Demanding the Impossible Part 2

See Part 1 here: Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

American Individualists and Communists

THE UNITED STATES, WITH its traditional hostility to central government, has produced many original anarchists. Like their European counterparts, the individualists amongst them drew inspiration from Adam Smith’s confidence in the market’s capacity to bring about economic and social order, and they assumed that a modified form of capitalism would lead to anarchy. But while later in the century they were influenced by Proudhon, their anarchism was largely a home-grown affair.1 It developed out of the American sense of independence and individuality which had been forged by the self-reliant settlers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Josiah Warren   The first real American anarchist was the musician and inventor Josiah Warren.2 He was first a member of Robert Owen’s utopian colony New Harmony, but left in 1827 because of its communal property arrangements and system of collective authority which he felt prevented initiative and responsibility and suppressed individuality. Warren thought that it had failed to reconcile the need for personal autonomy and the demand for communal conformity; the ‘united interests’ of the members were directly at war with their individual personalities and the circumstances.

The experience did not lead Warren however to reject the principle of co-operative living, but rather made him aware that society should adapt to the needs of the individual and not vice versa. He henceforth adopted the principle that:

SOCIETY MUST BE SO CONSTRUCTED AS TO PRESERVE THE SOVEREIGNTY OF EVERY INDIVIDUAL INVIOLATE. That it must avoid all combinations and connexions of persons and interests, and all other arrangements, which will not leave every individual at all times at LIBERTY to dispose of his or her person, and time, and property, in any manner in which his or her feelings or judgement may dictate, WITHOUT INVOLVING THE PERSONS OR INTERESTS OF OTHERS.3

  In his Equitable Commerce (1846), Warren further argued that each person should be the final judge of right and wrong. He advocated a society in which every agent is independent from his fellows and unable to suffer the consequences of actions he does not commit. The only way to avoid discord is to avoid all necessity for artificial organizations. ‘The Individual’, Warren insisted ‘“is by nature a law unto himself” or herself, and if we ever attain our objects, this is not to be overlooked or disregarded.’4 It is worthy of note that Warren adds ‘or herself’; unlike most of his contemporaries, he was concerned with the individuality of women as much as men. His radical individualism moreover did not prevent him from trying to establish libertarian communities in which people defined their own wants and received according to their work done.

Although he worked out his principles independently, Warren has been called the ‘American Proudhon’.5 Like Proudhon, he focused on property as the key to human freedom. Each individual has the right to the product of his or her labour, but no one could be entirely self-sufficient. Existing forms of production made a division of labour inevitable. To overcome this contradiction, Warren proposed like Robert Owen an exchange of notes based on labour time, with the additional proviso that the intensity of labour be taken into account in evaluating an individual’s work. He wanted to establish an ‘equitable commerce’ in which all goods are exchanged for their cost of production. He therefore proposed ‘labour notes’ to replace conventional money, assuming that each seller would accurately calculate his or her labour time. In this way profit and interest would be eradicated and a highly egalitarian order would emerge.

On leaving New Harmony, Warren tried out his system in a Time Store which he set up in Cincinatti. It lasted three years and demonstrated the practicality of his ideas. Goods were sold at cost price and customers gave the storekeeper labour notes representing an equivalent time of their own work to recompense his labour. Keen to spread the new gospel, Warren managed to earn enough money from his patents (which included the first design for a rotary press) to bring out a journal called The Peaceful Revolutionist in 1833, the first anarchist periodical to appear in America. He also set up a model village based on the equitable exchange of labour which he hoped would be the first of many such communities. In the long run, he thought that two hours’ labour a day would suffice to provide all necessaries.

The next experiment Warren undertook was called the Village of Equity in Ohio. Half a dozen families bought a strip of land, built their own houses, and set up a co-operative sawmill. With relationships based on voluntary agreements, it proved to be the first anarchist community in any country since the Diggers tried to set up theirs on George’s Hill during the English Revolution. Unfortunately, it collapsed through illness. Warren was not dismayed and immediately founded in 1846 another community called Utopia, mainly with former members of Fourierist communities. Based on stone quarries and sawmills, it attracted about a hundred members and lasted into the 1860s. At the beginning, it was entirely libertarian and voluntary in character. ‘Throughout our operations on the ground’, Warren observed in 1848,

everything has been conducted so nearly upon the Individualist basis that no one meeting for legislation has taken place. No Organization, no indefinite delegated power, no ‘Constitution’, no ‘laws’ or ‘Bye-laws’, ‘rules’ or ‘Regulations’ but such as each individual makes for himself and his own business. No officers, no priests nor prophets have been resorted to — nothing of either kind in demand.6

  Warren moved on in 1850 to establish a third community called the City of Modern Times on Long Island which survived for more than a decade. True to its individualist principles, the only way of dealing with a recalcitrant member was the boycott: ‘When we wish to rid ourselves of unpleasant persons, we simply let them alone’, a friend of Warren’s recalled. ‘We buy nothing of them, sell them nothing, exchange no words with them — in short, by establishing a complete system of non-interference with them, we show them unmistakably that they are not wanted here, and they usually go away on their own accord.’7 The settlers showed remarkable mutual tolerance, and remained faithful to ‘the great sacred right of Freedom even to do silly things’.8

Warren’s form of individualism did not exclude co-operation for mutual advantage. He argued, for instance, that something like a communal kitchen would be cheap and efficient and would ‘relieve the female of the family from the full, mill-horse drudgery to which they otherwise are irretrievably doomed’.9 He also suggested that individuals could choose to live together, and that there could be ‘hotels for children’, organized according to the peculiarities of their wants and pursuits. Like Utopia, Modern Times did not collapse but rather evolved into a more traditional village with mutualist leanings.

In his theory, Warren remained consistent to the end, calling for complete religious freedom – ‘every man his own church’ – and asserting the absolute sovereignty of the individual – ‘every man his own nation’.10 He looked to a classless society of equal opportunity, with all coercive institutions abolished and replaced by a regime of voluntary contract To enforce contracts and to sanction infractions against the ‘law of equal liberty’, Warren advocated the deployment of rotating, voluntary juries who could shape general rules which would deal with individual cases. He even countenanced the use of public censure, imprisonment and death as possible sanctions, although he recognized that ‘punishment is in itself an objectionable thing, productive of evil even when it prevents greater evil, and therefore it is not wise to resort to it for the redress of trivial wrongs.’11

The practical success of Warren’s theories made them particularly attractive, and he went on to inspire individual anarchists like Lysander Spooner and Stephen Pearl Andrews. When William B. Greene introduced Proudhon’s mutualism into America, its reception had already been prepared by Warren.

Even John Stuart Mill praised Warren as a ‘remarkable American’. While noting abundant differences in detail, he accepted his general conception of liberalism and admitted that he had borrowed the phrase ‘the sovereignty of the individual’ from the Warrenites. Mill also correctly observed that while Warren’s Village Community had a superficial resemblance to some aspects of socialism, it was opposed to them in principle since ‘it recognizes no authority in Society over the individual, except to enforce equal freedom of development for all individualities’.12

The lawyer and linguist Stephen Pearl Andrews adopted Warren’s notion of the sovereignty of the individual and his principle that cost should be the equitable limit of price. Throughout the universe, Andrews asserted, ‘Individuality is the essential law of order’.13 At the same time, he argued that the cost principle underlies individuality, or the ‘disconnection of interests’, since it ensures that I take as much of your labour for my benefit, as you take from me for your benefit.

But Andrews was not content to accept these principles merely in theory. He consistently opposed slavery and tried to free the state of Texas by raising money to buy off all of its slaves but the war with Mexico intervened. He also argued that sexual behaviour and family life should be matters of personal responsibility beyond the control of Church and State. Above all, he applied Warren’s principle of the ‘sovereignty of the individual’ to both sexes, advocating the ‘complete emancipation and self-ownership’ of women as well as men.

Lysander Spooner   Another American individualist, Lysander Spooner, turned Lockean arguments to anarchist conclusions. In Natural Lam; or the Science of Justice (1882), he asserted that justice requires each individual to respect the inviolability of person and property. Since in the state of nature men are at war when they forget justice, in civil society ‘it is evidently desirable that men should associate, so far as they freely and voluntarily can do, for the maintenance of justice among themselves, and for mutual protection against wrong-doers.’14 Such a voluntary association to maintain justice is nothing like a minimal State, but resembles more an insurance policy against fire or commercial loss. It is wholly a matter of contract.

As a lawyer, Spooner at first accepted the American Constitution. In his early writings, especially in a treatise on slavery, he recognized that it could not be reconciled with the right of private judgement. He also came to believe that trial by jury is more likely to bring about justice than government statutes. The Civil War finally convinced him that it is wrong for a people to be compelled to submit to, and support, a government they do not want. In his series of No Treason pamphlets, he argued ‘if a man has never consented or agreed to support a government, he breaks no faith in refusing to support it. And if he makes war upon it, he does so as an open enemy, and not as a traitor.’15 Consent must be unanimous, requiring the separate consent of every individual who is required to contribute, either by taxation or personal service, to the government.

Spooner was consistent, if nothing else: with irrefutable logic he demolished the contractual theory of the State in general, and the US Constitution in particular, on the grounds that it is impossible to say that every citizen has made a contract with government. People can contract for nobody but themselves; it is absurd to say that they can make political contracts binding on subsequent generations as the founding fathers tried to do. Any government that claims authority on the basis of an invalid social contract is clearly illegitimate. Indeed, all the great governments of the world, Spooner insists, have been

mere bands of robbers, who have associated for purposes of plunder, conquest, and the enslavement of their fellow men. And their laws, as they have called them, have been only such agreements as they found it necessary to enter into, in order to maintain their organizations, and act together in plundering and enslaving others, and in securing to each his agreed share of the spoils.16

  Unfortunately the ‘tyrant-thief’ of government dupes its subjects by convincing them that they are free simply because some of them can vote for a new master every few years. Voting is nothing more than an act of self-defence made in the vain hope that one will remain free while others are enslaved.

In his pamphlet Poverty: Its Illegal Causes and Legal Cure (1846), Spooner traced crime to poverty and fear of poverty which in turn is itself a sign of pernicious inequality and the unjust distribution of wealth. The remedy for crime is therefore to turn the present ‘wheel of fortune’ into ‘an extended surface, varied somewhat by inequalities, but still exhibiting a general level, affording a safe position for all, and creating no necessity, for either force or fraud, on the part of any one, to enable him to secure his standing’.17 To this end he recommends that every man should be his own employer, and he depicts an ideal society of independent farmers and entrepreneurs who have access to easy credit. If every person received the fruits of his own labour, the just and equal distribution of wealth would result.

Although he did not call himself an anarchist, Spooner invariably traced the ills of American society to its government and argued that civil society should be organized as a voluntary association. Contemporary right-wing libertarians in the United States like Murray Rothbard and Robert Nozick have been impressed by Spooner’s arguments, but his concern with equality as well as liberty makes him a left-wing individualist anarchist. Indeed, while his starting-point is the individual, Spooner goes beyond classical liberalism in his search for a form of rough equality and a community of interests.

Benjamin R. Tucker   Benjamin Tucker was the first American thinker to call himself an anarchist with pride. He was influenced by Warren (whom he called his ‘old friend and master’), but he further developed American individualist anarchism by drawing on Proudhon, Bakunin and Stirner. He was, a friend declared, ‘an all-round man — Atheist, Anarchist, Egoist, Free Lover — not, like so many reformers, radical in one direction and reactionary in another’.18 Although he was not an original thinker, Tucker was the most influential in spreading anarchism in America, arguing that it was not a system of philosophy but ‘the fundamental principle in the science of political and social life’.19 In 1878 he founded the Radical Review and, three years later, Liberty, which adapted from Proudhon the rubric: ‘Not the Daughter but the Mother of Liberty’. It became the best anarchist periodical in English, celebrated for its aggressive and controversial tone. Tucker not only made pioneering translations of Proudhon and Bakunin into English, but published a whole series of books on anarchism and related topics over thirty years. Bernard Shaw admired him as a controversialist, and himself contributed to Liberty. Walt Whitman, who subscribed to Liberty, also said of its editor: ‘I love him: he is plucky to the bone.’20 Despite his hostility to Tucker’s individualism, Kropotkin still applauded his criticism of the State as ‘very searching’ and his defence of the individual as ‘very powerful’.21

Tucker came from a family of wealthy liberals and radical Protestants in New Bedford, inheriting from his parents their Painite individualism and formality of dress and manner. His experience of the best qualities of Quakerism made him confident that people could govern themselves without elected leaders, each following his or her light of reason in a community of fellowship. He went on to develop laissez-faire liberalism to its extreme and to express the aspirations of the small entrepreneur. ‘The most perfect Socialism’, he insisted, ‘is possible only on the condition of the most perfect individualism.’22 When he published his own translation of Bakunin’s God and the State, Tucker advertised it as ‘Paine’s “Age of Reason” and “Rights of Man” Consolidated and Improved’, a novel way of grafting Left Hegelianism onto the American individual tradition of natural rights.

Although personally timid and a man of thought rather than of action, Tucker was no less iconoclastic than Bakunin. His greatest fear was of inconsistency, and a friend described him as ‘a glittering icicle of logic’.23 He called for the destruction of every monopoly, including that worst of all monopolies and the mainstay of all privilege — the State. He rejected government as an invasion of the individual’s private sphere, and the State as a monopoly of government in a particular area. All government, he recognized, is based on aggression and therefore tyrannical. By contrast, anarchism is ‘the doctrine that all the affairs of men shall be managed by individuals or voluntary associations, and that the State should be abolished’. Anarchists are simply ‘unterrified Jeffersonian Democrats’ who believe that ‘the best government is that which governs least, and that which governs least is no government at all.’24 Even the police function of protecting persons and property could be done by voluntary associations and co-operatives for self-defence. Tucker was confident that the powers of every individual would be limited by the exercise of the equal rights of all others and equal liberty would eventually prevail. The fundamental law of social expediency for anarchism, he claimed, is ‘the greatest amount of liberty compatible with equality of liberty’.25

No code of morals should be imposed on the individual. In Tucker’s view, the only moral law is ‘“Mind your own business” and the only crime is interference with another’s business’.26 Not surprisingly, Tucker asserted that anarchists should not only be utilitarians pursuing their own self-interest but egoists in the fullest sense. Yet he did not deny that individuals should influence their neighbours through the influence of reason, persuasion, example, public opinion, social ostracism and the influence of unhampered economic forces.

Although Tucker recognized that property is a social convention and labour is the only basis of the right of ownership, he believed strongly in competition and called anarchism ‘consistent Manchesterism’.27 He followed Warren in wanting prices to be fixed by costs of production and measured in labour time. But where Warren looked to ‘equitable’ individuals to work out the cost, Tucker relied on their self-interested conduct in a free market (that is, one which has abolished money, tariffs and patents). He also believed that absolute equality is not desirable: people should enjoy the results of their superiority of muscle or brain. But while retaining private property and admiring certain aspects of laissez-faire capitalism, he was critical of the ‘system of violence, robbery, and fraud that the plutocrats call “law and order”’.28 Although Emma Goldman complained that his attitude to the communist anarchists was ‘charged with insulting rancor’, he remained a left- rather than a right-wing libertarian.29

Like Godwin, Tucker looked to the gradual spread of enlightenment to bring about change. He made a plea for non-resistance to become a universal rule. But he distinguished between domination and defence, and accepted that resistance to encroachment from others is acceptable. Like Warren, he considered the use of violence as justified in enforcing contracts, and argued that individuals and groups have the right to any violence, including the use of capital punishment, in order to defend themselves. As Kropotkin observed, such a position opened the way to re-introduce in the name of ‘defence’ all the traditional functions of the State.30

Tucker saw like Proudhon the need for alternative institutions like schools, co-operative banks and trade unions, and hoped that, ultimately, massive civil disobedience and general strikes would bring about the collapse of the State. But he would refuse to be drawn on the exact nature of a free society beyond saying that natural patterns of organization would emerge. It was absurd, he argued, to predict ‘A Complete Representation of Universal Progress for the Balance of Eternity’.31

Tucker was undoubtedly more effective in his critique of the State than in his alternative proposals. Indeed, he once confessed that it was easier to demonstrate why he was not anything else than to say why he was an anarchist: ‘Archy once denied, only Anarchism can be affirmed. It is a matter of logic.’32 While he kept individualist anarchism alive whilst anarcho-communism and anarcho-syndicalism were growing in strength, he became increasingly disillusioned. He spent the last thirty years of his life in silence in France, where his family lived an anarchistic life. His only daughter described him as a ‘born nonteacher’ who always considered himself right.33 He endorsed, with Kropotkin, the cause of the Allies in the First World War, being anti-German from the outset. Still uncertain whether humanity had yet discovered the path to the goal of anarchy, he died in 1939 aged eighty-five.

Adin Ballou and John Humphrey Noyes   Although individualism dominated American indigenous anarchism, there was a communitarian tradition which was largely of Christian inspiration. Adin Ballou, for instance, had sought freedom with community in the 1830s. Admired later by Tolstoy, he insisted that the absolute authority of God must guide the life of humanity: ‘The will of man (human government) whether in one, a thousand, or many millions, has no intrinsic authority — no moral supremacy — and no rightful claim to the allegiance of man. It has no original, inherent authority whatsoever over the conscience …’34 While divine government is nurtured by persuasion and love, human government depends on cunning and physical force, expressed in its corruption, jails and wars. The Christian should therefore behave as though the millennium had already come, and refuse to support the secular authority by voting, legislating or fighting. In place of human government, Ballou proposed a ‘neighbourhood society by voluntary association’ like town meetings, in which public opinion would be enough to reform the disorderly individual. He tried to realize these ideals in the model community of Hopedale.

In the following decade, another Christian radical, John Humphrey Noyes, founded a community at Oneida, New York, believing like the Ranters that true Christians have thrown off the chains of Satan and become as innocent as Adam and Eve. Being in God’s grace, they cannot sin. Under his system of ‘Perfectionism’, churches and governments are considered harmful impositions. The Bible, he insists, has depicted the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth and in heaven ‘God reigns over body, soul and estate, without interference from human governments.’35

Unlike the more repressive millenarian sects like the Shakers, Noyes’ disciples at Oneida pooled their property and practised free love, believing in the physical and spiritual union of all. Solidarity was achieved and disputes solved through the practice of ‘mutual criticism’ by rotating committees. It proved remarkably successful in Oneida. Ironically the very success of Oneida’s communism proved its undoing for the growing prosperity encouraged materialist and consumer values which eventually undermined its radical aims.

Towards the end of the century, European immigrants brought in a new kind of militant anarchist communism which rapidly overtook the indigenous variety. Nevertheless, middle-class society in New England could still produce fiery and rebellious youth. One such was Voltairine de Cleyre.

Voltairine de Cleyre   As a child de Cleyre attended a convent and wanted to become a nun. The Haymarket Massacre, a lecture on Paine, and a reading of Benjamin Tucker’s journal Liberty eventually convinced her that ‘Liberty is not the Daughter but the Mother of Order.’ She lost her religious vocation and began to give lectures on free-thinking, and worked as a language teacher amongst working-class Jewish immigrants. Her religious upbringing however led her to see anarchism as ‘a sort of Protestantism, whose adherents are a unit in the great essential belief that all forms of external authority must disappear to be replaced by self-control only’.36

To begin with, De Cleyre was both a pacifist and non-resister, believing like Tolstoy that it was easier to conquer war by peace rather than force. Although she came to accept direct action as a form of public protest, she refused to advise anyone to do anything which involved a risk to herself. She thought that it was only from a peaceful strategy that a real solution to inequality and oppression would eventually emerge.

De Cleyre was fully aware that anarchists in the States at the time were divided in their conception of a future society between the individualists and the communists. Initially she favoured individual solutions to social problems, but increasingly stressed the importance of community. In her maturity, she envisaged a time when the great manufacturing plants of America would be broken up and society would consist of ‘thousands of small communities stretching along the lines of transportation, each producing largely for its owns needs, able to rely upon itself, and therefore independent’.37 She came to label herself simply ‘Anarchist’, and called like Malatesta for an ‘anarchism without adjectives’, since in the absence of government many different experiments would probably be tried in various localities in order to determine the most appropriate form.

Alexander Berkman   After the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago in 1886 and the subsequent repression, anarchism remained principally a movement of immigrants among the Italian and Jewish populations, and the Russian refugees in the larger cities. From the latter community emerged the most influential anarcho-communists in America in the early part of this century: Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. They were not only tireless campaigners but also produced the best journals, especially Mother Earth which ran from 1906 to 1917.

Berkman was born into a respectable Jewish family in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1870. Moving to St Petersburg he found the revolutionary movement inspirational, especially in the person of his uncle Mark Natanson, a revolutionary leader and founder of the Chaikovsky circle. After his parents’ deaths, Berkman left Russia at the age of sixteen, arriving in America in 1882. On becoming the companion of Emma Goldman, and inspired by the martyrdom of the Haymarket anarchists, he tried to put his revolutionary beliefs into action by attempting unsuccessfully to shoot in 1892 the financier Henry Clay Frick, an employee of Andrew Carnegie who had ordered gunmen to kill strikers at a steel strike in Homestead. The action earned Berkman a twenty-two year sentence in prison, but it did not dampen his spirit. Unrepentant, he wrote in the Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist that ‘Human life is indeed sacred and inviolate. But the killing of a tyrant, an enemy of the People, is in no way to be considered the taking of a life.’ Despite the effect of prison on his nerves, Berkman wrote to Goldman after ten years inside: ‘My youthful ideal of a free humanity in the vague future has become clarified and crystallized into the living truth of anarchy, as the sustaining elemental force of my every-day existence.’38

After serving fourteen years, he was released and immediately took up the revolutionary struggle once again. He helped organize the free Ferrer school in New York and edited with Goldman Mother Earth. They became the leading figures in the American anarchist movement, and both threw themselves into the anti-militarist campaign. Berkman went on to edit his own journal Blast which from 1915 to 1917 called stridently for direct action.

After being arrested and imprisoned for two years for opposing conscription on the US entry into the War, in 1919 Berkman was deported, with Emma Goldman, to Russia. At first, he worked with Bolsheviks and was even asked to translate Lenin’s ‘Left-Wing’ Communism, An Infantile Disorder (1920). But Berkman rapidly became disillusioned and witnessed at first hand the Bolsheviks’ betrayal of the revolution and their persecution of the anarchists. The crushing of the Kronstadt rebellion was the final blow. In July 1921, he wrote in his diary: ‘Grey are the passing days. One by one the embers of hope have died out. Terror and despotism have crushed the life born in October. The slogans of the Revolution are forsworn, its ideals stifled in the blood of the people … Dictatorship is trampling the masses underfoot … The Revolution is dead; its spirit cries in the wilderness.’39 The disillusioned Berkman decided to leave Russia once and for all. He lived at first in Germany for a couple of years, then settled in Paris, and finally ended up in the south of France.

In his last years, Berkman remained faithful to the anarchist cause, which he still considered the Very first thing humanity has ever thought of.’40 But he became less certain about the efficacy of violence and wrote to Goldman in November 1928: ‘I am in general now not in favour of terroristic tactics, except in very exceptional circumstances.’ Whilst working on his pamphlet What is Communism? in the following year, he even wrote to his lifelong companion: ‘There are moments when I feel that the revolution cannot work on anarchist principles. But once the old methods are followed, they never lead to anarchism.’41 Rather than die slowly after an operation, he shot himself in 1936, only a few weeks before the Spanish anarchists decided to take up arms against Franco.

Berkman’s What is Communism? was first published in 1929 in New York as Now and After: the ABC of Anarchism. The pamphlet proved one of the best introductions to anarcho-communism and has become an anarchist classic. Its value lies not so much in the originality of its ideas (mainly culled from Kropotkin) but in its plain and clear style and readiness to answer the traditional objections to anarchism.

Berkman defines anarchism as the ideal of ‘a society without force and compulsion, where all men shall be equals; and live in freedom, peace and harmony’. It does not mean, as its enemies would allege, bombs or chaos, but that ‘you should be free; that no one should enslave you, boss you, rob you, or impose upon you’. For Berkman anarchist communism implies ‘voluntary communism, communism from free choice’.42

His most interesting arguments are in the chapter ‘Will Communist Anarchism Work?’ where he insists that laziness implies the ‘right man in the wrong place’ and asserts that freedom in practice implies diversification. As far as means are concerned, he points out that anarchists do not have a monopoly on violence any more than other social activists. Individual acts of violence are more an expression of temperament than theory and are the ‘method of ignorance, the weapon of the weak’.43 Indeed, in his chapter on the ‘Defence of the Revolution’, Berkman specifically condemns the suppression and terrorization of counter-revolutionaries and argues that the practice of liberty and equality is the best possible defence.

Emma Goldman

  The Most Dangerous Woman   EMMA GOLDMAN WAS MORE of an activist than a thinker. Nevertheless, she made a lasting contribution to anarchist theory by giving it a feminist dimension which had only been hinted at in the work of Godwin and Bakunin. She not only stressed the psychological aspects of women’s subordination but made a creative synthesis of personal individualism and economic communism. As a lecturer on anarchism, agitator for free speech, pioneer of birth control, critic of Bolshevism, and defender of the Spanish Revolution, she was considered to be one of the most dangerous women of her time. Ever since her death her star has been rising in the firmament of reputation.

Goldman was born in 1869 in a Jewish ghetto in Russia, the unwanted child of her father’s second marriage. She grew up in the remote village of Popelan, where her parents had a small inn. She later recalled that she had always felt a rebel. As a girl, she was instinctively repelled by the knouting of a servant and shocked that love between a Jew and Gentile should be regarded a sin. When she was thirteen, the family moved in 1882 to the Jewish quarter in St Petersburg. Coming just after the assassination of Alexander II, it was a time of intense political repression and the Jewish community in Russia suffered a wave of pogroms. It was also a time of severe economic hardship. Due to her family’s poverty Goldman was obliged to leave school in St Petersburg only after six months and find work in a factory.

Mixing with radical students, she was introduced to Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862) and was impressed by the definition of a nihilist as ‘a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in’. More important to her subsequent development, she secured a copy of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? (1863) in which the heroine Vera is converted to nihilism and lives in a world of easy friendship between the sexes and enjoys free enquiry and co-operative work. The book not only offered an embryonic sketch of her later anarchism, but strengthened her determination to live her life in her own way.1

Unfortunately her father would have none of it. The archetypal patriarch, he became the ‘nightmare’ of her childhood.2 He not only whipped her in an attempt to break her spirit, but tried to marry her off at fifteen. When she refused and begged to continue her studies, he replied: ‘Girls do not have to learn much! All a Jewish daughter needs to know is how to prepare gefüllte fish, cut noodles fine, and give the man plenty of children.’3 It was eventually agreed in the family that such an impossible child should go to America with a half-sister to join her other half-sister who had already settled in Rochester.

As a Russian Jew without connections, Emma quickly realized that the paradise of America was, for the poor at least, hell on earth. She gained her real education in the slums and sweatshops, earning her living as a seamstress. The difficulties of her early years undoubtedly strengthened her sense of injustice and inspired her impassioned love of freedom.

What drew Goldman initially to anarchism in America was the outcry which followed the Haymarket Square tragedy in 1886 in Chicago. After a bomb had been thrown in a crowd of police during a workers’ rally for an eight-hour day, four anarchists were eventually hanged. Convicted on the flimsiest evidence, the judge at the trial had openly declared: ‘Not because you have caused the Haymarket bomb, but because you are Anarchists, you are on trial.’4 These events not only shaped the radical conscience of a generation but made Goldman undergo a profound conversion. On the day of the hanging, she decided to become a revolutionary and to find out what exactly had inspired the ideals of the martyrs.

At the age of twenty, she divorced the Russian immigrant she had married out of loneliness and decided to go to New York. Here she met Johann Most, the fiery editor of the German-language anarchist paper Freiheit and adopted his violent brand of communism as her own. She was soon giving lectures on anarchism herself. Increasingly repelled by Most’s destructive ire, she became interested in the rival German anarchist journal Die Autonomie. It introduced her to the writings of Kropotkin whom she immediately recognized as anarchism’s clearest thinker.

Goldman was never one to rest in theory. In keeping with her views on free love, she became the lover of the anarchist Alexander Berkman, the ‘Sasha’ of her autobiography. It was the beginning of a lifetime’s relationship. They lived in a ménage à trois with an artist comrade Modest Stein called Fedya, rejecting jealousy as an outmoded form of honour and possession.

Keen to carry out some spectacular deed to advance the workers’ cause, she planned with Berkman the assassination of Henry Clay Frick during a steel-strike at Homestead in 1892. Goldman even tried unsuccessfully to work as a prostitute on Fourteenth Street to raise money for the gun but eventually borrowed the money from her sister.

Berkman managed to enter Frick’s office and shot him, but the manager was only wounded. Although Berkman was sentenced to twenty-two years’ imprisonment, Goldman openly tried to explain and justify the attempted assassination. The trial not only confirmed the growing reputation of anarchism for violence but made Goldman a marked woman. Thereafter her lectures were regularly disrupted by the authorities. They were certainly lively affairs: when on one occasion, Most condemned Berkman’s act, Goldman was so enraged that she took out a horsewhip and tried to give him a fierce lashing.

In 1893, Goldman was arrested for allegedly urging the unemployed to take bread ‘by force’ and given a year in prison on Blackwell’s Island. At the trial the Assistant District Attorney questioned her about her beliefs:

Do you believe in the Supreme Being, Miss Goldman?

No, sir, I do not.

Is there any government on earth whose laws you approve?

No, sir, for they are all against the people.

Why don’t you leave this country if you don’t like its laws?

Where shall I go? Everywhere on earth the laws are against the poor, and they tell me I cannot go to heaven, nor do I want to go there.5

  Her replies were hardly intended to endear her to the respectable jury. After her release, Goldman found herself a celebrity, the notorious ‘Red Emma’, renowned and feared for her espousal of free love, atheism and revolution. She did little to dissuade her critics. When asked by the editor of the Labor Leader in 1897 for an account of a free society, she simply replied: ‘I am really too much of an anarchist to work out a programme for the members of that society; in fact, I do not bother about such trifling details, all I want is freedom, perfect, unrestricted liberty for myself and others.’6

When the young Polish immigrant Czolgosz assassinated President McKinley in 1901, it was said that Goldman had incited him to commit the act. Although she denied any connection, her sympathy for the defenceless assassin only made her more dangerous in the public mind. The repression of anarchists which followed meant that she could not return to public life until 1906.

It was then that she began publishing with Berkman the monthly Mother Earth. Originally called the ‘Open Road’ after a poem by Walt Whitman, the title was particularly appropriate, invoking the goddess of fertility and the beauty of freedom. Its pages not only discussed anarchist ideas but became a platform for literature and art, introducing writers like Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Thoreau, Nietzsche and Wilde to the American public.

Goldman’s writing and editorial activities did not prevent her from organizing her lecture tours. She became one of the most magnetic and volatile orators in American history, despite the attempts of the police and vigilante groups to silence her. In 1910, when her most theoretical work Anarchism and Other Essays came out, she undertook a tour during which she spoke 120 times in 37 cities to 25,000 listeners. Her drama lectures were published in 1914 as The Social Significance of the Modern Drama. She not only saw drama as a powerful disseminator of radical thought and championed the work of Hauptmann and Ibsen, but was consistently concerned with the aesthetic dimension to the struggle for freedom.

Not surprisingly, the little revolutionary with the pince-nez repeatedly fell foul of the authorities for her outspoken attack on the scourge of law, government and property. She was imprisoned a second time for distributing birth control literature, but her longest sentence resulted from her involvement in setting up No-Conscription Leagues and organizing rallies against the First World War. She and Berkman were then arrested in 1917 for conspiracy to obstruct the draft and given two years. Afterwards, they were stripped of their American citizenship and deported with other undesirable ‘Reds’ to Russia in 1919. J. Edgar Hoover, who directed her deportation hearing, called her ‘one of the most dangerous women in America’.

In the circumstances, Goldman was not too disappointed to return to her homeland and to witness at first hand the Russian Revolution which she had extolled in America as ‘the promise and hope of the world’.7 For the sake of the revolution, she was at first willing to repress her distaste of Marxist centralism and Statism and to work with the Bolsheviks. She was immediately disappointed by the gagging of free speech and by the special privileges enjoyed by Communist Party members. She and Berkman travelled throughout the country to collect documents for the revolutionary archives and were horrified at the growing bureaucracy, political persecution and forced labour they found.

Their breaking-point was reached when the Kronstadt rebellion broke out. A series of strikes took place in March 1921 in Petrograd, supported by the sailors of Kronstadt. Among their demands, the workers and sailors called for an equalization of rations, freedom of speech for Left groups, and elections to the Soviets. When they were brutally crushed by Trotsky and the Red Army, Goldman and Berkman felt unable to stay in Russia, convinced that the triumph of the Bolshevik State had meant the defeat of the Revolution. In December 1921 they were issued passports and they left for Europe.

Goldman set down her two years in Russia in a book entitled My Disillusionment in Russia (1923), followed up by My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924), which were published together as a single volume in Britain the following year. In her moving account, she describes how she had tried to raise the question of the New Economic Policy in an interview with Lenin but quickly came to realize that the ‘centralized political State was Lenin’s deity, to which everything else was sacrificed’. Although the libertarian principle had been strong in the early days of the Revolution, she put down its failure to the ‘fanatical governmentalism’ of Marxism and to its concept of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.8 Goldman later argued that Bolshevism in practice was not a form of voluntary communism but rather ‘compulsory State Communism’.9 With its nationalized economy, its rigid central planning, its wage system, its class divisions and privileges, its vast bureaucracy, its dominant and exclusive Communist Party, it was little different from State capitalism. Indeed, she even claimed that Stalin’s dictatorship was more absolute than any tsar’s had been.

After leaving Russia, Goldman and Berkman were not allowed to return to America. Berkman settled in France and she in England. Here she was championed by Rebecca West, who wrote an introduction to My Disillusionment in Russia, but she was unable to capture the public attention with her unwelcome message. She was almost alone amongst radicals in condemning the Bolsheviks. Bertrand Russell recalled that although she had been welcomed enthusiastically by Rebecca West and others to give a speech in 1924, she sat down in dead silence after severely criticizing the Bolsheviks. Increasingly her public lectures were poorly attended. She was even unable to find a publisher for a perceptive manuscript on the Russian dramatists. On hearing that she might be deported in 1925, James Colton, an old self-taught Welsh miner, offered to marry her in order to give her British nationality and she accepted his expression of ‘sweet solidarity’. With a British passport, she was then able to travel to France and Canada. In 1934, she was even allowed to give a lecture tour in the States.

The greatest experience of her old age was the Spanish Revolution. Depressed by Berkman’s suicide in 1936 and the rise of fascism, she was greatly cheered to hear of the republican stand against Franco in Spain. At the age of sixty-seven, she went to Barcelona in September 1936 to join in the struggle. At last anarchism seemed about to triumph. She told a rally of Libertarian Youth: ‘Your revolution will destroy forever [the notion] that anarchism stands for chaos.’10 She worked with the anarchist CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and the Federación Anarquista Ibérica); on one occasion, ten thousand of their members turned out to hear her call them ‘a shining example to the rest of the world’.11 She edited the English language edition of the Bulletin of the CNT-AIT-FAI and was given the task of publicizing their cause in Britain.

But once again her high hopes for revolution were to be dashed. She disagreed with the participation of the anarchists of the CNT-FAI in the coalition government of 1937 and the concessions they made to the increasingly powerful communists for the sake of the war effort. She correctly foresaw that it would do irreparable harm to the anarchist cause; the social revolution ought to have gone ahead simultaneously with the fight against Franco. However, Goldman felt unable to condemn her anarchist comrades for their understandable compromises by joining in the government and accepting militarization since she felt the alternative at the time was communist dictatorship.

At the International Working Men’s Association Congress held in Paris late in 1937, she declared that in the ‘burning house’ of Spain, it seemed a breach of solidarity to pour the ‘acid’ of criticism on their ‘burned flesh’.12 She wrote a year later to Vernon Richards:

though I disagreed with much that our Spanish comrades had done I stood by mem because they were fighting so heroically with their backs to the wall against the whole world, misunderstood by some of their own comrades and betrayed by the workers as well as by every Marxist organisation. Whatever verdict future historians will give the struggle of the CNT-FAI they will be forced to acknowledge two great actions of our people, their refusal to establish dictatorship when they had power, and having been the first to rise against Fascism.13

  Despite her profound disappointment at the triumph of Franco in Spain and the spread of fascism throughout Europe, she refused to compromise her anarchist principles. She wrote just before her death in 1940: ‘I am against dictatorship and Fascism as I am opposed to parliamentary regimes and so-called political democracy.’14 She continued to consider anarchism the ‘most beautiful and practical philosophy’ and was confident that one day it would be vindicated.15

She died in 1940 three months after a stroke, in Toronto. Her body was finally allowed to return to America and was buried in a Chicago cemetery, not far from the Haymarket martyrs whose fate had changed the course of her life over fifty years before.

Philosophy   Although primarily an activist, Goldman developed an original and persuasive view of anarchism. In her metaphysics, she was a thoroughgoing atheist, and felt that the Church was as oppressive an institution as the State. She believed like Bakunin that religion originated in our mental inability to solve natural phenomena and that the Church had always been ‘a stumbling block to progress’. As for Christianity, with Christ’s exaltation of the meek and determination to fulfil the law of the prophets, it is ‘most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of slave society’. In terms reminiscent of Nietzsche, she concluded that ‘Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.’16

Goldman defined anarchism as ‘The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all the forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary’. She repudiated entirely the objections that it is an impractical ideal and that it stands for destruction and violence. On the contrary, anarchism, she believed, is ‘the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent’. As such, it is a great liberator from the ‘phantoms’ of religion and property. Government which makes and enforces law moreover is unnecessary since ‘crime is naught but misdirected energy’ and prison is a social crime and failure which only creates anti-social beings.17

While none of this is particularly original, her most striking contribution was her defence of individuality. She counted Stirner and Nietzsche as allies in her struggle for freedom and became convinced that ‘if society is ever to become free, it will be so through liberated individuals’. As a woman, she had directly experienced the intolerance and prejudice of the average American, and consequently repudiated the ‘mass as a creative factor’.18 She was also only too well aware of the readiness of the majority of people to become dependent on leaders and bow before authority:

the mass itself is responsible for this horrible state of affairs. It clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify! the moment a protesting voice is raised against the sacredness of the capitalistic authority or any other decayed institution … Yes, authority, coercion, dependence rest upon the mass, but never freedom or the free unfoldment of the individual, never the birth of a free society.19

  It would be misleading however to call Goldman an elitist. Despite her realistic assessment of the revolutionary potential of her contemporaries she was still convinced that all human beings are ultimately capable of throwing off their chains and of reaching their full stature. There was nothing in human nature to prevent it and ‘the love of freedom is a universal trait’.20

Again, while inspired by Stirner, Goldman is not an egoist. Anarchism may be the philosophy of ‘the sovereignty of the individual’ but it is also the theory of ‘social harmony’.21 She tried to achieve the central anarchist ideal of communal individuality. In her most widely read essay ‘What I Believe’ (1908), she insisted that anarchism is a theory of ‘organic development’. Rejecting property as ‘dominion over things’, she argues moreover that liberated work is possible only ‘in a society based on voluntary cooperation of productive groups, communities and societies loosely federated together, eventually developing into free communism, actuated by a solidarity of interests’.22

Having met leading French syndicalists, she saw syndicalism at the time, with its wish to overthrow the wage system and to replace the centralized State by the ‘free, federated grouping of the workers’, as the ‘economic expression of Anarchism’.23 She also praised the educational work of the French Labour Chambers and approved of their methods of direct action, industrial sabotage, and the general strike.

She returned to the question of ‘The Place of the Individual in Society’ (1940) in her last published essay. She reasserted her belief that ‘The Individual is the true reality in life’ and criticized government precisely because it not only seeks to widen and perpetuate power but has an inherent distrust of the individual and fear of individuality. Fully aware of the crippling influence of public opinion, she further suggested that ‘even more than constituted authority, it is social uniformity and sameness that harass the individual most.’ Like Oscar Wilde, whom she admired, she maintained that true civilization is to be measured by a person’s ‘individuality and the extent to which it is free to have its being, to grow and expand unhindered by invasive and coercive authority’. At the same time, she followed Kropotkin by asserting that mutual aid and voluntary co-operation have worked for the evolution of the species and can only create the basis of a ‘free individual and associational life’.24 Goldman’s individualism was not therefore a rugged individualism which operates at the expense of others.

Goldman was scathing about the American Left as well as the Right. She considered the radical movement before the First World War to be in a state of ‘sad chaos … a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character’. She swiped at those ‘intellectual proletarians’ who preferred comfort to the ideal, and external success to the vital issues of life.25 Though she frequently worked with individual socialists on particular issues, she attacked the American Socialist Party for treating every ‘spook prejudice’ with kid gloves and for following the ‘crooked path’ of politics as a means of capturing the State: ‘if once economic dictatorship were added to the already supreme political power of the State, its iron heel would cut deeper into the flesh of labor than that of capitalism today.’26

As for Marxists in general, she felt keenly the split in the First International between Marx and Bakunin. She criticized moreover Marx’s historical materialism for overlooking the ‘human element’ and for failing to recognize that the rejuvenation of humanity needs ‘the inspiration and energising force of an ideal’. Class consciousness can never be expressed in the political arena but only through the ‘solidarity of interests’ forged in the determined effort to overthrow the present system.27

While she offered a telling critique of her own society and culture and rejected the programmes of other socialists, Goldman refused to impose ‘an iron-clad programme or method on the future … Anarchism, as I understand it, leaves posterity free to develop its own particular systems, in harmony with its needs.’28 While some have seen this as a theoretical weakness, it is in fact in keeping with her view that the past or the present should not determine the future, and it is impossible to imagine how people in a free society would want to arrange their affairs.

When it came to the means of bringing about a free society and transformed humanity, Goldman was somewhat ambivalent. To begin with she accepted the need for individual acts of political violence and she not only supported Berkman in his assassination attempt but commiserated with Czolgosz after he was condemned to death for killing McKinley. The men who make violent protests are not cruel and heartless monsters, she argued, but rather it is their ‘supersensitiveness to the wrong and injustice surrounding them’ which compels them to pay ‘the toll of our social crimes’.29 Compared with the wholesale violence of capital and government, political acts of violence are but a drop in the ocean. Indeed, it is the ‘terrible inequality and great political injustice that prompts such acts’.30 But towards the middle of he life, she came to see Berkman and Czolgosz as victims who had committed deeds of misplaced protest. While she refused to condone them, neither did she condemn them.

The State, according to Goldman, is the greatest source of violence in our society, particularly by being the focal point for the twin evils of patriotism and militarism. Patriotism is a menace to liberty, fuels militarism, and should be replaced by universal brotherhood and sisterhood. She was totally opposed to militarism and like Tolstoy saw the soldier merely as a professional man-killer – ‘a cold-blooded, mechanical, obedient tool of his military superiors’.31 Whereas class war and war against false values and evil institutions are legitimate, to prepare for war between States is ‘The Road to Universal Slaughter’.32 As she said at her trial in July 1917 for conspiracy to avoid the draft: ‘It is organized violence at the top which creates individual violence at the bottom.’33

Whilst living in America, Goldman thus advocated the use of collective violence to overthrow the State and capitalism and endorsed class war, direct action and industrial sabotage. But after her experience in Russia in 1920 and 1921, she had second thoughts. It is one thing to employ violence in combat as a means of defence, but to institutionalize terrorism as the Bolsheviks had done is altogether different: ‘Such terrorism begets counter-revolution and in turn becomes counter-revolutionary.’ In Russia, the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party had become: ‘THE END JUSTIFIES THE MEANS.’34 Indeed, after her stay in Russia, she began to insist that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim.

In practice, this meant that all violent means to realize libertarian ends are suspect. Social revolution should not only recognize the sanctity of human life but aim at a fundamental transvaluation of values; it involves internal change in our moral values as well external social relations. As she wrote to a friend in 1923: ‘The one thing I am convinced of as I have never been in my life is that the gun decides nothing at all.’35 Five year later, she wrote to Berkman that it was time to reject revolution as a ‘violent eruption destroying everything’ and that the only choice was to accept terrorism and become Bolsheviks or to become Tolstoyans.36 But she never relinquished her belief in revolution. When the Spanish Revolution broke out she not only refused to condemn those anarchists who collaborated in the republican government with socialists and communists but even condoned the military training of soldiers in the exceptional circumstances of the civil war.

In general, Goldman thought the most important way of reconstructing society was through example and education. She defined example as ‘the actual living of a truth once recognized, not the mere theorizing of its life element’.37 It was to this end that she wrote the two volumes of her frank and intimate autobiography Living My Life (1931).

In the area of education, she involved herself in the Modern School Movement, helping to establish one in an anarchist community in Stelton, New Jersey and another in Manhattan. They were inspired by the schools of the Frenchman Sébastien Faure and those of the Spaniard Francisco Ferrer, whose execution in 1909 had caused an international outcry in liberal circles. Goldman saw existing schools as drilling the young into absolute uniformity by compulsory mental feeding. The social purpose of the libertarian Modern School on the other hand was ‘to develop the individual through knowledge and the free play of characteristic traits, so that he may become a social being’.38

To bring this about, there should be no rules and regulation. The educators should encourage the free expression of the child and to bring about his or her understanding and sympathy. Since ‘man is much more of a sex creature than a moral creature’, sex education should be given to recognize the central and beautiful part it plays in life.39 But while Goldman insisted on the ‘free growth’ of the innate tendencies of a child, she did not foresee a time like Godwin and Ferrer when education would become an entirely spontaneous affair. She continued to believe in the creative power of the good teacher: ‘The child is to the teacher what clay is to the sculptor.’40

Sexual Politics   Goldman’s arguments on government, revolution and education were invariably clear and perceptive, but her most important contribution to anarchist theory was in giving it a feminist dimension. She was particularly incensed about the status and conditions of women in her day and her outspoken views caused much of her notoriety. She detested the double standard which prevailed in the relations between the sexes. She attacked the ‘The Hypocrisy of Puritanism’ which demeans natural impulses and depresses culture. She railed against the existing system which treated women as sex objects, breeders and cheap labour. Prostitution was the prime example of the exploitation of woman, but all women in different ways were obliged to sell their bodies. By stressing the personal as the political in this way, Goldman was isolated from feminists in her own day but it made her particularly appealing to the American feminists of the 1970s and 1980s.

Unlike the suffragettes, who saw the vote as the principal means of female emancipation and who wanted to bring men under the same restrictions as women, Goldman rejected completely the ‘modern fetish’ of universal suffrage. She criticized the existing suffrage movement in America for being ‘altogether a parlor affair’, detached from the economic needs of the people.41 While the true aim of emancipation should make it possible for woman to be human in the fullest sense, ‘The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation’ in America had been to turn her into an isolated and artificial being. Paradoxically, Goldman thought it necessary to emancipate her American sisters from ‘emancipation’ as it was then understood. The so-called ‘free American citizen’ had by the right of universal suffrage merely ‘forged chains about his limbs’; she saw no reason why woman should not have the equal right to vote with man but felt it an absurd notion to believe that ‘woman will accomplish that wherein man has failed’.42

No political solution is possible for the unequal and repressive relations between the sexes. Goldman therefore called for a Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of all accepted values’ coupled with the abolition of economic slavery. She invited her contemporaries to go ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ and assert ‘the right to oneself, to one’s personality’.43 True emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the courts; it begins in a ‘woman’s soul’. Above all, woman’s emancipation must come from and through herself:

First, by asserting herself as a personality, and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right to anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family etc., by making her life simpler, but deeper and richer. That is, by trying to learn the meaning and substance of life in all its complexities, by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free, will make her a force hitherto unknown in the world, a force for real love, for peace, for harmony; a force of divine fire, of life-giving; a creator of free men and women.44

  Goldman felt no compunction in tackling head on the most tabooed subjects and called for a frank and open discussion of sex, love and marriage. Far from being synonymous, Goldman believed that marriage and love are often mutually antagonistic. Whereas love has been the most powerful factor in breaking the bars of convention, marriage furnishes the State and Church with an opportunity to pry into our most intimate affairs. It is often purely an economic arrangement, furnishing the woman with an insurance policy and the man with a pretty toy and a means of perpetuating his kind. As such it ‘prepares the woman for a life of a parasite, a dependent helpless servant, while it furnishes the man the right to a chattel mortgage over a human life’.45 A woman therefore emancipates herself when she admires a man only for the qualities of his heart and mind, asserts the right to follow that love without hindrance, and declares the absolute right to free motherhood. No anarchist thinker other than Godwin has compiled such a trenchant critique of the ‘market place of marriage’.

Goldman not only advocated free love but practised it. She had at least one affair with another woman. In her twenties, she lived with Berkman and the artist Fedya as a ménage à trois. In 1908 when she was thirty-eight she took a lover called Ben Reitman who was nine years her junior. He was known as the ‘Hobo King’ for his work as a doctor in Chicago among vagrants. For all her declarations of independence, she became obsessed by the ‘handsome brute’. He aroused in her a ‘torrent of elemental passion’ she had never dreamed a man could evoke and she admitted ‘I responded shamelessly to its primitive call, its naked beauty, its ecstatic joy.’46

Reitman continued to have frequent sex with other women during their ten-year relationship and, as their correspondence shows, Goldman could not help feeling jealous and anxious when he was with someone else. Her lamentations might be interpreted as at least a contradiction and perhaps a failure of her philosophy. She recognized the danger herself and wrote to Reitman ‘I have no right to speak of Freedom when I myself have become an abject slave in my love.’47 But her personal experience as a spurned and neglected lover does not contradict, but rather gives more weight to, her considered thoughts and public statements.

In an essay on ‘Jealousy’ probably written around 1912, she insisted that the anguish over lost love which inspired many Romantic poets has nothing to do with jealousy, which only makes people angry, petty and envious. Goldman traces its source to the idea of an exclusive sex monopoly endorsed by Church and State and sees it embodied in an outmoded code of honour based on possession and vengeance. It also involves the conceit of the male and the envy of the female. The cure is firstly to recognize that no one is the owner of the sex functions of another, and secondly, to accept only love or affection which is voluntarily given: ‘All lovers do well to leave the doors of their love wide open.’48 In a lecture called ‘False Fundamentals of Free Love’, Goldman further distinguished carefully between promiscuity and the free choice of committed love. As she wrote to Reitman at the same time ‘My love is sex, but it is devotion, care, anxiety, patience, friendship, it is all …’49 Goldman always had a romantic view of love, celebrating its ‘savagery’ as well as its ideal beauty, and was fully aware that it was a double-edged sword.

It could be argued that it was easy for Goldman to practise free love because she was infertile through endometriosis. But she could have had an operation to enable her to conceive; she chose not to. As such, her choice amounted to a voluntary form of birth control. Moreover, she was not without maternal feelings and wrote to Reitman: ‘I have a great deep mother instinct for you, baby-mine; that instinct has been the redeeming feature in our relation.’50 This did not prevent her from attacking at times the myth of motherhood and asserting the right of every woman to make a free choice of becoming a parent. In addition, she fought the laws against birth control until she was jailed in 1916. As the contemporary feminist Margaret Anderson observed, Goldman was sent to prison for advocating that ‘women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open’.51

Goldman called for a new society where individuals could read, write and say what they liked, and have equal opportunities regardless of their sex to realize their full potential. She wanted women to have control over their bodies and to be able to practise birth control. She hoped men and women would become truly individual whilst living in voluntary associations. She looked to a revolution to bring about both an internal and external change, economic communism as well as a complete transformation of values.

Although at the end of her life, Goldman acknowledged that she was hopelessly out of tune with her contemporaries, she has reached a new and broader audience since her death. She is now widely read and admired for her trenchant attack on repressive institutions and for her call for the complete fulfilment of the individual. One of the most dangerous women in America, once pilloried and then spurned, she has become the heroine of modern feminists and a founding mother of anarcho-feminism. She allegedly said at an anarchist ball: ‘if I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution.’ If the next revolution is libertarian and feminist, it will certainly be playing many of her favourite tunes.

German Communists

  DESPITE THE OVERWHELMING INFLUENCE of Marxism in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, a number of bold and original thinkers gravitated towards anarchism. Gustav Landauer was amongst those who struggled in the unfavourable political climate and were killed for their activities and views. Others like Johann Most and Rudolf Rocker were forced to move abroad to exert their influence.

Gustav Landauer   Gustav Landauer was the most important anarchist thinker in Germany after Max Stirner. He was born in 1870 of a middle-class Jewish family in Karlsruhe in southern Germany. As a student he joined the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Due to his political activities, which led to a spell in prison, he was refused entrance to the School of Medicine at Freiburg University. Because of his extreme views, he was also one of a small group who were expelled from the SPD in 1891. Two years later, he became an anarchist, although he preferred to call himself an ‘anarchist-socialist’ to dissociate himself from the Stirnerite egoism which was fashionable in some anarchist circles at the time. As he wrote to his friend Martin Buber, ‘anarchism is the negative side of that which, positively, is called socialism.’1 He went on to edit, from 1892, the Berlin anarchist paper Der Sozialist, but changed its subtitle to Organ für Anarchismus-Sozialismus to stress the socialist nature of his anarchism and the libertarian nature of his socialism. In Der Sozialist, he wrote on 15 July 1911: ‘Anarchy is the expression of the liberation of man from the idols of the state, the church and capital; socialism is the expression of the true and genuine community among men, genuine because it grows out of the individual spirit.’2

Landauer was always prepared to collaborate with socialists. In 1893 he was excluded, with Rosa Luxemburg and others, from the Zürich Congress of the Second International. Undismayed, he attended with Malatesta the Second International Congress held in London in 1896, and tried to put the anarchist case:

What we fight is State socialism, levelling from above, bureaucracy; what we advocate is free association and union, the absence of authority, mind freed from all fetters, independence and well-being of all. Before all others it is we who preach tolerance for all — whether we think their opinions right or wrong — we do not wish to crush them by force or otherwise.3

  Despite his plea for tolerance, the anarchists were expelled. It was the last time anarchists tried to attend meetings of the Socialist International.

Such setbacks did not deter Landauer. He was primarily a thinker and a man of letters, elaborating a form of mystical anarchism which stood in the German idealist tradition stretching as far back as Meister Eckhart. His originality lies in the way he developed the romantic concern with the Volk in a libertarian rather than an authoritarian direction. The word Volk had come to mean something like the ‘common people’, but it was also used to described the German language, culture, and customs as distinct from the State. Landauer wanted to realize the potential unity of the Volk, to develop ‘a connexion between people which is actually there; only it has not yet become bond and binding, it is not yet a higher organism’.4 Landauer was thus an eloquent prophet of real community.

Drawing on the work of the German sociologist Ferdinand Toennies, Landauer developed the distinction between community (Gemeinschaft), which is an organic, long-standing living together, and atomized, mechanical, and transitory society (Gesellschaft). He wanted to see the reborn community develop out of the artificial shell of existing society and the State. His most penetrating and oft-quoted insight is the recognition that the State is not merely something standing above society but a force which permeates everyday life:

The state is a condition, a certain relationship among human beings, a mode of behaviour between them; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another … We are the state, and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men.5

  The setting up of the community outside and alongside the State is therefore essentially a discovery of something actually present, something which has grown out of the past: ‘This likeness, this equality in inequality, this peculiar quality that binds people together, this common spirit, is an actual fact.’6

While rejecting the artificial State and the atomistic society of capitalism, Landauer saw the nation as a peaceful community of communities: ‘Every nation is anarchistic, that is, without force; the conceptions of nation and force are completely irreconcilable.’ He also saw the nation as a stepping stone, not an obstacle, to internationalism. ‘The goal of humanity’, he wrote to Julius Bab in 1913, ‘is the outer structure for which we strive; the way toward this goal, however, does not lead merely from our own humanity, but above all through our differentiated nationality.’7 The nation is a circle within the ever-widening circles from the individual to the whole of humanity. This is Landauer’s most important idea, and lays the ground for a nationalism which is not exclusive and xenophobic. He demonstrates that the nation can exist without the State; indeed, one of his principal objections to the State is that it destroys the organic unity of the nation. Each nation can contribute something unique and valuable to our common humanity.

Community for Landauer not is merely the liberal’s view of society as a sum of individuals; it is an organic whole which has its own interests. According to Landauer, Stirner’s absolute and independent individual is a myth, a phantom in the brain. Each individual is united not only to his own local community but also to the rest of humanity, both in a physical and spiritual sense: ‘As the individual organism is only a part of a great, real physical community, so the individual soul is part of a great, real spiritual community.’ Landauer did not reject genuine individualism but rather the atomistic, uprooted individualism of capitalism. In each individual there is a unique individuality which offers a different picture of humanity. The individual personality is therefore a ‘vital part of a larger organic whole’.8

Landauer was not opposed to revolution. ‘Revolution’, he wrote, ‘concerns every aspect of human life—not just the State, the class-structure, industry and commerce, arts and letters, education and learning, but a combination of all these social factors which is at a given moment in state of relative stability.’ He did not consider revolution merely as a period of time or even a borderline between two social conditions, but ‘a principle stepping over vast distances of time’.9 He insisted on the identity of means and ends and the necessity of moral action in the present. He was totally opposed to violent revolution and individual acts of terrorism. The great error of revolutionary anarchists, he wrote, is ‘the idea of being able to reach the ideal of power-lessness through power … every act of force is dictatorship’. For Landauer, anarchy should not involve more war and murder but a spiritual rebirth: ‘The way to a new, higher form of human society leads from the dark, fateful gate of our instincts and terra abscondita of our soul, which is our world. Only from within to without can the world be formed …’10

Landauer recognized that in revolution, there rises up ‘the image and feeling of positive union through the binding quality, through love’ but it is impossible to solve social problems by political and violent means.11 This can only be done by each individual’s decision to refuse to co-operate with the existing State and its institutions in order to create positive alternatives:

there comes a time in the history of a social structure, which is a structure only as long as individuals nourish it with their vitality, when those living shy away from it as a strange ghost from the past, and create new groupings instead. Thus I have withdrawn my love, reason, obedience, and my will from that which I call the ‘state’. That I am able to do so depends on my will.12

  It is a process which is never complete, but constantly renews itself: ‘No final security of measures should be taken to establish the millennium or eternity, but only a great balancing of forces, and the resolve periodically to renew the balance …’13

He therefore called for the development of self-managing communities and co-operatives which can bring people together and release them from their crippling dependence on authority. As he grew older, he talked less of class struggle and saw ‘direct action’ as the building of co-operatives coupled with Tolstoyan passive resistance to authority. The ‘general strike’ – the panacea of the anarcho-syndicalists — should not be a downing of tools but rather the reorganization of work under workers’ control. In the end, he came to see revolution not as a violent cataclysmic upheaval but as the peaceful rejection of coercive society and the gradual creation of alternative institutions. Rejecting industrial urbanism, he further urged the renewal of the traditional rural community by a return of the workers to the land.

Although Landauer wrote a preface to a pamphlet by Max Nettlau on Bakunin, his mature anarchism drew on the writings of both Proudhon and Kropotkin (whose works he also translated). He considered Proudhon the greatest of all socialists and freely adopted his schemes for mutual credit and exchange. He tried to reconcile individual possession of property and mutualist co-operation by suggesting that there should be a profusion of different forms of possession — individual, communal and co-operative — in a free society. It would be for the members of each community to decide periodically on the right balance between the different forms of possession.

Landauer translated Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and was impressed by his Fields, Factories and Workshops. Like Kropotkin, he promoted the economic independence of local and regional communities which combined agriculture and industry on a small scale. For Germany, he advocated a confederation of local communities in order to release the creative and organic spirit which lay imprisoned within the State. But while sharing Kropotkin’s vision of the integration of industry and agriculture, he called more insistently for a return to the land. Landauer even went so far as to argue that ‘the struggle for socialism is a struggle for the land; the social question is an agrarian question’.14 By identifying the genuine community with the land, Landauer turned his back on urban-based syndicalism.

The philosophical idealist in Landauer ultimately diverged from the scientifically-minded Kropotkin. He shared his stress on mutual aid and co-operation, but he insisted, like Malatesta, that they were the result of human will, not of natural laws at work in human society. In order to create a free society, he looked to spiritual awareness, not to the development of reason or science. A degree of high culture is reached only when a unifying spirit pervades social structures, ‘a spirit dwelling in the individuals themselves and pointing beyond earthly and material interests’. Socialism, he wrote in 1915, is ‘the attempt to lead man’s common life to a bond of common spirit in freedom, that is, to religion’.15

Landauer was not very optimistic about the possibility of change in his own day. He felt that his German contemporaries were the most obedient of subjects, demonstrating only too well la Boétie’s notion of voluntary servitude. The authoritarian State existed as a result more of human passivity than of externally imposed tyranny. He had little faith in the German working class and felt that only a few would be able to develop anarchism in exemplary co-operative settlements on the land.

Landauer remained an impressive figure in German literary circles, tall and gaunt with his long, dark beard and hair. ‘One felt when he spoke’, Rudolf Rocker recalled, ‘that every word came from his soul, bore the stamp of absolute integrity.’16 But he became increasingly isolated within the socialist movement before and during the First World War, earning the hatred of many compatriots for his principled opposition to it: ‘War is an act of power, of murder, of robbery’, he wrote in 1912. ‘It is the sharpest and clearest expression of the state.’17

Nevertheless, Landauer participated as a minor leader in the Bavarian Revolution of 1918–19. In November 1918, he was invited to Munich by his friend Kurt Eisner, the new socialist President of the Bavarian republic. He threw himself into the struggle as a member of the Revolutionary Workers’ Council and the Central Workers’ Council, trying to create his ideal of a federalist and decentralized society of self-managing communities. After the assassination of Eisner, Landauer became minister of education in the ‘cabinet’ of the short-lived Munich Council Republic proclaimed in April 1919. It was an attempt by anarchists and intellectuals to establish a free and independent Bavaria. Landauer worked with the poet Erich Mühsam, Ernst Toller (the author of a play about the Luddites), and Ret Marut (later to become the author B. Traven) but their efforts were tragically cut short Landauer’s programme to provide libertarian education for people of all ages was never realized. In little more than a week, the anarchists were ousted by communists who rejected their ‘pseudo-republic’. The revolution was eventually crushed by an army of 100,000 troops sent from Berlin by the Minister of Defence Gustav Noske.

In the aftermath, Landauer was beaten and murdered in Munich. According to a worker who witnessed the event, ‘an officer struck him in the face. The men shouted, “Dirty Bolshi! Let’s finish him off!” and a rain of blows from rifle-butts drove him out in the yard … they trampled on him till he was dead; then stripped the body and threw it into the wash-house.’ ‘Kill me then!’, he is reported as saying, ‘To think that you are human beings!’18 The unassuming pacifist had just turned forty-nine years old.

But he was not forgotten. The Anarchist Syndicalist Union of Munich, with workers’ contributions, raised a monument to him, using his own words as his epitaph: ‘Now is the time to bring forth a martyr of a different kind, not heroic, but a quiet, unpretentious martyr who will provide an example for the proper life.’19 It was torn down by the Nazis after Hitler’s rise to power.

Since his death, Landauer has exerted a strong influence on those who see the State as a set of relationships pervading society rather than as some mechanical superstructure. Through his friend Martin Buber (who edited his writings), Landauer influenced the Israeli communitarian movement. In the sixties and seventies, his call to drop out and to create alternative institutions found a resounding echo in the counter-culture.

The Jewish poet Erich Mühsam was also deeply influenced by Landauer and worked with him in Munich Council Republic. He was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour in the aftermath. He was a brilliant journalist as well as lyric poet, combining the insights of Kropotkin and Nietzsche to develop his own eccentric anarchism. After the defeat of the Munich Council, Mühsam served more than four years of a long sentence before being released in 1924 in a general amnesty. He did not turn his back on politics: he became active in the Red Aid organization which assisted political prisoners, and edited a monthly anarchist review Fanal. He remained an outspoken critic of German militarism and warned of the growing dangers of Nazism. He not only continued to write poetry but also composed a volume of ‘Unpolitical Memoirs’. One of his last works was called The Liberation of Society from the State. Mühsam was eventually arrested by the Nazis in 1933 and murdered in Oranienburg concentration camp the following year.

Johann Most   While Landauer expresses the most constructive side of anarchism, his compatriot Most probably contributed more than any other German to anarchism’s reputation as a violent and destructive creed. Most was born at Augsburg in Bavaria, the son of a governess and a clerk. He left school at fourteen and became apprenticed to a bookbinder. As a member of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), he was elected a deputy to the Reichstag from 1874 to 1878. After writing against the Kaiser and clergy, he was forced into exile and arrived in London as a political refugee in 1878. His activities provided Henry James with a theme for his novel The Princess Casamassima (1886).

From 1879 Most began publishing the journal Freiheit. It was exported and mainly exerted an influence in Germany and Austria where its gospel of revolutionary violence and illegality appealed more to conspiratorial groups than to the socialist movement at large. As a result of writing an editorial celebrating the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the British courts sentenced him to sixteen months’ imprisonment.

On his release, Most set sail for the United States. When he arrived in New York in 1882, he rapidly became a fully-fledged anarchist. He began publishing Freiheit again and continued to do so until his death in 1906. He fervently promoted propaganda by the deed as well as by the word, undertaking lecture tours which preached violent revolution. Most became notorious for recognizing ‘a “wild” anarchist in every criminal’.20 In order to obtain specialised information on how to make bombs, he worked in an explosive factory. He then wrote the pamphlet Revolutionäre Kriegsmissenschaft (Science of Revolutionary Warfare), a do-it-yourself ‘manual of instruction in the use and preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc.’ Much of this was just bluster: Most did not employ such means himself, but his enthusiastic advocacy inspired disaffected rebels with more foolhardiness than himself. Nevertheless, like Nechaev, he believed for a while that the revolutionary end justifies any means, including the murder of individuals. ‘Assassination’, he wrote, ‘is a concomitant of revolution, if you choose to call the forcible removal of insufferable oppression, assassination.’21 Not surprisingly, Most rapidly became known as one of the most dangerous men in America, although after the Haymarket Massacre in 1886 he had second thoughts about violent revolution. He gloried in his reputation and always embraced class warfare with enthusiasm: ‘Tyrants and the bourgeoisie hate me. I hate tyrants and the bourgeoisie. Our mutual hatred is my pride and joy.’22

Most was no original thinker; indeed, Max Nettlau correctly observed that he advanced ‘in steps’ in his own political development.23 It is difficult to find in Most’s writings many nuanced ideas. He was above all a propagandist, and felt obliged to express views which he thought his subscribers wanted to hear. As a social revolutionary, in 1882 he adopted for himself four ‘rules’ which sum up his positive teaching:

I follow four commandments. Thou shalt deny God and love truth; therefore I am an atheist. Thou shalt oppose tyranny and seek liberty; therefore I am a republican. Thou shall repudiate property and champion equality; therefore I am a communist. Thou shall hate oppression and foment revolution; therefore I am a revolutionary. Long live the Social Revolution!24

  For Most, it was as if revolution had replaced God, and he worshipped the new deity in every possible way. The ultimate goal was anarchism which, as a good lapsed socialist, he defined as ‘socialism perfected’.25

Rudolf Rocker   Like Most, Rocker was a German by birth and reflected in his life the transnational and cosmopolitan nature of modern anarchism. He was born in 1873 in the ancient Rhine city of Mainz, South Germany, the scion of old burgher families. As a Rhinelander, he was exposed to the region’s anti-Prussian and federalist traditions. His father was a printer but it was his uncle who introduced him to socialism. He joined a dissident Marxist group in Mainz known as ‘Die Jungen’ (Landauer was also a temporary member), a largely libertarian grouping within the SPD. The German socialist movement was dominated at the time by Marx and Lassalle and the young Rocker was soon repelled by its dogmatic narrow-mindedness. He became convinced that socialism was not only a question of a full belly but also a question of culture which ‘would have to enlist the sense of personality and the free initiative of the individual’.26 Looking for an alternative, he began to read the classic anarchist thinkers from Godwin to Kropotkin.

After leaving school, Rocker became a bookbinder and travelled through several European countries, contacting members of the international anarchist movement. Because of his political activities he went into exile in 1892, first in Paris and then, at the beginning of 1895, in London.

For the next twenty years, Rocker devoted the best years of his life to the Jewish anarchist movement in the East End of London. He quickly learned Yiddish and from 1898 edited the Yiddish paper Arbeter Fraint (The Worker’s Friend) and from 1900 the literary monthly Germinal. The paper was responsible for one of the first criticisms of the Marxist conception of history to appear in Yiddish. Rocker argued that materialism and idealism are both different views of life; however much we try, we can never find absolute truth. It is therefore impossible to believe that there is a final goal as Marx suggested: ‘Freedom will lead us to continually wider and expanding understanding and to new social forms of life. To think that we have reached the end of our progress is to enchain ourselves in dogmas, and that always leads to tyranny.’27

The experience of the poverty and suffering in what Rocker called ‘Darkest London’ rapidly disproved for him the idea, held by some revolutionaries about the condition of the poor, that ‘The worse, the better’. He believed, to the contrary, that if people suffer terribly, they become demoralized and are unlikely to have the strength or inclination to fight for social emancipation. It was this concern and sympathy which enabled him to become accepted by the Jewish community. But he also helped galvanize them into action. When he turned Arbeter Fraint into a daily paper during the successful strike of sweatshop workers in 1912, he won the respect of thousands. He later recorded his experiences amongst the Jewish community in his lively autobiography The London Years (1956): ‘I gave them all I had to give, and I gave it to them gladly, for there is no greater joy than to see the seed one has planted sprout. They were devoted to me because they saw that I was honestly devoted to them, that I was working with them, at their side, as one of them.’28

It was during his years amongst the Jewish Anarchist Group in Whitechapel that Rocker met his lifelong companion Milly Witcop. True to their anarchist beliefs, in 1898 they preferred to be turned back by the US Immigration Authority rather than go through the ceremony of a marriage imposed by the State. When they did eventually marry, it was on their own terms.

During the First World War, Rocker was interned in Britain as an ‘enemy alien’. He was deported in 1918 and went back to Germany. He became a leading figure in the syndicalist International Working Men’s Association which was set up in 1922 and which had its International Bureau in Berlin for the next decade.

Rocker was a competent and profuse writer. He defended the anarchists in the Spanish Revolution in the pamphlets The Truth about Spain (1936) and The Tragedy of Spain (1937) and produced an incisive account of Anarcho-Syndicalism (1938). His most important work was undoubtedly the monumental Nationalism and Culture (1937), completed shortly before the Nazi’s seizure of power. Forced into exile again, he finally settled in the United States. His opposition to fascism led him to support the allies in the war against Hitler and the Nazi dictatorship. He also wrote Pioneers of American Freedom (1949), to remind his new compatriots of the depth and breadth of their own libertarian tradition. He died in 1958, aged eighty-five.

In his Nationalism and Culture, Rocker tried to present an outline of the causes of the general decline of our civilization, the most important of which being power politics. He offered a searching analysis of human culture and institutions throughout known history. It is the most important anarchist treatment of the subject; Rocker’s standard of value is always the utmost possible freedom. The work was widely hailed as one of the great books of its time; Bertrand Russell, for instance, considered it an important contribution to political philosophy on account of its analysis of political thinkers as well as its ‘brilliant criticism of state-worship’.

Rocker insists that the nation is not the cause, but the result of the State: ‘It is the state which creates the nation, not the nation the state.’ At first sight this might seem strange since there are many ‘nations’ which are colonized and seek to create an independent State for themselves. But Rocker’s position becomes clearer when he distinguishes between a ‘people’ and a ‘nation’. A people is the ‘natural result of social union, a mutual association of men brought about by a certain similarity of external conditions of living, a common language, and special characteristics due to climate and geographic environment’. On the other hand, the nation is ‘the artificial result of the struggle for political power, just as nationalism has never been anything but the political religion of the modern state’. A people is always a ‘community with rather narrow boundaries’, whereas a nation generally encompasses a whole array of different peoples and groups of peoples who have ‘by more or less violent means been pressed into the frame of a common state’. Nation-States are therefore ‘political church organizations’.29

Rocker rejects the idea that a nation is founded on communality of language as an arbitrary assumption since peoples change their language, and nations exist with different language districts. He also repudiated race as a delusive concept since it is merely an artificial classification of biological science and only humanity as a whole constitutes a biological unit, a species. Not surprisingly, Rocker felt that all nationalism is reactionary since it enforces artificial separations within the ‘organic unity’ of the great human family.30

Cultural nationalism according to Rocker appears in its purest form when people are subjected to a foreign rule, and cannot for this reason pursue their own plans for political power. For Rocker ‘home sentiment’ is natural and acceptable for it is not the same as patriotism or love of the State. Only when it is mixed with ‘national consciousness’ does it become ‘one of the most grotesque phenomena of our time’.31

Rocker’s principal thesis is that States create no culture. In this he placed himself within the important if minor German libertarian tradition. He admired Nietzsche for his views of the State, the decline of German culture, and the Apollonian and Dionysian spirit in art. He also appreciated Humboldt’s ideas regarding the limitation of State action and his view that freedom is the basis of human progress and culture. Developing their ideas, Rocker argued that political power and culture are irreconcilable opposites; the former always strives for uniformity, while the latter looks for new forms and organizations. It follows that ‘Where states are dying or where their power is still limited to a minimum, there culture flourishes best.’32 Culture gives man consciousness of his humanity and creative strength; but power deepens in him the sense of dependence and bondage. Indeed, Rocker compares the contest between power and culture, State and society, to the motion of a pendulum which proceeds from one of its poles — authority – towards its opposite — freedom.

Rocker however is no social ecologist. He defines culture as ‘the conscious resistance of man against the course of nature, to which resistance alone he owes the preservation of the species’. The process of culture is therefore ‘only a gradual mastery of nature by man’.33

The Nation-State has destroyed the old community and has turned gradually all social activity into an instrument to serve the special ends of organizations for political power. Rocker makes the characteristic anarchist point:

It is not the form of the state, it is the state itself which creates evil and continually nourishes and fosters it. The more government crowds out the social element in human life or forces it under its rule, the more rapidly society dissolves into its separate parts.34

  The great problem set for our age is not the government of men, but the administration of things: ‘It is not so much how we are governed, but that we are governed at all.’ Whether in the form of State socialism or State capitalism, Rocker argued that there is no tyranny more unendurable than that of an all-powerful bureaucracy.

In place of government and the State, Rocker proposes federalism as ‘the organic collaboration of all social forces towards a common goal on the basis of covenants freely arrived at’:35 While rejecting ‘positive’ law made by governments, he accepts ‘natural’ law which existed before the growth of States and which is the ‘result of mutual agreements between men confronting one another as free and equal, motivated by the same interests and enjoying equal dignity as human beings’.36

In an epilogue to Nationalism and Culture written at the end of the war in 1946, Rocker called for a real federation of European peoples as the first condition for a future world federation. Despite the rise of fascism and the defeat of the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain, Rocker was confident that ‘just as there was once a time when might and right were one, so we are now apparently moving towards a time when every form of rulership shall vanish, law yield place to justice, liberties to freedom’.37

Rocker’s social philosophy took off from the teachings of Kropotkin. He argued that modern anarchism is a confluence of the currents of socialism and liberalism and may be regarded as ‘a kind of voluntary Socialism’.38 It is not a patent solution for all human problems but believes in ‘an unlimited perfectibility of social patterns and human living conditions’. It strives for the ‘free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life’.39 Freedom is valuable not because it is an absolute goal but because it enables this process to take place.

Rocker defined anarchism as an intellectual current ‘whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions in society’. In place of the capitalistic economic order, anarchists would have ‘a free association of all productive forces based on co-operative labour’.40 The State on the other hand is ‘the defender of mass exploitation and social privileges, the creator of privileged classes and castes and of new monopolies’. He concludes that the liberation of humanity from economic exploitation and political oppression, which is only possible through the ‘world-philosophy’ of anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity.41

Rocker saw anarcho-syndicalism as the most relevant form of anarchism for the twentieth century. He rejected political struggle since all the political rights and liberties enjoyed by people are not due to the goodwill of their governments but to their own strength. Anarcho-syndicalists are not against political struggle — they fight political suppression as much as economic exploitation — but they see that the struggle lies not in the legislative bodies but in direct action, particularly in the form of the strike. Although opposed to militarism, Rocker was not a pacifist, and accepted the need for a determined people to fight for their freedom. The workers, he argued, ‘can regain their rights only by incessant warfare against the dominant powers’.42 He defended the anarchists in the Spanish Revolution and the fight against Franco and his troops. He also supported the allies in the war against Nazi Germany. Towards the end of his life, he took a more reformist stand, but he never lost the vision of a free society which he found in the writings of the great anarchist thinkers as a boy.

Mohandas Gandhi

  The Gentle Revolutionary   THE MOST IMPORTANT AND outstanding libertarian thinker to emerge in India this century was undoubtedly Mohandas Gandhi. On several occasions he called himself a kind of anarchist and always opposed the centralized State and the violence it engendered. In a famous speech in 1916, referring to India’s violent revolutionaries, he declared that he too was an anarchist, ‘but of another type [than the terrorist kind]’.1

Gandhi’s particular form of libertarian philosophy was strongly influenced by several Western thinkers. A reading of Tolstoy’s Kingdom of God is Within You in 1893 inspired him to practise non-resistance to violence, but he went on to develop his own highly successful technique of nonviolent direct action. In a South African prison in 1907, he found further confirmation of his approach in Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience. From Ruskin, he learned that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all and the life of labour is the life worth living. He was particularly influenced by Ruskin’s Unto This Last and translated the title as Sarvodaya, welfare for all. Finally, it was from Kropotkin that he elaborated his vision of a decentralized society of autonomous village communes.

But despite the Western influences, Gandhi’s anarchism is deeply embedded in Indian philosophy. He attempted to reconstruct an ancient tradition of Indian religious thought which depicts man as a divine being capable of perfection and of self-discipline by internalising moral norms. His appeal to all classes and groups was based on a metaphysical belief in the cosmic unity of all beings. Central to his world-view were also the principles of satya (truth), karmayoga (self-realization through disinterested action), varnasramdharma (the Hindu law of right conduct), and above all ahimsa (non-injury or non-violence). But the most revolutionary aspect of Gandhi’s teaching was undoubtedly his social and political interpretation of ahimsa in which he turned the principle of individual self-realization into a principle of social ethics. He also drew on the traditional Indian values of village life and the joint family and the practice of making decisions by consensus.2

One looks in vain for a clear exposition of Gandhi’s social philosophy in his writings. He was prepared to change his theory according to his experience and aptly called his autobiography My Experiments with Truth. In his voluminous writings, he left behind no clear system of moral or political philosophy but rather ‘an existential pattern of thought and deed’.3 Since he was mainly concerned with persuading people, his writings chiefly consist of the monotonous repetition of a few basic themes.

The primary motive of Gandhi’s pacifism was religious but in South Africa he developed a specific method of resistance (against the registration laws for Indians) which he called Satyagraha. The term in Gujarati means ‘firmness in the truth’ but in Gandhi’s hands it became a kind of non-violent struggle. Tolstoy had urged that the way to undermine the State is to refuse to co-operate with it but Gandhi shifted the emphasis from passive to active non-violent resistance. He regarded ‘passive resistance’ as the weapon of the weak, but he was also wary of the kind of ‘civil disobedience’ which implies angry defiance. His strategy was therefore a form of non-violent resistance which sought to fight with the power of truth rather than with the force of the body. Based on the precept ‘Hate the sin but not the sinner’, it aimed at defeating the enemy without harming him or arousing hatred. In practice, it involved the classical syndicalist tactic of the strike, but it also entailed refusing to hit back at charging police and lying on railway lines.

For all his commitment to non-violence, Gandhi was not in fact an absolute pacifist. He became a stretcher bearer on the British side in the Boer War, even acting as a kind of recruiting sergeant for the British Army. He was prepared to be a stretcher bearer in the First World War. He always thought it better to fight than to be a coward: ‘where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence’, he declared.4

One of Gandhi’s most important contributions to libertarian theory was his clarification of the relationship between means and ends. He insisted that the two cannot be separated; means are ends. Means are never merely instrumental, but create their own ends; they are ends-in-the-making.5 If we concentrate on the right means then the desirable ends will follow automatically. Again, by acting here and now as if we are free agents capable of self-rule, we actually bring about the free society rather than seeing it as some distant goal. His non-violent revolution therefore does not involve the seizure of power but the transformation of everyday life and relationships.

Although his method was gradualist and piecemeal, Gandhi was a revolutionary who sought not only to end British rule in India but to transform traditional Indian society and eventually world society. His long-term goal was to realize a realm of peace and justice throughout the world, to bring about Ram Raj, the kingdom of God on earth. To this end, he deepened his campaign in the 1930s to uproot the worse aspects of the caste system by concentrating on the lot of the untouchables. He deliberately called them Harijans (Children of God) and set an example by doing their traditional work like cleaning out his own toilet. The campaign showed his profound wish to bring about a more equal and co-operative society. He was concerned to provide service to ‘backward tribes’ as well as to bring about the ‘uplift of women’. Women he felt were equal in status, but different in function. He demanded the abolition of purdah and hoped that women would be able to practise sexual restraint once freed from male domination.

Gandhi’s ‘Constructive Programme’, as it came to be known, not only included the end of untouchability and communal reconciliation, but also the renewal of village life. He told his co-workers in 1944:

Through it you can make the villagers feel self-reliant, self-sufficient and free so that they can stand up for their rights. If you can make a real success of the constructive programme, you will win Swaraj (self-government) for India without civil disobedience.6

  In Gandhi’s view, it was essential to create a new society on the sound base of a decentralized economy, in which villages grew their own food and developed industries based on local materials. Suspicious of the nomadic hunter as much as the city slicker, he felt that the ideal society would combine good husbandry with a high level of craftsmanship. Artisans should be their own masters and the land should belong to those who cultivate it Children ought to practise handicrafts before reading and writing in order to learn how to use their hands; like everyone else, they should do ‘bread-labour’ in field or workshop to help meet their basic needs. All should enjoy the benefits of a simple and self-reliant life.

Despite his emphasis on crafts, Gandhi was no Luddite opposed to technological progress. He was not against electricity although he thought each village should have its own power station to maintain its autonomy. The few remaining centralized factories would be run by workers with their former owners acting as trustees.

Gandhi’s libertarian sensibility not only comes through in his description of his ideal society but also in his criticism of the State and parliamentary democracy. Like Tolstoy, he fully realized that the State represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. He feared the power of the State, even when it tries to minimize exploitation and provide welfare, since it destroys individuality which lies at the root of all progress. Instead, he advocated swaraj or self-government, by which he meant the ‘continuous effort to be free of government control, whether it is foreign or whether it is national’.7 It would be the first step towards his ultimate ideal, a form of enlightened anarchy in which social life is self-regulated and ‘there is no political power because there is no state’.8

While Gandhi does not reject the notion of a State in a transitional period, it is clear in his writings that he does not mean anything more by it than a co-ordinating body in a decentralized society of autonomous villages. Although a person’s concern would be first directed towards his neighbours, it would not end there:

Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals … The outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its strength from it.9

  In place of parliamentary democracy, he proposed a form of indirect democracy in which each village would be ruled by its own traditional five-man council and would elect a representative to the district council. Each district would elect a representative to the regional council which in turn would choose members of the national council. The latter would have little to do other than co-ordinate communications, energy, minerals and other resources. There would be no need for an army: if the land were invaded, peace brigades would meet the invader and oppose them non-violently. The police might still have to use restraint on wrongdoers but they would not be punished and prisons would be turned into education centres. Disputes would be solved by arbitration amongst neighbours rather than by lawcourts.

It is easy to overestimate Gandhi’s anarchist tendencies. Although he declared that ‘The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy’, he did not call for the immediate abolition of State and government.10 Although he resigned from the Indian National Congress and had a diminishing influence on its policies, he initiated the 1942 Quit India movement. After independence, he made no frontal criticism of the Indian government.

While Gandhi wanted to end political coercion, many of his opponents felt morally coerced by him. It is almost as if he felt it necessary to internalize the laws of the State in the individual so that he or she would be capable of self-restraint. He constantly stressed the need for duty, and called for the willing submission of the individual to the well-being of society.

There was also a strong puritanical and repressive streak in his personality and teaching which led him to prohibit tobacco and alcohol. He recommended strict sexual continence, and for those incapable of it, he would only countenance sex for procreation and not pleasure. His society might be tolerant of different religions, but it would expect a rigid moral code. He ruled like a patriarch in his communes or ashrams in South Africa and India and did not always reject the role of the venerable guru. Like Godwin he believed that close friendship and loyalty can override the demands of impartial justice but his own imperfect practice of universal benevolence led to claims that he was inconsiderate to his own wife and children.

Gandhi also deliberately cultivated a power of his own which did not always have democratic tendencies. ‘Non-violence’, he declared, ‘does not seize power. It does not even seek power. Power accrues to it.’11 After the First World Gandhi helped organize, mainly through the Indian National Congress, collective acts of non-violent resistance, including the Salt March. After 1932 however he increasingly acted as a charismatic leader exerting moral and spiritual power over his opponents. As an outstanding satyagrahi, he grew more isolated, and by exercising so much power himself he prevented others from developing their own initiative. Indeed, for all his undoubted sincerity and humility, his form of persuasion could at times become a kind of moral coercion. Satyagraha, or the force of truth, could in practice degenerate into duragraha, the force of stubbornness.12 Gandhi’s chosen tactic was to oppose moral power against political power, but in the end the anarchist goal is to decentralize and dissolve power altogether. Just as Gandhi the patriarch prevented his ashrams from becoming wayward self-governing communities, so the example of India’s most famous satyagrahi hindered the development of a mass libertarian movement of equals.

Nevertheless, Gandhi remained until the end deeply suspicious of political power. When asked what would happen to India if the British abdicated their responsibility, he replied: ‘Leave India to God. If that is too much to believe, then leave her to anarchy.’ After Indian independence, he suggested that his fellow constructive workers should not enter politics; their task was to mould the politics of the country without taking power for themselves. Just before he died, he also urged the leaders of Congress, his party, to avoid the ‘ungainly skirmish for power’ and to turn their organization into a ‘body of servants of the nation engaged in constructive work, mostly in the villages, to achieve social, moral and economic freedom’.13 Needless to say, his advice fell on deaf ears, and his ‘political heir’ Pandit Nehru proceeded to militarize and centralize the Indian State amidst mounting communal violence between Hindus and Muslims.

Through his spectacular feats of fasting, Gandhi tried to bring political and religious factions together. Despite his enormous prestige, he failed to unite the warring factions. Winston Churchill’s ‘half-naked fakir’ had helped bring an empire to its knees but he was unable to hold back the violent passions checked by colonial rule. After being shot by a fellow Hindu in January 1948, the funeral of the penniless anarchist and pacifist became a huge State affair, organized by the military authorities, with a British general in charge. It was the final irony of a complex life.

Gandhi once defined himself as a politician trying to be a saint. He was certainly a practical politician, ready to make compromises and forge temporary alliances in his overriding drive to make India independent of colonial rule. Even so, as George Orwell observed, he managed to shake empires by sheer spiritual power and ‘compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!’.14 Gandhi accepted the title of Mahatma, the teacher, but he once declared: ‘There is no such thing as ‘Gandhism’ and I do not want to leave any sect after me.’15 It was enough for him that he was his own follower. But while there are not many ‘Gandhians’, even in India, his experiments with truth and his technique of non-violence have had a wide influence. He demonstrated that non-violence is not only an effective means of resistance but that it can be used to transform society peacefully. He also showed that the individual, and a group of individuals, can by their example wield enormous moral power which can shake political authority to its roots.

In the West, Gandhi has primarily been seen as a national leader whose principal aim was to achieve independence for India.16 But he was also influential in bringing pacifism and anarchism together. It has been argued that, after 1930, Gandhi came to accept the modern State, but apart from some ambiguous statements there is little evidence to support this view.17 On the contrary, Gandhi remained an anarchist to the end, albeit of a distinctly Indian stamp, since he believed that the State is incompatible with the moral and spiritual nature of humanity. His ideal was always ‘enlightened anarchy’ even though he recognized that the State was likely to continue to exist for a long time. Above all, he insisted that any State is not simply a structure built to legitimize organized violence, but that it consists of a network of internal relations with its own citizens. It would never be adequate merely to ‘overthrow’ it; it will only disappear with the liberation of our own selves. This is Gandhi’s central and most enduring insight.

In his lifetime, Gandhi’s ideas were popularized in the West by books such as Richard Gregg’s The Power of Non-Violence (1935). The Dutch anarchist Bart de Ligt in his The Conquest of Violence (1937) warned his fellow anarchists that ‘The more violence, the less revolution’ and linked Gandhi’s moral non-violence with the non-violent direct action of the syndicalists, notably in their use of the general strike. In the 1950s and 1960s, anarcho-pacifism came to the forefront in the New Left and the campaigns for nuclear disarmament, and it looked for a time that a non-violent revolution might be possible towards the end of the sixties before the transatlantic reaction set in.

PART FIVE   Anarchism in Action Anarchy is order: government is civil war.

Anarchy is order: government is civil war. ANSELME BELLEGARRIQUE

There is no such thing as revolutionary power, for all power is reactionary by nature. CONFEDERACIóN NACIONAL DEL TRABAJO (SPAIN)

The greater the violence, the weaker the revolution. BART DE LIGT

Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom, but an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual.

MOHANDAS GANDHI

France

FRANCE IN MANY WAYS was the cradle of the historic anarchist movement. Its seeds were scattered by the enragés during the French Revolution and began to grow amongst the workers in the 1840s. France produced in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon the ‘father’ of the organized anarchist movement. Proudhon not only inspired the varieties of anarchism which developed in the second half of the nineteenth century but the mutualist workers with whom he was associated helped set up the First International Working Men’s Association. Towards the end of the century, France witnessed the worst examples of terrorist ‘propaganda by the deed’ as well as the great imaginative flowering of anarchism amongst the writers and artists of Symbolism and Post-Impressionism. It also gave rise to one of anarchism’s most constructive forms — anarcho-syndicalism.

The libertarian spirit had been strong in France ever since the irreverent Rabelais coined his motto ‘Do what you will’, and la Boétie offered his insights about voluntary servitude. The anti-authoritarian utopias of Foigny and Fénelon had been followed by the searing criticisms of the philosophes, Morelly, Meslier, Diderot and Rousseau. They all fired the mood of discontent which was eventually to culminate, of course, in the French Revolution.

The French Revolution set the context of many of the disputes and struggles on the Left which were to follow in the nineteenth century. From the beginning there was a struggle between the libertarians and the federalists and the authoritarians and centrists. Condorcet, who believed in the perfectibility of man and the possibility of a free and classless society even while awaiting his execution at the hands of the authoritarian Jacobins, proposed a remarkable scheme of mutualité, that is a vast mutual aid association among all workers. The moderate Girondins also advocated a form of federalism as a means of saving France from a Jacobin Paris.

A more revolutionary and spontaneous form of federalism developed in the ‘districts’ or ‘sections’ into which Paris had been organized administratively for elections. Out of these emerged the Commune of Paris. Many popular societies and revolutionary committees also arose which soon replaced the Jacobin-dominated sections. But while it was argued that the Commune must legislate and administer itself, it remained a kind of federalist direct democracy. Mutualism and federalism not only became later the twin pillars of Proudhon’s system but Kropotkin was convinced that the principles of anarchism found their origin in the deeds of the French Revolution.1

The term anarchist was still used as a term of abuse at the time. It was applied indiscriminately to libertarians and authoritarians alike by their opponents. In England, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in his anti-revolutionary Anarchical Fallacies (1791) attacked the French Declaration of Rights, arguing that it would replace the old tyranny of a single master by the new tyranny of collective anarchy. The Jacobins called the sans culottes anarchists and were called anarchist in turn by the Directory which replaced them. The sans-culottes, the revolutionary mob who took to the streets in the spring and summer of 1793, were not strictly speaking anarchists for they helped overthrow the Girondins and bring about the Jacobin dictatorship.

Once in power Robespierre employed the epithet to attack those on the Left whom he had used for his own ends. But it was also adopted as a term of pride: in September 1793, the Sans-Culottes of Beaucaire informed the Convention: ‘We are poor and virtuous sans-culottes; we have formed an association of artisans and peasants … we know whom our friends are: those who have delivered us from the clergy and nobility, from the feudal system … those whom the aristocrats called anarchists, factious elements, Maratists.’2 It was Marat of course who had called for revolution in 1789 and declared that ‘the people have broken the yoke of nobility; in the same way they will break that of wealth’. He was however in practice an extreme authoritarian.

When the Directory came to call the authoritarian Jacobins whom they had replaced in 1795 as ‘anarchists’ the term began to develop its elasticity of meaning which makes it so misleading, especially since:

By ‘anarchists’ the Directory means these men covered with crimes, stained with blood, and fattened by rapine, enemies of laws they do not make and of all governments in which they do not govern, who preach liberty and practice despotism, speak of fraternity and slaughter their brothers …3

  Nevertheless, not only in practice but also in theory, there were popular leaders reaching characteristically anarchist conclusions, particularly amongst the enragés, a loose movement of revolutionaries who rejected parliamentary politics, practised direct action, and looked to economic reform. One of their leaders was named Anacharsis Clootz. When the Girondin Brissot called for the suppression of the enragés in 1793, he declared:

Laws that are not carried into effect, authorities without force and despised, crime unpunished, property attacked, the safety of the individual violated, the morality of the people corrupted, no constitution, no government, no justice, these are the features of anarchy.4

  Apart from the references to the safety of the individual and the morality of the people, at least there was some element of truth in this definition.

Chief among the enragés was Jacques Roux, a country clergyman who became a member of the General Council of the Commune. He has been remembered for escorting the king to the guillotine and for urging the mob to direct action, such as the seizure of goods in shops. He was also one of the first to link political freedom with economic equality: ‘Freedom is but an empty phantom if one class of men can starve another with impunity. Freedom is but an empty phantom when the rich man can through his monopoly exercise the right of life and death over his fellow men.’5 The Jacobins accused him of telling the people that ‘every kind of government must be proscribed’; he was arrested and condemned to death by them, but he committed suicide before they could enjoy their triumph. But for all his libertarian profession, Roux like Marat remained an extreme authoritarian.

It was Jean Varlet however who came closest to being an anarchist during the French Revolution. He asserted the absolute sovereignty of the Section. He was imprisoned during the Terror but survived to mount a blistering attack on the Jacobin dictatorship in a work entitled L’Explosion:

What a social monstrosity, what a masterpiece of Machiavellism is this revolutionary government. For any rational being, government and revolution are incompatible — unless the people is willing to set up its delegates in a permanent state of insurrection against themselves — which is absurd.6

  The work may be considered the earliest anarchist manifesto in continental Europe.

Gracchius Babeuf with the support of the enragés tried in his Conspiration des Égaux to overturn the Directory in 1796. He called for perfect equality, attacked private property as the principal source of ills in society, and believed everything should be shared in common. Kropotkin saw a direct filiation from Babeuf’s conspiracy to the International Working Men’s Association set up in 1866.7 But Babeuf was never an anarchist like Varlet for he looked to the State, run by a revolutionary dictatorship, to bring about his ‘Republic of Equals’.

It was the French thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who was the first to call himself deliberately and provocatively an anarchist. To the rhetorical question ‘What are you then?’, Proudhon replied unequivocally in What is Property? in 1840:

I am an anarchist.

‘I understand, you are being satirical at the expense of government.’

Not in the least. I have just given you my considered and serious profession of faith. Although I am a strong supporter of order, I am in the fullest sense of the term, an anarchist.8

  Aware of the derivation of the word anarchy from the Greek, Proudhon rejected the government of man by man as oppression, and insisted that society finds its highest perfection in the union of order and anarchy: ‘Just as man seeks justice in equality, society seeks order in anarchy.’9 This apparent paradox had a profound meaning: only society without artificial government could restore the natural order and social harmony.

Proudhon generally spelt the word ‘an-archy’ to emphasize its etymological meaning. He not only defined anarchy as a ‘state of total liberty’ but referred to ‘absolute liberty, which is synonymous with order’.10 He added to the potential confusion by occasionally using the word anarchy in its negative sense, associating it with property and exploitation, the complete laissez faire of ‘Industrial Empire’, and referring to the ‘anarchy of commercial capitalism’ and ‘anarchical capitalism’.11 Towards the end of his life, he grew more cautious and preferred to call himself a ‘federalist’ rather than an anarchist. His followers did not call themselves anarchists either but mutualists, after the principle of the mutual exchange of the products of labour. Bakunin however described anarchism as ‘Proudhonism broadly developed and pushed to its extreme consequences’.12

Proudhon may have been the most influential anarchist thinker in France but he was not the only one. At the time of the 1848 Revolution an obscure revolutionary called Anselme Bellegarrique launched the slogan ‘Anarchy is order: government is civil war’ quite independently of Proudhon. Before disappearing into Central America, he went on to publish in 1850 two issues of L’Anarchie, Journal de l’Ordre which combined a form of Stirnerite egoism with a vision of a free society based on the commune, without government and armies. The physician Ernest Coeurderoy and the upholsterer Joseph Déjacque also participated in the 1848 Revolution and the bitterness of failure and exile led them to apocalyptic celebration of violence and barbarism. ‘Anarchist revolutionaries’, Coeurderoy declared, ‘we can take hope only in the human deluge, we can take hope only in chaos, we have no recourse but a general war.’13

Déjacque edited the anarchist paper Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social in New York from 1858 to 1861. He advocated ‘war on civilization by criminal means’ and secret societies in La Question Révolutionnaire (1854). He let his utopian imagination run riot in L’Humanisphère in which man holds in his hand ‘the sceptre of science’ which had once been attributed to the gods. Each is his own representative in a ‘parliament of anarchy’.14 Déjacque’s ‘humanispheres’ resemble Fourier’s ‘phalansteries’ and while based on the principle of complete freedom reflect a similarly rigid planning.

Anarchism as a movement only started gathering momentum in the 1860s in France, mainly inspired by Proudhon’s mutualism and his ideas expressed in De la Capacité politique des classes ouvrières (1865). Workers’ associations and mutual credit schemes were considered the principal way forward. Towards the end of the 1860s men like Eugène Varlin and Benôit Malon helped shift the emphasis from mutualism to Bakuninite collectivism in the French sections of the First International. The Paris Commune of 1871, which declared ‘the absolute autonomy of the Commune extended to all the localities of France’, advocated in theory a form of Proudhonian federalism. In practice little could be done except to keep public services going and defend its existence. In the bloody aftermath, amongst the anarchists Varlin was shot, Louise Michel was transported to a penal settlement, and Elisée Reclus was imprisoned.15

The anti-authoritarians within in the International saw the Commune as the spontaneous expression of federalist, anti-statist ideas and it strengthened their argument for the Communal reconstruction of post-revolutionary society. The Federal Committee of the Jura Federation in 1872 saw the principle issue at stake in the socialist movement was the choice between the Commune libre or the Volkstaat. By 1875, the Commune was gradually becoming a myth. As Le Révolté declared on 1 November 1879, ‘the people, who in modern times have first formulated in practice the anarchist programme of the proletariat by constituting the free Commune of Paris, cannot be for authoritarianism.’

For a decade after the Commune all anarchist and socialist activity was declared illegal in France. The Jura in Switzerland became the new centre of opposition to the General Council of the International, and the nucleus of the incipient European anarchist movement. Its principal leader James Guillaume argued that federalism in the sense given to it by the Paris Commune and Proudhon meant above all the negation of the nation and the State. In a federal revolution:

There is no more State, no more central power superior to groups and imposing its authority on them; there is only collective force resulting from the federation of groups … The national and central State no longer existing, and the Communes enjoying the fullness of their independence, there is truly an-archy.16

  In 1873 Paul Brousse, a graduate of the medical school of Montpellier University, joined the Jura Federation and tried to give anarchism a scientific basis and make it more militant. He had been with the Republican opposition at the end of the Second Empire, but on joining the International he soon became an opponent of Marx and the General Council, and played a major role in the anti-authoritarian wing. He was expelled from the Montpellier section of the International in 1872. After a short period of exile in Spain where he became more influenced by Bakuninite ideas and was involved in an uprising in Barcelona in 1873, he moved to Switzerland.

Kropotkin became acquainted with him there and described him as ‘a young doctor full of mental activity, uproarious, sharp, lively, ready to develop any idea with a geometrical logic to its utmost consequences’. At the Berne Congress of the International in 1874, Brousse had heard Malatesta and Cafiero insisting that revolution consists more in deeds than in words. Matching the violence of the Russian and Italian anarchists, Brousse became a leading exponent of ‘propaganda by the deed’, which led to conflict with the moderate James Guillaume.17 He was sufficiently eminent to give a speech, along with Guillaume and Reclus, at Bakunin’s funeral in Bern in 1876.

In the same year Brousse edited Die Arbeiter-Zeitung, and later launched from La Chaux-de-Fonds L’Avant-Garde. Under the rubric ‘Collectivism, Anarchy, Free Federation’, the latter organ called for the replacement of the State by a society based on contract and the free federation of groups formed around each need and interest. The strategy advocated by the journal was extremely violent, calling for the creation of the Commune by insurrection: ‘It is necessary to desert the ballot boxes and man the barricades, and for that, it is necessary to get organized.’18 Its motto was ‘Rise, people, in your might!/ Worker, take the machine!/ Take the land, peasant!’

After being one of the most active anarchist organizers and militants, on his return to France in 1880 Brousse went over to the socialists and developed the reformist doctrine of ‘possibilism’ which sought improvements through factory legislation and municipal politics. ‘The ideal’, he wrote in 1883, ‘divided into several practical stages; our aims should, as it were, be immediatized so as to render the possible.’19 He formed the Possibilist Party which became the most powerful socialist organization in France in the 1880s.

A general awareness of the anarchist movement as a distinct strand within socialism did not appear until the beginning of the decade. Even as late as 1876 James Guillaume in the Jurassian Federation complained that the terms ‘anarchist’ and ‘anarchy’ expressed only a negative idea and led to ‘distressing ambiguities’.20 Elisée Reclus however soon argued that the notoriety of the term would aid their cause by attracting attention.21

At the same time, the Federation moved from collectivism to communism. The first mention of anarcho-communism was made by a French exile living in Geneva François Dumartheray who, in 1876 in Aux Travailleurs manuels partisans de l’action politique, announced the publication of a pamphlet on the subject which in the event has never been traced.

In October 1876 anarcho-communism was adopted by the Italian Federation at its Florence congress, and Malatesta and Cafiero travelled to Switzerland and told their Swiss comrades about it. In 1876 Guillaume in his pamphlet Idées sur l’organisation sociale also argued that after the revolution there would be a general sharing out of wealth and consumption need not be related strictly according to work. Kropotkin claimed that he was ignorant of the doctrine as late as 1889, but in the following year it was officially adopted on his insistence by the Congress of the Jurassian Federation at La Chaux-de-Fonds.

With the lifting of restrictions on political activity in France in 1881, anarchism became recognizable for the first time as an identifiable movement.22 A remarkable group of activists emerged. The shoemaker Jean Grave, who edited La Révolte and Les Temps Nouveaux, was an able and indefatigable propagandist. Emile Pouget edited the scurrilous Le Père Peinard and went on to become a leading exponent of anarcho-syndicalism. The ex-Jesuit seminarist Sébastien Faure popularized anarchist theory in a series of pamphlets and founded the Le Libertaire in 1899 which continued into the 1950s. Kropotkin’s presence in France at the time greatly inspired the movement and he wrote for the leading anarchist journals, especially Le Révolté and its successor La Révolte. Many of his works first appeared in French.

Elisée Reclus, the geographer, felt no compunction about using his knowledge to support the anarchist cause. His brother Elie also wrote about Les Primitifs (1903), employing the findings of anthropology to demonstrate the possibility of a free society, but he took an increasingly pessimistic interest in past myths and religions. Elisée Reclus remained an optimist and became the most competent French exponent of anarchism at the end of the nineteenth century. He not only supported La Révolte and Le Révolté with money and contributions but his purely anarchist pamphlets like A mon frère, le paysan (1893) and Evolution et révolution (1880) had a wide circulation.

But while these thinkers were elaborating a profound critique of the French State, and developing a persuasive anarcho-communist alternative, a series of spectacular and bloody acts of propaganda by the deed won anarchism its notorious reputation in the popular mind which it has never been able to shake off. In the desperate social unrest in the 1880s many anarchists thought that the only way to bring down the State was through a campaign of terror. Jean Grave for one concluded at the time that ‘all the money spent to propose deputies would be more judiciously used to buy dynamite’.23

Charles Gallo agreed and threw a bottle of vitriol from the gallery of the Paris Stock Exchange and then starting firing his revolver at random. The legendary François-Claudius Ravachol placed bombs in the houses of two French judges (whom he held responsible for imposing severe sentences on two workers after a May Day demonstration). His name became immortalized in the verb – ravacholiser (to blow up). Théodule Meunier bombed a barracks and the restaurant where Ravachol had been betrayed to the police (killing the proprietor and a customer). Auguste Vaillant hurled a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies (killing no one).

The most notorious terrorist at this time was the young intellectual Entile Henry, who threw a bomb in the Café Terminus in the Gare St Lazare in Paris to show the vulnerable side of the bourgeoisie. He killed one customer and injured twenty others. At his trial, Henry declared:

I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that henceforth their pleasures would not be untouched, that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would rock violently on its pedestal until the final shock that would cast it down among filth and blood.

  He made clear that he saw himself as part of an international anarchist movement which no government could crush:

You have hanged in Chicago, decapitated in Germany, garrotted in Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and Paris, but what you will never destroy is anarchy. Its roots are too deep. It is born in the heart of a society that is rotting and falling part. It is a violent reaction against the established order. It represents all the egalitarian and libertarian aspirations that strike out against authority. It is everywhere, which makes it impossible to contain. It will end by killing you!24

  On the scaffold, Henry exclaimed: ‘Long live Anarchy! My death will be avenged.’ It certainly was. In 1894, an Italian anarchist Santo Jeronimo Caserio stabbed to death President Sadi Carnot of France. Kropotkin and others tried to excuse such acts as desperate responses to an impossible situation, but no such tortuous arguments could assuage the public revulsion. As the writer Octave Mirbeau drily observed: ‘A mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better than Emile Henry when he hurled his inexplicable bomb in the midst of peaceful anonymous people who had come to a café to drink a beer before going to bed.’25

While anarchism showed its ugliest and most destructive side in the terrorists acts at the end of the nineteenth century in France, it also inspired many artists and writers in its most creative form. Gustave Courbet of course had been a friend of Proudhon who had argued that art must have a moral and social purpose, and that it should be ‘an idealist representation of nature and ourselves with the aim of perfecting our species physically and morally’.26 The view was shared by Courbet who depicted the life of the poor, and it eventually contributed to the theory of social realism. Courbet in his famous Burial at Ornans tried to negate the ideal of Romanticism and arrive at the emancipation of the individual. He became a member of the Commune and responsible for artistic policy; as a result he was involved in the decision to demolish the Vendôme Column in Paris, a symbol of Napoleon’s military dictatorship.

Many of the Post-Impressionist painters found in anarchism a confirmation of their call for artistic freedom, their revolt against bourgeois society, and their sympathy for the poor and oppressed. Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien contributed regularly to Le Père Peinard and to Jean Grave’s Les Temps Nouveaux. Pissarro like Courbet was exiled after the Commune and in 1894 had to move to Belgium to escape the persecution of the anarchists following the assassination of President Carnot. Paul Signac, who eventually ended up in the Communist Party, declared in 1902: ‘The anarchist painter is not one who will show anarchist paintings, but one who without regard for lucre, without desire for reward, will struggle with all his individuality, with a personal effort, against bourgeois and official conventions …’27 Steinlen and later Vlaminck and other Fauvist artists also contributed to Les Temps Nouveaux.

A young French philosopher who greatly impressed Kropotkin was J. M. Guyau who offered in his Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction (1884) a view of morality free from all external duty and coercion. Guyau rejected the utilitarian calculus as well as metaphysical sanctions, arguing that we create our own morality through rational choice. Unlike Stirner and Nietzsche, however, he did not draw egoistic conclusions: we have a superabundance of energy which leads us to go beyond the instinct of self-preservation to feel compassion for others. Altruism is therefore based on a natural need to live a full, intense and productive life. Guyau was unable to develop these insights for he died when he was thirty-four, but Kropotkin felt that he was an anarchist without being conscious of it.

Amongst other writers, the novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, whom Degas called the ‘pyromaniac fireman’, came to anarchism in his maturity after reading Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Elisée Reclus. His ornate novels often show a fascination with the very vices he condemns, and his heroes are listless rebels. In Sébastien Roch, a study of a young man traumatized by his Jesuit education, Mirbeau raises the question whether youth will ever rebel against the suffocating system run by priests and police. Le Jardin des supplices, inspired by the Dreyfus affair, offers an Oriental allegory of Western corruption and legalized torture, while Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, made recently into a successful film, shows the bourgeoisie held together principally by its vices. Amongst his explicitly anarchist writings, Mirbeau wrote the immensely successful pamphlet La Grève des électeurs which sold in tens of thousands.28 He was a lifelong anti-militarist, and his comment on the political violence of the 1880s proved the most astute of all his contemporaries: ‘The biggest danger of the bomb is the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.’ However, it did not stop him from describing Ravachol as ‘the peal of thunder to which succeeds the joy of sunlight and of peaceful skies’.29

Anarchism at the turn of the century undoubtedly attracted many bohemian individualists, and for a while it became a broad cultural movement, giving expression to a wide range of social disenchantment and artistic rebellion.30 Jean Grave, amongst others, was suspicious of their importance, and certainly many were more interested in attacking bourgcois convention than in exploring social theory. The writer Laurent Tailhade declared ‘Qu’importe les vagues humanités, pourvu que le geste soit beau?’ (Of what importance are the vague expressions of humanity, as long as the gesture is fine?) – although he might have changed his mind after a bomb exploded in a restaurant where he was eating and he lost an eye.

Maurice Barrès, influenced by Nietzsche, wrote a series of novels called Le Culte du moi which expressed an anti-social individualism. In L’Ennemi des lois, he depicted the protagonists who became anarchists after studying Saint-Simon, Fourier and Marx but they withdraw to the country to cultivate their refined sensuality and practice universal benevolence. Jean Grave declared that it was an anarchism only appropriate for millionaires who could free themselves from existing laws.

In Switzerland during the First World War a group of artists, pacifists and radicals, including Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck, met in Zürich and launched the Dada movement, a unique blend of art and anarchy. It claimed to be a total negation of everything that had existed before, but was very much in the tradition of the medieval Heresy of the Free Spirit. The Romanian-born French poet Tristan Tzara explained in his Notes pour la bourgeoisie that the soirées at the Cabaret Voltaire and Galerie Dada ‘provided the possibility for the spectators to link for themselves suitable associations with the characteristic elements of their own personality’.31 Dada aimed at destroying through art the entire social order and to achieve through art total freedom. Marcel Duchamp was among the leading exponents of Dada in France before leaving for the United States. Many Dadaists became involved in the Berlin rising of 1918, calling for a Dadaist Revolutionary Central Council on the basis of radical communism and progressive unemployment. Although Tzara became a Stalinist, the Dadaists influenced the Surrealist movement in France which developed in the 1920s, as seen in the characteristic declaration of 1925 ‘Open the Prisons! Disband the Army!’ which asserted ‘Social coercion has had its day. Nothing … can force man to give up freedom.’32

The antics of the artists and writers were a far cry from the struggles of the revolutionary syndicalists who were forging the Conféderation Générale du Travail in France at the turn of the century. Syndicalism not only redirected the impulses of the advocates of ‘propaganda by the deed’ but also took over many of the most positive ideas of anarchism.33

The origins of French syndicalism went as far back as the First International which had adopted the principle that ‘The emancipation of the workers shall be the task of the workers themselves.’ At the fourth congress of the International in Basel in 1869, it had further been argued by the French, Spanish, Swiss, Jurassian and Belgian delegates that the economic associations of the workers should be considered the social nucleus of the coming society. The advocates of this policy were strongly influenced by Bakunin who had asserted:

The organization of the trade sections, their federation in the International, and their representation by the Labour Chambers, not only create a great academy, in which the workers of the International, combining theory and practice, can and must study economic science, they also bear in themselves the living germs of the new social order, which is to replace the bourgeois world.34

  The organization of the new revolutionary syndicates therefore tried to reflect the organization of the new society; they were based on the principles of federalism and autonomy, recognizing the right of self-determination of each syndicate. Organized from the bottom up, the various committees in the federations acted merely as co-ordinating organs without any executive or bureaucratic power.

What distinguished the French anarcho-syndicalists from other trade unionists was their insistence that the movement should be completely independent of political parties and their refusal to participate in conventional politics. As the anarchist Emile Pouget succinctly put it, ‘The aim of the syndicates is to make war on the bosses and not to bother with the politics.’35 They insisted that the reconstruction of society must be carried out by the economic organization of the workers themselves. Their strategy was one of ‘direct action’ in the form of the boycott, labelling (buying goods from approved employers), sabotage, anti-militarist propaganda, and the strike in all its gradations. The strike was considered to be the most important tactic, especially the general strike which took on mythic proportions.

As early as 1874 the Jura anarchist Adhémar Schwitzguébel had argued that the general strike would ‘certainly be a revolutionary act capable of bringing about the liquidation of the existing social order’.36 Enthusiasm for the general strike rapidly spread amongst anarchists involved in the labour movement and it was soon considered as the best means of bringing about the collapse of the State and ushering in the new society.

Georges Sorel, inspired by Proudhon and the syndicalists, maintained in his Reflections on Violence (1908) that class war invigorates society. He opposed ‘bourgeois force’ with ‘proletarian violence’, arguing that the latter has a purifying effect and enables the people to take possession of themselves. The general strike moreover is of value as a ‘social myth’, an article of faith which inspires the workers in their struggle. For Sorel, social myths are important since they are ‘not descriptions of things, but expression of a determination to act’. Although he later influenced Lenin, Mussolini and Action Française, he did not object to acknowledging himself an anarchist since ‘Parliamentary Socialism professes a contempt for morality’ and the new ethic of the producers.37

In the long run Sorel’s celebration of revolutionary will and proletarian violence had more influence on the Right than the Left. The syndicalist movement certainly did not think that the general strike was a myth, and Sorel had only a slight influence on syndicalist theoreticians. Although he earned a bloodthirsty reputation, he was in fact opposed to industrial sabotage and argued that syndicalist revolution should not be defiled by abominations such as terror which had sullied bourgeois revolutions.

The most constructive phase of anarcho-syndicalism was at the turn of the century when the French trade union movement separated into revolutionary and reformist sections. It found fertile soil in France because of its long revolutionary tradition and because the political leaders had so clearly betrayed the workers in the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848. The general strike became an economic alternative to the barricades.38

Many anarchists such as Fernand Pelloutier and Emile Pouget joined the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and helped develop it in an anarcho-syndicalist direction. In 1895, the CGT declared itself independent of all political parties, and in 1902, it was joined by the Fédération des Bourses du Travail. Pelloutier became the secretary of the later, while Pouget edited the official organ of the CGT, La Voix du Peuple. The revolutionary Pouget was sufficiently impatient to maintain that there was a difference between le droit syndical and le droit démocratique, and that conscious minorities need not wait for majority approval of their action if it be intended to promote the interests of their fellow workers.39

After 1902, the CGT was organized into two federations of the Bourses du Travail (Labour Chambers) and of the Syndicate (syndicates or unions). The federation of Labour Chambers co-ordinated the activities of local syndicates. They had originally been set up to find jobs for workers, but soon became centres of education and discussion for all aspects of working-class life.

The syndicates had been formed in factories and, in some cases, in different branches of industry. Any syndicate, however small, had the right to be represented in the federation by a delegate chosen by itself. The confederal committee of the CGT which consisted of delegates from the labour chambers and the syndicates acted as a co-ordinating body and had no authority. Officers were kept to a minimum to avoid bureaucracy, and were instantly dismissible by the rank and file.40 Each section of the CGT was autonomous but each syndicate was obliged to belong to a local labour chamber or equivalent organization.

The revolutionary influence in the CGT grew to such an extent that its Charter of Amiens in 1906 pledged the organization to class struggle, political neutrality, and the revolutionary general strike. While trying to achieve the immediate improvement in the workers’ conditions, it was committed to

preparing the way for the entire emancipation that can be realized only by the expropriation of the capitalist class. It commends the general strike as a means to this end and holds that the trade union, which is at present a resistance group, will be in the future the group responsible for production and distribution, the foundation of the social organization.41

  The adversaries of the CGT called it anarchist, but the militant Pierre Monatte claimed that it had no official doctrine and was independent of all political tendencies. Nevertheless, he was ready to admit that syndicalism had recalled anarchism to an awareness of its working-class origins. It was moreover ‘a school of will, of energy, and of fertile thinking’.42

But while the CGT engaged in a series of dramatic strikes, culminating in the campaign for an eight-hour day in 1906, it never attracted more than half of the total number of unionized workers in France and failed to provoke a revolutionary general strike. In the outcome, it tended to be pragmatic, appealing to a diverse work-force and trying to make the existing world more habitable.43 After 1914, the CGT became largely a reformist trade union movement and abandoned its anarcho-syndicalist principles.

The French CGT however left the broad outline of anarcho-syndicalist organization which was copied in most other countries. Workers organized themselves into syndicates according to trade or industry in a given locality. The syndicates then federated horizontally with other syndicates in the same area (town or rural district) to establish a local federation; and vertically, with other syndicates in the same industry or craft. These federations then united into a confederation to co-ordinate the movement. Taking the CGT as his model, Rudolf Rocker argued that in a revolutionary situation, it would be the task of the Federation of Labour Chambers to take over and administer existing social capital and arrange distribution in each community, while the Federation of Industrial Alliances would organize the total production of the country.44 In practice, anarcho-syndicalism was to flourish most in Latin countries where there was little alternative for the labour movement other than revolutionary struggle.

The broader anarchist movement in France had an uneasy relationship with anarcho-syndicalism. The individualists and bohemians naturally wanted little to do with the unions. Amongst the anarchist communists, Jean Grave and Les Temps Nouveaux gave their qualified approval. The purist Sébastien Faure in Le Libertaire was at first hostile although he too came to tolerate it. The tension between the anarchists and the syndicalists came to the fore at the International Anarchist Congress held in Amsterdam in 1907. Pierre Monatte criticized the ‘revolutionarism’ of the pure anarchists which had ‘taken superb retreat in the ivory tower of philosophic speculation’.45 Emma Goldman replied that the syndicalists’ principle of majority rule cramped the initiative of the individual: ‘I will only accept anarchist organization on one condition. It is that it should be based on absolute respect for all individual initiatives and should not hamper their free play and development.’46 For his part, Malatesta voiced the concern of many anarchist communists that syndicalism had too simple a conception of class struggle and placed too much confidence in the general strike — a ‘pure utopia’ which could degenerate into a ‘general famine’.47 Syndicalism should be considered only as a means to anarchy, not the sole one.

The French anarchist movement, both its communist and syndicalist wings, reached its peak before the outbreak of the First World War. Faure and the individualist E. Armand remained true to their anti-militarist principles, but most anarchists either joined the army or declared their support for the allies. After the war, the apparent success of the Russian Revolution ensured that communists gained ground in the CGT. Anarcho-syndicalists and communists formed a revolutionary group which split away in 1921 to form the CGT Unitaire, but the communists gained the upper hand in the following year and aligned themselves with Moscow. The anarchists left to form the Comité de Defence Syndicaliste Révolutionnaire which claimed to represent 100,000 workers at the syndicalist IWMA founded in Berlin 1923. It lingered on until 1939 but was never able to make much headway amongst the working class. Outside the syndicalist movement, a small band of ageing militants kept the anarchist message alive in a few papers with declining readership. Their international connections were maintained by the increasing number of anarchist refugees from the Soviet Union, Italy, Germany and Spain to seek asylum in France.

After the experience of the German occupation and the resistance, anarchism in France had something of a revival in the fifties and early sixties around magazines like Le Libertaire of the Anarchist Federation and the new Noir et Rouge. Alain Sergent and Claude Harmel (the latter a French Nazi during the occupation) produced an incomplete Histoire de l’anarchie in 1949 and Jean Maitron brought out his Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France in 1951. The libertarian atmosphere affected Albert Camus who associated with French and Spanish anarchists and syndicalists, and studied anarchist history and philosophy. Although he was critical of Stirner and Bakunin in his L’Homme révolté (1951), he was even more critical of authoritarian communism. The work shows that he was moving towards a form of anarcho-syndicalism.

It was in the sixties that libertarian ideas really began to take hold on a new generation. Inspired by Dada and Surrealism, a small band of artists and intellectuals founded the Internationale Situationniste in 1957 which soon rediscovered anarchist history and developed a libertarian critique of consumer society and culture. In 1964 a French group, Jeunesse Libertaire, gave new impetus to Proudhon’s slogan ‘Anarchy is Order’ by creating the circled A, a symbol which quickly proliferated throughout the world. Daniel Guérin, a former Marxist, developed a libertarian form of socialism and called in 1965 for L’Anarchisme: de la doctrine à l’action. Three years later the greatest outburst of libertarian energy since the Second World War occurred in the student rebellion of May 1968. During the general strike which followed, de Gaulle’s regime tottered but did not fall. While the students lost the revolution, they won the argument, and authoritarian socialists and communists in France have been on the retreat ever since. A revived syndicalist organization — the Confédération Nationale du Travail — has since made headway, especially in south-west France and in the Paris region.

Amongst intellectuals, Michel Foucault developed a highly imaginative, and equally contentious, critique of power, while Cornelius Castoriadis as Paul Cardan posed the choice of libertarian Socialisme ou Barbarie as we reach the crossroads in the labyrinth of contemporary society and culture. French post-modernist thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard have made a major contribution to renewing anarchist theory. In the new century, French anarchists have been at the forefront of the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements.

=FRANCE IN MANY WAYS was the cradle of the historic anarchist movement. Its seeds were scattered by the enragés during the French Revolution and began to grow amongst the workers in the 1840s. France produced in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon the ‘father’ of the organized anarchist movement. Proudhon not only inspired the varieties of anarchism which developed in the second half of the nineteenth century but the mutualist workers with whom he was associated helped set up the First International Working Men’s Association. Towards the end of the century, France witnessed the worst examples of terrorist ‘propaganda by the deed’ as well as the great imaginative flowering of anarchism amongst the writers and artists of Symbolism and Post-Impressionism. It also gave rise to one of anarchism’s most constructive forms — anarcho-syndicalism.

The libertarian spirit had been strong in France ever since the irreverent Rabelais coined his motto ‘Do what you will’, and la Boétie offered his insights about voluntary servitude. The anti-authoritarian utopias of Foigny and Fénelon had been followed by the searing criticisms of the philosophes, Morelly, Meslier, Diderot and Rousseau. They all fired the mood of discontent which was eventually to culminate, of course, in the French Revolution.

The French Revolution set the context of many of the disputes and struggles on the Left which were to follow in the nineteenth century. From the beginning there was a struggle between the libertarians and the federalists and the authoritarians and centrists. Condorcet, who believed in the perfectibility of man and the possibility of a free and classless society even while awaiting his execution at the hands of the authoritarian Jacobins, proposed a remarkable scheme of mutualité, that is a vast mutual aid association among all workers. The moderate Girondins also advocated a form of federalism as a means of saving France from a Jacobin Paris.

A more revolutionary and spontaneous form of federalism developed in the ‘districts’ or ‘sections’ into which Paris had been organized administratively for elections. Out of these emerged the Commune of Paris. Many popular societies and revolutionary committees also arose which soon replaced the Jacobin-dominated sections. But while it was argued that the Commune must legislate and administer itself, it remained a kind of federalist direct democracy. Mutualism and federalism not only became later the twin pillars of Proudhon’s system but Kropotkin was convinced that the principles of anarchism found their origin in the deeds of the French Revolution.1

The term anarchist was still used as a term of abuse at the time. It was applied indiscriminately to libertarians and authoritarians alike by their opponents. In England, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in his anti-revolutionary Anarchical Fallacies (1791) attacked the French Declaration of Rights, arguing that it would replace the old tyranny of a single master by the new tyranny of collective anarchy. The Jacobins called the sans culottes anarchists and were called anarchist in turn by the Directory which replaced them. The sans-culottes, the revolutionary mob who took to the streets in the spring and summer of 1793, were not strictly speaking anarchists for they helped overthrow the Girondins and bring about the Jacobin dictatorship.

Once in power Robespierre employed the epithet to attack those on the Left whom he had used for his own ends. But it was also adopted as a term of pride: in September 1793, the Sans-Culottes of Beaucaire informed the Convention: ‘We are poor and virtuous sans-culottes; we have formed an association of artisans and peasants … we know whom our friends are: those who have delivered us from the clergy and nobility, from the feudal system … those whom the aristocrats called anarchists, factious elements, Maratists.’2 It was Marat of course who had called for revolution in 1789 and declared that ‘the people have broken the yoke of nobility; in the same way they will break that of wealth’. He was however in practice an extreme authoritarian.

When the Directory came to call the authoritarian Jacobins whom they had replaced in 1795 as ‘anarchists’ the term began to develop its elasticity of meaning which makes it so misleading, especially since:

By ‘anarchists’ the Directory means these men covered with crimes, stained with blood, and fattened by rapine, enemies of laws they do not make and of all governments in which they do not govern, who preach liberty and practice despotism, speak of fraternity and slaughter their brothers …3

  Nevertheless, not only in practice but also in theory, there were popular leaders reaching characteristically anarchist conclusions, particularly amongst the enragés, a loose movement of revolutionaries who rejected parliamentary politics, practised direct action, and looked to economic reform. One of their leaders was named Anacharsis Clootz. When the Girondin Brissot called for the suppression of the enragés in 1793, he declared:

Laws that are not carried into effect, authorities without force and despised, crime unpunished, property attacked, the safety of the individual violated, the morality of the people corrupted, no constitution, no government, no justice, these are the features of anarchy.4

  Apart from the references to the safety of the individual and the morality of the people, at least there was some element of truth in this definition.

Chief among the enragés was Jacques Roux, a country clergyman who became a member of the General Council of the Commune. He has been remembered for escorting the king to the guillotine and for urging the mob to direct action, such as the seizure of goods in shops. He was also one of the first to link political freedom with economic equality: ‘Freedom is but an empty phantom if one class of men can starve another with impunity. Freedom is but an empty phantom when the rich man can through his monopoly exercise the right of life and death over his fellow men.’5 The Jacobins accused him of telling the people that ‘every kind of government must be proscribed’; he was arrested and condemned to death by them, but he committed suicide before they could enjoy their triumph. But for all his libertarian profession, Roux like Marat remained an extreme authoritarian.

It was Jean Varlet however who came closest to being an anarchist during the French Revolution. He asserted the absolute sovereignty of the Section. He was imprisoned during the Terror but survived to mount a blistering attack on the Jacobin dictatorship in a work entitled L’Explosion:

What a social monstrosity, what a masterpiece of Machiavellism is this revolutionary government. For any rational being, government and revolution are incompatible — unless the people is willing to set up its delegates in a permanent state of insurrection against themselves — which is absurd.6

  The work may be considered the earliest anarchist manifesto in continental Europe.

Gracchius Babeuf with the support of the enragés tried in his Conspiration des Égaux to overturn the Directory in 1796. He called for perfect equality, attacked private property as the principal source of ills in society, and believed everything should be shared in common. Kropotkin saw a direct filiation from Babeuf’s conspiracy to the International Working Men’s Association set up in 1866.7 But Babeuf was never an anarchist like Varlet for he looked to the State, run by a revolutionary dictatorship, to bring about his ‘Republic of Equals’.

It was the French thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who was the first to call himself deliberately and provocatively an anarchist. To the rhetorical question ‘What are you then?’, Proudhon replied unequivocally in What is Property? in 1840:

I am an anarchist.

‘I understand, you are being satirical at the expense of government.’

Not in the least. I have just given you my considered and serious profession of faith. Although I am a strong supporter of order, I am in the fullest sense of the term, an anarchist.8

  Aware of the derivation of the word anarchy from the Greek, Proudhon rejected the government of man by man as oppression, and insisted that society finds its highest perfection in the union of order and anarchy: ‘Just as man seeks justice in equality, society seeks order in anarchy.’9 This apparent paradox had a profound meaning: only society without artificial government could restore the natural order and social harmony.

Proudhon generally spelt the word ‘an-archy’ to emphasize its etymological meaning. He not only defined anarchy as a ‘state of total liberty’ but referred to ‘absolute liberty, which is synonymous with order’.10 He added to the potential confusion by occasionally using the word anarchy in its negative sense, associating it with property and exploitation, the complete laissez faire of ‘Industrial Empire’, and referring to the ‘anarchy of commercial capitalism’ and ‘anarchical capitalism’.11 Towards the end of his life, he grew more cautious and preferred to call himself a ‘federalist’ rather than an anarchist. His followers did not call themselves anarchists either but mutualists, after the principle of the mutual exchange of the products of labour. Bakunin however described anarchism as ‘Proudhonism broadly developed and pushed to its extreme consequences’.12

Proudhon may have been the most influential anarchist thinker in France but he was not the only one. At the time of the 1848 Revolution an obscure revolutionary called Anselme Bellegarrique launched the slogan ‘Anarchy is order: government is civil war’ quite independently of Proudhon. Before disappearing into Central America, he went on to publish in 1850 two issues of L’Anarchie, Journal de l’Ordre which combined a form of Stirnerite egoism with a vision of a free society based on the commune, without government and armies. The physician Ernest Coeurderoy and the upholsterer Joseph Déjacque also participated in the 1848 Revolution and the bitterness of failure and exile led them to apocalyptic celebration of violence and barbarism. ‘Anarchist revolutionaries’, Coeurderoy declared, ‘we can take hope only in the human deluge, we can take hope only in chaos, we have no recourse but a general war.’13

Déjacque edited the anarchist paper Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social in New York from 1858 to 1861. He advocated ‘war on civilization by criminal means’ and secret societies in La Question Révolutionnaire (1854). He let his utopian imagination run riot in L’Humanisphère in which man holds in his hand ‘the sceptre of science’ which had once been attributed to the gods. Each is his own representative in a ‘parliament of anarchy’.14 Déjacque’s ‘humanispheres’ resemble Fourier’s ‘phalansteries’ and while based on the principle of complete freedom reflect a similarly rigid planning.

Anarchism as a movement only started gathering momentum in the 1860s in France, mainly inspired by Proudhon’s mutualism and his ideas expressed in De la Capacité politique des classes ouvrières (1865). Workers’ associations and mutual credit schemes were considered the principal way forward. Towards the end of the 1860s men like Eugène Varlin and Benôit Malon helped shift the emphasis from mutualism to Bakuninite collectivism in the French sections of the First International. The Paris Commune of 1871, which declared ‘the absolute autonomy of the Commune extended to all the localities of France’, advocated in theory a form of Proudhonian federalism. In practice little could be done except to keep public services going and defend its existence. In the bloody aftermath, amongst the anarchists Varlin was shot, Louise Michel was transported to a penal settlement, and Elisée Reclus was imprisoned.15

The anti-authoritarians within in the International saw the Commune as the spontaneous expression of federalist, anti-statist ideas and it strengthened their argument for the Communal reconstruction of post-revolutionary society. The Federal Committee of the Jura Federation in 1872 saw the principle issue at stake in the socialist movement was the choice between the Commune libre or the Volkstaat. By 1875, the Commune was gradually becoming a myth. As Le Révolté declared on 1 November 1879, ‘the people, who in modern times have first formulated in practice the anarchist programme of the proletariat by constituting the free Commune of Paris, cannot be for authoritarianism.’

For a decade after the Commune all anarchist and socialist activity was declared illegal in France. The Jura in Switzerland became the new centre of opposition to the General Council of the International, and the nucleus of the incipient European anarchist movement. Its principal leader James Guillaume argued that federalism in the sense given to it by the Paris Commune and Proudhon meant above all the negation of the nation and the State. In a federal revolution:

There is no more State, no more central power superior to groups and imposing its authority on them; there is only collective force resulting from the federation of groups … The national and central State no longer existing, and the Communes enjoying the fullness of their independence, there is truly an-archy.16

  In 1873 Paul Brousse, a graduate of the medical school of Montpellier University, joined the Jura Federation and tried to give anarchism a scientific basis and make it more militant. He had been with the Republican opposition at the end of the Second Empire, but on joining the International he soon became an opponent of Marx and the General Council, and played a major role in the anti-authoritarian wing. He was expelled from the Montpellier section of the International in 1872. After a short period of exile in Spain where he became more influenced by Bakuninite ideas and was involved in an uprising in Barcelona in 1873, he moved to Switzerland.

Kropotkin became acquainted with him there and described him as ‘a young doctor full of mental activity, uproarious, sharp, lively, ready to develop any idea with a geometrical logic to its utmost consequences’. At the Berne Congress of the International in 1874, Brousse had heard Malatesta and Cafiero insisting that revolution consists more in deeds than in words. Matching the violence of the Russian and Italian anarchists, Brousse became a leading exponent of ‘propaganda by the deed’, which led to conflict with the moderate James Guillaume.17 He was sufficiently eminent to give a speech, along with Guillaume and Reclus, at Bakunin’s funeral in Bern in 1876.

In the same year Brousse edited Die Arbeiter-Zeitung, and later launched from La Chaux-de-Fonds L’Avant-Garde. Under the rubric ‘Collectivism, Anarchy, Free Federation’, the latter organ called for the replacement of the State by a society based on contract and the free federation of groups formed around each need and interest. The strategy advocated by the journal was extremely violent, calling for the creation of the Commune by insurrection: ‘It is necessary to desert the ballot boxes and man the barricades, and for that, it is necessary to get organized.’18 Its motto was ‘Rise, people, in your might!/ Worker, take the machine!/ Take the land, peasant!’

After being one of the most active anarchist organizers and militants, on his return to France in 1880 Brousse went over to the socialists and developed the reformist doctrine of ‘possibilism’ which sought improvements through factory legislation and municipal politics. ‘The ideal’, he wrote in 1883, ‘divided into several practical stages; our aims should, as it were, be immediatized so as to render the possible.’19 He formed the Possibilist Party which became the most powerful socialist organization in France in the 1880s.

A general awareness of the anarchist movement as a distinct strand within socialism did not appear until the beginning of the decade. Even as late as 1876 James Guillaume in the Jurassian Federation complained that the terms ‘anarchist’ and ‘anarchy’ expressed only a negative idea and led to ‘distressing ambiguities’.20 Elisée Reclus however soon argued that the notoriety of the term would aid their cause by attracting attention.21

At the same time, the Federation moved from collectivism to communism. The first mention of anarcho-communism was made by a French exile living in Geneva François Dumartheray who, in 1876 in Aux Travailleurs manuels partisans de l’action politique, announced the publication of a pamphlet on the subject which in the event has never been traced.

In October 1876 anarcho-communism was adopted by the Italian Federation at its Florence congress, and Malatesta and Cafiero travelled to Switzerland and told their Swiss comrades about it. In 1876 Guillaume in his pamphlet Idées sur l’organisation sociale also argued that after the revolution there would be a general sharing out of wealth and consumption need not be related strictly according to work. Kropotkin claimed that he was ignorant of the doctrine as late as 1889, but in the following year it was officially adopted on his insistence by the Congress of the Jurassian Federation at La Chaux-de-Fonds.

With the lifting of restrictions on political activity in France in 1881, anarchism became recognizable for the first time as an identifiable movement.22 A remarkable group of activists emerged. The shoemaker Jean Grave, who edited La Révolte and Les Temps Nouveaux, was an able and indefatigable propagandist. Emile Pouget edited the scurrilous Le Père Peinard and went on to become a leading exponent of anarcho-syndicalism. The ex-Jesuit seminarist Sébastien Faure popularized anarchist theory in a series of pamphlets and founded the Le Libertaire in 1899 which continued into the 1950s. Kropotkin’s presence in France at the time greatly inspired the movement and he wrote for the leading anarchist journals, especially Le Révolté and its successor La Révolte. Many of his works first appeared in French.

Elisée Reclus, the geographer, felt no compunction about using his knowledge to support the anarchist cause. His brother Elie also wrote about Les Primitifs (1903), employing the findings of anthropology to demonstrate the possibility of a free society, but he took an increasingly pessimistic interest in past myths and religions. Elisée Reclus remained an optimist and became the most competent French exponent of anarchism at the end of the nineteenth century. He not only supported La Révolte and Le Révolté with money and contributions but his purely anarchist pamphlets like A mon frère, le paysan (1893) and Evolution et révolution (1880) had a wide circulation.

But while these thinkers were elaborating a profound critique of the French State, and developing a persuasive anarcho-communist alternative, a series of spectacular and bloody acts of propaganda by the deed won anarchism its notorious reputation in the popular mind which it has never been able to shake off. In the desperate social unrest in the 1880s many anarchists thought that the only way to bring down the State was through a campaign of terror. Jean Grave for one concluded at the time that ‘all the money spent to propose deputies would be more judiciously used to buy dynamite’.23

Charles Gallo agreed and threw a bottle of vitriol from the gallery of the Paris Stock Exchange and then starting firing his revolver at random. The legendary François-Claudius Ravachol placed bombs in the houses of two French judges (whom he held responsible for imposing severe sentences on two workers after a May Day demonstration). His name became immortalized in the verb – ravacholiser (to blow up). Théodule Meunier bombed a barracks and the restaurant where Ravachol had been betrayed to the police (killing the proprietor and a customer). Auguste Vaillant hurled a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies (killing no one).

The most notorious terrorist at this time was the young intellectual Entile Henry, who threw a bomb in the Café Terminus in the Gare St Lazare in Paris to show the vulnerable side of the bourgeoisie. He killed one customer and injured twenty others. At his trial, Henry declared:

I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that henceforth their pleasures would not be untouched, that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would rock violently on its pedestal until the final shock that would cast it down among filth and blood.

  He made clear that he saw himself as part of an international anarchist movement which no government could crush:

You have hanged in Chicago, decapitated in Germany, garrotted in Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and Paris, but what you will never destroy is anarchy. Its roots are too deep. It is born in the heart of a society that is rotting and falling part. It is a violent reaction against the established order. It represents all the egalitarian and libertarian aspirations that strike out against authority. It is everywhere, which makes it impossible to contain. It will end by killing you!24

  On the scaffold, Henry exclaimed: ‘Long live Anarchy! My death will be avenged.’ It certainly was. In 1894, an Italian anarchist Santo Jeronimo Caserio stabbed to death President Sadi Carnot of France. Kropotkin and others tried to excuse such acts as desperate responses to an impossible situation, but no such tortuous arguments could assuage the public revulsion. As the writer Octave Mirbeau drily observed: ‘A mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better than Emile Henry when he hurled his inexplicable bomb in the midst of peaceful anonymous people who had come to a café to drink a beer before going to bed.’25

While anarchism showed its ugliest and most destructive side in the terrorists acts at the end of the nineteenth century in France, it also inspired many artists and writers in its most creative form. Gustave Courbet of course had been a friend of Proudhon who had argued that art must have a moral and social purpose, and that it should be ‘an idealist representation of nature and ourselves with the aim of perfecting our species physically and morally’.26 The view was shared by Courbet who depicted the life of the poor, and it eventually contributed to the theory of social realism. Courbet in his famous Burial at Ornans tried to negate the ideal of Romanticism and arrive at the emancipation of the individual. He became a member of the Commune and responsible for artistic policy; as a result he was involved in the decision to demolish the Vendôme Column in Paris, a symbol of Napoleon’s military dictatorship.

Many of the Post-Impressionist painters found in anarchism a confirmation of their call for artistic freedom, their revolt against bourgeois society, and their sympathy for the poor and oppressed. Camille Pissarro and his son Lucien contributed regularly to Le Père Peinard and to Jean Grave’s Les Temps Nouveaux. Pissarro like Courbet was exiled after the Commune and in 1894 had to move to Belgium to escape the persecution of the anarchists following the assassination of President Carnot. Paul Signac, who eventually ended up in the Communist Party, declared in 1902: ‘The anarchist painter is not one who will show anarchist paintings, but one who without regard for lucre, without desire for reward, will struggle with all his individuality, with a personal effort, against bourgeois and official conventions …’27 Steinlen and later Vlaminck and other Fauvist artists also contributed to Les Temps Nouveaux.

A young French philosopher who greatly impressed Kropotkin was J. M. Guyau who offered in his Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction (1884) a view of morality free from all external duty and coercion. Guyau rejected the utilitarian calculus as well as metaphysical sanctions, arguing that we create our own morality through rational choice. Unlike Stirner and Nietzsche, however, he did not draw egoistic conclusions: we have a superabundance of energy which leads us to go beyond the instinct of self-preservation to feel compassion for others. Altruism is therefore based on a natural need to live a full, intense and productive life. Guyau was unable to develop these insights for he died when he was thirty-four, but Kropotkin felt that he was an anarchist without being conscious of it.

Amongst other writers, the novelist and playwright Octave Mirbeau, whom Degas called the ‘pyromaniac fireman’, came to anarchism in his maturity after reading Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Elisée Reclus. His ornate novels often show a fascination with the very vices he condemns, and his heroes are listless rebels. In Sébastien Roch, a study of a young man traumatized by his Jesuit education, Mirbeau raises the question whether youth will ever rebel against the suffocating system run by priests and police. Le Jardin des supplices, inspired by the Dreyfus affair, offers an Oriental allegory of Western corruption and legalized torture, while Le Journal d’une femme de chambre, made recently into a successful film, shows the bourgeoisie held together principally by its vices. Amongst his explicitly anarchist writings, Mirbeau wrote the immensely successful pamphlet La Grève des électeurs which sold in tens of thousands.28 He was a lifelong anti-militarist, and his comment on the political violence of the 1880s proved the most astute of all his contemporaries: ‘The biggest danger of the bomb is the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.’ However, it did not stop him from describing Ravachol as ‘the peal of thunder to which succeeds the joy of sunlight and of peaceful skies’.29

Anarchism at the turn of the century undoubtedly attracted many bohemian individualists, and for a while it became a broad cultural movement, giving expression to a wide range of social disenchantment and artistic rebellion.30 Jean Grave, amongst others, was suspicious of their importance, and certainly many were more interested in attacking bourgcois convention than in exploring social theory. The writer Laurent Tailhade declared ‘Qu’importe les vagues humanités, pourvu que le geste soit beau?’ (Of what importance are the vague expressions of humanity, as long as the gesture is fine?) – although he might have changed his mind after a bomb exploded in a restaurant where he was eating and he lost an eye.

Maurice Barrès, influenced by Nietzsche, wrote a series of novels called Le Culte du moi which expressed an anti-social individualism. In L’Ennemi des lois, he depicted the protagonists who became anarchists after studying Saint-Simon, Fourier and Marx but they withdraw to the country to cultivate their refined sensuality and practice universal benevolence. Jean Grave declared that it was an anarchism only appropriate for millionaires who could free themselves from existing laws.

In Switzerland during the First World War a group of artists, pacifists and radicals, including Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck, met in Zürich and launched the Dada movement, a unique blend of art and anarchy. It claimed to be a total negation of everything that had existed before, but was very much in the tradition of the medieval Heresy of the Free Spirit. The Romanian-born French poet Tristan Tzara explained in his Notes pour la bourgeoisie that the soirées at the Cabaret Voltaire and Galerie Dada ‘provided the possibility for the spectators to link for themselves suitable associations with the characteristic elements of their own personality’.31 Dada aimed at destroying through art the entire social order and to achieve through art total freedom. Marcel Duchamp was among the leading exponents of Dada in France before leaving for the United States. Many Dadaists became involved in the Berlin rising of 1918, calling for a Dadaist Revolutionary Central Council on the basis of radical communism and progressive unemployment. Although Tzara became a Stalinist, the Dadaists influenced the Surrealist movement in France which developed in the 1920s, as seen in the characteristic declaration of 1925 ‘Open the Prisons! Disband the Army!’ which asserted ‘Social coercion has had its day. Nothing … can force man to give up freedom.’32

The antics of the artists and writers were a far cry from the struggles of the revolutionary syndicalists who were forging the Conféderation Générale du Travail in France at the turn of the century. Syndicalism not only redirected the impulses of the advocates of ‘propaganda by the deed’ but also took over many of the most positive ideas of anarchism.33

The origins of French syndicalism went as far back as the First International which had adopted the principle that ‘The emancipation of the workers shall be the task of the workers themselves.’ At the fourth congress of the International in Basel in 1869, it had further been argued by the French, Spanish, Swiss, Jurassian and Belgian delegates that the economic associations of the workers should be considered the social nucleus of the coming society. The advocates of this policy were strongly influenced by Bakunin who had asserted:

The organization of the trade sections, their federation in the International, and their representation by the Labour Chambers, not only create a great academy, in which the workers of the International, combining theory and practice, can and must study economic science, they also bear in themselves the living germs of the new social order, which is to replace the bourgeois world.34

  The organization of the new revolutionary syndicates therefore tried to reflect the organization of the new society; they were based on the principles of federalism and autonomy, recognizing the right of self-determination of each syndicate. Organized from the bottom up, the various committees in the federations acted merely as co-ordinating organs without any executive or bureaucratic power.

What distinguished the French anarcho-syndicalists from other trade unionists was their insistence that the movement should be completely independent of political parties and their refusal to participate in conventional politics. As the anarchist Emile Pouget succinctly put it, ‘The aim of the syndicates is to make war on the bosses and not to bother with the politics.’35 They insisted that the reconstruction of society must be carried out by the economic organization of the workers themselves. Their strategy was one of ‘direct action’ in the form of the boycott, labelling (buying goods from approved employers), sabotage, anti-militarist propaganda, and the strike in all its gradations. The strike was considered to be the most important tactic, especially the general strike which took on mythic proportions.

As early as 1874 the Jura anarchist Adhémar Schwitzguébel had argued that the general strike would ‘certainly be a revolutionary act capable of bringing about the liquidation of the existing social order’.36 Enthusiasm for the general strike rapidly spread amongst anarchists involved in the labour movement and it was soon considered as the best means of bringing about the collapse of the State and ushering in the new society.

Georges Sorel, inspired by Proudhon and the syndicalists, maintained in his Reflections on Violence (1908) that class war invigorates society. He opposed ‘bourgeois force’ with ‘proletarian violence’, arguing that the latter has a purifying effect and enables the people to take possession of themselves. The general strike moreover is of value as a ‘social myth’, an article of faith which inspires the workers in their struggle. For Sorel, social myths are important since they are ‘not descriptions of things, but expression of a determination to act’. Although he later influenced Lenin, Mussolini and Action Française, he did not object to acknowledging himself an anarchist since ‘Parliamentary Socialism professes a contempt for morality’ and the new ethic of the producers.37

In the long run Sorel’s celebration of revolutionary will and proletarian violence had more influence on the Right than the Left. The syndicalist movement certainly did not think that the general strike was a myth, and Sorel had only a slight influence on syndicalist theoreticians. Although he earned a bloodthirsty reputation, he was in fact opposed to industrial sabotage and argued that syndicalist revolution should not be defiled by abominations such as terror which had sullied bourgeois revolutions.

The most constructive phase of anarcho-syndicalism was at the turn of the century when the French trade union movement separated into revolutionary and reformist sections. It found fertile soil in France because of its long revolutionary tradition and because the political leaders had so clearly betrayed the workers in the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848. The general strike became an economic alternative to the barricades.38

Many anarchists such as Fernand Pelloutier and Emile Pouget joined the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and helped develop it in an anarcho-syndicalist direction. In 1895, the CGT declared itself independent of all political parties, and in 1902, it was joined by the Fédération des Bourses du Travail. Pelloutier became the secretary of the later, while Pouget edited the official organ of the CGT, La Voix du Peuple. The revolutionary Pouget was sufficiently impatient to maintain that there was a difference between le droit syndical and le droit démocratique, and that conscious minorities need not wait for majority approval of their action if it be intended to promote the interests of their fellow workers.39

After 1902, the CGT was organized into two federations of the Bourses du Travail (Labour Chambers) and of the Syndicate (syndicates or unions). The federation of Labour Chambers co-ordinated the activities of local syndicates. They had originally been set up to find jobs for workers, but soon became centres of education and discussion for all aspects of working-class life.

The syndicates had been formed in factories and, in some cases, in different branches of industry. Any syndicate, however small, had the right to be represented in the federation by a delegate chosen by itself. The confederal committee of the CGT which consisted of delegates from the labour chambers and the syndicates acted as a co-ordinating body and had no authority. Officers were kept to a minimum to avoid bureaucracy, and were instantly dismissible by the rank and file.40 Each section of the CGT was autonomous but each syndicate was obliged to belong to a local labour chamber or equivalent organization.

The revolutionary influence in the CGT grew to such an extent that its Charter of Amiens in 1906 pledged the organization to class struggle, political neutrality, and the revolutionary general strike. While trying to achieve the immediate improvement in the workers’ conditions, it was committed to

preparing the way for the entire emancipation that can be realized only by the expropriation of the capitalist class. It commends the general strike as a means to this end and holds that the trade union, which is at present a resistance group, will be in the future the group responsible for production and distribution, the foundation of the social organization.41

  The adversaries of the CGT called it anarchist, but the militant Pierre Monatte claimed that it had no official doctrine and was independent of all political tendencies. Nevertheless, he was ready to admit that syndicalism had recalled anarchism to an awareness of its working-class origins. It was moreover ‘a school of will, of energy, and of fertile thinking’.42

But while the CGT engaged in a series of dramatic strikes, culminating in the campaign for an eight-hour day in 1906, it never attracted more than half of the total number of unionized workers in France and failed to provoke a revolutionary general strike. In the outcome, it tended to be pragmatic, appealing to a diverse work-force and trying to make the existing world more habitable.43 After 1914, the CGT became largely a reformist trade union movement and abandoned its anarcho-syndicalist principles.

The French CGT however left the broad outline of anarcho-syndicalist organization which was copied in most other countries. Workers organized themselves into syndicates according to trade or industry in a given locality. The syndicates then federated horizontally with other syndicates in the same area (town or rural district) to establish a local federation; and vertically, with other syndicates in the same industry or craft. These federations then united into a confederation to co-ordinate the movement. Taking the CGT as his model, Rudolf Rocker argued that in a revolutionary situation, it would be the task of the Federation of Labour Chambers to take over and administer existing social capital and arrange distribution in each community, while the Federation of Industrial Alliances would organize the total production of the country.44 In practice, anarcho-syndicalism was to flourish most in Latin countries where there was little alternative for the labour movement other than revolutionary struggle.

The broader anarchist movement in France had an uneasy relationship with anarcho-syndicalism. The individualists and bohemians naturally wanted little to do with the unions. Amongst the anarchist communists, Jean Grave and Les Temps Nouveaux gave their qualified approval. The purist Sébastien Faure in Le Libertaire was at first hostile although he too came to tolerate it. The tension between the anarchists and the syndicalists came to the fore at the International Anarchist Congress held in Amsterdam in 1907. Pierre Monatte criticized the ‘revolutionarism’ of the pure anarchists which had ‘taken superb retreat in the ivory tower of philosophic speculation’.45 Emma Goldman replied that the syndicalists’ principle of majority rule cramped the initiative of the individual: ‘I will only accept anarchist organization on one condition. It is that it should be based on absolute respect for all individual initiatives and should not hamper their free play and development.’46 For his part, Malatesta voiced the concern of many anarchist communists that syndicalism had too simple a conception of class struggle and placed too much confidence in the general strike — a ‘pure utopia’ which could degenerate into a ‘general famine’.47 Syndicalism should be considered only as a means to anarchy, not the sole one.

The French anarchist movement, both its communist and syndicalist wings, reached its peak before the outbreak of the First World War. Faure and the individualist E. Armand remained true to their anti-militarist principles, but most anarchists either joined the army or declared their support for the allies. After the war, the apparent success of the Russian Revolution ensured that communists gained ground in the CGT. Anarcho-syndicalists and communists formed a revolutionary group which split away in 1921 to form the CGT Unitaire, but the communists gained the upper hand in the following year and aligned themselves with Moscow. The anarchists left to form the Comité de Defence Syndicaliste Révolutionnaire which claimed to represent 100,000 workers at the syndicalist IWMA founded in Berlin 1923. It lingered on until 1939 but was never able to make much headway amongst the working class. Outside the syndicalist movement, a small band of ageing militants kept the anarchist message alive in a few papers with declining readership. Their international connections were maintained by the increasing number of anarchist refugees from the Soviet Union, Italy, Germany and Spain to seek asylum in France.

After the experience of the German occupation and the resistance, anarchism in France had something of a revival in the fifties and early sixties around magazines like Le Libertaire of the Anarchist Federation and the new Noir et Rouge. Alain Sergent and Claude Harmel (the latter a French Nazi during the occupation) produced an incomplete Histoire de l’anarchie in 1949 and Jean Maitron brought out his Histoire du mouvement anarchiste en France in 1951. The libertarian atmosphere affected Albert Camus who associated with French and Spanish anarchists and syndicalists, and studied anarchist history and philosophy. Although he was critical of Stirner and Bakunin in his L’Homme révolté (1951), he was even more critical of authoritarian communism. The work shows that he was moving towards a form of anarcho-syndicalism.

It was in the sixties that libertarian ideas really began to take hold on a new generation. Inspired by Dada and Surrealism, a small band of artists and intellectuals founded the Internationale Situationniste in 1957 which soon rediscovered anarchist history and developed a libertarian critique of consumer society and culture. In 1964 a French group, Jeunesse Libertaire, gave new impetus to Proudhon’s slogan ‘Anarchy is Order’ by creating the circled A, a symbol which quickly proliferated throughout the world. Daniel Guérin, a former Marxist, developed a libertarian form of socialism and called in 1965 for L’Anarchisme: de la doctrine à l’action. Three years later the greatest outburst of libertarian energy since the Second World War occurred in the student rebellion of May 1968. During the general strike which followed, de Gaulle’s regime tottered but did not fall. While the students lost the revolution, they won the argument, and authoritarian socialists and communists in France have been on the retreat ever since. A revived syndicalist organization — the Confédération Nationale du Travail — has since made headway, especially in south-west France and in the Paris region.

Amongst intellectuals, Michel Foucault developed a highly imaginative, and equally contentious, critique of power, while Cornelius Castoriadis as Paul Cardan posed the choice of libertarian Socialisme ou Barbarie as we reach the crossroads in the labyrinth of contemporary society and culture. French post-modernist thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard have made a major contribution to renewing anarchist theory. In the new century, French anarchists have been at the forefront of the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements.

Italy

IN ITALY THE EARLY anarchists emerged from the republican and nationalist movement led by Mazzini and Garibaldi. The methods of the clandestine Carbonari with their loose organization and acts of insurrection left a mark on the developing anarchist strategy. The ideas of Proudhon were also nudging republican thought in a federal direction long before the arrival of Bakunin in 1864. But while he is often seen as the first inspiration of the Italian anarchist movement, he was with other Russian revolutionaries more of a catalyst than an originator.1

Carlo Pisacane, the Duke of San Giovanni, was a transitional figure between the old nationalists and the anarchist movement, acting as chief of staff in Mazzini’s army and spreading Proudhon’s and Fourier’s ideas. He called for the creation of an independent nation through the social revolution. The only just and secure form of government, he asserted, was ‘the anarchy of Proudhon’, but he went beyond Proudhon by arguing that industrial factories should become c1ollective property and the land be collectivized in communes. Above all, Pisacane was one of the earliest advocates of propaganda dei fatti (propaganda by the deed):

The propaganda of the idea is a chimera. Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but will be educated when they are free. The only work a citizen can do for the good of the country is that of co-operating with the material revolution.2

  There were several old comrades of Pisacane amongst the Brotherhood founded by Bakunin in Florence in 1864 as well as in his International Brotherhood set up later in Naples. It was in Florence that Bakunin abandoned his Panslavism, so it could be argued that the birth of anarchism in Italy coincided with the birth of the international anarchist movement.3 Amongst the members of the Italian section of the International Brotherhood were Giuseppe Fanelli, a deputy at the Italian parliament, who went on a pioneering mission to Spain to spread the anarchist gospel, and Carlo Gambuzzi, who became for a long time one of the principal leaders of the Italian anarchist movement.

In 1869 the branches of Bakunin’s Brotherhood were dissolved in Italy and the they became sections of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA). It was from this time that the Italian anarchist movement really began to grow. When Bakunin replied to Mazzini’s twin-pronged attack — on the Paris Commune for its atheism and on the International for denying genuine nationalism — the International in Italy went from strength to strength.4 Disenchanted Mazzinian republicans and Garibaldian volunteers radicalized by the Paris Commune recruited some thirty thousand members to the International, mainly from central Italy and Naples. But it was not yet a workers’ organization. It had been introduced by the bourgeoisie, and by 1872 its militants were still mainly young people from affluent families.5

Early in the 1870s a new group of militants emerged, led by young Carlo Cafiero, Errico Malatesta and Andrea Costa. Cafiero was a product of the Apulian nobility who had given up his family fortune and his career as a diplomat. As a member of the International Marx had hoped to use him to convert Italy and Spain to Marxism; he wrote a compendium of Capital and met Marx in 1871 in London. In the event, he was converted by Bakunin and Malatesta to the anarchist cause. Malatesta was the son of a liberally minded small-scale landowner, and was raised in the province of Caserta. He too cast in his lot, when a medical student, with the people. Andrea Costa came from Romagnole petty bourgeois stock, and studied law at Bologna University. All three young men were convinced positivists. Inspired by the sociology of Comte and Spencer, they saw society as a living organism whose natural growth was hindered by the institutions of private property and the State.

In order to rival the feats of the followers of Garibaldi and Mazzini, the anarchists organized strikes and demonstrations, but also resorted to the well-tried tactic of the Italian revolutionary tradition — the insurrection. In the 1860s there had been civil war in the south and the Italian State was particularly weak. It was therefore not unreasonable to hope that an uprising could spark off a general insurrection which would bring down the tottering State. In 1874, Andrea Costa, Malatesta, and members of a group within the International who called themselves the Italian Committee for the Social Revolution planned an uprising in Bologna in order to trigger off similar actions in other towns and cities throughout Italy. Bakunin was waiting to join them, but the carabinieri had been informed and foiled the insurgents as they were marching on Bologna.

The Italian message of direct action was not lost on the international anarchist movement. At the Berne Conference of the IWMA in 1876, Malatesta explained the background to the Bologna uprising and argued that ‘the revolution consists more in deeds than words … each time a spontaneous movement of the people erupts … it is the duty of every revolutionary socialist to declare his solidarity with the movement in the making.’6

Three months later Cafiero and Malatesta gave a clear definition of propaganda by the deed in the Bulletin of the Jura Federation: ‘The Italian federation believes that the insurrectional fact, destined to affirm socialist principles by deeds, is the most efficacious means of propaganda.’7 The view of the Italians came to dominate European anarchist activities during the 1880s, especially in France and Spain.

Despite the persecution of the authorities a national congress was held in a wood outside Florence in 1876, where Cafiero and Malatesta persuaded the delegates to move from a form of Bakuninite collectivism to communism. Those present accepted the proposition:

Each must do for society all that his abilities will allow him to do, and he has the right to demand from society the satisfaction of all his needs, in the measure conceded by the state of production and social capacities.8

  The congress also confirmed the insurrectional position of the Italian anarchist movement.

Malatesta, Cafiero and Costa lost no time in putting their preaching into practice. In the following year, they entered two villages near Benevento in Campania with an armed band, burning the tax registers and declaring the end of the reign of King Victor Emmanuel. The peasants, including their priests, welcomed them at first but feared joining them; as a result, Italian troops soon arrived and captured the insurgents.

This second abortive rising provoked another round of persecution. The Italian sections of the outlawed International called for a general insurrection on a national scale but when it failed to materialize individuals turned to their own acts of terror. In 1878, the new King Umberto was stabbed and on the following day a bomb was thrown in a monarchist parade. Even greater repression followed. The International was broken up and Cafiero and Malatesta went into exile.

Costa soon turned his back on insurrectionary anarchism. He considered that ‘insurrectionism, if practised, leads to nothing if not the triumph of reaction and, if not practised, it leads to the disesteem of him who preaches it and it remains merely verbal’.9 He became a deputy, and played an important part in forming the Italian Socialist Party. Like Paul Brousse, whom he met in the spring of 1880, he developed a form of communalism with the tactic of formulating minimum and maximum programmes for local socialist parties. While collectivism was the means, he still saw anarchy as the end. Cafiero on the other hand suddenly went over to the parliamentary socialists; he eventually became insane, obsessed by the idea that he was enjoying more than his fair share of the sun.

The defection of Costa and Cafiero reflected a general shift to social democracy in the Italian labour movement. It was not long before anarchism in Italy became the preserve of constantly changing, largely autonomous groups in the small towns. Towards the end of the century, individual Italians were responsible for some of the most notorious assassinations, killing the French President Sadi Carnot in 1894, the Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas in 1897, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, and finally King Umberto after two attempts in 1900.

Some anarchists during this period went abroad to realize their ideals in utopian communities, such as the Cecilia Colony in Brazil which lasted four years in the early 1890s. In the twentieth century, many Italians emigrated and continued to propagate anarchist ideas, especially in Latin America and North America.

The most prominent anarchist thinker to emerge in Italy was undoubtedly Errico Malatesta who remained active in the international anarchist movement for nearly sixty years and the principal figure in the Italian anarchist movement during its most important years. In the late 1880s and early 1890s he tried to form a new nationalist anarchist ‘party’ but it failed to get off the ground. Nevertheless, his tolerant ‘anarchism without adjectives’ was widely influential.

Malatesta worked closely at this time with F. S. Merlino, a lawyer who showed in his studies of the Italian State that bureaucracy and State institutions can exert their influence on the economic base of society. Although Merlino went on to become a socialist, he helped lay the foundations of Italian syndicalism and weaned Malatesta off his early Marxian taste for economic determinism. Other anarchist intellectuals who collaborated with Malatesta at this time included Pietro Gori, a lawyer who composed some of the most popular inspirational songs of the era, and Luigi Fabbri, who popularized anarchist ideas about education, birth control, and militarism.

National congresses of the anarchist movement were held in 1891, 1907 and 1915 but there was no continuous national organization. Anarchists in the 1890s remained a minority group in the labour movement, seeing their role as being to foster revolutionary consciousness and to prod socialists to insurrection. They worked in their local Chambers of Labour (camere de lavoro), which remained largely autonomous. As a result, while anarchism remained weaker as a movement than socialism from the turn of the century to the First World War, its values, symbols and language dominated Italian working-class popular culture.10 Localism, anti-Statism, operaismo (workerism), and anti-clerical and anti-militarist sentiments prevailed.

The anarchists too were the first to see syndicalism as a serious alternative to socialism for the workers. Modelled on the French CGT, the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro (CGL) was founded in 1906 and tried to centralize and control the local Chambers of Labour. The anarchist-inspired Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI) broke away in 1912 from the increasingly socialist and reformist CGL. The new organization grew rapidly and by 1919 claimed a membership of half a million, mainly in Central Italy and along the Ligurian coast. Although the railway workers were led by anarchists they did not join the USI, and except in Apulia, the Unione won a minority following amongst the landless peasants.

Despite his reservations about syndicalism voiced at the Amsterdam Anarchist Congress, Malatesta called in 1914 for a general strike after the shooting of some anti-militarist demonstrators in his base in Ancona. The call was taken up in different parts of Italy. In the ‘Red Week’ (settimana rosa) which followed the railway system virtually ground to a halt and fighting broke out in many areas. Small towns in the Marches declared themselves self-governing republics. The movement, led by the anarchists and the Unione Sindacale Italiana, seemed poised to overthrow the monarchy, but the CGL ordered its members back to work. The experience left many syndicalist leaders disillusioned with direct action. The syndicalists too became split during the crisis over Italy’s intervention in the war in 1915.

News of the Russian Revolution greatly inspired the Italian syndicalist movement. By 1920, the USI had nearly recruited half a million members, although the CGL had two million. The Italian Federation of Metal Workers won an agreement in 1919 allowing them to elect ‘internal commissions’ in the factories; in a series of spectacular strikes and occupations, they then tried to turn them into factory councils. When in August 1920, the employers locked them out, the metal workers of Milan and Turin decided to take over the factories and run them themselves by workers’ committees. As a culmination of the biennio rosso, the call for a general strike was endorsed by the Unione Sindacale Italiana, led by the journalist Armando Borghi.

Malatesta in the first Italian anarchist daily newspaper Umanità Nova founded at the time in Milan warned that the failure of the strike would lead to retribution. The reformist leadership of the moderate CGL again persuaded the workers to abandon their occupations in exchange for some minor reforms which never materialized. Within a few weeks, there were mass arrests of strike leaders and anarchist activists, including Malatesta and Borghi.

It was the last great experiment in workers’ control in Italy before the rise of fascism. But the strike was of considerable importance for it had gone some way in realizing the aspirations of the group of libertarians and left-socialists associated with the weekly L’Ordine Nuovo. Edited by Antonio Gramsci, the journal called for factory councils to replace the reformist trade unions in order to prepare the workers for self-management. In line with anarcho-syndicalist teaching, the councils were also considered as embryos of the new socialist society.

Antonio Gramsci at this stage was developing a form of Marxism which was to prove hugely influential in revisionist Eurocommunist circles later in the twentieth century. He was opposed to the bureaucratic State as well as to the reformist trade union movement. His call for a party as a co-ordinating body for factory councils and Soviets was not very different from Malatesta’s earlier conception of an anarchist party.11 Like many Italian anarchists at this time, he considered the Bolshevik regime to be genuinely democratic, and thought it possible to reconcile Bolshevism with the withering away of the State. The young anarchist intellectual Camillo Berneri, who was to die during the Spanish Revolution, also saw the Soviet system at this stage as one of autogoverno (self-management).

As early as 1919, however, Luigi Fabbri and Malatesta had warned that a new class was emerging in Russia. Malatesta wrote to Fabbri on 30 July 1919:

In reality one is dealing with a dictatorship of a party; and a very real dictatorship with its decrees, penal sanctions, executions and above all its armed force that today helps defend the revolution from external enemies, but tomorrow will help impose the dictators’ will on the workers, stop the revolution, consolidate and defend new interests of a new privileged class against the masses.12

  At their congress at Ancona in November 1921, the recently formed Unione Anarchica Italiana denounced the Bolshevik government as the main enemy of the Russian Revolution.

Although anarchists were instrumental in the establishment of an antifascist front in 1921–2, Gramsci and his friends went on to set up the Italian Communist Party which soon affiliated to the Communist International. In an obituary on Lenin, Malatesta suggested in 1924 that his death should be celebrated as a holiday rather than an occasion for mourning, thereby further alienating the Communists. After Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, anarchism as a movement began to disintegrate, but it went down fighting. Anarchists were imprisoned, sent to penal islands, put under house arrest (as in the case of Malatesta) or driven into exile.

The anarchists had been unable to pose a serious alternative to the fascists because of their uneven national distribution, their local disagreements, and their loose organization. During the war, anarchists fought in the resistance, especially in the north of the country. After the war, there was a slight revival of anarchism amongst disenchanted workers. The Italian Anarchist Federation was regrouped in Carrara, the traditional stronghold of the rebellious marble-cutters. Umanità Nova was revived and Cesare Zaccaria helped found Volontà, which is still published today. But when the New Left emerged in Italy in the 1960s it was strictly Marxist; the terrorist Red Brigades were especially authoritarian.

An international anarchist congress held in Carrara in 1968 helped revive libertarian spirits despite the failure of the students’ insurrection earlier in the year. In the seventies, with the rise of the peace, Green and feminist movements, anarchism started to make a comeback, albeit mainly amongst students and the middle class. The Unione Sindacale Italiana was relaunched in 1983 and now has groups in every province. In the following year, the city of Venice welcomed three thousand people to an international congress which revived dormant contacts, and confirmed that the ideas of anarchism thrive once again. Anarchism may no longer shape Italian working-class life, but it still challenges the Italian State, and is a considerable thorn in its side.

Spain

TO DATE, SPAIN IS the only country in the modern era where anarchism can credibly be said to have developed into a major social movement and to have seriously threatened the State. There are some good local reasons why this should be the case. The anarchist principles of autonomy, association and federation are peculiarly suited to the independent cast of the Spanish social temperament. There was also a long tradition of independent communes which stretched back to the Middle Ages; these communes had had their own public charters and made their own fueros or local laws. The free commune was considered a self-governing organism capable of federating with others.

Very firmly in this tradition was the Catalan Pi y Margall, who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, became the leader of the Federalist Party. Referring to the brotherhoods formed by the municipalities chiefly in Castilla and León in the last third of the Middle Ages, he wrote:

The citizens not content with their fuero or own law codes, attempted all the time to extract further privileges to buttress them. If for any reason they united with their neighbours, it was to defend local freedoms, even against the king himself, whom they always looked at with cautious and suspicious eyes.1

  Pi y Margall was inspired by Hegel’s principle of ‘unity in diversity’ and translated Proudhon into Spanish. He advocated a federal society based on self-governing communes. In Reacción y Revolución (1854), he declared that ‘I shall divide and subdivide power; I shall make it changeable and go on destroying it’. The book was to have a profound influence on Spanish radicalism. When Pi became President for a short period during the 1873 revolution, he only managed to introduce a few liberal reforms.2 But he was long considered the moving spirit of Spanish anarchism.

The European message of anarchism first arrived in Spain in 1868. On hearing of the military revolution which had driven Queen Isabella into exile, Bakunin sent several of his envoys to win supporters for his newly formed International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, a secret society within the First International. Despite his inability to speak Spanish, the Italian Giuseppe Fanelli managed to set up in Madrid a nucleus of twenty-one converts who formed the Federación Regional Española, the Spanish section of the First International. He also won over some students and workers to Bakunin’s anti-authoritarian collectivism in Barcelona. The Spanish section of the First International was to remain firmly Bakuninist and immediately developed in an anarcho-syndicalist direction.3

Anarchism in Spain quickly took root amongst the rural poor. Itinerant apostles like the austere printer Anselmo Lorenzo (who had been inspired by Fanelli and Proudhon) carried the anarchist message from village to village, awakening revolutionary aspirations which would occasionally burst out in local insurrections. In the villages obreros conscientes (clear-thinking workers) would keep the anarchist flames alight. The peasants dreamed of the day of el reparto, the redistribution of land, when authority in the form of the landowner, priest and police would come to an end.4

But it was not only amongst the dispossessed in the south and east — the landless peasants and poor farmers of Andalucía and the Levante — that anarchism found fertile soil. It made headway in the mining districts of Catalunya and Oviedo. It appealed to the most advanced workers in Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid. Young intellectuals, like Francisco Ferrer who founded the Modern School Movement, were attracted by its militant atheism and rebellious spirit as well as to its confidence in human goodness and progress. Even the young Pablo Picasso came under its sway at the turn of the century.

Anarchism tended to take on a more violent form in Spain than elsewhere because political violence had come to seem unexceptional since the Napoleonic Wars. But while Spanish anarchism had a prophetic, and to some degree a millenarian ring, it is misleading to see it, as many historians have, as fundamentally religious in character. It was usually based on a clear understanding and analysis of the causes of social oppression and offered a realistic solution to agricultural impoverishment and industrial alienation.5 It was rooted in popular culture and expressed in a new form ancient aspirations for land and liberty, bread and justice, education and freedom.

At the same time, Spanish anarchism placed a great stress on culture and lifestyle and sought to free everyday life from the traditional bonds of Church and State. Maturing in a period of economic scarcity, it developed on occasion a somewhat puritanical strain. But while the strong moral sense of many Spanish anarchists led them to reject usury and waste, they also celebrated free love and free enquiry. In their desire to live in harmony with nature, some even adopted simple dress, a vegetarian diet, and nudism. They were well organized and efficient and yet valued spontaneity and initiative. In their grupos de afinidad (affinity groups), they developed forms of organization which were based not only on ideological ties but more importantly on friendship and conviviality.6

As in France, mere was an upsurge in the early 1890s of anarchist bombings and assassinations in Spain, which was met by brutal government repression. But the anarchists soon recognized the inability of terrorism to overthrow the State and turned to propaganda amongst the workers and peasants. A new wave of industrial unrest broke out at the turn of the century. Inspired by the successes of the French CGT, the libertarian unions of Catalunya formed a syndicalist organization called Solidaridad Obrera (Workers’ Unity) in 1907.

It held its first congress the following year. When the government called for conscription in Catalunya in 1909 for its war with the Riffs in Morocco, Solidaridad Obrera called a general strike. Street battles broke out in Barcelona, and during the subsequent Semana Trágica (tragic week) some two hundred workers were killed, thousands injured, and many churches burnt down. In the merciless reprisals which followed Ferrer lost his life although he had not even been present during the fighting in Barcelona. In the aftermath the unions recognized the need to create a stronger organization and in 1911 the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was formed at a congress in Sevilla. It saw itself as the successor to the First International which had existed in Spain in one form or another since 1868.

The CNT was unable to operate legally until 1914. Five years later, its membership had soared to one million. Its main period of activity was between 1917 and 1923 when it organized all over Spain revolutionary strikes which almost provoked a civil war. Gunmen or pistoleros of the Left and Right shot it out in the streets, especially in Barcelona, and perpetrated revenge killings. But the CNT faced the same dilemma as the CGT had in France, since it was dedicated to improving the conditions of its members in the short term as well as aiming ultimately at the revolutionary transformation of society. At the CNT congress in 1919 it adopted the principles of comunismo libertario as its basic ideology, as proposed by the regional congress of the Catalan unions the previous year. It also committed itself to ‘struggle in the purely economic field, that is by direct action, untrammelled by any political or religious prejudice’.7

A split developed between a moderate wing led by Salvador Segui and Angel Pestaña, who were willing to compromise with employers and even the State, and extremists like Buenaventura Durruti who were ready to use virtually any means to bring about the revolution. But what united both wings in the CNT was their common opposition to authoritarian socialism. A delegate returned from a Congress of the Third International in Moscow in 1920 with the news that under the pretext of revolutionary power a new dictatorship, that of a single (if nominally socialist) party, was emerging in Russia. In 1922 at its Zaragoza Congress, the CNT declared itself to be a ‘firm defender of the principles of the First International maintained by Bakunin’, and broke away from the Communist Third International because of its link with the Soviet Union. The constitution of the CNT adopted the principle ‘The emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves’. They took it so far to begin with that only waged workers with a permanent employer were allowed to join.

At every opportunity the militant literature of the CNT attacked the State as the source of all evil and denounced political power with such well-known aphorisms as:

there is no such thing as revolutionary power, for all power is reactionary by nature; power corrupts both those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised; those who think they can conquer the State in order to destroy it are unaware that the State overcomes all its conquerors; there are no good and bad politicians, only bad ones and worse; the best government is no government at all; the Nation is not the People, nor is the State the same as Society; instead of the government of men, let us have the administration of things; peace to men, and war on institutions; dictatorship of the proletariat is dictatorship without the proletariat and against them; to vote for politicians is to renounce your own personality; your union is yourself.8

  Unlike the French CGT with its dual structure of local bourses du travail and a national federation of trade unions, the CNT was at first based on the local sindicatos únicos. These syndicates brought together all workers in one factory or town and were loosely federated at a regional and national level. It had no permanent officials and the minimum of administrative arrangements: officers were unpaid and rotated annually to prevent them from becoming bureaucrats. All decisions were taken at a meeting of the branch, preferably by acclamation but if not, by majority vote. The constitution of the CNT, which was printed in every membership card, unequivocally stated: ‘We recognize the sovereignty of the individual, but we accept and agree to carry out the collective mandate taken by majority decision. Without this there is no organization.’

Complete autonomy was the basis of the federation and the only ties were the general agreements reached at the national congresses. In carrying a resolution, it was usual to operate by majority vote, but proportional representation was also used to stop the small unions from the villages being crushed by the large unions from the cities. The delegates at conferences had the mandate to discuss fundamental themes but they had to submit the propositions agreed to referendum of individual unions. At all times the members had control over the delegates and could dismiss them.

As a union organization, the CNT was one of the most democratic. But there were some limitations to its libertarian structure. Interpreting strictly its principle that the emancipation of workers must be the work of the workers themselves, initially it only allowed workers who had a wage and an employer to join. This of course excluded self-employed workers, members of co-operatives, certain technicians and intellectuals. Its revolutionary impetus also had an anti-intellectual edge — in its constitution printed on membership cards, it declared: ‘To lose time in talking in meetings by holding philosophical discussions, is anti-revolutionary. The adversary does not discuss, he acts.’9 With its emphasis on the slogan ‘Unity is Strength’, it overruled private judgement and free enquiry by insisting that each member be obliged to comply with majority decisions, even when they contravene his or her own principles. The union also insisted that there should be no public criticism of the organization.

The highly decentralized structure of the CNT however made it extremely resilient. When it went underground during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera from 1923 to 1930, it re-emerged largely intact.

At the 1931 Madrid Congress, the moderate tendency within CNT carried a proposal to form, like the French CGT, national federations in each industry, in addition to the local sindicatos únicos which grouped workers from every factory into a town federation. At the same time, the extreme Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), which had been formed in exile in 1927, began through its loose grupos de afinidad (affinity groups) to dominate the important committees and bureaux of the CNT. Its intention was to counter the reformist wing. While all the anarchists of the FAI were members of the CNT, not all the members of the CNT were anarchists. Those in the CNT who rejected the idea of revolution and a movement led by an audacious minority like the FAI began to be expelled.

The result was that from 1932 at least half of the Spanish trade-union movement was being guided by a dedicated anarchist nucleus — Bakunin’s dream of a secret vanguard come true. The FAI succeeded in ousting the moderate leaders of the CNT, including Angel Pestaña and Juan Peiro. They were known as the Treintistas as thirty of them had signed a manifesto opposing the tactic of unprepared insurrection, violence for the sake of violence, and the ‘myth of revolution’. When the moderates broke away, criticizing the dictadura de la FAI, they formed their own sindicatos de oposición, but they probably never gained more than sixty thousand members.

The FAI was also split into various tendencies, which ranged from the supporters of Diego Abad de Santillan who proposed a planned economy run by the industrial unions, to those who advocated like Federica Montseny a free federation of communes. The FAI did not come out into the open until the beginning of the Civil War in 1936. Despite its considerable influence, it never achieved more than thirty thousand members.

Amongst its ranks numbered not only a criminal element but also a group of puritanical idealists who were the first to advocate the burning of churches and the summary execution of priests and male prostitutes during the Civil War. Although it would be misleading to call these atheist militants fundamentally religious, they undoubtedly shared some of the hatred for organized religion felt by the puritanical sects of the Reformation.

Opponents accused the FAI of trying to seize power in the CNT, but in reality there was no central power to seize and on most issues the two organizations agreed.10 In their tactic of using their affinity groups to spearhead the revolution and direct the CNT, the FAI has also been accused of adopting a theory of ‘anarcho-Bolshevism’.11 Murray Bookchin also acknowledges that the Peninsular Committee of the FAI walked ‘a very thin line between a Bolshevik-type Central Committee and a mere administrative body’.12 It certainly remained a secret organization, with its members carefully selected right up until the Civil War, although it could have acquired legal status after the founding of the republic. The faistas were also responsible for many of the revenge killings.

But while the affinity groups of the FAI undoubtedly had vanguardist tendencies, they were free associations held together voluntarily by mutual sympathy as well as ideology. They can hardly be compared to Communist Party cells or cadres with their strict discipline and hierarchy. With their ties of intimacy, they had something in common with an extended family. They often acted on their own initiative, which earned them the nickname of los incontrolados amongst the authoritarian Left. In addition, the FAI like the CNT was organized along confederal lines, with the delegated Peninsular Committee executing any general agreements rather than making policy. Trotsky, aware of their differences with Bolshevism but misjudging their true nature, called the FAI and CNT a ‘fifth wheel on the cart of bourgeois democracy’.13

In the early thirties, there were many anarchist attempts to set up insurrectional communes, particularly in the Levante, Andalucía and Catalunya by militants like Buenaventura Durruti. The most famous was in a small village near Jerez called Casas Viejas, where a small group of local anarchists inspired by a veteran nicknamed seisdedos (six fingers) locked up the civil guards, unfurled the red and black flag, and announced el reparto. After fierce fighting with the Guardia Civil, the rebels were all killed, burnt alive in a shepherd’s hut.14

Social unrest grew more bitter and widespread. In 1932 a general strike was attempted in Sevilla and in 1933 there were riots in Barcelona. As a result of an abstention campaign led by the CNT, the Republican-Socialist coalition was defeated at the 1933 elections. The alternative was more strikes and insurrections, especially in Aragón and the Rioja district. The CNT and the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) supported a rising of seventy thousand miners in Asturias in October 1934 which was brutally put down with the help of Moroccan troops. Hundreds were killed and nine thousand sent up for trial. In the bienno negro (black two years) which followed, the country seemed to be drifting towards civil war.

The CNT in the mean time had consistently rejected voting in elections with the slogan: ‘Frente a las urnas, la Revolución Social’ (Social Revolution instead of ballot boxes). Its abstention in the 1933 elections undoubtedly led to the formation of a right-wing government. But not all its members were happy with the policy and many voted early in 1936 in elections which brought the Popular Front coalition to power. At the national congress at Zaragoza in May 1936, representing some half million workers, the CNT also welcomed back moderate dissidents of the sindicatos de oposición and agreed to try and seek out an alliance with the socialist UGT.

The CNT at the Congress also reaffirmed its revolutionary anarchist beliefs: ‘Once the violent aspect of the revolution is finished, the following are declared abolished: private property, the state, the principles of authority, and as a consequence, the classes which divide men into exploiters and exploited, oppressed and oppressors.’ The revolution, it was made clear, was not only a sudden act of violence but would involve a profound psychological transformation.

The resolutions made at the ten-day congress add up to one of the most eloquent and incisive statements of libertarian communism. It was agreed that the new society would consist of communes, based on the freely associated syndicates, who would produce and exchange the necessities of life through regional and national federations. Elected committees in the communes, without any executive or bureaucratic character, would make decisions regarding agriculture, hygiene, culture, discipline, production, and statistics. There would be no social hierarchy: the producers would meet at the end of the day to discuss questions of detail which did not require the approval of the communal assemblies.

The individual was seen as the cell and cornerstone of all social, economic and moral creation, but the congress adopted the principle of economic communism. Everyone who freely gave assistance to the collective according to their strength and ability would receive from the commune the satisfaction of their needs. With ecological insight, it was further resolved that eventually the new society should assure each commune of all the agricultural and industrial elements necessary for its autonomy, ‘in accordance with the biological principle which affirms that the man, and in this case, the commune, is most free, who has least need of others’.

Tolerance of diversity was one of the keynotes of the Congress. Every attempt was made to incorporate the many shades of anarchist opinion, from the collectivist to the individualist. It was recognized that the communes would take on many different forms, and opponents of industrial technology and advocates of nudism would be free to create their own. As for personal relations, it was affirmed that the revolution would not act violently against the family since at its best it encouraged solidarity in society. But it was recognized that comunismo libertario proclaims ‘free love, with no more regulation than the free will of the men and women concerned, guaranteeing the children with the security of the community’.

There was to be no distinction between intellectuals and manual workers, but education would be developed to end illiteracy and help people to think for themselves. Courts and prisons would no longer be needed: ‘Comunismo libertario has nothing in common with coercion: a fact which implies the disappearance of the existing system of correctional justice and furthermore of the instruments of punishment.’ It was clear to those gathered at the Congress that ‘man is not bad by nature, and that delinquency is the logical result of the state of injustice in which we live’. As for antisocial people, it would be the task of the popular assemblies in a spirit of conciliation to seek the just solution to each individual case. They were confident that when a person’s needs are satisfied and he or she receives a rational and humane education the principal causes of social injustice will disappear.

These remarkable resolutions of a congress which sought to define the ‘Confederal Conception of Libertarian Communism’ were not presented as a specific programme or a blueprint for a future society. They were offered as the broad outlines of an initial plan, as ‘the point of departure for Humanity towards its integral liberation’.15 But while these were all revolutionary demands, and revolution was in the air, the Congress made no concrete arrangements to prepare for one. A proposal that militias should be trained was defeated by one favouring the idea of guerrilla warfare. The revolutionary general strike was to be the answer to military rebellions. The vagueness about the means for realizing comunismo libertario did not however diminish its popularity. At the time of the Congress, the CNT had half a million members; by the end of the year, it had swelled to more than one and a half million.

When Franco rebelled against the republic on 19 July 1936, his forces were rapidly disarmed by popular militias. By the end of July, he was left in control of only half the country. The CNT responded by declaring the revolutionary general strike and by calling for the collectivization of the land and factories. For the following ten months the CNT and the FAI were amongst the dominant associations in republican Spain. The anarchosyndicalists immediately took over the running of Barcelona. As George Orwell observed, most of the active revolutionaries were ‘Anarchists with a mistrust of all parliaments’.16

Catalunya became virtually an independent republic. A Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias was set up to represent the workers’ organizations and various political parties and groupings. But when confronted with the issue of dissolving the Generalitat, the provisional government of Catalunya, the leaders of the CNT-FAI made the crucial decision to leave it intact and support its President Lluis Companys. García Oliver lamely commented: ‘The CNT and the FAI decided on collaboration and democracy, renouncing revolutionary totalitarianism which would lead to the strangulation of the revolution by the anarchist and Confederal dictatorship.’17 Oliver spelt out the dilemma more clearly as a choice ‘between Libertarian Communism, which meant anarchist dictatorship, and democracy which meant collaboration’.18

The decision to collaborate with the Catalan government however put a break on the further development of the social revolution. Within two months the Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias was abolished. On 27 September 1936 the anarchist leaders of the CNT-FAI entered the government of the Generalitat, vainly trying to justify their action by referring to it as a Regional Defence Council. They had started down the slippery slide to parliamentary participation. Forgetting their function as delegates, they tried to direct the popular movement. They became mesmerized by the slogan: ‘Sacrificamos a todo menos a la victoria!’ (We sacrifice all except victory!) In the long run, the social revolution itself was to be sacrificed for the war against Franco.

But while the CNT leadership rejected an ‘anarchist dictatorship’ and opted for collaboration with other republican political parties and unions, it still supported the collectivization process. With the co-operation of a large part of the socialist UGT, members of the CNT rapidly collectivized the land and took over factories in the areas under the control of the republican forces. Although short-lived, the successful outcome of the experiment demonstrated triumphantly that workers and peasants can manage their own affairs and that comunismo libertario is firmly in the realm of the possible.

The anarchists, like the other factions, formed themselves into militia groups, electing their own officers, and discussing orders before carrying them out. The militia columns may have been somewhat chaotic at first but as the professional soldier Colonel Jimenez de la Beraza observed: ‘From a military point of view it is chaos, but it is chaos which works. Don’t disturb it!’19 The lack of military discipline was more than compensated by the initiative and courage of the columns. Orwell asserted that the anarchist militias were ‘notoriously the best fighters amongst the purely Spanish forces’.20

As he went with papers from the Independent Labour Party, Orwell was drafted into the dissident Communist group POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), and he preferred it to the International Brigades. But he confessed that if he had understood the situation better he would have probably joined the anarchists.21 Orwell moreover went out of his way to correct the misrepresentations of the anarchists and syndicalists in England and to stress the remarkable achievements of Spanish anarchism at the beginning of the war, especially in Catahinya.22 Another Englishman, Walter Gregory, was deeply impressed by the anarchists, despite his communist affiliation: ‘Their obvious sincerity, dedication and enthusiasm were wonderful to see. No amount of hardship seemed to lessen their deeply held conviction in the natural justice of their cause or the inevitably of its fulfilment.’23 Yet despite the enthusiasm and bravery of the anarchist militias, after the initial drive of Durruti’s column into Aragón, the principal anarchist front became one of the most static of the whole war.

In the country behind the war fronts, the peasants drawing on their own communal traditions collectivized their land in Andalucía, Catalunya, the Levante, Aragón and parts of Castilla immediately after Franco’s rebellion in July 1936. By 1937 some three million people were living in rural collectives. In Aragón about three-quarters of the land was managed through the collectives which ranged from a hundred to several thousand members. In Andalucía, before it was overrun by Franco’s troops early in the war, many village communes were set up, abolishing money, collectivizing the land, and attempting the direct exchange of goods. They set up plans to eradicate illiteracy and to provide elementary medical services. Free and equal poverty became the ideal. Having experienced centuries of poverty and oppression, they were notable for their austere moral fervour and revolutionary idealism.24

In general, the CNT syndicates were turned into popular assemblies of the entire population, often including women and children. The assemblies would elect an administrative committee which would be entirely accountable to the assemblies. Decision making was thus shared between the village or town assemblies and the CNT committees which were concerned with the day-to-day running. They operated through what might be called a system of ‘voluntary authority’; no one was forced to join or remain a member of the collective, but was subject to the authority of the general assembly, and in most cases, to the local committees. Regional federations were set up to co-ordinate the collectives.25

In most areas, ‘individualist’ peasants were allowed to cultivate their own plots of land if they preferred and in some areas had consumer tickets printed especially for them. The members of the collectives wanted to persuade people to join them by example and not by force, although the powerful influence of public opinion played a role. Most of the collectives moved towards the communist goal of distribution according to need. New methods of cultivation were tried and overall production of agricultural production increased, despite the loss of labour to the war effort.26

In the cities, the CNT continued production with remarkable efficiency, considering the difficulties with supplies and in many cases the loss of the entire management structure and many technicians.27 In some cases, owners remained but were directed by the elected committees. In Catalunya, which had seventy per cent of Spain’s total industry, entire branches of industry (such as textiles and glass) were reorganized into larger units. A war industry, with its chemical plants to back it up, had to be created. In Barcelona, which was the centre of urban collectivization, the public services and industries were taken over and run with great success in such a large and complex city. From July until October 1936, virtually all production and distribution were under workers’ control.

Even as late as the summer of 1937, Fenner Brockway, Secretary of the British Independent Labour Party, reported after a visit that it was evident that the CNT was the largest and most vital of the working-class organizations in Spain. He was

immensely impressed by the constructive revolutionary work which is being done by the CNT. Their achievement of workers’ control in industry is an inspiration … The Anarchists of Spain, through the CNT, are doing one of the biggest constructive jobs ever done by the working class. At the front they are fighting Fascism. Behind the front they are actually constructing the new Workers’ Society. They see that the war against Fascism and the carrying through of the Social Revolution are inseparable.

  Brockway also observed that ‘the great solidarity that existed among the Anarchists was due to each individual relying on his own strength and not depending on leadership’.28 In the long run, the anarchists might have lost the war, but their successful collectivization of the land and industry remained their most enduring and constructive achievement.

There were of course difficulties which sympathetic visitors did not always see. Relations between different enterprises were often casual, and some collectives continued to compete as if they were still privately owned. Wages fluctuated in different factories even within the same industry. With the Madrid government refusing to release funds from the gold reserve (the second largest in the world), there was a shortage of capital and materials.

The revolutionary process was halted on 24 October 1936 when the provisional government of Catalunya, the Generalitat, issued a Collectivization Decree which recognized the collectives, but tried to bring them under government and not workers’ control. It not only checked their further development but restricted collectivization of industry to those enterprises employing more than a hundred workers. In privately owned factories a Workers’ Control Committee was established to increase production and ensure strict discipline. A planning and co-ordinating body called the Economic Council (with powers of compulsion as the ultimate industrial authority) and a Council of Enterprises (with workers’ representatives joined by a ‘controller’ from the Generalitat) were set up. They both reflected the drift towards central government control.

Yet for all the restrictions of a wartime economy, Orwell for one was deeply impressed in Barcelona by the spectacle of a vibrant city where ‘the working class was in the saddle’.29 Everyday relations were transformed. Men called each other by the familiar Tú.

Women participated on a mass scale in the revolution. In the early part of the war, they fought alongside men as a matter of course, and took part in the communal decision-making in the village assemblies. Many wanted to replace legal marriage with ‘free unions’ based on mutual trust and shared responsibility. The more active feminists formed a libertarian group called Mujeres Libres which worked towards freeing women from their passivity, ignorance and exploitation and sought a co-operative understanding between men and women. By the end of September 1936 they had seven labour sections and brigades.30 The liberation of women however was only partial: they were often paid a lower rate than men in the collectives; they continued to perform ‘women’s work’; they saw the struggle primarily in terms of class and not sex. But in a traditionally Catholic and patriarchal society, there were undoubtedly new possibilities for women and they appeared unaccompanied in public for the first time with a new self-assurance.

The experiment however was short-lived. The CNT-run factories were unable to provide the militias with the necessary equipment because of the shortage of raw supplies. They failed to win the support of the majority of the working class, and their attempt to develop the social revolution was checked by the war with Franco’s army and the struggle with other Republican factions, notably the Communists. In September 1936 the Madrid paper of the CNT was still insisting that ‘the libertarian transformation of society can only take place as a result of the abolition of the state and the control of the economy by the working class’.31 Yet towards the end of October, as Franco’s troops were closing in on Madrid, the CNT in Barcelona agreed with the UGT to accept the need for a unified command, military discipline, and conscription. It also halted the expropriation of small proprietors and businesses. The CNT-FAI in Barcelona not only had a Propaganda Bureau in which members were expected to toe the line, but also set up a School for Militants which smacked of vanguard elitism.

The anarchist leaders further checked the social revolution by their collaboration with government. Some joined in November 1936 the Generalitat of Catalunya, with the feeble excuse that it was a regional defence council. Four leaders of the CNT then became ministers in the socialist government of Largo Caballero (known as the ‘Spanish Lenin’) in December, breaking at a stroke the honoured tradition of abstention from all forms of parliamentary politics. Juan López and Juan Peiró were made Ministers of Commerce and Industry respectively. The FAI militant García Oliver accepted the post of Minister of Justice; he introduced some liberal reforms, but was reduced to defending work camps for political prisoners.

After much agonizing the anarchist intellectual Federica Montseny became Minister of Health even though she had always believed that ‘the state could achieve absolutely nothing, that the words Government and Authority meant the negation of any possibility of liberty for individuals and peoples’.32 The strength of the CNT had always lain in its rejection of the State and political intrigue. It was independent of political parties and committed to the revolution through direct action. In an unparalleled bout of dissimulation, the CNT daily paper Solidaridad Obrera declared that, at the very moment its leaders joined Caballero, the government ‘as a regulating instrument of the organisms of the State, has ceased to be an oppressive force against the working class, just as the State no longer represents the organism which divides society into classes’.33

The leaders of the CNT felt that it had to compromise to obtain foreign aid and to win the war against Franco. But inevitably they were obliged to reinforce the very institutions which they had so vehemently denounced in the past. They checked the collectivization process. They oversaw the transformation of the popular militias into an army. Minister of Justice García Oliver went so far as to tell the students of the new Military School early in 1937: ‘Officers of the Popular Army, you must observe an iron discipline and impose it on your men who, once they are under your command, must cease to be your comrades and be simply cogs in the military machine of our army.’34 The subsequent regimentation and militarization demoralized many of the anarchist militias and workers.

The anarchist participation in government has been described by Vernon Richards as the unavoidable outcome of the FAI’s original collaboration with the CNT.35 Others like Emma Goldman tried to excuse it on grounds of expediency in order to unite the republican forces and to defeat fascism. It certainly demonstrated the constant danger which awaited anarcho-syndicalism if it became involved in parliamentary politics. By the middle of 1937 the greatest anarchist experiment in history was virtually over; it had lasted barely a year.

The Communists increased their influence because the Soviet Union was the sole foreign supplier of arms to the Republican cause, and together with the socialists they began to replace the anarchist committees with municipal government. The militia columns were converted into orthodox brigades with a centralized command structure. On 16 December, 1936, Pravda declared; ‘As for Catalunya, the purging of the Trotskyists and Anarcho-syndicalists has begun; it will be conducted with the same energy with which it was conducted in the USSR.’ A Communist-controlled secret police, based on the Cheka model, began a reign of terror. By the end of April 1937 open hostilities were taking place between the members of the Partido Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC — the combined Socialist and Communist Parties of Catalunya) and the supporters of the CNT who were joined by the dissident Marxist group POUM.

Fighting broke out in Barcelona in early May, when the Communist-controlled police attacked the Telephone Building of Barcelona which was in the hands of the CNT. The street battles which followed left four hundred people dead, including the Italian anarchist intellectual Camillo Berneri. A group calling themselves the Friends of Durruti (who had been shot in the back in mysterious circumstances) criticized the capitulation of the CNT leadership and called for a fresh revolution led by an elected Revolutionary Junta to manage the war and to supervise revolutionary order, propaganda, and international affairs while the unions dealt with the economic affairs with an Economic Council. They argued that ‘the revolution needs organisms to oversee it, and repress, in an organised sense, hostile sectors’.36

By this stage however they were a voice in the revolutionary wilderness, and the Federación Ibérica de Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL — Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth) and the Regional Committee of the CNT rejected the call. The government however with the support of the PSUC put down the anarchist resistance. Strict censorship was imposed. It marked the end of anarchist ascendancy in Catalunya. The conflict between the anarchists and Communists was to prove one of the principal causes of the defeat of the republican forces.

Largo Caballero’s government fell directly after the ‘May Days’. It was replaced by Juan Negrin’s government which was even more strongly influenced by the Stalinists; one of its first acts was to declare POUM illegal. It was argued that the war demanded the concentration of the authority of the State. This attitude came to the foremost in the Extended National Economic Plenum of January 1938, the first full gathering of the CNT since the Zaragoza Conference in 1936. It accepted the need for work inspectors, work norms, and workers’ cards. Censorship of the CNT press was approved to prevent public disagreements. It was even agreed to form an Executive Committee of the CNT, FAI and FIJL.

Soon after the meeting the CNT formed a pact with the UGT, over which the Socialist leader Luis Araquistina said ‘Bakunin and Marx would embrace’. It was however never implemented and at least the Barcelona anarchist weekly Tierra y Libertad had the clarity of thought to point out:

There is ‘embrace’ for a common revolutionary upheaval. But authority and freedom, the State and Anarchism, dictatorship and the free federation of peoples, remain irreconcilably antagonistic until such a time as we all will understand that no real union is possible except by the free choice of the people.37

  At a national congress held in October 1938 attended by delegates from the CNT, the FAI and the FIJL, the secretary-general of the CNT argued that it was the refusal of his comrades to accept militarism from the start which was responsible for the mess they were in. The movement reaffirmed its belief in decentralization and workers’ control but Franco’s victory soon made their realization impossible. Half a million Spaniards went into exile. The anarchist groups formed a Movimiento Libertario Español (Spanish Libertarian Movement) which mulled over what had gone wrong in exile.

The defeat of the anarchist movement in Spain did not result from a failure of anarchist theory and tactics but rather a failure to carry through the social revolution. If the latter had not been sacrificed for the war effort, and the Communists had not seized power, the outcome may well have been very different.

After Franco’s death, the CNT re-emerged in Spain in 1976 as a vigorous force in the trade-union movement, but it is the socialist UGT who now makes the running.38 The new CNT is still a loose association of sindicatos administered by committees, unpaid officers, and dedicated workers. The programme of the 1936 Zaragoza Congress with its commitment to comunismo libertario remains its goal. Their numbers are small but their idealism is intact, as old veterans pass on their experience to new generations of workers and students.

For a time, the CNT seemed poised to become a considerable force in the labour movement once again. Unfortunately the movement split, after the Sixth National Congress in 1983, into two factions — the CNT-AIT (Asociación Internacional de Trabajadores) and the CGT (Confederación General de Trabajadores) – one broadly revolutionary, the other more reformist. These wings have been locked in a dispute over who owns the historical assets of the confederation which had been seized by Franco’s State. The CGT has taken on board social ecology, and now calls itself an anarcho-syndicalist trade union that struggles for a libertarian society, and ‘a future in which neither the person nor the planet is exploited’.

Spanish anarchists were cheered by the appearance of anarchist ideas and tactics briefly during the Portuguese Revolution in the early 1970s.39 But few believe that revolution is possible in post-Franco Spain, increasingly entrenched as it is in the European Community. As elsewhere in Europe, anarchism finds its chief expression in the campaign for workers’ control and self-management, in the counter-culture, in the peace and green movements and in the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization campaigns.