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Title: The International Author: Albert Parsons Date: 4 April 1885 Language: en Topics: Anarchist International, international, syndicalism Source: Retrieved on 24th April 2021 from https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=1102 Notes: Introduction by Iain McKay. Originally published in The Alarm.
The first instalment of Precursors of Syndicalism (ASR No. 75, Winter
2019) sketched the rise of syndicalist ideas within the First
International. Championed by Bakunin, the idea of the International as a
militant union for economic struggle was the majority trend within it
and Marx preferred to destroy the organisation when it did not endorse
his position of transforming it into parties pursuing political action.
Syndicalist ideas reappeared in America in 1883, with the creation of
the International Working Peoples’ Association (IWPA). Created by former
Marxists who had come to reject political action in favour of direct
action, its legacy was secured in the fight for the Eight Hour Day which
started on the 1^(st) of May 1886 and the bombing of a squad of
policemen who were breaking up a peaceful IWPA rally on the 4^(th)
called to protest the killing of picketers the day before. After a red
scare, eight anarchist militants were arrested and given a kangaroo
trail, resulting in three imprisoned and five sentenced to death. Louis
Lingg committed suicide in prison, while Albert Parsons, August Spies,
Adolph Fischer and George Engel mounted the gallows in spite of
international protest.
In 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld signed pardons for the
imprisoned anarchists – Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, Oscar Neebe –
recognising them as victims of “hysteria, packed juries, and a biased
judge” and noting that the state “has never discovered who it was that
threw the bomb which killed the policeman, and the evidence does not
show any connection whatsoever between the defendants and the man who
threw it.” He also faulted the city of Chicago for failing to hold
Pinkerton guards responsible for repeated use of lethal violence against
striking workers.
The commemoration of the Chicago Martyrs on the anniversary of their
judicial murder on November 11^(th) became an International custom in
anarchist circles. As Kropotkin put it at one such meeting: “Were not
our Chicago Comrades right in despising politics, and saying the
struggle against robbery must be carried on in the workshop and the
street, by deeds not words?” (“The Chicago Anniversary,” Freedom,
December 1891) Like Bakunin, the Chicago Anarchists held, to quote Lucy
Parsons, “that the granges, trade-unions, Knights of Labor assemblies,
etc., are the embryonic groups of the ideal anarchistic society.” (“Lucy
E. Parsons on Anarchy”, Albert Parsons (ed.) Anarchism: Its Philosophy
and Scientific Basis [Honolulu: University of the Pacific, 2003], 110)
As with the syndicalists, the Internationalists rejected the ballot-box
and embraced direct economic struggle, arguing that the groupings
workers formed in the fight against exploitation would be the basis for
ending it by workers control of production. They summarised their
position towards the end of the manifesto agreed at the IWPA Pittsburgh
Congress in 1883:
“First: Destruction of the existing class rule, by all means, i.e., by
energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action.
“Second: Establishment of a free society based upon co-operative
organisation of production.
“Third: Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the
productive organisations without commerce and profit-mongery.
“Fourth: Organisation of education on a secular, scientific, and equal
basis for both sexes.
“Fifth: Equal rights for all without distinction to sex or race.
“Sixth: Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between the
autonomous (independent) communes and associations, resting on a
federalistic basis.” (Anarchism, 78)
This free society would be based on “the decentralisation of power” with
“no political parties, no capitalism, no rings, no kings, no statesmen
and no rulers” for “[a]ll political power must necessarily become
despotic, because all government tends to become centralised in the
hands of the few, who breed corruption among themselves, and in a very
short time disconnect themselves from the body of the people.” (Lucy
Parsons, Anarchism, 110–1) In short, the federal socialism which has
been the aim of anarchism since Proudhon using the tactics advocated by
anarchists since Bakunin. As one historian correctly summarised:
“The ‘Chicago idea,’ in its essential outlines, anticipated by some
twenty years the doctrine of anarcho-syndicalism, which, in a similar
way, rejected centralized authority, disdained political action, and
made the union the center of revolutionary struggle as well as the
nucleus of the future society. […] This is not to say, however, that
anarcho-syndicalism originated with Parsons and his associates. As early
as the 1860s and 1870s the followers of Proudhon and Bakunin were
proposing the formation of workers’ councils designed both as a weapon
of class struggle against the capitalists and as the structural basis
for the libertarian millennium. A free federation of labor unions,
Bakunin had written, would form ‘the living germs of the new social
order, which is to replace the bourgeois world.’” (Paul Avrich, The
Haymarket Tragedy [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], 73)
It should be sufficient to leave it here, but sadly not. Since the 1970s
there has been a tendency to suggest that the Chicago Anarchists were
not, in fact, anarchists. This seems to have started in 1976 with
Carolyn Ashbaugh’s biography Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary
(recently reprinted by Haymarket Books) which proclaimed that she, like
the other Chicago Internationalists, were syndicalists rather than
anarchists (that this simply expressed a shocking lack of understanding
of anarchism has previously been show in “Lucy Parsons: Anarchist
Anarchist” [ASR No. 60, Summer 2013]). This was followed by Bruce
Nelson’s Beyond the Martyrs: a social history of Chicago’s anarchists,
1870–1900 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988) which
suggested this “was not an evolution from socialism to anarchism but
from republicanism, through electoral socialism, to revolutionary
socialism.” (171) More recently, Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic at
least claimed they had created a “synthesis between anarchism and
Marxism.” (Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism
and Radical History [Oakland: PM Press, 2008], 11)
The latter base their claims on the historian James Green who suggested
that the Chicago Anarchists had “turned away from electoral competition
and adopted Karl Marx’s strategy of organising workers […] building
class-conscious Trade Unions as a basis for future political action.”
They “faithfully adhered to the lesson they had learned from Karl Marx:
that socialism could be achieved only through the collective power of
workers organised into aggressive Trade Unions.” Thus the
“Internationals of Chicago invented a peculiar, in some ways, American
brand of revolutionary socialism they called anarchism.” (Death in the
Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing
That Divided Gilded Age America [Anchor Books, 2007], 50, 130, 131)
There are a few problems with this.
The first, and most obvious, problem is that Marx advocated no such
thing. Yes, Marx supported unions but he did not think the workers
movements should be limited to, or even based on, them. Instead, he
argued for the creation of workers’ parties and the use of “political
action” in the shape of standing for elections. Indeed, in 1870 he
explicitly mocked Bakunin’s programme for advocating the ideas Green
proclaims as Marx’s:
“The working class must not occupy itself with politics. They must only
organise themselves by trade-unions. One fine day, by means of the
Internationale they will supplant the place of all existing states.”
(Marx, Engels, Lenin, Anarchism, and Anarcho-Syndicalism [Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1974], 48)
Here are all the elements the historians use to proclaim the Chicago
Anarchists anything other than anarchists – the dismissal of
electioneering, the embrace of economic struggle, unions replacing the
state – and all are rejected. Can we expect Green to have known that?
Yes, for he is discussing anarchists and expressly comparing their ideas
to Marx. Yet he was a historian, surely Marxists would know better?
There is a long, long history of Marxist attacks on syndicalism –
social-democratic and Leninist – which echo Marx’s attack on Bakunin,
namely that it ignores the necessity for political organisation
(workers’ parties) and political action (electioneering). Sadly, no:
“The ‘anarchism’ that Spies, Parsons, and their comrades espoused had
little in common with the ‘anarchism’ of Karl Marx’s political opponent,
Michael Bakunin, but was more akin to a revolutionary socialist vision
of a new society that would replace capitalism.’ (Patrick M. Quinn,
“James Green’s Death in the Haymarket,” Against the Current,
November/December 2006)
This brings us to the second issue, namely that Green makes no attempt
to define anarchism nor any real mention of the political ideas of the
Chicago Internationalists. This makes evaluating his claims difficult
for the average reader, which means they will draw their own conclusions
on what constitutes anarchism and what anarchists believe. Given the
popular image, almost all will agree with Green when he seems to imply
it is throwing dynamite as the sole tactic for social change – a few
violent actions and some violent rhetoric is remembered, unlike the much
more violent rhetoric and actual violence of the business class and its
state. That Bakunin never advocated individual terror is as irrelevant
as his actual syndicalism. Equally, it would remiss not to note that the
Chicago Anarchists killed no one, unlike the Pinkerton and state forces
which regularly killed strikers – indeed, it was this need for
self-defence which contributed to the dynamite rhetoric which so many
equate to their anarchism.
Green does not even provide the six-point conclusion of the Pittsburgh
Manifesto which, with its federalism, is hardly Marxist. Likewise, the
IWPA was as decentralised and federalist as the socialist society it
sought to create, a position much at odds with Marxist orthodoxy. A
federal militant union International was what Bakunin advocated and what
Marx opposed in favour of a centralised International based on political
parties. At least he quotes from Pittsburgh Manifesto, for he does not
even mention Albert Parson’s book Anarchism: Its Philosophy and
Scientific Basis. Parsons included articles by Peter Kropotkin, Élisée
Reclus and Dyer Lum on anarchism. This, in itself, suggests a clear
awareness by Parsons of what the term meant and that his use of
Anarchist was neither invented nor used in ignorance. Yes, Parson did
include in his book an analysis of wage-labour by quoting Marx. However,
this analysis was one most anarchists then – as now – would agree with:
labour is exploited by capital, the surplus-value produced by the many
is appropriated by the few. Bakunin praised Marx’s economic analysis and
attacked him not on the critique of capitalism nor the goal of a
socialist society but rather the means advocated: political action and
seizing state power.
While Nelson warned that this subject “should not be approached with
twentieth-century labels,” (153) he like the others did so. All these
historians show an unawareness of anarchism is a branch of socialism and
as expressed by Kropotkin in the work Parsons included in his book. Thus
anarchism is “the no-government system of socialism” and “private
ownership of land, capital, and machinery has had its time; that it is
condemned to disappear; and that all requisites for production must, and
will, become the common property of society, and be managed in common by
the producers of wealth” with “a complete negation of the wage-system.”
(“The Scientific Basis of Anarchism,” Anarchism, 111) Like the Chicago
Anarchists, Bakunin called himself a revolutionary socialist, as did
Kropotkin who also happily used the term communist. The issue between
the two schools of socialism was, as the Chicago Anarchists repeatedly
explained, the State and in this they echoed Proudhon:
“Louis Blanc represents governmental socialism, revolution by power, as
I represent democratic socialism, revolution by the people. An abyss
exists between us.” (Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire [Garnier:
Paris 1851], 177)
The idea that “socialism” or “communism” referred purely to Marxism is
of recent origin, one favoured and encouraged by Marxists themselves.
Similarly, the notion that anarchism was – or is – solely concerned with
the state is simply untenable once you move from the dictionary or
general accounts of anarchism like the one Green utilised (James Joll’s
The Anarchists) to actual anarchist writings and movements. Thus Green’s
comments that the Chicago Internationalists “thought of themselves as
socialists of the anarchist type – that is, as revolutionaries who
believed in liberating society from all state control, whether
capitalist or socialist” (129) – would apply to all anarchists, even
those who eschewed insurrection and the violent rhetoric of the IWPA. As
anarchists were and are socialists, aiming for an anti-state, federal,
self-managed socialism, Green comments are confused, at best. As Adolph
Fischer put it:
“A number of persons claim, that an anarchist cannot be a socialist, and
a socialist not an anarchist. This is wrong […] every anarchist is a
socialist but every socialist is not necessarily an anarchist.”
(Anarchism, 78)
So to suggest Parsons, Spies, etc. were Marxists when they had come to
the same conclusions as that of his political opponent in the First
International, Bakunin, which Marx had so furiously attacked and
combatted is simply wrong. It should also be noted that while some
Marxists claim the Chicago Anarchists as their own, Marxists at the time
did not. Green makes no mention that Marx’s daughter Eleanor expressed
the opinion “that we are not Anarchists, but are opposed to Anarchism
[…] strengthens our position in asking justice for the condemned men.”
(“The Chicago Anarchists,” To-day, November 1887) Engels said nothing
about the events publically beyond signing a petition for clemency, a
somewhat strange position to take if they were Marxists (in private
letters, on the very few occasions he refers to them at all, he never
suggests they were anything other than anarchists).
In short, someone can draw the exact same conclusions as Bakunin did and
which Marx explicitly and repeatedly denounced yet be denied the
anarchist label. Is it too much to ask historians writing on a subject
to gain some understanding of the politics involved before putting pen
to paper? As for the Marxists who make the claim, suffice to say it is a
strange admiration which suggests the Martyrs had no idea what the word
on their lips when they died meant.
The Chicago Internationalists called themselves anarchists for a reason.
They underwent an evolution from political socialism to anti-political
socialism, from Marxism to revolutionary Anarchism. This can be seen by
the writings of later anarchists. Emma Goldman – regardless of what
Ashbaugh and a host of Leninist regurgitators assert – advocated
syndicalism and noted “that in this country five men had to pay with
their lives because they advocated Syndicalist methods as the most
effective, in the struggle of labor against capital” (Syndicalism: the
Modern Menace to Capitalism). On the twenty-first anniversary of the
Chicago events, her Mother Earth argued as follows:
“Bitter experience has gradually forced upon organized labor the
realization that it is difficult, if not impossible, for isolated unions
and trades to successfully wage war against organized capital; for
capital is organized, into national as well as international bodies,
co-operating in their exploitation and oppression of labor. To be
successful, therefore, modern strikes must constantly assume ever larger
proportions, involving the solidaric co-operation of all the branches of
an affected industry – an idea gradually gaining recognition in the
trades unions. This explains the occurrence of sympathetic strikes, in
which men in related industries cease work in brotherly co-operation
with their striking bothers – evidences of solidarity so terrifying to
the capitalistic class.
“Solidaric strikes do not represent the battle of an isolated union or
trade with an individual capitalist or group of capitalists; they are
the war of the proletariat class with its organized enemy, the
capitalist regime. The solidaric strike is the prologue of the General
Strike.
“The modern worker has ceased to be the slave of the individual
capitalist; to-day, the capitalist class is his master. However great
his occasional victories on the economic field, he still remains a wage
slave. It is, therefore, not sufficient for labor unions to strive to
merely lessen the pressure of the capitalistic heel; progressive
workingmen’s organizations can have but one worthy object – to achieve
their full economic stature by complete emancipation from wage slavery.
“That is the true mission of trades unions. They bear the germs of a
potential social revolution; aye, more – they are the factors that will
fashion the system of production and distribution in the coming free
society.” (“The First May and the General Strike,” Mother Earth, May
1907)
Given the all-too-common Marxist myth that Goldman was some kind of
“lifestylist” libertarian who was unaware of the class nature of society
and the need for class struggle, it is worth noting that her actual
position was well-known at the time as can be seen by leading British
Syndicalist Tom Mann’s comments that her journal had “[f]or nine years
[…] voiced in clear terms the necessity for ‘working class solidarity,’
‘direct action in all industrial affairs’ and ‘free association.’ I
subscribe to each of these with heart and mind […] I am the more
grateful to the editor and conductors of Mother Earth for labouring so
thoroughly to popularise principles calculated, as I believe, to
emancipate mankind, intellectually and economically.” (“Mother Earth and
Labour’s Revolt,” Mother Earth, March 1915)
Once we know the actual politics of revolutionary anarchism, we see how
wrong Nelson was to suggest that if Kropotkin and Bakunin “epitomized
nineteenth century anarchism” and “immigrant anarchism [is identified]
with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, then the membership of
Chicago’s IWPA was not anarchist” (171, 153) His account, like that of
Ashbaugh and Green, may contain useful research but sadly within a
context so flawed that many, even most, of the conclusions have to be
dismissed or, at best, taken with copious caveats and corrections.
Otherwise we would have to conclude that Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman
and Peter Kropotkin along with Lucy Parsons and the Chicago Martyrs did
not understand what anarchism is…
We end with Albert Parsons’ article on the IWPA’s position on unions
from the English-language IWPA paper The Alarm on 4^(th) of April 1885.
While extracts have been included by many writers, including Dave
Roediger in an article entitled “Albert R. Parsons: The Anarchist as
Trade Unionist” in Haymarket Scrapbook (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986),
this is the first time as far as we are aware that it has appeared in
full since originally published.
The Alarm, 4 April 1885
If it be true as lately asserted by many, that the communist anarchists
known as the (Black) International, have decided upon a vigorous warfare
against Trades Unions as an important branch of their tactics, it is
much to be regretted. Such a course of action would not only be
economically unsound but is suicidal as well – Labor Enquirer
The ALARM takes pleasure in setting its contemporary, from whose columns
the above extract is taken, right on the attitude of the International
Working Peoples’ Association towards Trades unions. We have ourselves
observed paragraphs of a similar nature floating around through the
labour press, and we gladly avail ourselves of this opportunity to
answer the charge. The Communist Anarchists or Internationalists, as our
organisation is alternatively called, have on some occasions found it
necessary to criticise adversely the tactics, propaganda and aims of
some Trades unions. In Chicago, not long since, the Trades assembly was
challenged to a “joint debate” upon the subject of the relations of
capital and labour, and the most practical method to achieve labour’s
economic emancipation, the International holding adverse views to those
of the Trades assembly. These facts taken together have, with the aid of
ignorant or designing leaders, who seem to be actuated in the matter by
a desire for “place and fame,” been taken up and an attempt made to
create a false impression with regard to the International.
However, in order to place the matter fairly before our contemporaries
of the Trades Unions it will be necessary to publish in this connection
the action of the Pittsburgh Congress held in October 1883, where the
following resolution was adopted as the official declaration of the
International upon that subject, viz:
WHEREAS. We view in Trades Unions based upon progressive principles, the
abolition of the wages system, the cornerstone of a better societary
structure than the present one, and
WHEREAS. Furthermore, these Trades Unions are an army of despoiled and
disinherited brothers, who are destined to overthrow the present
economic system for the purpose of free universal co-operation, be it
Resolved. That we, the International Working Peoples’ Association,
extend to them our brotherhood and our aid in their struggle against the
ever-growing despotism of private capital, and
Resolved. That while we are in full sympathy with such progressive
unions, we will attack and seek to destroy all those organisations who
stand upon reactionary principles, since they are the enemies of the
cause of labour’s emancipation and a detriment to humanity and progress.
The International recognises in the Trades Unions the embryonic group of
the future “free society.” Every Trades Union is, nolens volens [whether
willing or not], an autonomous commune in the process of incubation. The
Trades Union is a necessity of capitalistic production, and will yet
take its place by superseding it under the system of universal free
co-operation. No, friends, it is not the unions but the methods which
some of them employ, with which the International finds fault, and as
indifferently as it may be considered by some, the development of
capitalism is hastening the day when all Trades Unions and Anarchists
will of necessity become one and the same.