The classic example of this is the Haymarket Martyrs. The standard Leninist line is to either call them "radicals" and/or trade union leaders or admit they were anarchists but fail to mention their trade union activism. This is because in the Leninist perspective anarchists fall into two categories. Either we are "individualists" (like Bakunin and Kropotkin!) who reject "collective class struggle" or we are "syndicalists" who accept that struggle but are doomed to failure for rejecting "political organisation." That anarchists who follow in the tradition of Kropotkin and Bakunin embrace, like them, both collective class struggle and political organisation simply does not compute and, consequently, goes unmentioned.
A more recent example of this historical revisionism caught my eye in the January 2005 issue of the SWP's Socialist Review magazine. In an article entitled "Happy Birthday Big Bill," Mike Davis commemorates the birth of the Industrial Workers of the World. Why he personified a mass union movement in one person escapes me, but the usual writing out of anarchists from labour history is shown. After noted that such "revolutionary socialists" as Eugene Debs and "his old sectarian antagonist" Daniel De Leon spoke, he mentions that "the most eloquent speech of the convention" was made by Lucy Parsons who "made it clear that this new solidarity also had to include working women, 'the slaves of slaves'." Davis describes her as an "ex-slave" and "widow of Albert Parsons, one of the Chicago radicals executed for the murder of a policeman in Haymarket Square."
Strangely, Davis did not bother to mention that this "most extraordinary figures on the American left" was an anarchist. And it would also have been nice if he had also mentioned that her husband had also been an anarchist and, furthermore, had been executed after being framed along with seven for the policemen killed in the Haymarket explosion.
He does inflict us with "the common stereotype of the Wobblies as romantic hobo anarchists" before dismissing it by arguing that the IWW was "an extraordinary melting pot of international revolutionary traditions." Yes it was, but it was that because of the influence of such anarchist unionists as Albert and Lucy Parsons and the syndicalist movements in Europe. The Marxist movement of the time was covering its reformism by revolutionary rhetoric and the IWW was part of a global revolt against it and the electioneering that had produced that dichotomy in the first place. And while a "few years later the IWW would become deeply involved in another epochal revolution in Mexico" along side Mexican anarchists, the US socialist parties stood aside and denounced it.
Needless to say, Davis ends his account with the "government repression and patriotic vigilantism during the First World War." For some reason he failed to mention the destructive role of the Leninists in the post-War period within the IWW. Following the orders of the Communist International, the US Communist Party worked within the IWW in an attempt to combat its "syndicalism" and "dual unionism", tie it to CP leadership and dissolve it into the AFL (ironically, the industrial unionism of the CIO in the 1930s showed the validity of the IWW's dual unionism tactic). Combined with the repression, this political manoeuvring ensured that the IWW became a shadow of its former self. It would be nice for Leninists to mention their sorry role in the decline of an organisation they praise so much (and whose ideas they reject).
And today the IWW is doing pretty well for a 100 year old. It is growing again as its brand of solidarity based, workplace rooted, direct actionist, libertarian unionism is proving to be as relevant today as it was in 1905. It has survived the attacks of both capitalists and Leninists for, in the end, its ideas and ideals are indeed "truly dangerous" to both.
The IWW can be contacted at www.iww.org (http://www.iww.org.uk/ for the UK branch).