In 1999 activists in Seattle spectacularly sabotaged the meeting of the World Trade Organization. The event launched what became known as the alterglobalization or global justice campaign, a complex, anti-capitalist ‘movement of movements’ widely described as anarchist. The same year, James Bond went head-to-head with Victor Zokas aka Renard in the movie The World Is Not Enough. Renard, an ex-Soviet army and KGB officer, brutal even by the standards of Bond’s antagonists, is also reportedly anarchist. His back story tells how he worked as a freelance assassin for anti-capitalists organizing before the alterglobalization movement fell under the media spotlight.
On one level, it is easy to distinguish the fact from the fiction. Renard is an invention of scriptwriters and movie-makers. The Seattle shutdown of the WTO is documented history. Yet on another level, the attribution of the anarchist label to both the killer and the street movement is confusing: the fiction appears to capture something about the reality. Film-goers may have to suspend their disbelief about the bullet permanently lodged in Renard’s brain, but the emotional instability his injury explains and which underpins his anarchism hardly seems demanding. On the contrary, his ruthlessness and single-mindedness play to a deeply rooted view of anarchism which continues to influence public analysis of activist movements. Admittedly, the anarchism of the alterglobalizers was not automatically condemned as sadistic, aggressive or vengeful, but leading politicians of the time commented on the dangerous mix of vandals and carnival clowns it attracted: the movement was by turns dismissed as unbalanced and unthinking. And once street protests resulted in property damage, as in Gothenburg in 2001, it was possible for authorities to mobilize against ‘the anarchists’ in its ranks. Both before and since, the use of the ‘A’ word has provided a green light to aggressive policing. The global justice movement was no exception. The protesters who converged in Genoa in 2001 for the meeting of the G8 met with savage police violence.
The cultural stereotypes of the anarchist that furnish Renard’s characterization are not only distorting, they are also disabling. They conceal a history of critique and resistance that is empowering and normalize practices that are discriminatory and oppressive, even in instances where unfairness and injustice are patently obvious and widely acknowledged. Being anarchist means challenging the status quo to realize egalitarian principles and foster co-operative, non-dominating behaviours. Anarchist actions can take multiple forms, many of which are easily absorbed into everyday life. As we will see in the following pages, Renard is far from being anarchism’s default setting.
In 1919 the sculptor and printmaker Eric Gill wrote to the Burlington Magazine to protest Sir Frederic Kenyon’s proposals to the Imperial War Graves Commission. The Commission had been established in May 1917 to identify the graves of soldiers who had already been buried and to record the deaths of those who had no known grave. At the end of the war three notable architects, Sir Edwin Lutyens, Sir Herbert Baker and Sir Reginald Blomfeld, were invited to design the war cemeteries. Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, was appointed to give coherence to the architectural plans. In his November 1918 report he urged the War Graves Commission to adopt the principle of equality. As Kenyon put it, ‘what was done for one should be done for all, and that all, whatever their military rank or position in civil life, should have equal treatment in their graves’. In practice, equality demanded that the Commission be given responsibility for the design of the individual memorials, as well as the layout of the cemeteries. Provision ‘could not be left to individual initiative’ because ‘satisfactory’ results were only likely to be obtained where ‘money and good taste were not wanting’. In most cases there was a risk that ‘no monument would be erected, or that it would be poor in quality’. The cemeteries would end up looking like English churchyards: ‘jumbled’ masses of monuments. The effect would be ‘neither dignified nor inspiring’ and the ‘sense of comradeship and of common service would be lost’.1
Coupling equality with regularity, Kenyon recommended individual headstones record the name, rank, regiment and date of death of each soldier. Families would be able to include a form of words from a limited set of standard inscriptions but denied ‘free scope for the effusion of the mortuary mason, the sentimental versifier, or the crank’, for this too would compromise the military idea, which was to give ‘the appearance of a battalion on parade’ and suggest ‘the spirit of discipline and order which is the soul of an army’.2 Kenyon’s major concession to ‘variety in uniformity’ was to suggest that the appropriate regimental badges be automatically incorporated on the headstones.
Gill objected to the totality of Kenyon’s vision and linked his corrupted egalitarianism to the mass production processes that architectural integrity implied. The War Graves Commission was right to seek the advice of architects but should never have given them ‘leadership’. The ‘designing of monuments is properly the business of those who make monuments’ – sculptors and tombstone makers. As a stone mason himself, Gill clearly had a vested interest in securing some of the contracts the War Graves Commission might have awarded, but his argument was about the social relationships that craft work sustained. Had the War Graves Commission given sculptors the task of engraving the headstones, it would have realized Kenyon’s egalitarian aims and been far better equipped to take account of the ‘sentiment of the nation, poor as well as rich’. His complaint centred on power and ownership:
The commission’s attitude in the matter is the more easily understood inasmuch as it is the whole trend of our time to impose the ideas of the few upon the many while being careful to hide the process under a guise of democratic sympathy and social reform. Thus the idea that half a million headstones should be made according to the ideas of a few architects (an idea worthy of the Prussian or the Ptolemy at his best) instead of according to those of several thousand stone-masons and twenty million relatives is not surprising, and under the plea of commemorating ‘the sense of comradeship and common service’ and ‘the spirit of discipline and order’ etc. it is hoped that the very widespread desire of relatives to have some personal control of the monuments to their dead will be overcome.3
Gill thought Kenyon’s appeal to equality disingenuous. His proposals amounted to a demand for regimentation, driven by thrift and conformity. And his vision of the cemetery as a battalion on parade was numbing, not inspiring. To illustrate the point Gill observed: ‘A crowd in Trafalgar Square is very impressive; but if you were to replace it by an equal number of tailor’s dummies it is not certain that the result, however architectural, would be equally impressive.’4 If the War Graves Commission was serious about honouring the dead, it should ensure that the dead were commemorated as fathers, brothers, lovers and sons not as cogs in a bloodied fighting force. The net effect was to dispossess the families of their loved ones. Indeed, Gill wondered about the legal powers Kenyon’s proposals assumed: Were the soldiers’ bodies as well as the land in which they were buried the ‘absolute property of the government’?5 Whatever the truth of the matter, he concluded that soldiers had been asked to lay down their lives for the greater good of the nation and were now being compelled to sacrifice their deaths too.
Gill’s objections were ignored but in pressing his complaint he expressed a profoundly if not explicitly anarchist sentiment, outlining in plain words anarchism’s mainsprings, interests, horizons and spirit. Its mainsprings are individual. Gill highlighted this by his wish that sculptors and relatives decide how best to commemorate their dead. He believed in general that life was enriched when individuals were able to make their own judgements and impoverished when decisions were entrusted to remote bodies, whatever their qualifications or virtues. As he wrote in his letter, the War Graves Commission had no ‘right to dictate to relatives as to what shall or shall not be inscribed upon the stone’ or how the dead should be remembered. It had the power but ‘not the right … to enslave, intellectually, morally, aesthetically, or physically, even one man, and certainly not a very large number of men’.6 Acknowledging that individual judgement entailed responsibility, Gill accepted that individuals could make mistakes. But so too could governments. And the consequences of their errors were usually far more costly.
Anarchism’s interests are collaborative. Gill expressed this aspect of anarchism in his call to the War Graves Commission to employ ‘small men and not big firms’ and by his hostility to ‘the commercial success of organized production’. The controversial view he expressed in his autobiography was that it was ‘incomparably more horrible’ that ‘men of business should rule us and impose their foul point of view on the world’ than ‘the whole race of men and women should rot their bodies with lechery and drunkenness’.7 Horrible ‘men of business’ were interested in amassing money. Small producers were not. As members of their communities they were not only less likely to exploit the bereaved but uniquely equipped to express their feelings. Behind this critique was the idea that social relationships should encourage association and amity and minimize exploitation and utility.
Anarchism’s horizons are expansive. Gill’s protest appeared to be narrowly focused on the production of headstones and the technicalities of their inscription, yet it was centrally concerned with the ideological biases of Kenyon’s proposals and the government’s readiness to push its own agendas on the citizens it claimed to honour. He wrote as an artist who believed that everyone could make and remake the world through their activity. Accordingly, instead of talking about abstractions like capitalism or modes of production, Gill explained the depersonalizing effects of mass production. Instead of decrying militarism, he showed how the values of discipline and command were being smuggled into public consciousness through the design of headstones. When he talked more abstractly about the rights of the citizen not to be enslaved, he brought the question of self-determination down to the raw ground of grief, loss and memory. Instead of attacking nationalism philosophically, he disputed Kenyon’s conflation of death with patriotic duty. This made the offensiveness of the concept real and intelligible. Repeatedly drawing on his own practice, Gill showed how high-level decisions play out in everyday life and how complex and seemingly intractable problems affecting ordinary people can be disentangled at their roots. In this, too, he adopted a typically anarchist perspective.
The aim of this book is to explain anarchist thought and practice. The first chapter opens some thirty years after Pierre-Joseph Proudhon published What is Property?, the first constructive defence of anarchy. I take as my starting point the anarchists’ restatement of the critique of government enslavement towards the end of the nineteenth century. Rather than presenting a chronological account of anarchism’s development, I adopt a thematic approach. My aim is to show that while the emergence of anarchism in the nineteenth century resulted in the construction of an ideology, it also represented the crystallization of a fluid political tradition that extends beyond the historical and geographical boundaries that the ideology assumes. The second chapter focuses on the anarchist critique of domination and subsequent chapters explore anarchist practices, planning and prospects. Anarchist histories are thus included in each of the chapters, but to provide a narrative arc the focus gradually shifts from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century.
My approach is more impressionistic than ideological in the sense that I make no attempt to classify the constellation of concepts that anarchism describes or systematically analyse the ways that anarchists have understood ideas of liberty, equality and so forth.8 While I am interested to show how anarchism was constructed in the late nineteenth century, I do not attempt to demarcate the boundaries of anarchism as some later historians have done.9 I do not believe that anarchism is endlessly porous and inevitably there are some ‘anarchisms’ that I ignore (notably ‘market anarchism’,10 ‘anarcho-capitalism’11 and ‘national anarchism’12). However, my contention is that anarchism can be read historically both backwards and forwards from its origins and plotted from multiple geographical sites and at different angles. One of the attractions of anarchism is that it has no single moment of enlightenment, no before or after ‘science’. Connected to this is my view that anarchism has strong affinities with a wide range of non-anarchist ideas and practices: Gill is just one example. To indicate these I place the work of non-anarchists alongside the writing of those who explicitly identified as anarchist.
The discussions present anarchism as a history of ideas in conversation rather than strictly in context, as has become the convention in histories of ideas. I try to show how anarchists have responded to their situations and the circumstances in which they have found themselves, but I juxtapose the work of authors who have explored questions about education, violence, class and so forth at different times and in different locations to emphasize their engagement with the tradition they have sought to develop. I have included accounts of well-known anarchists but, conscious of the concerns that many anarchists have about the dangers of constructing an anarchist ‘canon’, I have discussed the work of less well-known and some obscure figures, too. None of these should be understood as representative (a term that anarchists typically regard as anathema). Rather the selection is intended to build a multi-layered picture of anarchism and showcase its rich diversity. Similarly, I have focused selectively on the ideas of the writers I mention: I am providing a snapshot, not an exhaustive or even indicative account of any individual’s work.
While I mention anarchist groups and movements, the analysis leans towards the individuals who comprise or have comprised them. I have been influenced here by Vladimiro Muñoz’s Biographical Encyclopedia, a study of twenty notable figures.13 Following his example, I have included short sketches of my cast of characters and their networks to give a flavour of their lives and indicate some of the important interconnections between activists. It should become plain that anarchists are not saints and that a few have been involved in some sharp and dubious practices. I hope that by the end of this book readers will appreciate the extraordinary courage and creativity generations of anarchist activists have shown in confronting injustice and understand how anarchist perspectives can animate our politics.