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Title: Anarchism
Author: Jesse Cohn
Date: 2009
Language: en
Topics: anarchism, introductory
Source: Retrieved on 21st November 2021 from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781405198073.wbierp0039
Notes: Published in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest.

Jesse Cohn

Anarchism

In common parlance “anarchy” refers to a state of chaos or violent

disorder and “anarchism” to the rebellious or merely perverse pursuit of

this state. Indeed, the word “anarchist” was first used in the

seventeenth century as an epithet against the defeated Levellers in the

English Civil War. While the ideas and practices that would become known

as anarchism were distinctly foreshadowed by movements such as the

Diggers and the Ranters in the seventeenth century as well as by

eighteenth-century thinkers such as William Godwin (and arguably by far

more ancient schools of thought, from the Cynics of the fifth century

BCE to the Taoists of a century later), it was not until Pierre-Joseph

Proudhon turned this epithet into a positive self-description that we

can speak of anarchism per se, as a historical entity. Historically

speaking, however, anarchism is the name for a movement, originating in

mid-nineteenth-century Europe, characterized by its vision of a society

of generalized self-management, its opposition to all forms of hierarchy

and domination, and its particular emphasis on means of transformative

action that prefigure the desired ends. The word also serves to name the

goal of the movement – substantive and universal freedom, sometimes

called “anarchy” – elements of which may be found in every society that

has ever existed, particularly among peoples living without private

property and the state.

PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES

Popular misunderstandings concerning anarchism, fed by more than a

century and a half of sensationalistic media representations, are

widespread – and, unfortunately, many scholarly accounts of anarchism do

little to correct these distortions. The association of anarchy with

chaos and senseless violence, while owing something to a certain phase

in anarchist history (that of “propaganda by the deed”), is readily

dispelled by even a cursory reading of works by actual self-described

anarchists: “Anarchism ...is not bombs, disorder, or chaos,” writes

Alexander Berkman (1870–1936). “It is not a war of each against all. It

is not a return to barbarism ...Anarchism is the very opposite of all

that” (Berkman 2003: xv). Similarly, Emma Goldman (1869–1940) defines

anarchism as “the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty

unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government

rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as

unnecessary” (1910: 56). The entry on anarchism that Peter Kropotkin

(1842–1921) wrote for the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica defined it as “a

principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived

without government” (2002: 284). These three explanations of anarchism –

it would be difficult to find any more widely accepted by anarchists –

show that anarchism is a form of social order rather than mere disorder

or absence of organization; the form of social order anarchism

represents is intended to maximize freedom, and to do so without

recourse to the kinds of coercive institutions that are typically

assumed to be necessary, variously called “government,” “law,” or

“authority”; and in place of these institutions, anarchists propose to

produce social order through a system of “free agreements” to meet

individuals’ “needs.”

This much is easily established. What is less tractable, even when

informed by these explanations, is the common perception that what is

being so explained is an “ideal” – possibly a noble ideal, albeit

probably impracticable, and in any case, one that has never been put

into practice anywhere. This misunderstanding is reinforced by academic

treatments of anarchism as an abstract set of beliefs, the history of

which is primarily a history of theorists or believers. The same

quotations will furnish evidence for this interpretation: Goldman and

Kropotkin, for instance, speak of anarchism as a “philosophy,” a

“theory,” and a “principle.” This set of beliefs is generally taken to

include the notion that there is something called “human nature,” and

that this nature is inherently virtuous and rational – after all, if

anarchists intend to do away with “man-made laws,” it must be that they

rely on “natural” laws to produce order. This would seem to place

anarchism within a history of ideas about “human nature” and “natural

law”; in particular, it links anarchism to the more idealistic

pronouncements of philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for whom

the “state of nature” alone represents true freedom, “civilization”

representing compromise and corruption. All that is left is to apply the

test of reality: if the belief in a good human nature matched up with

the way things are, anarchism would be a valid belief, but since it

obviously does not – history seems amply to testify that when people are

freed from coercive institutions, they are selfish and violent –

anarchism is purely Utopian, an image of the perfect life that could

never find realization in an imperfect world.

In fact, this conclusion, so apparently self-evident, only finds what it

assumes at the start: that anarchism is a theory without a practice.

This assumption not only requires that we overlook everything that

anarchist writings have to say about anarchist practices (for example,

the establishment of “free agreements” among “various groups”); it also

requires that we ignore the concrete, material history of anarchism as a

movement. To read the history of the anarchist movement is not to

discover a disembodied idea floating in the heads of a few privileged

thinkers. On the contrary: practices are everywhere.

The question, for instance, of how agreements are to be established

between groups without subordinating them to the will of privileged

decision-makers (“representatives”) is not answered by abstract

speculations about natural law, but by the institutionalization of very

specific kinds of tactics and norms. Here is how José Llunas Pujols

(1855–1905), a Catalonian worker and anarchist, describes them:

“delegates,” he observes, are to be “instructed in advance on how to

proceed” by members of a group meeting in general assembly, and are

“subject at any time to replacement or recall by the permanent suffrage

of those who had given them their mandate” so that they “can never

establish themselves as dictators” (quoted in Nettlau 1996: 187–8). Note

that the assumption built into this practice is that delegates who are

not given specific instructions, who cannot be held to account and

recalled by the collectivity, may indeed be expected to seek and

accumulate power. Indeed, far from assuming the best about “human

nature,” it often appears that anarchist practices prepare against the

worst: in the words of Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76), anarchists assume that

“absence of opposition and control and of continuous vigilance

inevitably becomes a source of depravity for all individuals vested with

social power” (2002: 245).

Anarchism consists, then, not so much in the elaboration of a “theory”

in the abstract which is then to be applied to “practice” from the

outside – indeed, this is a model anarchists reject as implicitly

authoritarian – but in a “mode of being” (Colson 2001: 14). Indeed, as

David Graeber observes, anarchism was never a political philosophy on

the model of other political philosophies, speculating about the essence

of humanity or offering prescriptions for the perfect society; rather,

it has been “primarily an ethics of practice,” the elaboration of

practices that embody certain principles (2007: 305). Thus, when Goldman

or Kropotkin speaks of anarchism as a “principle,” this is in the sense

of an ethical norm, a principle-in-action that can be extrapolated from

what it is that human beings already do. For example, in his emphasis on

mutualism, Kropotkin rooted his anarchism in “the countless acts of

mutual support and devotion which every one of us knows from his own

experience” (1989: 116). That is, anarchists proposed neither to destroy

society in favor of untrammeled human nature nor to invent a new society

ex nihilo (in the manner of classical Utopias like Plato’s Republic),

but to extrapolate and codify certain principles already implicit within

ordinary human behavior.

All of the most important formulators of anarchist theory dispensed with

notions of instinctual goodness right along with the doctrine of

Original Sin, rejecting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the state of

nature as the idyllic home of the “noble savage” as well as Thomas

Hobbes’s conception of the state of nature as a “war of all against

all.” Rather than begin from any such imaginary starting point, they

took for granted the fairly uncontroversial observation that human

beings are capable of altruistic as well as egoistic behavior. To the

extent that anarchist theory appealed to “natural laws” as the basis for

a new social structure, these “laws” consisted largely of other such

commonplaces, such as the recognition that concentrated power corrupts

those entrusted with it, or that communities lacking a sense of

solidarity and trust tend to require and solicit coercive authority. The

point is neither to affirm nor to deny speculations such as Hobbes’s

that “man is a wolf to man,” but actively to construct the social

conditions under which human beings may be humane: as Paul Goodman

remarks, “the moral question is not whether men [and women] are ‘good

enough’ for a type of social organization, but whether the type of

organization is useful to develop the potentialities of intelligence,

grace, and freedom in [women and] men” (1968: 19).

SOCIALISM AND THE ANARCHIST MOVEMENT

While existing practices – from the survival of convivial social customs

to the emergence of modern workers’ associations – supplied Proudhon’s

formulation of anarchist theory with its content, historians tend to see

an anarchist movement as such emerging gradually within the First

International (1864–72), where Proudhonian ideas gained popularity, and

within which Mikhail Bakunin exerted an increasing influence until the

final split and dissolution of the organization. Sharing the outlook

reflected in the founding document written by Marx, which declared that

“the emancipation of the toilers can be the work only of the toilers

themselves,” Bakunin argued that this self-emancipation was incompatible

with the methods of struggle Marx advocated, which aimed at the capture

of state power, and which depended, in view of this goal, on the

formation of workers’ parties that would reproduce all the features of

the state (or, indeed, the church) within themselves: ideology,

hierarchy, and discipline. Anarchism thus gained its identity as a

movement from its relation to a broader working-class socialist movement

of which it formed the anti-authoritarian wing; in the next generation,

Peter Kropotkin would refer to it as “the no-government system of

socialism,” and from the 1890s on, the term “libertarian socialism” has

entered common use as a synonym for anarchism.

A second distinction that became apparent in the controversies that tore

apart the First International would prove just as significant for the

future of the anarchist movement. Bakunin objected to Marx’s

identification of the socialist movement exclusively with the urban

industrial proletariat – the particular segment of the working classes

which, from the standpoint of Marx’s conception of history, represented

the future, beside which every other class, however underprivileged,

necessarily represented the past. For Bakunin, the exclusion from the

ranks of potential revolutionaries not only of the petit bourgeoisie

(self-employed shopkeepers and small business proprietors) but of the

peasantry (small farmers and farm workers) and even the

“lumpenproletariat” (the unemployed, criminals, and others living on the

margins of the capitalist system), is unacceptable. Since, for the

anarchists, revolution was not merely the inevitable outcome of a

deterministic historical process but a moral obligation, all of the

oppressed – in city or country, in factories or on farms, employed or

unemployed, male or female – could participate. By the same token,

anarchists refused to limit this revolution to a unique event or a

single goal: Proudhon had spoken of “the revolution” as an ongoing

process, a “permanent revolution,” the scope of which could be extended

indefinitely by “analogy,” so that church, state, and capital appeared

as so many different modes of domination. This lateral extension of the

potential sites of anarchist resistance gave it a tactical and

theoretical flexibility often lacking in Marxism (which would be slow to

embrace forms of revolt that resisted reduction to its economic schemas

and class categories), and would give anarchism relevance to political

groupings that Proudhon himself had never countenanced, including women,

migrant workers, homosexuals, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, and

colonized peoples. In Goldman’s (1910: 56) words, anarchists took “every

phase of life” as a potential terrain of struggle, from education to

sexuality, from art and music to diet and dress.

MIGRATIONS

Perhaps just as fundamental to the historical development of anarchism

as the transmission of anarchist ideas by people in motion is the fact

of motion itself, the unsettling of settled ways and the creation of a

“nomadic” working class in ceaseless exchanges (Colson 2001: 140–1).

People on the move, “transitional classes,” seem to have constituted one

of the great anarchist constituencies: not only immigrants, diasporic

peoples, refugees, and exiles, but also migrant workers, hoboes, and

peasants and artisans newly arrived in urban factory jobs. Indeed,

Benedict Anderson suggests that the history of anarchism is fatefully

intertwined with the development of the kinds of transportation and

communications technologies – steamships, railways, telegraphs, etc. –

that facilitated “early globalization” (2005: 2–3). Thus, anarchism

spread to the Americas, Asia, Australia, and parts of Africa, largely in

the luggage of immigrants. Italian immigrants, imported as cheap labor

to Brazil and to Argentina, brought the anarchist idea with them, joined

by Jewish anarchists fleeing pogromist Russia; Russian Jewish immigrants

such as the young Emma Goldman, arriving in New York, picked it up from

German immigrant anarchists like Johann Most, and her counterparts in

London formed a movement around the leadership of another German

anarchist émigré, Rudolf Rocker. The American anarchosyndicalist

Industrial Workers of the World union exported ideas concerning direct

action and extra-parliamentary politics to destinations as far away as

Japan and Chile. Chinese anarchists, a number of whom absorbed the ideas

of Bakunin and Kropotkin while studying in Paris, became emissaries of

anarchism to the rest of East Asia, as Italian anarchists did to the

eastern Mediterranean, as did Eastern Europeans to Central Asia.

What is stranger and more difficult to narrate is the way in which these

political missionaries generally found the idea to be in some sense

“already there.” Thus, as a conventionally Eurocentric history would

have it, the seeds of the Mexican anarchist movement were sown in the

1860s by an itinerant Greek disciple of Proudhon, Plotino C. Rhodakanaty

(1828–ca. 1885). At the same time, Rhodakanaty found in the Huichol

tradition of the calpulli (a form of communal property) a native model

of Proudhonian mutualism. Arriving in Spain in 1868, Bakunin’s emissary,

Giuseppe Fanelli (1826–77), found that his inability to speak Spanish

hardly handicapped him; it seemed that the workers who gathered to

listen were ready to hear him – having been prepared, perhaps, by

Spain’s relatively early reception of Proudhon’s federalist ideas,

popularized as early as 1854 via Francisco Pi y Margall (1824–1901) and

demonized even earlier than that by the Catholic conservative Juan

Donoso Cortés – and Spain’s anarchist movement quickly became one of the

most vigorous in the world. Exiled to the prison colony of New Caledonia

for their participation in the Paris Commune of 1871, anarchists such as

Louise Michel and Maxime Lisbonne encountered the Kanak people

struggling against French colonialism, and on their return to Paris,

brought a distinctly anti-colonial élan to the movement there. Rebels

from distant corners of the decaying Spanish Empire, encountering

Spanish anarchists, adapted their ideas to their own circumstances.

Chinese radicals sojourning in Tokyo in 1907 interpreted the reports of

Kotoku Shusui (1871–1911) on American anarcho-syndicalism in terms of

the anti-authoritarian concepts implicit in their own Taoist, Buddhist,

and peasant-communalist heritage.

DIVISIONS WITHIN ANARCHISM

While adherence to the principles of opposition to domination in all

forms, self-management, and means-ends coherence have generally stood as

the minimal requirements for inclusion in the anarchist movement,

anarchists have diverged in their interpretations of them. Divisions

emerged fairly quickly, as anarchists questioned what they saw as

Proudhon’s inconsistent application of his own insights. Thus, Joseph

Déjacque (1822–65) reproached Proudhon not only for his defense of the

patriarchal family, but for his overreliance on an economic system of

contracts as a replacement for the state. On the subject of gender,

Déjacque’s egalitarianism rapidly became the standard for the entire

movement.

On the subject of economy, however, no such consensus was forthcoming.

Three distinct positions emerged. One position was Proudhonian

“mutualism,” which described an exchange economy minus several of the

defining characteristics of capitalism, such as rent, profit, interest,

and absentee ownership of land, and bearing several defining

characteristics of socialism, such as producer-consumer cooperatives,

free credit, and a labor-time currency. Another position was “communism”

(also called “anarchist communism,” “anarchocommunism,” or “libertarian

communism”), which rejected the wage system entirely in favor of

distribution according to need. Finally, there was “collectivism,” a

modification of the mutualist system which further emphasized collective

ownership of the means of production, but which retained the principle

that workers should be rewarded proportionately to their contribution in

labor.

Several further developments complicated this division. The combination

of anti-statism and laissez-faire capitalism that is currently called

“libertarianism” in the United States – a term that, until the

mid-twentieth century, was synonymous with “anarchism” per se – evolved

from an extreme individualist offshoot from the mutualist school, which

shed so many of its socialist and anti-capitalist qualities as to become

all but unrecognizable. The result, sometimes called

“anarcho-capitalism,” is almost universally regarded by anarchists as

mere capitalist ideology, an extreme version of the neoliberal doctrine

now enshrined in institutions such as the World Trade Organization, no

longer a form of anarchism. Nonetheless, varieties of “individualist

anarchism,” most ably represented by writers such as E. Armand

(1872–1963) in France and Benjamin Tucker (1854–1939) in the United

States, enjoyed considerable popularity, inspired partly by the

posthumous popularization and translation of the “egoist” writings of

Max Stirner (a.k.a. Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806–56). While these have

generally been seen by anarchists as marginal to the movement, the

mainstream of which has always been socialist in orientation, they have

generally been seen as remaining within the anarchist orbit.

The collectivist position became associated, for a time, with strategies

that integrated anarchism into the trade union movement, what became

known as “anarchosyndicalism.” Anarchocom-munists often criticized

anarchosyndicalists both for including some form of the wage system in

their vision of a post-revolutionary society, calling this merely a

“mitigated individualism,” and for struggling for better wages and

conditions within the capitalist system, a strategy that courted the

danger of cooptation and degeneration into mere self-interested

reformism. Anarchosyndicalists retorted that to remain aloof from the

trade union movement would be to isolate anarchism in the name of

ideological purity – and indeed, anarchocommunists from Spain to Japan

often called their position “pure anarchism.” Where anarchosyndicalists,

like other labor radicals, saw the workplace as the primary site of

exploitation and therefore as the primary battleground, individualist

anarchists and anarchocommunists insisted that the emancipatory struggle

was equally to be located in unwaged time and space, such as in the

personal realm and domestic life, where oppression was largely a matter

of informal customs and traditional institutions, often reinforced by

the state, for example through the apparatuses of law, public education,

and medicine.

In long-term strategy, too, the individualist anarchists,

anarchosyndicalists, and anarchocommunists diverged. Thus, where the

Proudhonian strategy had been to avoid revolutionary “shocks” by

building up popular alternatives to capitalism and the state (such as

cooperatives and credit unions) so as to gradually supplant them,

anarchosyndicalists assigned the task of “forming the structure of the

new society within the shell of the old” to the labor union, which, on

the eve of the last great general strike, would then serve as a

ready-made organ for the self-management of society, a federation of

workers coordinating production for use in the absence of capital and

the state (Industrial Workers of the World 1908: 1). This conception of

the union as the “embryo” of anarchy, strikingly similar to the notion

of the soviets or “workers’ councils” in the libertarian Marxism of Rosa

Luxemburg (1870–1919) and others, seemed overly reductive and rigid to

anarchocommunists, for whom the proper unit of society was not the

workplace but the community. It is argued that the commune is not only

the most appropriate form for the expressions of all sides of the human

person (rather than reducing the person to mere producer), but also more

suited to the ecological vision of human beings as organisms inhabiting

an environment.

Numerous attempts have been made to reconcile these schools of

anarchism. As early as 1889, Fernando Tarrida del Mármol (1861–1915)

sought to calm tensions in the Spanish anarchist movement by an appeal

to “anarchism without adjectives.” As revolutionary unions gained ground

in the early twentieth century, the animosity and distrust between

anarchosyndicalists and anarchocommunists faded, with prominent

representatives of both camps, such as Peter Kropotkin and Victor

Griffuelhes, making significant concessions to one another, and

ultimately, the most powerful anarchosyndicalist union, the Spanish

Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), formally adopted “libertarian

communism” as part of its official program in 1936. In the 1920s

pragmatists like Errico Malatesta (1853–1932) argued that the

differences between communist and individualist “schools of thought”

could be resolved in practice, while Voline (a.k.a. Vsevolod

Mikhailovitch Eichenbaum, 1882–1945) and Sébastien Faure (1858–1942)

proposed an “anarchist synthesis” that included elements of all three

schools. Meanwhile, from another direction, a group of anarchists

including Nest Makhno (1888–1934) and Peter Arshinov (1887–1937)

proposed to reconstruct the anarchist movement around a kind of

constitution, a “program” setting forth “hard and fast positions” on

matters of theory, tactics, and organization, dubbed The Organizational

Platform of the General Union of Anarchists. Not only was this

controversy not resolved, but other disagreements about means and ends

have proliferated.

Another serious dispute concerned the question of organization.

“Anti-organizationa lists” such as Luigi Galleani (1861–1931),

anticipating the advent of what would become known as “insurrectionary

anarchism” a century later, saw formal organizations as perpetually in

danger of becoming rigid, gradually reproducing all the salient features

of the state; “organizationalists” countered, with Malatesta, that “the

less organized we have been, the more prone are we to be imposed on by a

few individuals” (Galleani 2006: 3; Malatesta 1993: 86).

Anarchopacifists such as Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) have charged that

violent means are radically incoherent with anarchist ends – an argument

that has been rejected by a majority of anarchists, who have judged that

this is to hold the oppressed, who are always in a legitimate state of

self-defense, to an impossible standard. Nonetheless, there was a

general shift in opinion, particularly after the spectacular violence

and reprisals of the early 1890s, against individual acts of violence

against persons – e.g., assassinations (attentats) and bombings

(“propaganda by the deed”) – and toward modes of action, such as labor

organizing, cultural resistance, and education, that could be pursued

more openly and peacefully even under capitalist and statist conditions.

As early as the 1890s, anarchists such as Henry Zisly (1872–1945),

calling themselves “naturistes” “naturianistes,” or “naturiens,”

declared machines, science, and “civilization” as such to be oppressive

and destructive of both the natural environment and human freedom,

declaring themselves in favor of a “return to a more natural life” on

the model of primitive peoples. Since the 1970s, John Zerzan (b. 1943)

and others have revived this critique of technology and modernity, in

forms strongly influenced by the Marxist theory of the Frankfurt School,

under the name of “primitivism.” Where the naturiens were largely

ignored or ridiculed by the leading anarchists of their day, who

generally embraced scientific and technological progress as sources of

revolutionary hope, the dire military and ecological trends of the

mid-to-late twentieth century have made it more difficult to dismiss the

charge that science and technology may both presuppose and reinforce

domination and ecocide, and that it is naive to think that we can use

them for other purposes. Nonetheless, a number of “eco-anarchists” such

as Bookchin insist that certain sciences and technologies are presently

useful and necessary, and that they may be made both humane and

ecologically sound; conversely, it is argued, it is primitivism which

has been naive in returning to Rousseau’s “noble savage” mythology

(Bookchin 1971: 41–84; 1995: 36–51).

Despite the strongly anti-clerical thrust of anarchism as developed by

Proudhon and Bakunin, who dedicated entire books to attacks on the

church, and by anarchist educators such as Francisco Ferrer y Guardia

(1859–1909), whose aim was to provide a rational, scientific,

materialist alternative to religiously sanctioned pedagogy, a number of

anarchists from the nineteenth century on, especially those influenced

by the writings of Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), have argued for the

compatibility of some varieties of religion with anarchism. Indeed, a

number of important precursors to modern anarchism stem from religious

traditions such as Taoism or the radical Protestantism of Gerrard

Winstanley (1609–76). While representing a minority tendency within the

movement, religious anarchism has exerted for some a strong enough

appeal.

The popularity of nationalism has posed a similar problem for anarchist

theory and practice. For instance, while the overwhelming majority of

Jewish anarchists were atheists and internationalists, enough were

attracted by the project of Palestinian settlement in the early

twentieth century for the term “anarcho-Zionism” to come into use.

Committed to internationalism in principle, anarchists such as Bakunin

and Kropotkin nonetheless sympathized with oppressed peoples engaging in

nationalist movements, particularly when these were articulated as forms

of rebellion against colonial regimes such as those exercised by Russia

over Poland. For many, this extended naturally to the struggles of

“stateless” peoples such as the Jews against oppression in diaspora.

Moreover, anarcho-Zionists such as Bernard Lazare (1865–1903) were

careful to differentiate their aspirations from the desire for a state

of any kind. Nonetheless, anarchists from Proudhon to Fredy Perlman

(1934–85) have warned against support for nationalist aspirations of any

kind for any reason, arguing that they always create new forms of

oppression.

The tension between anarchism as a particular movement and its

universalist aims has never ceased to raise questions. Indeed, the

decision of the Spanish CNT union to join other left-wing factions in a

Popular Front government in order to resist the fascists – for many then

and since, a clear violation of principles – was defended in part by the

argument that anarchists were too small a faction to dictate to others

what course to take. In more recent decades this tension has manifested

itself in connection with solidarity work of various kinds – for

instance, of white American anarchists in support of African American

movements or the Zapatista revolt in Mexico. For some anarchists, this

kind of support work, reaching across sometimes substantial differences

in goals and tactics, often means an unacceptable compromise; it is

argued that to abandon, defer, or disguise anarchist goals in order to

serve others is either to manipulate them or to be manipulated by them,

and that anarchists should instead embrace their specificity, organizing

their own movements and arguing openly for their ideas, finding allies

where they can. On the other hand, anarchists inspired by the Zapatista

principle of mandar obedeciendo (“leading by obeying”) as well as by the

anarchist tradition of mistrust for Leninist-style vanguardism argue

that rather than presuming to “lead” social movements of the oppressed,

anarchists should attempt to help existing movements to self-organize,

even when not all goals are shared.

Finally, the very fact of living within the state poses routine moral

and tactical problems for anarchists, particularly in so far as states

adopt some of the characteristics of democracy and socialism. Proudhon

himself, in the revolutionary moment of 1848, sought election to the

French parliament as a platform for his economic proposals, albeit

without success and to his rapid regret. Then and now, each election

renews the question of whether it is appropriate or useful for

anarchists to vote in defense of civil rights and social welfare. For

many anarchists (and perhaps most), this question is always to be

answered in the negative, on principle: even when there is something to

be gained by voting or lost by abstaining, voting fails the test of

means-ends consistency. Moreover, it is argued, such engagement with the

system always risks legitimizing it, diluting radical energies; reforms

and welfare initiatives stifle discontent and coopt potential

revolutionary actors, and even voting defensively against fascists means

becoming the tool of political rivals. However, a number of anarchists,

from Saverio Merlino (1856–1930) to Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), have

objected to hardline abstentionism, which can seem to sacrifice the

direct interests of the oppressed in the present for the sake of a

principle located in the future.

DECLINE AND RENAISSANCE

While it is extremely difficult to estimate the size of the anarchist

movement at any point in its history with any real certainty, it may

nonetheless be possible to date the height of its global scope and power

to the years just before and after 1917, the year of the Russian

Revolution. However, the triumph of the Bolsheviks in Russia, at first

taken as a sign of hope, was to prove disastrous for the anarchist

movement on several counts. First, the Soviet state itself became one of

the most powerful enemies of anarchist movements within its own

territories (crushing the Makhnovist revolt in the Ukraine and the

uprising at Kronstadt, jailing and exiling anarchist dissidents) and in

Spain, where Stalin’s machinations were instrumental in securing the

collapse of resistance to the fascist coup. Waves of anti-communist

reaction in the United States and elsewhere pushed workers away from

anarchism, serving meanwhile as the pretext for another round of

repressive state measures. Perhaps more fatally, Bolshevism became

established as the model par excellence of revolutionary action and

post-revolutionary organization, copied all over the globe by emergent

socialist and nationalist movements, reversing the terms of the old

rivalry.

Many histories of anarchism written from the standpoint of the end of

the twentieth century ring the curtain down after the end of the Spanish

Civil War in 1939, concluding that while anarchism persisted as an idea

among scattered groups and isolated intellectuals, it never again

enjoyed the close link it once had to active mass movements. Even the

worldwide rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s, after the fact, appeared to

have been a radical hiccup in a world-system otherwise stably split

between finance capitalism and bureaucratic socialism, giving way in its

turn to a monopolar world dominated by multinational capital and

American military power.

From the standpoint of the last decade, this assessment seems to have

been premature: indeed, quite suddenly, in the wake of the Seattle

protests of 1999, observers of the nascent global justice movement noted

that anarchism seemed to be “the radical ideology that prevails among

its core activists” (Epstein 2001: 13). Over the same period – notably

in regions hit hardest by neoliberal doctrines, such as Argentina after

the economic collapse of 2001 and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina –

anarchist practices of mutual aid and direct action were spontaneously

reinvented as means of survival.

The “new anarchism” is in many ways discontinuous with the old, both

institutionally and ideologically. Many of the new anarchists have

nothing to do with the surviving anarchist unions and federations, have

little expectation of an imminent revolution, and theorize in terms

strongly inflected both by the “New Social Movements” of the 1960s and

1970s (particularly ecology and feminism) and by the post-Marxist and

postmodern philosophies that emerged from that era as alternatives to

the varieties of Marxist discourse still dominant in the New Left. The

continuities, however, are arguably profound – both in terms of the

unresolved problems and the unexhausted possibilities.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Anderson, B. R. O. (2005) Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the

Anti-Colonial Imagination. London: Verso.

Bakunin, M. (2002) Bakunin on Anarchism. Montréal: Black Rose Books.

Barclay, H. B. (1990) People Without Government: An Anthropology of

Anarchy. London: Kahn & Averill.

Berkman, A. (1929) [2003] What Is Anarchism? Oakland: AK Press.

Black, B. (1997) Anarchy After Leftism. Columbia: CAL Press.

Bookchin, M. (1971) [2004] Post-Scarcity Anarchism. Oakland: AK Press.

Bookchin, M. (1995) Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An

Unbridgeable Chasm. Oakland: AK Press.

Cahm, C. (1989) Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism,

1872–1886. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Colson, D. (2001) Petit lexique philosophique de l’anarchisme de

Proudhon à Deleuze. Paris: Librairie Générale Française.

Colson, D. (2004) Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste: Islam,

Histoire, Monadologie. Paris: Editions Léo Scheer.

Déjacque, J. (1857) [2005] On Being Human. In Robert Graham (Ed.),

Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Vol. 1: From

Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939). Montréal: Black Rose Books.

Dirlik, A. (1991) Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

Dolgoff, S. (1970) [2002] The Relevance of Anarchism to Modern Society .

Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books.

Epstein, B. (2001) Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement.

Monthly Review 53, 4 (September): 1–14.

Galleani, L. (1927) [2006] The Principle of Organization in the Light of

Anarchism. Cascadia: Pirate Press Portland.

Goldman, E. (1910) Anarchism and Other Essays. New York: Mother Earth

Publishing Association.

Goodman, P. (1968) People or Personnel: Decentralizing and the Mixed

Systems and Like a Conquered Province: The Moral Ambiguity of America.

New York: Vintage Books.

Graeber, D. (2001) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago:

Prickly Paradigm Press.

Graeber, D. (2007) Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and

Desire. Oakland: AK Press.

Guérin, D. (2005) No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism.

Edinburgh: AK Press.

Industrial Workers of the World (1908) Preamble and Constitution of the

Industrial Workers of the World. Chicago: IWW.

Krebs, E. (1998) Shifu, Soul of Chinese Anarchism. Lanham, MD: Rowman &

Littlefield.

Kropotkin, P. A. (1902) [1989] Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution.

Montréal: Black Rose Books.

Kropotkin, P. A. (1927) [2002] Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary

Writings. New York: Dover Publications.

Malatesta, E. (1993) Life and Ideas. London: Freedom Press.

Nettlau, M. (1996) A Short History of Anarchism. London: Freedom Press.

Proudhon, P.-J. (1840) [1994] What Is Property? Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Proudhon, P.-J. (1851) [1989] General Idea of the Revolution in the

Nineteenth Century. London: Pluto Press.

Purchase, G. (1997) Anarchism and Ecology. Montréal: Black Rose Books.

Reclus, E., Clark, J. P., & Martin, C. (2004) Anarchy, Geography,

Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisée Reclus. Lanham, MD:

Lexington Books.

Rocker, R. (1938) [2004] Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice.

Oakland: AK Press.

Skirda, A. (2002) Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization

from Proudhon to May 1968. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Voline (1924) [2005] Anarchist Synthesis. In Robert Graham (Ed.),

Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Vol. 1: From

Anarchy to Anarchism (300 ce to 1939). Montréal: Black Rose Books.

Woodcock, G. (2004) Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and

Movements. Peterborough: Broadview Press.