CHAPTER 1Traditions
Some like to define anarchism etymologically by tracing the roots of the doctrine to the ancient Greek word anarchia. This translates roughly as ‘the government of no one’. Self-identifying anarchists have done this too, usually to draw attention to the oppression they claim government entails and the equality anarchists advocate. While monarchists accept the government of one, anarchists call for the government of no one. It’s a powerful strapline and easy to understand. The problem with it is that it situates anarchism in a framework of government that uses the rejection of anarchy for its justification. So anarchy immediately becomes a condition of disorder. In political thought, the same applies. The prevailing view is that human beings want to escape from the inconvenience or violence of anarchy and, because they have the wit to do so (uniquely, we are told), they submit to government. Anarchy is the order they run away from. It implies chaos, sometimes vigilantism, sometimes mob rule, and it cannot guarantee peace or security.
How then, should we start thinking about anarchism? Finding a starting point that fits the spirit of the subject is difficult because anarchists typically resist the categorization of their movements and principles. They are usually suspicious of attempts to fix anarchism’s origins, either in time or space, and they reject selective accounts that lavish special attention on particular historical figures. Why? Because labelling looks like an attempt to determine boundaries that anarchists themselves have not fixed, because the identification of origins seems an unwelcome first step towards the ideological construction of a set of fixed traditions that anarchists prefer to see as permeable and fluid, and finally, because dating and locating the emergence of anarchism to the foundation of particular groups appears both arbitrary and exclusionary. This last move can also create a Eurocentric bias which is exaggerated and further distorted by the elevation of special individuals or identification of key texts. Overall the effect is to attribute the power of anarchist invention to a collection of individuals of particular genius – characteristically, white men – who cleverly articulated a great idea, parcelled it up and exported it across the world.
My entry point is that anarchism began to emerge as a distinctive movement in mid-nineteenth-century Europe – France, Germany, Italy and Spain – in a period of European state dominance. That is not to say that it appeared as ready-made or that this location fixes anarchism’s ideology. What I would like to suggest is that anarchism emerged through critical engagement with other radical and progressive movements and in the face of concerted opposition from conservative and reactionary forces. This circumstance gave anarchism a particular political flavour. Anarchists came to be distinguished from non-anarchists by their responses to specific issues and events. They were frequently identified by their expulsion from other political groups and by the targeted repression of religious and government institutions.
My second proposition is that anarchism was elaborated by critics as well as figures like P.-J. Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, Louise Michel and John Most who proudly called themselves anarchists. For the first group, the writings and practices of these anarchists were critically important to its ideological construction. Some early commentators understood that there was a relationship between the principles that anarchists expounded and the movements they were associated with. But even though they realized that anarchism was not a conventional philosophy, they still focused their attention on a small number of key figures. So while the field of anarchist studies is extremely wide (there are no key statements, no primary modes or sites for action, just endless examples of resistance, reaction and re-recreation), it is still possible to talk about anarchist traditions. Anarchism has been shaped by multiple histories and experiences which are recognizably anarchist because the branding of anarchism in the nineteenth century by advocates and opponents alike makes it possible to identify family resemblances across time and space.
Anarchism and the International
The break-up of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA or First International) in 1872 is sometimes said to be the watershed moment for the European anarchist movement. In histories of socialism the split tends to be seen as the point at which the movement divided into two separate wings, one Marxist and the other anarchist. This is a simplification. The significance of the First International’s collapse grew only as hostilities between anarchists and Marxists deepened, and it is more obvious in retrospect than it was at the time. In itself, the split left the designation of socialists uncertain. However, the timing of the collapse was indeed important for the subsequent development of socialism. For those who adopted the label anarchist the collapse of the IWMA crystallized an understanding of the state that had been discussed until that time in largely abstract terms.
The First International had been founded in London in 1864 by British and French labour leaders to advance workers’ struggles against exploitation. Members were committed to a number of principles, but two were particularly significant: the idea that the struggle for emancipation could only be achieved by workers themselves, and the belief that class equality transcended distinctions based on colour, creed or nationality. This was the commitment to internationalism. Beyond these general rules little else kept the IWMA together, and throughout its history the association was plagued by factional rivalries and disputes.
In 1872 an argument between Karl Marx and Michael Bakunin that had been rumbling on since the late 1860s came to a head. Marx was a leading light in the International and had been elected to its executive council in 1864. Like Marx, Bakunin also enjoyed enormous prestige, having cut his teeth on the barricades during the 1848 revolutions, dodged two death sentences in 1850 and 51 and escaped from Siberia ten years later. A one-time associate of Marx in the 1840s, Bakunin was no longer close to him. Indeed, he had joined the Geneva section of the IWMA in 1868 as the leader of a separate body, the Alliance of Socialist Democracy. When he did so, Bakunin accused Marx of attempting to undermine the autonomy of the IWMA’s federated bodies by tightening the executive’s control. He also argued that Marx was wrong to call for the organization of political parties as a means of realizing revolution. At the time there was little scope for the organization of socialist parties in Europe. However, Bakunin objected to Marx’s policy in principle, believing that involvement with lawmaking institutions would likely dampen the revolutionary ardour of the oppressed and enmesh it in the very systems that regulated their exploitation and oppression.
Running alongside this disagreement about organization and strategy was a theoretical dispute which turned on a set of ideas about the dynamics of historical change, the state, private property and class. These concepts formed part of a shared vocabulary in socialist circles but they could mean different things to different people. This was the case for Marx and Bakunin, as Bakunin attempted to show.
Bakunin’s critique of Marx followed an encounter that Marx had had in the 1840s with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first writer to positively embrace the epithet ‘anarchist’ to describe his politics. Probably best known as the author of What is Property?, Proudhon was an ex-printer, journalist and author who came to prominence in France as an advocate of workers’ self-organization during the French Second Republic (1848–51). While Bakunin’s reprise of some of Proudhon’s arguments seemed to cement a basic division between anarchists and Marxists in the International, the battle lines were muddier than this partition implies. Marx had earlier ridiculed Proudhon’s economics and had drawn attention to their different understandings of historical change. Against Proudhon he had argued that history was driven primarily by economic changes. Marx’s materialist view was that innovations in production upset existing power balances. The groups who benefited from the introduction of new technologies and who possessed economic power would seek to secure the benefits that accrued to them by taking charge of the machinery of the state. They would fight for political power and so confront the existing elites who had similarly used their money and wealth to fix laws to their own advantage. For Marx, the confrontation was revolutionary and it represented the progressive energy of class war. Proudhon was also a revolutionary, but he did not subscribe to the idea of class war and he rejected what he considered to be the economic determinism of Marx’s view.
Proudhon argued that Marx had misdescribed the character of economic and political power. For him, the former was derived from the possibility of claiming an exclusive right to property ownership. This was enshrined in law and enforced by the violence vested in the state (police, military, justice systems). He thought Marx was right that there were different patterns of ownership and that these changed over time, but genuine revolutionary transformation depended on the abolition of the exclusive right of private ownership and on the dismantling of the systems of government that were organized to guarantee it. Like Marx, Proudhon was a materialist, but his conception of legal reform made him appear an idealist in Marx’s eyes. For Marx, Proudhon was a utopian who mistakenly believed that it was possible to change the world by changing our legal conception of property.
Where did Bakunin stand in all this? Somewhat surprisingly, he endorsed Marx’s description of Proudhon’s idealism and declared himself a follower of Marx’s materialist history. Yet he also argued that Marx construed materialism too narrowly and consequently failed to appreciate what revolutionary transformation involved. So siding with Proudhon against Marx, Bakunin advanced a critique of Marx’s theory which focused on the twin institutions of private property and the state.
Marx, Bakunin argued, was primarily interested in studying changes in patterns of ownership and the dynamics of class struggle. This was important work: Marx had explained the rise of the new industrial bourgeoisie, he had shown how this class had swept away the old aristocracy whose power had been rooted in land ownership and how it had also created a proletarian class that would pursue its interests through revolutionary struggle against capitalists. Yet, while acknowledging Marx’s genius in this regard, Bakunin accused him of being blinkered by his analysis. Above all, Marx had failed to pay proper attention to the state and here Proudhon was right. Marx defined the state too narrowly as an instrument of class rule. According to Marx, Bakunin argued, whoever controlled the economy also had control of the political apparatus. While this construction usefully highlighted the corrupting power of the bourgeoisie and the partiality of the law, it wrongly underplayed the independent, oppressive power of the state. Thus for Marx, Bakunin argued, revolution meant seizing control of the ownership of the means of production. Marx believed wrongly, in Bakunin’s view, that this was possible if the proletariat seized control of the state’s machinery. Marx was unable to see that for as long as the state remained intact, the revolution would be stunted. Control of the means of production would bring class equality, in the sense that it would wipe out the economic power of the bourgeoisie, but it would not remove hierarchy: workers would still be subject to the dictates of the law. They would work for the state rather than private owners of capital. From Bakunin’s perspective, Marx had explained the processes of revolutionary change, but his notion of class struggle restricted his understanding of what socialist transformation involved.
At the 1872 Hague conference of the International, Marx engineered Bakunin’s expulsion. In doing so, he established a primary division in the socialist movement that in fact was never clean or complete. Persistent disagreements about the policy implications of the political theory meant that the determination of ideological boundaries remained fluid and uncertain for years. Indeed, the theoretical disagreements between Bakunin and Marx were never fully resolved and debates about class, state and historical change have rumbled on in socialist movements ever since. Even as socialists took sides, a number of those who aligned with Marxist groups discovered that they supported positions that were outlawed as anarchist. By the same token, some of those who sided with Bakunin continued to think of themselves as Marxists. In 1881, when the call to organize an anarchist International was issued, some anarchists argued that the old one had never disappeared.1 Yet as far as the emergence of anarchism is concerned, the organizational collapse of the IWMA was significant.
The immediate result of the IWMA’s demise was the realignment of its local federations. The Jura Federation of the International rallied around Bakunin and inaugurated a new International. This met a few days after the Hague conference in St Imier in Switzerland. To distinguish it from the followers of Marx, Bakuninists called it ‘the anti-authoritarian International’ without relinquishing the relationship to the IWMA. The anarchist tag was adopted soon afterwards. The American academic Richard Ely, a keen observer of European socialism, explained that Bakunin had formed ‘a new International … based on anarchic principles’. This substituted a ‘Federal Council’ for the General Council, meaning that the ‘central organ (not authority), changed from year to year’ and, moreover, that ‘each land was left free to conduct its agitation in its own way, and every individual atom, i.e., local organization, was left free to come and go as it pleased’.2
By 1877 a distinctively anarchist programme began to take shape. The Geneva section of the Jura Federation had four main points: abolition of the state, political abstention, rejection of the workers’ candidatures, various means of propaganda and, in particular, propaganda by the deed.3 The last plank, later linked to individual acts of violence, was a commitment to transmit anarchist principles by example to largely uneducated workers. In 1881 two major anarchist conferences were convened, the first in London and the second in Chicago. In Europe anarchism had a strong presence in Belgium, France, Spain, Switzerland and Italy. Anarchists were also organized in Germany, Argentina, Cuba, Egypt and Mexico. A Uruguayan section of the Bakuninist International was set up in Montevideo in 1872.4 In North America the concentration of European migrants in Chicago and New York made these the important centres.
In 1889 the founding of the Second International formalized this organizational division of the socialist movement. The first meeting included anarchists, but the invitation was grudging. A motion passed at the Second International’s 1893 Congress was designed to exclude anarchists from future meetings and it committed socialists to enter into electoral competition as a revolutionary tactic. The resolution to expel those who refused to follow this line (and the commitment to fight for revolutionary change by strictly constitutional methods) was too blunt an instrument to sort anarchists from dissident Marxists. Even Lenin was caught in the Second International’s anarchist trap. But it reinforced the doctrinal significance of the IWMA’s disintegration and signalled the victory of Marx’s policy in the international revolutionary socialist movement.
The organizational collapse of the IWMA was felt in movement literatures, too. In the years following Bakunin’s death in 1876 a plethora of pamphlets appeared that lauded him as founder of genuine revolutionary socialism and decried Marx as its Machiavellian manipulator. A number of leading anarchists, notably Peter Kropotkin, were subsequently motivated to theorize their hostility to Marxism, establishing clear theoretical boundaries between anarchist and non-anarchist socialism. In the late nineteenth century it was common for anarchists to refer to Marxism as state socialism. Although this hardening of line still left considerable latitude for confusion, and the division of the IWMA clearly passed some groups by, there was a growing view in the anarchist sections that Marx had betrayed the commitment to self-emancipation and that anarchists should therefore take it upon themselves to uphold and protect the International’s goals and values by maintaining their own organizations.
The Paris Commune and the Haymarket Affair
As anti-authoritarian exponents of the IWMA’s politics, anarchists fleshed out the implications of their position with reference to two key events: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Haymarket Affair of 1886. These two episodes served as rallying points for anarchists in the early years of the European movement and they were habitually celebrated in anarchist journals and at annual meetings.
The Paris Commune is a shorthand term to describe a series of events in France at the end of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 – the last of the three wars of German unification engineered by Otto von Bismarck, which led to the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire and the founding of the French Third Republic. The Commune was declared in March 1871, following the catastrophic defeat of French forces by Bismarck’s Prussian army, on the back of a crippling siege of Paris in September 1870. It was sparked by the refusal of Parisians to accede to the demands of the Republic’s provisional government, based in Versailles under the leadership of Aldophe Thiers, which was then negotiating terms with Bismarck. It ended with the brutal suppression by the French government of the armed resistance that this refusal spawned. Frustrating Thiers’s plans to disarm the city, Parisian workers concentrated in the areas of Montmartre, Belleville and Buttes-Chaumont prevented government troops from confiscating the cannon of the National Guard. Seizing the guns, they constructed barricades and brought together left republicans, Proudhonists and other revolutionary socialists in the city’s defence. These were the Communards. As historian John Merriman has shown, the resistance resulted in the biggest massacre in nineteenth-century Europe: an estimated 20,000 Parisians were slaughtered in the Bloody Week of the Commune’s collapse in late May 1871. Many thousands more were deported to New Caledonia. They were not amnestied for ten years.
The other key anarchist event, the Haymarket Affair, started at a protest meeting in Chicago’s Haymarket Square on 4 May 1886 and concluded with the execution of four anarchists in November 1887. The Haymarket meeting had been called after the killing of workers by police at a locally organized strike held on 3 May at the McCormick reaper factory in support of a national campaign for the eight-hour day. As police attempted to disperse the crowd, a bomb exploded, killing one police officer and wounding several others. The police opened fire on the crowd and in the skirmishes that followed, seven officers were killed. A Chicago police round-up netted eight anarchists: George Engel, Samuel Fielden, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg, Oscar Neebe, Albert Parsons, Michael Schwab and August Spies. All were active in Chicago’s socialist networks as prominent radicals and labour organizers. Tried for instigating the bombing but not for the bombing itself, they were found guilty as charged. The case against them was flimsy, to say the least. The rigging of the jury, the incompetence of the jurors, a wanton disregard for the evidential basis of the law and the partiality of the judge ensured the prosecution’s victory. The case sparked international protests, so obvious were the procedural flaws, and eventually went to appeal. This failed and the miscarriage of justice was not recognized until 1893. John Altgeld, the Governor of Illinois who quashed the original verdicts, observed that the presiding judge, Judge Gary, had displayed a degree of ‘ferocity’ and ‘subserviency … without parallel in all history’.5 Judge Jeffries, England’s notorious seventeenth-century hanging judge, was moderate by comparison. Altgeld’s decision resulted in an absolute pardon for Fielden, Schwab and Neebe, ending their terms of imprisonment. It came too late for Parsons, Spies, Engel and Fischer. They were all dead. It was also too late for Lingg, who had committed suicide in his cell while awaiting execution.
What made these events so significant for the anarchists emerging from the disintegration of the IWMA? Proudhonists were a significant force in the Commune. It was Proudhon’s friend, the artist Gustave Courbet, who famously instigated the toppling of the column in the Place Vendôme. A number of other prominent Communards, including Louise Michel and Élisée Reclus, later emerged as leading figures in the anarchist movement. That’s not to say that the Commune was an exclusively anarchist affair. Those who fought on the barricades identified with a plethora of revolutionary traditions. To complicate matters, the publication of Marx’s Civil War in France, the official statement of the IWMA’s General Council, linked the Commune strongly to the Red Doctor, as the British press dubbed him. Marxists as well as anarchists were able to make credible claims to the Commune’s mantle.
Haymarket, in contrast, was an obviously anarchist affair. The defendants were arrested and charged because they were anarchists. The state attorney, Julius Grinnell, devised a strategy designed to put anarchism on trial. The accused responded in kind. Albert Parsons, who emerged as the most charismatic of the so-called Chicago martyrs, argued in an eight-hour address to the court that the defendants were on the stand because of their beliefs, not because of anything they had done. His co-defendants likewise delivered powerful speeches to explain and advocate anarchism rather than concentrate on protesting their innocence. Dispelling any doubts about the grounds of the convictions, Engel shouted ‘Long Live Anarchy’ just before the trapdoor was tripped. His last words and the final statements of the other three were widely reproduced in anarchist journals.
The horrifying brutality and evident injustice of the government actions was one strong thread tying these events together. And in responding to the violence that the Commune and Haymarket unleashed, anarchists argued that the limits of European republicanism and liberalism had been revealed. For those within the nascent anarchist movement, these two events exposed the continuity between these regimes and the tyrannies and the systems of absolutism that the great seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolutions in Britain, America and France were supposed to have swept away. It appeared that class war raged as violently in these apparently virtuous, enlightened states as in the autocratic regimes that republicans and liberals jointly held in contempt. Neither France nor America was Russia, almost universally regarded as the ‘sick man of Europe’. Nevertheless, Paris and Haymarket demonstrated that the state’s credentials for toleration were fake. The anarchist critique that the Commune and Haymarket buttressed was that these progressive republics legitimized systems of state oppression that were as unjust and partial as anything that had gone before. As Louise Michel put it on her return from New Caledonia, ‘the Social Revolution had been strangled. It was a France whose rulers mendaciously called themselves republicans, and they betrayed our every dream through their “opportunism”.’6
The Pittsburgh Manifesto, the charter of the American revolutionary movement drafted by John Most in 1883, used the language of the US Declaration of Independence to advance an anarchist cause against bourgeois tyranny, ‘citing not only the right but also the duty to overthrow a despotic government’.7 Haymarket amplified the cruelty of the legitimate authorities. On the first anniversary of the executions, the London anarchist paper Freedom compared the trial of the Haymarket anarchists to that of Algernon Sidney, the English republican politician accused of treason against Charles II in 1683. The charge of ‘constructive conspiracy’, the editorial argued, was a revival ‘by the American democracy’ of the ‘dangerous instrument of despotism’ and a return to ‘the worst days of monarchical absolutism’.8 There was no greater prospect that ordinary people would achieve liberty and equality in these phoney egalitarian regimes than in the monarchies they had replaced. ‘No illusions as to Governments were possible any longer in France,’ Kropotkin commented in his 1893 Commune address.9
The anarchist critique of the state
The Commune and Haymarket were significant for two key reasons. First, the Commune crystallized the critique of the state that Bakunin had rehearsed in the abstract in his debates with Marx. Second, the ferocity of the government response to anarchism helped convince anarchists that government was violence. Together, the Commune and Haymarket furnished anarchists with a distinctive perspective on the state and a model for non-state, anarchist alternatives.
Bakunin delivered his analysis in The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State, a no-holds-barred attack on Marxist socialism. His argument was that the Commune was an expression of anti-authoritarianism which the authoritarian sections of the IWMA under Marx’s sway had opposed and which Bismarck’s forces had determined to crush. In Paris, the antagonistic politics of the IWMA and the reactionary forces behind the Commune’s defeat converged. Considering the implications for socialist activism, Bakunin wrote that the lasting effect of the civil war in France was the establishment of the boundary between ‘scientific communism’ developed by Marx and ‘the German school’, on the one hand, and the revolutionary socialism of ‘the Latin countries’ on the other.10 For Bakunin, authoritarian socialism was a variation of revolutionary republicanism. The Civil War in France, Marx’s commentary on the Commune and the official statement of the IWMA General Council, had argued that the ‘working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes’.11 Doubting his sincerity, Bakunin argued that Marx still imagined that revolution required the representatives of the proletariat to exercise power on behalf of the exploited and to use state violence to uphold proletarian class interests. This model assumed an identification between the goals of the workers and those of their representatives, which was both implausible and troubling. In any case, it replicated existing forms of government, albeit reformulated to suit the preferences of a rising, currently exploited social group.
In an appreciation of Bakunin published in 1905 Peter Kropotkin subsequently pressed Bakunin’s argument. Bakunin had rightly recognized that the triumph of ‘Bismarck’s military state’ in 1871 was ‘at the same time’ the triumph of ‘German State-socialism’.12 Also linking the Paris Commune to the ‘Latin’ sections of the IWMA and its defeat to German statism, Kropotkin argued that Marx’s policy of state conquest was congruent with Bismarck’s unification strategy and concluded that authoritarian socialism was an expression of German imperialism.
This inflammatory critique of statist organization had already begun to percolate in anarchist movements when the politicization of the Haymarket trial gave the defendants a platform to flesh out another anarchist anti-state critique. The Chicago anarchists did this by turning conventional politics on its head, using popular misconceptions about anarchy to draw attention to the dysfunction of established norms. One after another, the co-defendants argued that the court’s rejection of anarchy in the name of civilization depended on the unconditional embrace of rules that benefited the bourgeoisie. Louis Lingg explained: ‘Anarchy means no domination or authority of one man over another, yet you call that “disorder”. A system which advocates no such “order” as shall require the services of rogues and thieves to defend it you call “disorder”.’13
The benefits that accrued to the bourgeoisie were numerous: status, wealth and leisure were chief among them. Like many anarchists, Albert Parsons believed that the power to extract surplus value from workers helped explain this advantage. Owners of land and machinery were able to pay workers for time worked and pocket the additional value of the goods and services that labour actually produced. Parsons also argued that this power was underpinned by a system of ownership that was based on the right to private property. This was Proudhon’s argument. Distinguishing the exclusive right to private ownership – property-in-dominion – from the temporary right to possession or property-in-use, Proudhon argued that the former necessarily restricted property to those who first claimed it and their beneficiaries. For everybody else, it was ‘impossible’. In contrast, because possession denied exclusive claims, property was left open to all. The existing regime was wrong in principle and injurious in practice. Responding to the charge of incitement, Samuel Fielden gave his account of Proudhon’s theory.
I have said you must abolish the private property system. Mr. English14 said that I said ‘It had no mercy; so ought you.’ Probably if I said ‘it had no mercy’, I did not say the latter part of the sentence in that way. I probably said, ‘So you ought not to have any mercy.’ Is it doubted by anybody that the system has no mercy? Does it not pursue its natural course irrespective of whom it hurts or upon whom it confers benefits? The private property system then, in my opinion, being a system that only subserves the interests of a few, and can only subserve the interests of the few, has no mercy. It cannot stop for the consideration of such a sentiment. Naturally it cannot. So you ought not to have mercy on the private property system.15
Hurling the charge of incivility back at their critics, anarchists described the relationships that private ownership created as tyrannous and enslaving. In the context of the abolition of slavery in America in 1865–6 and the Emancipation of the Serfs which liberated approximately 20 million Russian ‘souls’ in 1861, this was a contentious claim. The anarchist view was that these formal acts of liberation left the master–slave relationship intact. Their invocation of slavery was not intended to suggest that chattel and wage slavery were moral equivalents, but to draw attention to the institutional frameworks that allowed both forms of mastership to flourish. When Harriet Jacobs, a freed Black woman living in the Free States that prohibited slavery, discovered that money was not the key that unlocked doors to first-class carriages on the Philadelphia to New York railroad, she compared the institutional segregation of the North to the freedom that prevailed in the South, namely the ability to ‘ride in a filthy box, behind the white people’ without having to pay for the privilege. Saddened to find that ‘the north aped the customs of slavery’,16 she identified the continuity of racism in America. The abolition of the laws that once permitted masters to own slaves had modified the condition of slavery but not ended it. Slaves were emancipated but not free. They had rights but they remained oppressed and exploited.
Likewise anarchists argued that absolutism had been swept away but mastership and tyranny remained. Slavery and mastership thus described the civic culture of the ‘new world’ and to anarchists it looked remarkably like the culture that prevailed in the old one. Declaring that ‘the abolition of the serfdom system was the establishment of the wage-labor system’, Parsons turned to Shakespeare in his defence:
Shakespeare makes Shylock say at the bar of the Venetian court, ‘You do take my life when you take the means whereby I live.’ Now, the means of life are monopolized; the necessary means for the existence of all has been appropriated and monopolized by a few. The land, the implements of production and communication, the resources of life are now held as private property, and its owners exact tribute from the propertyless.
The welcome that former slave-owners gave to the terms of abolition convinced Parsons of the truth of this analysis. He explained:
Under the wage slavery system the wage slave selects his master. Formerly the master selected the slave; today the slave selects his master … He is compelled to find one … the change of the industrial system … upon the question of the chattel slave system of the South and that of the so-called ‘free laborer’, and their wages … was a decided benefit to the former chattel slave owners who would not exchange the new system of wage labor at all for chattel labor, because now the dead had to bury themselves and the sick take care of themselves, and now they don’t have to employ overseers to look after them. They give them a task to do – a certain amount to do. They say: ‘Now, here, perform this piece of work in a certain length of time’, and if you don’t … why, when you come around for your pay next Saturday, you simply find in the envelope which gives you your money, a note which informs you of the fact that you have been discharged. Now … the leather thong dipped in salt brine, for the chattel slave, had been exchanged under the wage slave system for the lash of hunger, an empty stomach and the ragged back of the wage-slave of free-born American sovereign citizens …17
Parsons’s analysis pointed to a second facet of bourgeois incivility: the force essential to maintain the unequal relations that private ownership created. Protecting the rights of property owners required regiments of police and the institution of elaborate court and prison systems. Workers were not only exploited as labourers, but also forced to relinquish a proportion of their wages in taxation to pay for the institutions that guaranteed bourgeois rights, thus forking out for the privilege of their own oppression or, in Parsons’s case, killing. And if these protections were deemed inadequate, owners were free to hire private security firms to enforce their rights. ‘This private army is at the command and control of those who grind the faces of the poor, who keep wages down to the starvation point,’ Parsons argued, referring to the armed Pinkerton officers that McCormick employed to break the union pickets prior to the Haymarket meeting. Violence was integral to bourgeois rule, wherever it operated. Parsons again: ‘Originally the earth and its contents were held in common by all men. Then came a change brought about by violence, robbery and wholesale murder, called war.’18
Returning to Lingg’s theme, Parsons concluded his address to the jury by asking what kind of anarchy the bourgeoisie wanted to defend. Webster’s dictionary contained two definitions. Anarchy meant ‘Without rulers or governors’ and also ‘Disorder and confusion’. Parsons had wrongly believed that the constitution upheld the former. He discovered to his cost that it in fact advocated the latter. To distinguish the two, he labelled the uncivil anarchy evident ‘in all portions of the world and especially in this court-room’, ‘capitalistic Anarchy’. This idea was incompatible with civil liberty ‘which means without rulers’, or ‘communistic Anarchy’.
In aftermath of the Commune and the Haymarket trial anarchists and their critics argued about the use of these two conceptions of anarchy. One was defined by the anarchists and the other by their opponents.
Anarchist socialism
In the period between the Commune and Haymarket, anarchism emerged as a doctrine associated with a particular critique of the state and capitalism and a model for revolutionary change defined by a distinctive conception of anarchy. In Paris anarchists found a prototype for revolutionary organization, seeing the Commune as a spontaneous action by subjugated peoples to resist bourgeois exploitation and government oppression. The Commune expressed the anti-authoritarian impulse that anarchists linked to self-emancipation and the type of decentralized federation that Marx appeared to reject.
In the Haymarket trial, the thinking behind this anti-authoritarian impulse was explained. The Haymarket anarchists exposed the continuities between monarchical and republican regimes and, importantly, labelled their analysis anarchist, using the drama of the trial to amplify their message. Proudhon’s 1840 masterpiece What is Property? opens with a description of slavery as murder and property as theft. The Haymarket critique brought this argument to a new audience, familiarizing a discourse that anarchists thereafter routinely adopted. In 1942, long after Parsons was dead, the antimilitarist activist Frederick Lohr declared poverty to be ‘the result of exploitation’, adding that ‘there could be no exploitation in the first place if there were no enslavement’. And since slavery was ‘an inseparable concomitant of government’, Lohr concluded, on other side of the Atlantic, that ‘Government is organised slavery.’19
In America in particular, anarchists also linked women’s oppression to patriarchal property rights and marriage contracts, often learning from leading abolitionists like Ezra Heywood. In Uncivil Liberty, first published in 1870, Heywood had argued that ‘the old claim of tyranny, “The king can do no wrong”’ was reasserted by majorities of men who thought of women as mere appendages. Only women designated prostitutes had rights to their children; ‘any married father … by will or deed may dispose of his child’.20 Lucy Parsons, a leading anarchist campaigner in Chicago, Albert’s partner and a vocal advocate for the executed anarchists, described women as ‘slaves of slaves’, not only ‘exploited more ruthlessly than men’ but in unique ways.21
The conception of state violence and war that Parsons developed was similarly absorbed. This referred both to the right to resist tyranny that workers in Chicago had been denied and also to the war that anarchists believed was being conducted within states and globally across the world. On this issue, the experience of Haymarket and the Commune converged. Violence was meted out against workers who resisted exploitation and used to discipline those colonized by Europeans. Indeed, the Europeans’ ‘civilizing mission’ gave the bourgeoisie free rein to press their rights, as the Communards knew. Louise Michel, deported for the part she played in the Commune, took her lessons from the Melanesian Kanak people she met during her exile on New Caledonia. The 1878 Kanak rebellion against the French was motivated by the same desire for liberty that she had sought in the Commune. Reflecting on European supremacism, she asked herself which group could claim to be superior. Her conclusion was that it was not ‘the well-armed white who annihilates those who are less well armed’.22
Considering the state of American politics at the 1891 Chicago Martyrs commemoration, Kropotkin fused the model of the Commune with the Haymarket anarchists’ commitment to class struggle:
Every year in the history of the American Labour movement has confirmed the views of our brothers. Every strike became a labour war. Workers were massacred during each strike … Every year, the conflict between labour and money became more acute in the great republic … during the last great railway strike, it was seriously discussed whether it would not be advisable to call out all the 200,000 strikers, and to repair – an army of rebel workers – to one of the Western states (Oregon for instance) where the nationalization of the land and railways would be proclaimed and an immense commune covering the territory of the whole state would be started. Not merely a single city as it was in Paris, but a whole territory, with all its agricultural and industrial resources.23
The anarchist politics that Paris and Haymarket helped to forge still remained plural. Anarchists understood the possibilities of commune organization and the implications of the anti-capitalist, anti-statist critique that the Haymarket anarchists expressed in multiple ways. Anarchism’s ideological boundaries also remained quite fluid, even in respect of Marxism. Bakunin and Kropotkin’s analysis of the revolutionary socialist movement in the wake of the Commune treated Marxism as a form of statism, but anarchists were not uniformly antagonistic towards Marxism and sometimes engaged creatively with it. If Marx and Bakunin stood at opposite ends of a revolutionary socialist spectrum, plenty of anarchists looked for spaces in between. Haymarket spawned a libertarian socialist movement – even today referred to as the Haymarket synthesis or Chicago idea. This was constructed around the local, direct action and solidarity and linked both to labour organizing and Indigenous peoples’ rural resistance.24 The priority that the synthesis accorded to organizational behaviours downplayed the significance of theoretical divergence between the socialist movement’s leading personalities and provided an antidote to the poisonous arguments that wrecked the IWMA.
Yet the Commune and Haymarket introduced rituals into the nascent anarchist movement which helped establish a distinctive anarchist identity. For years after the events, annual commemorations were organized by anarchist groups. These extended across the globe. Vladimiro Muñoz reports that a ‘beautiful colored illustration’ appeared in the centre pages of the March issue of the Uruguayan paper El Derecho a la Vida on the Commune’s thirtieth anniversary.25 Haymarket reinforced the picture of the heroic anarchist type. The dramatic account of the executions published in Paris in 1892 emphasized the unwavering, fearless dedication of the condemned. Reporting that loved ones were refused permission to ‘kiss their husbands one last time’, the commentary described how
Fischer intoned the Marseillaise and his brothers in misfortune responded from their neighboring cells, singing the anthem before leaving for death.
At eleven fifty-five minutes they came to fetch them … it was impossible to prolong their sufferings. Ah! What pleasure it would have been for the citizens to hear any one of them appeal for mercy!
But our brothers did not offer these wretches the desired spectacle; they remained quiet and walked to the scaffold …
Parsons started a speech … but the hood and the knot put an end to his words.
Spies shouted: ‘Our voices, comrades, will speak louder after our death than they have ever done in our lives.’
‘Long live Anarchy!’ Engel shouted.
‘It’s the happiest moment of my life,’ Fischer shouted …
A second later, the trapdoor opened, throwing the four friends into the void at the same time. Parsons had his neck broken and barely moved, Engel, Fischer and Spies, struggling in convulsions, were impossible to look at.26
Telegrams received at the meeting of anarchists at the memorial held at London’s Holborn Town Hall the same year struck a familiar note: from Meadow Lane, Leeds, ‘Yorkshire anarchists send greeting to comrades celebrating Chicago. Hurrah for anarchy.’ The greeting from the Liverpool comrades was: ‘[m]en die but principals [sic] live. Hurrah for the social revolution long live anarchy.’ With another ‘hurrah’ the Manchester anarchists intoned ‘[o]ur comrades died that Anarchy might live, their spirit shall lead us to victory.’ Glasgow anarchists joined ‘in commemorating the death of our martyrs though the enemy did apparently overcome them yet is their triumph now Long Live Anarchy!’ From Inverness, the message was: ‘the north is awakening. For Liberty they lived, for liberty they died. It is for us to conquer’ and Edinburgh: ‘let the voice of the people be heard.’27
The unconcealed alarm of the bourgeoisie: the anarchist as terrorist
While anarchists articulated their theoretical principles and advanced a revolutionary identity, a negative stereotype of the anarchist as the state’s most determined enemy also emerged. Indeed, the legacy of the Commune and Haymarket, coming soon after the division of the socialist movement into two apparently discrete wings – one more open to participation in ordinary politics than the other – proved to be momentous for anarchists.
In Paris, loyalty to civilized republican values established the limits of acceptable politics and legitimized the swift eradication of adversaries. John Merriman describes how the demonization of the Communards as a lazy, dirty rabble helped quicken the killings during the Bloody Week. Simultaneously betraying the racism and virulent supremacism of the dominant civilization, troops who casually dispatched the Communards often compared them to colonial peoples: not really human at all. According to Merriman, one anti-Communard ‘intoned that Paris had been “in the power of negroes”’. Gaston Galliffet, the colonel who earned the nickname ‘the slayer of the Commune’, ‘contrasted the Communards with North African Arabs’, using the reference both to benchmark the Communards’ savagery and to highlight their appalling godlessness and cosmopolitanism: as part of the same barbaric subspecies, Arabs were at least believers and patriots.28
In Chicago, the demonization of the underclass dovetailed with the criminalizing of anarchism. References to the anarchist beast and the anarchist peril began to circulate widely in the press, in cheap popular literatures and political commentaries. Michael Schaack, the police chief who headed up the Haymarket case, profited from the expertise he acquired in Chicago by publishing an international history of ‘red terror’. In London’s East End, an area populated by some of the poorest in the city, he found a ‘crowd of boozy, beery, pot-valiant, squalid, frowsy, sodden Whitechapel outcasts who shrieked and fought in a small hall in their district’. These were the anarchists. Amid ‘the fumes of scores of dirty pipes and a thousand other causes that made the air almost unbearable’ Schaack found another group of anarchists, ‘a fourth of whom were lushed, soggy Whitechapel women’.29
Cesare Lombroso, one of the leading criminologists of the age, used the Chicago anarchists to develop a scientific model of the ignoble anarchist criminal type. Applying Darwinian insights about species fitness to social science, Lombroso pioneered physiognomy – the study of facial features – to analyse degenerative behaviours. Noting some noble and genial facets in the physiognomy of Parsons and Neebe, he nevertheless concluded that all the accused exhibited the same hereditary ‘degenerative characters common to criminals and to the insane’. Writing from his prison cell, Michael Schwab challenged the robustness of Lombroso’s methods. Schwab charged Lombroso with using drawings of the men reproduced in Schaack’s book to make his diagnosis, not the photographs that he had to hand. So challenged, Lombroso admitted that the photographic evidence failed to display the tell-tale ‘degenerative’ traits and thus failed to support his conclusions.30 And yet, however flaky his methods, Lombroso caught the public mood and Schwab’s protest was ignored. The popular view was that anarchists were defective types who posed a threat to the health and well-being of the community. By extension, anarchism was a disorder that required urgent remedy: a political as well as a social disease. In 1886, when the verdict on the Haymarket anarchists was announced, the British consul in Chicago told the Foreign Secretary in London how relieved and happy local people were: ‘The sentence of the Jury has given the greatest satisfaction in this city and district … The question was one which was considered as gravely concerning the safety of the State and caused much uneasiness.’31
In the years leading up to the First World War the perceived threat of anarchism was felt most sharply in the European autocracies. As a rule of thumb, the intensity of anti-socialist repression correlated with the survival of feudal systems of land ownership and revolutionaries fared least well in Spain, Germany and Russia and best in Britain, France and Switzerland. Similarly, the international campaign to outlaw anarchism was pressed hardest by the imperial powers, Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia. However, antipathy towards anarchism was really a matter of degree. The international tensions created by the willingness of British, French and Swiss regimes to tolerate anarchists as political refugees owed as much to European power-politicking as it did to liberal principle. This became clearer as the nineteenth century progressed. Liberal regimes became increasingly intolerant of anarchists over time, tightening asylum rules and becoming less inclined to grant political status to those fighting extradition. Liberal regimes felt far less vulnerable to revolutionary pressures than the autocracies but the reaction to the Commune and Haymarket illustrated how vehement the aggression to anarchists was. And it played out in similar ways wherever anarchists happened to organize. The torturing of activists imprisoned at the Monjuich fortress in Barcelona in 1892, the shooting of the educationalist Francisco Ferrer in 1909, the hanging in 1911 of twelve Japanese anarchists for merely contemplating injury to the Emperor, the executions of Joe Hill in 1915 and of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927 on trumped-up murder charges were some of the more notorious instances of the use of repression to quell anarchist opposition.
The conjunction of the IWMA’s collapse with the Commune and Haymarket placed anarchism beyond the realm of ordinary politics and civility. The barriers to membership agreed by the Second International further underlined the anarchists’ refusal to contemplate participation in established politics. Anarchism quickly became – and remains – an ideal type for terrorism studies. Modern terrorism, one leading analyst writes, ‘began in the latter part of the nineteenth century as a strategy adopted by anarchist groups … to be used in the place of propaganda to create terror’.32 Social histories have told a similar story. Anarchists appear as utopian chiliasts impelled to violence by their commitments to freedom.33 Anarchism symbolizes ‘the kind of terrorism that seems to be violent for the sake of violence itself – the irrational striking out … that seems to have no tactical or strategic purpose beyond the pure expression of alienation, anger and hatred’.34
This hostile understanding of anarchism seeped into the early analysis of the ideology. As much as anarchists regarded the Commune and the Haymarket trial as moments of heroic resistance which illuminated state tyranny and crystallized their politics, their opponents believed these events exemplified the wanton destructiveness of the anarchist creed. And as the nineteenth century progressed, the anarchists’ best efforts to highlight the disorder and violence of state systems were largely resisted.
Three anarchisms
It would be misleading to say that nineteenth-century analysts set out to construct a stereotype of the anarchist as bomb-thrower, though this was evident in Michael Schaack’s post-Haymarket history. Yet the subtext of irrationality and fanaticism importantly shaped early accounts of anarchism and the attempt to explain the destructiveness of the doctrine almost inevitably reinforced anarchism’s negativity and unintelligibility. Whether analysts focused on the actions, ideas or characters of individual anarchists or on the body of ideas anarchists expounded, anarchism emerged as a deviant ideology. Examined in the context of post-revolutionary ideas, anarchism was sometimes located in a longer history of utopianism and millenarianism. This rendering of anarchism’s history helped explain the tendency towards physical violence and it also suggested that it was a peculiarly European phenomenon.
In reply to the question, ‘Who were the anarchists?’, three early commentators, Paul Eltzbacher, Michael Schaack and E. V. Zenker all replied: Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin. However, this small set was not exclusive. Eltzbacher, a law professor-turned-Bolshevik active at the turn of the twentieth century selected seven ‘especially prominent’ sages to undertake his analysis of anarchism. Apart from Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin he chose the eighteenth-century philosopher William Godwin, the mid nineteenth-century egoist Max Stirner, the Proudhonian-cum-Stirnerite Benjamin Tucker and the novelist Leo Tolstoy to complete the set. Schaack, the detective who led the Haymarket investigation, called Proudhon the real ‘father of French anarchy’, but keen to alert his readers to the revolutionaries responsible for spreading the anarchist contagion he also included Louise Michel on his list of prominent revolutionaries. E. V. Zenker, another law student and journalist active in the 1890s, had a longer list: Proudhon, Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin and Michel; the ex-Communards Élisée Reclus and Jean Grave; and Charles Malato, the son of a Communard. He added Carlo Cafiero and Errico Malatesta, both of whom supported Bakunin against Marx in the IWMA, and Severino Merlino, who joined the anarchist movement shortly after the First International’s collapse. He also identified Tucker and the novelist and poet John Henry Mackay. As will be seen, there has been some movement in the outer layers of the constellation that Eltzbacher, Schaack and Zenker collectively created, but the inner core has remained stable over time.
Zenker mapped these individuals to currents of ideas, notably distinguishing anarchist communists from individualists. On this reckoning, Proudhon was a precursor of anarchism. Stirner, whom he dubbed Proudhon’s German follower, was the other significant forerunner of the movement. Kropotkin was nominated the leading voice in communist school and Tucker the most important exponent of individualist anarchism. The communists were the larger set. They included Michel, Reclus, Grave, Malato, Cafiero, Malatesta and Merlino. He placed Mackay alongside Tucker but identified the school as otherwise largely American. Zenker believed that Tucker’s independent anarchist school had been nurtured by intellectuals and abolitionists including Stephen Pearl Andrews and Josiah Warren.
Early assessments of anarchism’s leading figures contributed to the construction of the anarchist canon
Zenker argued that the gap between Kropotkin and Tucker was quite wide, yet concluded that the libertarian impulse he traced to Proudhon and Stirner distinguished anarchism from what he called the ‘Socialistic and the religious view of the world’ and the ‘religion of the absolute, infallible, all-mighty, and ever-present State’. Indeed, evoking the arguments that split the IWMA in anarchism’s defence, Zenker concluded that the ‘centralising tendency and the coercive character of the system of doing everything in common, without which Socialism cannot have the least success, will naturally and necessarily be replaced by Federalism and free association’.35
Although Zenker’s analysis of anarchist individualism and communism interestingly pointed to the cultural and political pluralism of anarchism, the histories of socialist thought that he and Schaack presented were actually quite reductive. Schaack leaned heavily on the work of the New York academic Richard Ely, but displayed none of Ely’s even-handedness. Ely had watched the disintegration of the First International and was an expert on European socialism. In his observations he articulated a widely felt tension between prospect of progressive change and the destructive power of movements determined to realize it. Keeping an open mind about anarchism, Ely identified it as a potentially civilizing force, capable of destroying ‘old, antiquated institutions’ and delivering ‘the birth of a new civilization’.36 Schaack, in contrast, used a distinction between physical and moral force popularized after the French Revolution to explore the development of socialism in western Europe and anarchism’s relationship to it.
Ernst Zenker’s analysis of anarchist schools, their instigators and leading exponents
As a body of thought, Schaack understood socialism as an outgrowth of the early nineteenth-century utopianism of Étienne Cabet, Charles Fourier and Saint-Simon. This was a familiar analysis. Marx and Engels had used a variation of it in the 1848 Communist Manifesto to illustrate the distinctiveness of their own contribution. However, whereas Marx and Engels had identified the scientific turn as decisive for socialism’s development, Schaack considered that modern socialism had matured under the influence of Russian nihilism, the anti-Tsarist ‘dynamite’ doctrine. Schaack acknowledged that socialism had a philosophical pedigree. He considered Marx and Engels to be the brains behind the modern movement. But he refused to accept that this extended to anarchism. Indeed, anarchism had produced no ‘first-rates’ or thinkers of their calibre. It had its roots in the homogeneous dogmatism of the utopians and was best thought of as a nihilist reflex rather than a philosophy. Having been adopted wholesale in Germany, it was exported to Chicago. The implication of this argument was that European anarchism overwhelmed American individualist traditions.
Zenker similarly drew out the naive utopianism, terrorism and millenarianism of anarchist doctrines, also plotting anarchism’s historical trajectory in Europe. His pre-history extended back to Reformation heresies, forward to the French Revolution, and included the Jacobin communist and arch-conspirator ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf as well as Godwin and the utopian socialists Fourier and Saint-Simon. This narrative added a telltale childlike catastrophism to anarchism as well as a penchant for intrigue and secrecy. Like Schaack, Zenker associated these aspects of anarchism with Bakunin, the most unreliable and self-delusional anarchist. ‘Bakunin tried to deceive himself into thinking that he deplored the violence that was sometimes necessary, and wrapped himself in the protecting cloak of the believer in evolution’. He ‘expressly excepted secret societies and plots from the means of bringing about this revolution. But this did not hinder him from becoming himself … the head of a secret society, formed according to all the rules of the conspirator’s art’.37 If Bakunin was not considered representative of anarchism, he nevertheless symbolized a pronounced anarchist tendency.
How Michael Schaack’s and Ernst Zenker’s histories model the divergence of anarchism from Marxism
Canons
For all the suspicion that surrounds the attempt to describe anarchist politics, anarchists have produced a substantial body of literature to do just that. An eagerness to correct popular misconceptions and contest the accuracy of popular stereotypes has been an important motivator. As well as contesting critical accounts, anarchists also complicated the categories that commentators used to classify anarchism and corrected the Eurocentric biases of these histories.
When anarchists identified notables in their ranks, they usually referred to their extraordinary commitment and dedication. Biography played an important part in these estimations. Bakunin’s early acolytes drew attention to his imprisonment by the Tsar, his dramatic escape from Siberia and his constant dedication to the cause of revolution. Bakunin was painted not so much as a man as a phenomenon. ‘Such struggles as this man experienced, and the sufferings he endured,’ Henry Seymour recorded, ‘would have softened the activity of most men, but our hero was a Bakounine!’ Having ‘scarcely stepped foot in England,’ Seymour gushed, ‘he redoubled his enthusiasm for the cause of social revolution.’38 Life stories exemplified anarchist values and virtues. Just as Bakunin was admired for his fortitude and energy, Louise Michel was celebrated by anarchists because of her defiant refusal to deny or excuse her actions in the Commune. Taking full responsibility for her part in the insurrection, she instead invited her accusers to execute her. Impressed by her courage, 10,000 people turned out to welcome her back to Paris 1881 when the Communards were amnestied. An article on Errico Malatesta written in 1912 when he faced deportation from the UK took special pains to describe his compassion, treating this as an embodiment of anarchist ethics. Those living in ‘the poorer Italian quarters of Islington and Soho’, the report read, ‘know little and care less about his political beliefs. They know him as one who would give his last penny to help fellow-countrymen in distress, and who has saved hundreds of boys from drifting into hooliganism by teaching them useful trades in the little shop in Windmill Street where he carried on his business of engineer.’39 Rudolf Rocker, a leading figure notably absent from Eltzbacher’s list, was celebrated as a labour organizer who taught himself Yiddish in order to work with some of the most disadvantaged Jewish workers in London’s East End. Emma Goldman, another absentee and one of the most prominent anarchists in America, established her reputation as a tireless and uncompromising campaigner for free speech and women’s rights and against government repression. Her fearless defence of activists accused of violence was widely respected.
While these ‘notables’ were concentrated in Europe and America, their practices were not geographically restricted. Collectively responsible for producing volumes of political tracts, essays, fiction and poetry, many also ran newspapers: Arbeter Fraint (Rocker), Associazione (Malatesta), Freedom (Kropotkin), La Questione Sociale (Malatesta), Le Révolté/La Révolte (Kropotkin/Grave), Liberty (Tucker) and Mother Earth (Goldman). But this was just the tip of the iceberg: there were plenty more.40 An expansive programme of publication supported by a global infrastructure for distribution and the facility to produce multiple translations of original work at speed ensured that authors were able to reach significant international audiences. As well as appearing in virtually all European languages Kropotkin’s work was also translated into Japanese and Chinese. His writings were regularly serialized and reviewed in non-anarchist cultural journals and in anarchist and labour newspapers stretching from London to Christchurch, New Zealand.41
Following sometimes forced and sometimes voluntary migratory paths, groups of émigré anarchists set up clubs and societies which, even if they were often quite insular, became centres for a complex network of transit and smuggling routes. Books and pamphlets travelled with them. Individual meetings, chance encounters and personal friendships further facilitated the wide dissemination of ideas. By regularly embarking on extensive lecture tours anarchists systematically took their politics to new locations. To correct popular misperceptions of anarchism and mobilize support for anarchist initiatives they wrote in different registers, targeting workers and intellectuals: Malatesta’s Fra Contadini, Kropotkin’s Appeal to the Young and Tolstoy’s The Slavery of Our Time were classics in this vein. The historian of Chinese anarchism Arif Dirlik observes that Kropotkin’s Appeal was ‘responsible for converting … numbers of young [Chinese] radicals to anarchism’ in the early decades of the twentieth century.42 Ricardo Flores Magón regarded Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread as ‘a kind of anarchist bible’. The communes he helped establish in Mexicali and Tijuana during the revolution in Baja California in 1911 were inspired by it.43
The approach that anarchists took towards movement history similarly diluted anarchist Eurocentrism. Kropotkin’s view was that anarchism was a politics of the people and that the movements that appeared in the nineteenth century were only the most modern manifestation of a kind of politics that could be found in all parts of the world and in every historical period. Anarchist thought, he argued, long predated the publication of Proudhon’s What is Property? or the emergence of anarchist movements in 1870s Europe. Pressing his case, Kropotkin placed principles of individual sovereignty and resistance at the heart of anarchism. These, he claimed, were evident in ancient Greece and China. Their exponents had not been anarchists but advocates of a politics that anarchists also espoused. Treating anarchism as a resistance movement against top-down organization, Kropotkin found examples of anarchistic movements in early Christianity and Buddhism.
On Kropotkin’s conception, anarchy involved challenging norms and experimenting with new forms of thought, expression and communication, where these undermined established hierarchies. It existed in every realm of activity, in cultural and well as social and political spheres. Anarchy thus encompassed individual and collective actions in the arts, literature and science, alongside the economy. But it was no single one of these things.
Rudolf Rocker borrowed Kropotkin’s conception of timeless, universal resistance to produce an evolutionary history of post-French Revolutionary Europe and plot the development of anarchism in the industrial union or syndicalist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Voltairine de Cleyre, a writer and educator active in Philadelphia, adopted a different tack and explored the relationship of anarchism to revolutionary republicanism, reviving some of the themes explored by the Haymarket anarchists. Thus while Rocker explored the ways that anarchist ideas were taken up by grass-roots movements over time, de Cleyre examined how cultural contexts shaped anarchism. Anarchism played out in different ways in different locations. In America anarchism was rooted in American traditions. It was a movement for liberty and independence against tyranny and militarism through resistance.
These variations in focus, different histories and competing judgements about anarchist principles helped keep the determination of anarchism open. The history of the IWMA welded anarchists to the advocacy of a decentralized federation as a means to support self-emancipation. But this commitment was fleshed out in a critique of prevailing religious, autocratic, liberal, republican and socialist doctrines. It took on a different hue in each geographical location and it was shaped by the special ways that anarchists responded to their predicaments. The recent recovery of neglected histories confirms that anarchism extended well beyond the activities of a handful of activists in western Europe and that it was transnational from the beginning.44 Historians of non-European currents of ideas have similarly argued that it is possible to talk about indigenous anarchism in parts of the world that nineteenth-century European anarchists did not reach.45 Anarchism attracted campaigners who had very clear, sometimes set notions of policy and principle. Charles Malato observed that the ‘worker-philosopher’ Jean Grave, editor the iconic French-language newspaper La Révolte, was ‘capable of raising … storms by the extreme dogmatism of his reasoning’.46 But it also drew activists who were not interested in formulating ideological positions. Together they produced a rich body of literature but no law. There was no party, no agreed policy, no philosophical canon. No gods, no masters – only an abundance of leaders, ideas, proposals and initiatives.