. Following which Schmidt, failing to get his racist organisational proposals accepted by ZCAF gave up on introducing them via ZACF and left the organization behind, which by the way seems to have turned out to have been a fortuitous turn of events for ZACF.
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