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Title: The Anarchist Current
Author: Robert Graham
Date: 2013
Language: en
Topics: anarchist movement, history
Source: Retrieved on 3rd February 2021 from https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/the-anarchist-current/

Robert Graham

The Anarchist Current

The subtitle of Volume One of my anthology of anarchist writings,

Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, was From Anarchy

to Anarchism. By this I meant to emphasize that people lived without

states for tens of thousands of years, and therefore in a kind of

“anarchy,” before the first states began to emerge about 6,000 years

ago. Far from being impossible, as Thomas Hobbes and many other

political commentators have argued, anarchy was a very successful form

of human social organization which existed for the most of the time of

human existence on this planet. Because these societies without states

were preliterate, it is impossible to say to what degree this may have

been a conscious choice. It is highly doubtful that people living in

stateless societies ever identified themselves in opposition to the

state, as “anarchists” of some sort, given that there were no states in

existence for most of the time that people lived within these stateless

societies. Anarchism, as an identifiable doctrine, could only emerge

after the development of state forms and institutions, hence the

subtitle, “From Anarchy to Anarchism.”

For Volume Three of the Anarchism anthology, I wrote an Afterword, “The

Anarchist Current,” in which I discuss the evolution from living without

states, or “anarchy,” to the origins of anarchist ideas and movements,

after the rise of so-called “civilization.” I then survey the

development of anarchist ideas over time and across the globe, from the

Daoists in ancient China to contemporary “Occupy” and similar

transnational movements against neo-liberalism. As the Afterword also

serves as an extended introduction to the material in the the volumes of

the Anarchism anthology, and the history of anarchist thought, I have

decided to publish it in serial form here on my blog in the hope that

this will pique peoples’ interest in the original material contained in

the anthology, of which the Afterward can of course only offer a glimpse

(the material is referenced in the text by volume and selection

numbers). I hope someday in the not too distant future to expand the

Afterward into a book.

---

From Anarchy to Anarchism

Anarchism, George Woodcock once wrote, is like the river of the ancient

Greek philosopher, Heraclitus: constantly changing, with different

sources, eddies and currents, sometimes percolating below the surface,

at other times bursting forth in revolutionary torrents, but generally

moving “between the banks of certain unifying principles” (1977: 16).

Contrary to popular misconceptions, those unifying principles are not

chaos and terrorism, but a rejection of hierarchy, authority and

exploitation, and an alternative vision of a society without domination

based on freedom and equality. Anarchists reject the State and its

institutions, advocating societies based on free association, without

anyone having the power to dominate or exploit another.

Long before anyone consciously articulated anarchist ideas, people had

lived in societies without a state for thousands of years. So-called

primitive and prehistoric peoples lacked any formal institutions of

government and hierarchical social structures based on relationships of

command and obedience (Clastres, Volume Two, Selection 64). As the

anthropologist Harold Barclay puts it, “Ten thousand years ago everyone

was an anarchist” (1982: 39). Around 6000 years ago, the first

hierarchical societies began to emerge in which a minority of their

members assumed positions of prestige and authority, from which they

came to exercise power over others (Barclay, Volume Three, Selection

17).

It took thousands of years for this process of state formation finally

to encompass the entire globe, with some people continuing to live in

stateless societies into the 20^(th) century. Members of stateless

societies lived in roughly egalitarian communities without rank or

status (Taylor, 1982). For the most part, stateless societies had

sustainable subsistence economies based on relationships of equality,

reciprocity and mutual aid (Clastres, Volume Two, Selection 64;

Bookchin, Volume Three, Selection 26; Sahlins (1974), Barclay (1982) and

Kropotkin (1902)).

Relatively few states emerged from within their own societies: ancient

Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mexico, Hawaii, Tahiti, Tonga, Samoa and

possibly India (Barclay, 2003). State institutions were forced on most

societies by external powers, or were created in response to such power.

According to Barclay, a combination of factors led to the emergence of

state forms: 1) increased population; 2) sedentary settlement; 3)

horticulture/agriculture; 4) redistribution of wealth; 5) military

organization; 6) secondary significance of kinship ties; 7) trading; 8)

specialized division of labour; 9) individual property and control of

resources; 10) a hierarchical social order; and 11) ideologies of

superiority/inferiority (Volume Three, Selection 17).

As most people were innocent of government, having lived without it for

thousands of years, they had nothing against which to compare their

so-called primitive forms of social organization until it was too late.

“Anarchy” was for them a way of life, not a concept. Although they may

have had nonhierarchical conceptions of their societies and the natural

world (Bookchin, Volume 3, Selection 25), it is unlikely that they

conceived of anarchy as some sort of ideal. Anarchist ideas only began

to be articulated after people started living within hierarchical

societies based on exploitation and domination. When looking for

precursors of the anarchist idea, one must be careful then not to read

too much into the writings of people who never identified themselves as

anarchists and never explicitly endorsed anarchy as an ideal.

Daoism and Early Anarchism

Daoism in ancient China helped give more formal expression to the

nonhierarchical sensibilities of earlier human societies, eventually

leading some Daoists to adopt an anarchist stance. John P. Clark has

argued that the classic text, the Daode Jing (or Tao Te Ching), circa

400 BCE, evokes “the condition of wholeness which preceded the rending

of the social fabric by institutions like the state, private property,

and patriarchy” (1984: 168).

Writing around 300 CE, the Daoist sage Bao Jingyan gave the Daoist

rejection of the hierarchical cosmology of the Confucians a more

political slant, seeing it as nothing more than a pretext for the

subjugation of the weak and innocent by the strong and cunning (Volume

One, Selection 1). He harkened back to the “original undifferentiated”

condition of the world in which “all creatures found happiness in

self-fulfillment,” expressing a nonhierarchical, ecological sensibility

which eschews “the use of force that goes against the true nature of

things.” He noted that in “the earliest times,” prior to the creation of

a hierarchical social order, “there was neither lord nor subjects.” He

saw compulsory labour and poverty as the results of the division of

people into ranks and classes. With the emergence of a hierarchical

social order, everyone seeks to be above the other, giving rise to crime

and conflict. The “people simmer with revolt in the midst of their

poverty and distress,” such that to try to stop them from revolting “is

like trying to dam a river with a handful of earth.” He prefered a life

worth living to the religious promise of life after death.

In his commentary on Bao Jingyan’s text, Etienne Balazs argues that Bao

Jingyan was “China’s first political anarchist” (1964: 243). As with

later self-proclaimed anarchists, Bao Jingyan opposed hierarchy and

domination, seeing them as the cause of poverty, crime, exploitation and

social conflict, rejected religious beliefs that justify such a state of

affairs, predicted the revolt of the masses and advocated a society

without hierarchy and domination where there are “neither lord nor

subjects,” a phrase strikingly reminiscent of the 19^(th) century

European anarchist battle cry, “Neither God nor Master.” While similar

ideas may have been expressed in ancient Greece by the Stoic

philosopher, Zeno of Citium (333–262 BCE), only fragments of his

writings have survived, making Bao Jingyan’s text perhaps the oldest

extant to set forth a clearly anarchist position.

Étienne de la Boétie and Voluntary Servitude

The Daoist sage Bao Jingyan argued that the strong and cunning forced

and tricked the people into submitting to them. That the people may play

a part in their own servitude is an idea that was explored in much

greater detail by Étienne de la Boétie (1530–1563), in his Discourse on

Voluntary Servitude (1552, Volume One, Selection 2). Seeking to explain

how the masses can be subjugated by a single tyrant, de la Boétie argued

that it is the masses themselves “who permit, or, rather, bring about,

their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end

to their own servitude.” Despite de la Boétie’s focus on tyranny, rather

than hierarchy and domination as such, as Murray Rothbard points out, de

la Boétie’s critique of tyranny applies to all forms of government,

whether democratic, monarchic or dictatorial, such that his arguments

can easily be pressed on “to anarchist conclusions,” as they were by

subsequent writers (1975: 20).

This idea that the power of the state depends on the voluntary

submission or acquiescence of the people, such that state power can be

abolished or undermined by the withdrawal of cooperation, was taken up

by later anarchists, including William Godwin (Volume One, Selection 4),

Leo Tolstoy (Volume One, Selection 47), Gustav Landauer (Volume One,

Selection 49), Praxedis Guerrero (Volume One, Selection 72), Alex

Comfort (Volume Two, Selection 26) and contemporary writers, such as

Noam Chomsky (Volume Two, Selection 68) and Ed Herman (Volume Three,

Selection 40), who have emphasized that so-called democratic states

require an extensive propaganda apparatus to “engineer” or “manufacture”

the consent of the people to their own continuing domination and

exploitation.

Heresy and Revolution

While religion has often served as both a justification and palliative

for coercive authority, various heretical religious currents have

emerged throughout human history denying the legitimacy of earthly

authority (Walter, Volume Two, Selection 43). In the 1960s, Gary Snyder

highlighted those strands of Buddhism that evinced an anarchist

sensibility (Volume Two, Selection 42). In the 9^(th) century, a

minority among the Mu‘tazili Muslims argued that anarchy is preferable

to tyranny (Crone, 2000), while another Islamic sect, the Kharijites,

“disputed any need at all for an imam, or head of state, as long as the

divine law was carried out” (Levy, 1957).

In Europe, several heretical Christian sects emerged during the Middle

Ages and Reformation, rejecting human authority in favour of freedom and

community. The Brethren of the Free Spirit adopted a libertarian

amoralism similar to Max Stirner’s egoism (Volume One, Selection 11),

advocating total freedom for themselves while taking advantage of others

(Marshall, 2008: 87–89). In contrast, the Taborites in Bohemia were

egalitarians, seeking to abolish private property, taxes and political

authority, asserting that “All shall live together as brothers, none

shall be subject to another” (Marshall: 92). The Hussites and Moravian

Brothers also advocated an egalitarian community without coercive

authority, modeled after Christ’s relationship with his apostles.

But it was not until the English Revolution (1642–1651) that Christian

teachings were transformed into a body of ideas resembling modern

anarchism. The Ranters advocated and practiced free love and the holding

of all things in common, with some adopting a libertarian amoralism

similar to that of the Brethren of the Free Spirit. The Diggers also

advocated holding things in common, and sought to establish egalitarian

communities on waste lands.

Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers

One of the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley (1609–1676), published a pamphlet

in 1649, The New Law of Righteousness, in which he advocated an early

form of anarchist communism, drawing inspiration from the Bible (Volume

One, Selection 3).

Winstanley argued that anyone getting “authority into his hands

tyrannizes over others,” whether husband, parent, master or magistrate.

He saw private property, inequality and exploitation as the inevitable

result of “rule and dominion, in one part of man-kinde over another.” He

advocated making the earth the “common treasury” of all, such that

anyone in need should be able to “take from the next store-house he

meets with.” There “shall be none Lord over others,” and “no need for

Lawyers, prisons, or engines of punishment,” with the distinction

between “Mine and Thine” having been abolished.

In opposing coercive authority, hierarchy and private property,

Winstanley was careful to endorse means consistent with his ends. He

endorsed a form of nonviolent direct action, while denouncing those who

would replace one tyranny with another. For Winstanley, “the

manifestation of a righteous heart shall be known, not by his words, but

by his actions,” for “Tyrannie is Tyrannie in one as wel [sic] as in

another; in a poor man lifted up by his valour, as in a rich man lifted

up by his lands.”

Although couching his argument in religious terms, Winstanley conceived

of God as “the law of righteousness, reason and equity” dwelling within

all of us, a position similar to that later adopted by Leo Tolstoy. He

advocated freedom for both men and women, applying his critique of

hierarchy and domination not just to their more obvious manifestations,

but also to relationships between husband and wife and parents and

children.

Utopian Undercurrents

Hounded by both parliamentary and royalist forces, the Digger movement

did not survive the English Civil War. However, anarchist ideas

continued to percolate underground in Europe, resurfacing during the

Enlightenment and the 1789 French Revolution.

In 1676, Gabriel de Foigny, a defrocked priest, published in Geneva Les

Adventures de Jacques Sadeur dans la découverte de la Terre Australe, in

which he depicted an imaginary society in Australia where people lived

without government, religious institutions or private property. De

Foigny was considered a heretic and imprisoned. A year after his death

in 1692, an abridged English translation of Les Adventures appeared as A

New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis. According to Max Nettlau, de

Foigny’s book became “well known,” being “reprinted and translated many

times” (1996: 12).

Jean Meslier, a priest from the Champagne area of France, wrote a

political Testament in the 1720s in which he denounced the alliance of

Church and State, calling on the people to keep for themselves “all the

riches and goods you produce so abundantly with the sweat of your brow,”

and to let “all the great ones of the earth and all nobles hang and

strangle themselves with the priests’ guts” (Joll: 14). Similar

sentiments were expressed by the French philosophe, Denis Diderot, who

wrote in 1772 that “nature has made neither servant nor master—I want

neither to give nor to receive laws… weave the entrails of the priest,

for want of a rope, to hang the kings” (Berneri: 202). During the French

Revolution this was transformed into the slogan, “Humanity will not be

happy until the last aristocrat is hanged by the guts of the last

priest.” Many variations on this slogan have followed since, with the

Situationists during the May-June 1968 events in France calling for the

last bureaucrat to be hanged by the guts of the last capitalist (Knabb:

344).

On the eve of the French Revolution of 1789, Sylvain Maréchal

(1750–1803) published some fables and satirical works evincing an

anarchist stance, picturing in one “the life of kings exiled to a desert

island where they ended up exterminating each other” (Nettlau: 11). He

attacked religion and promoted atheism. In 1796, in the face of the

growing reaction, he published his “Manifesto of the Equals” (Volume

One, Selection 6), in which he called on the people of France to march

over the bodies of “the new tyrants, seated in the place of the old

ones,” just as they had “marched over the bodies of kings and priests.”

Maréchal sought “real equality,” through “the communal enjoyment of the

fruits of the earth,” and the abolition not only of “individual property

in land,” but of “the revolting distinction of rich and poor, of great

and small, of masters and valets, of governors and governed.”

The Great French Revolution

Anarchist tendencies emerged among the more radical elements during the

first, or “Great,” French Revolution of 1789, particularly among the

sans-culottes and enragés who formed the backbone of the Revolution.

Denounced as anarchists by their opponents, they did not entirely reject

the label. In 1793, the sans-culottes of Beaucaire identified their

allies as “those who have delivered us from the clergy and nobility,

from the feudal system, from tithes, from the monarchy and all the ills

which follow in its train; those whom the aristocrats have called

anarchists, followers of faction (factieux), Maratists” (Joll: 27).

The sans-culottes played an important role in the revolutionary

“sections” in Paris, directly democratic neighbourhood assemblies

through which ordinary people took control of their lives. As Murray

Bookchin has argued, the sections “represented genuine forms of

self-management” that “awakened a popular initiative, a resoluteness in

action, and a sense of revolutionary purpose that no professional

bureaucracy, however radical its pretensions, could ever hope to

achieve” (Volume Two, Selection 62).

Unfortunately, other forces on the left, notably Robespierre and the

Jacobins, adopted an authoritarian policy of revolutionary terror to

fight the counter-revolution, leading the enragé Jean Varlet (1764–1837)

to denounce so-called “revolutionary government” as a monstrous

“masterpiece of Machiavellianism” that purported to put the

revolutionary authorities “in permanent insurrection” against

themselves, which is patently absurd (Volume One, Selection 5).

Varlet and other sans-culottes and enragés had fought with the Jacobins

against the more conservative Girondins, unwittingly helping the

Jacobins to institute their own dictatorship. When Varlet saw his fellow

revolutionaries “clapped in irons” by the Jacobins, he “retreated back

into the ranks of the people” rather than support “a disgusting

dictatorship dressed up with the title of Public Safety.” He could not

accept that “Robespierre’s ghastly dictatorship” could somehow vindicate

the preceding dictatorship of the Girondins, nor that he and his fellow

enragés could be blamed for being the unwitting dupes of the Jacobins,

claiming that they had done “nothing to deserve such a harsh reproach”

(Volume One, Selection 5).

Varlet made clear that the Jacobin policy of mass arrests and

executions, the so-called “Reign of Terror,” far from protecting the

gains of the revolution, was not only monstrous but

counter-revolutionary, with “two thirds of citizens” being deemed

“mischievous enemies of freedom” who “must be stamped out,” terror being

“the supreme law” and torture “an object of veneration.” The Jacobin

terror “aims to rule over heaps of corpses” under the pretext that “if

the executioners are no longer the fathers of the nation, freedom is in

jeopardy,” turning the people against the revolution as they themselves

become its victims. Even with the overthrow of Robespierre in July 1794,

Varlet warned that “his ghastly system has survived him,” calling on the

French people to take up their arms and their pens to overthrow the

government, whatever its revolutionary pretensions.

Varlet, in rejecting his own responsibility for the Jacobin ascendancy

to power, avoided a critique of revolutionary violence, simply calling

on the people to rise yet again against their new masters, a call which

went largely unanswered after years of revolutionary upheaval which had

decimated the ranks of the revolutionaries and demoralized the people.

There were a couple of abortive uprisings in Paris in 1795, but these

were quickly suppressed.

Godwin’s Critique of Coercion

Jean Varlet’s English contemporary, William Godwin (1756–1836),

developed an anarchist critique not only of revolutionary violence but

of coercion as such, whether the institutionalized coercion of the law

with its penal systems, or the individual coercion of a parent toward a

child. Godwin wrote and revised his great philosophical work, An Enquiry

Concerning Political Justice (Volume One, Selection 4), during the

French Revolution, publishing the final revised edition in 1797, around

the time that Napoleon was coming to power, three years after the fall

of Robespierre.

Godwin argued that coercion, and its positive correlate, inducements

offered by those with wealth and power, distort political debate and

moral discussion by causing people to evaluate a policy or course of

conduct in terms of the punishments or rewards attached to them, rather

than on their intrinsic merits. Coercion and inducements also have a

debilitating effect on both persons in power and the people who obey or

accept them.

“Dressed in the supine prerogatives of a master,” those in power are

“excused from cultivating” their rational faculties. Those who are

forced to obey their rulers become resentful and fearful. Instead of

being encouraged to think for themselves, they learn how to avoid

detection and seek power for themselves so that they can effect their

own purposes.

The deleterious consequences of coercion and inducements are not

surmounted by parliamentary debates, or what is now referred to as

“deliberative democracy” (Dryzek, 2000). In the first place, the laws

and policies of the government are not the result of direct debate among

the people, but the result of the debates of elected representatives who

represent particular interests. Decisions are made by majority vote of

the representatives, who invariably vote along party lines. Even when a

debate is not cut short by the ruling party, the “minority, after having

exposed, with all the power and eloquence, and force of reasoning, of

which they are capable, the injustice and folly of the measures adopted,

are obliged… to assist in carrying them into execution,” since all the

representatives are required to uphold the law. For Godwin, “nothing can

more directly contribute to the deprivation of the human understanding

and character” than to require people to act contrary to their own

reason.

During parliamentary debates, which must come to a close with a vote of

the assembled representatives, the “orator no longer enquires after

permanent conviction, but transitory effect. He seeks to take advantage

of our prejudices than to enlighten our judgement. That which might

otherwise have been a scene of patient and beneficent enquiry is changed

into wrangling, tumult and precipitation.”

This is particularly true during revolutionary upheavals. Reasoned and

impartial debate “can scarcely be pursued when all the passions of man

are afloat, and we are hourly under the strongest impressions of fear

and hope, apprehension and desire, dejection and triumph.” Revolutions

invariably provoke counter-revolution. When “we lay aside arguments, and

have recourse to the sword,” amidst “the barbarous rage of war, and the

clamorous din of civil contention, who shall tell whether the event will

be prosperous or adverse? The consequence may be the riveting on us anew

the chains of despotism.” To combat the counter-revolution, the

revolutionaries suppress freedom of expression and resort to terror,

organizing “a government tenfold more encroaching in its principles and

terrible in its proceedings” than the old regime.

Despite regarding revolutions as being “necessarily attended with many

circumstances worthy of our disapprobation,” Godwin recognized that

“revolutions and violence have too often been coeval with important

changes of the social system.” While we should “endeavour to prevent

violence,” during revolutionary upheavals we cannot simply “turn away

our eyes from human affairs in disgust, and refuse to contribute our

labours and attention to the general weal.” Rather, we must take “proper

advantage of circumstances as they arise, and not… withdraw ourselves

because everything is not conducted according to our ideas of

propriety.” Godwin’s critique of revolutionary violence must not

therefore be misconstrued as tacit support for the injustices which the

revolutionaries are seeking to overturn.

Since Godwin’s time, anarchists have continued to struggle with

questions regarding recourse to violence and the role of anarchists

during revolutionary struggles. The validity of Godwin’s warning, based

on his own observations of the French Revolution, that revolution may

result in a new tyranny because it is the strongest and not the most

just who typically triumph, has been borne out by the experience of

anarchists in subsequent revolutions. In the 20^(th) century, both the

Russian (Volume One, Chapter 18) and Spanish (Volume One, Chapter 23)

revolutions resulted in dictatorships even more “ghastly” than that of

Robespierre, despite the presence of significant anarchist movements.

When anarchist movements began to emerge in 19^(th) century Europe,

Godwin’s work was relatively unknown. It was largely through the work of

the anarchist historian, Max Nettlau (1865–1944), that the ideas of de

la Boétie and Godwin were introduced to European anarchists, well after

anarchism had emerged as an identifiable current of thought (Walter,

2007).

Charles Fourier and the Liberation of Desire

A younger contemporary of William Godwin was to have a noticeable

influence on the development of anarchist ideas, the French writer,

Charles Fourier (1772–1837). Fourier had lived through the French

Revolution. Imprisoned for a time, he almost became another victim of

the Terror. He witnessed the hoarding and profiteering that occurred

during the Revolution and sought to develop a libertarian alternative by

which everyone would not only be guaranteed their means of subsistence

but would be able to engage in productive work which they themselves

found fulfilling. “Morality teaches us to love work,” Fourier wrote,

“let it know, then, how to render work lovable” (Volume One, Selection

7).

Fourier recognized that in order to survive in the emerging capitalist

economy, workers were compelled to take whatever work they could find,

regardless of their personal talents, aptitudes and preferences. They

had to work long hours under deplorable conditions, only to see their

employers reap the fruits of their labours while they continued to live

in poverty. The new economy was “nothing but… a league of the minority

which possesses, against the majority which does not possess the

necessaries of life.”

Fourier, however, did not advocate revolution. He hoped to attract

financial benefactors to fund the creation of communes or “phalanxes”

where each person would rotate through a variety of jobs each day, free

to choose each task, doing what they found to be enjoyable, giving

expression to their talents and passions. Each member of the phalanx

would be guaranteed a minimum of material support and remunerated by

dividends from the phalanx’s operations. While later anarchists agreed

that work should be freely undertaken, enjoyable and fulfilling, rather

than an onerous burden, they found Fourier’s more detailed plans

regarding the organization of society to be too constrictive and his

idea that wealthy benefactors would bankroll the abolition of their own

privileged status naïve.

Fourier was an early advocate of sexual liberation. Foreshadowing the

work of Wilhelm Reich (Volume One, Selection 119; Volume Two, Selection

75), Fourier argued that people should be free to satisfy their sexual

needs and desires, and that the repression of such desires is not only

harmful to the individual but one of the foundations of a repressive

society (Guérin, Volume Two, Selection 76).

Proudhon: The Self-Proclaimed Anarchist

In 1840, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) declared himself an

anarchist in his groundbreaking book, What is Property? An Inquiry into

the Principle of Right and of Government. Karl Marx (1818–1883), later

Proudhon’s scornful opponent, at the time praised Proudhon’s book as

“the first resolute, pitiless and at the same time scientific” critique

of private property (Marx, 1845: 132). To the question posed by the

title of the book, Proudhon responded that “property is theft” (Volume

One, Selection 8). According to Proudhon, the workers should be entitled

to the full value of their labour, not the mere pittance the capitalists

doled out to them while keeping the lion’s share for themselves. By

arguing that, in this sense, “property is theft,” Proudhon was not

giving expression to bourgeois notions of justice, as Marx later claimed

(Marx, 1867: 178–179, fn. 2), but was expressing a view of justice held

by many workers, that people should enjoy the fruits of their own

labours.

That the capitalists were parasites exploiting the workers by depriving

them of what was rightfully theirs was to become a common theme in

19^(th) century socialist and anarchist propaganda. In the 1883

Pittsburgh Proclamation of the International Working People’s

Association (the so-called “Black International”), the then anarchist

collectivist Johann Most (1846–1906) put it this way: “the propertied

(capitalists) buy the working force body and soul of the propertyless,

for the mere cost of existence (wages) and take for themselves, i.e.

steal, the amount of new values (products) which exceeds the price”

(Volume One, Selection 55).

Besides declaring property theft, Proudhon boldly proclaimed himself an

anarchist, denouncing “the government of man by man” as “oppression.” It

is government, through its laws and coercive mechanisms, that protects

the property of the capitalists, condemning the workers to lives of

servitude and misery. The only just form of society is one in which

workers are free to associate, to combine their labour, and to exchange

what they produce for products and services of equivalent value, instead

of receiving wages “scarcely sufficient to support them from one day to

another.” In a society based on equivalent exchange there would no

longer be any need for government because those things which make

government necessary, such as “pauperism, luxury, oppression, vice,

crime and hunger,” would “disappear from our midst” (Volume One,

Selection 8). Proudhon described this form of socialism as “mutualism.”

Proudhon was not the first to have drawn the connection between economic

exploitation and political servitude. Bao Jingyan, Winstanley, Maréchal,

Godwin and Fourier all made similar arguments. But Proudhon was the

first to describe himself as an anarchist. Others were soon to follow.

Revolutionary Ideas in Europe

In the 1840s there was an explosion of radical ideas and movements in

Europe, culminating in a wave of revolutions that swept the continent in

1848–49. In Germany, radical intellectuals inspired by and reacting

against the philosophy of Hegel, sometimes referred to as the “Young” or

“Left Hegelians,” began developing a “ruthless criticism of everything

existing,” as Marx put it in 1843. The previous year, Bakunin had

published his essay, “The Reaction in Germany,” in which he described

the revolutionary program as “the negation of the existing conditions of

the State” and “ the destruction of whatever order prevails at the

time,” concluding with the now notorious phrase, the “passion for

destruction is a creative passion, too!” (Volume One, Selection 10). Max

Stirner’s masterpiece of nihilistic egoism, The Ego and Its Own, came

out in 1844 (Volume One, Selection 11). Arnold Ruge, one of the most

prominent of the “Young Hegelians,” called for “the abolition of all

government” in favour of “an ordered anarchy… the free community… of men

who make their own decisions and who are in all respects equal comrades”

(Nettlau: 53–59).

Three aspects of the Young Hegelian critique had a lasting impact on

Bakunin, and through him on the development of anarchist ideas. The

first was the Young Hegelian critique of religion. The second was the

development of a materialist worldview, from which all “divine phantoms”

were banished. The third, which followed from the first two, was

atheism. Bakunin and later anarchists were to denounce the alliance of

Church and State, particularly the role of religion in pacifying the

masses and in rationalizing their domination and exploitation,

advocating a materialist atheism that emphasizes human agency because

there are no divine or supernatural forces to protect or deliver the

people from their earthly misery. The people can only liberate

themselves through their own direct action.

Max Stirner

Max Stirner (1806–1856) took the Young Hegelian critique of “divine

phantoms” to its furthest extreme, attacking all ideal conceptions,

whether of God, humanity, or good and evil, as “spooks” or “wheels in

the head” which dominate the very consciousness of the unique

individual, preventing him or her from acting freely.

In The Ego and Its Own, Stirner argued that through upbringing,

education and indoctrination, people internalize abstract social norms

and values, putting the individual “in the position of a country

governed by secret police. The spy and eavesdropper, ‘conscience,’ watch

over every motion of the mind,” with “all thought and action” becoming

“a matter of conscience, i.e. police business.” Anticipating radical

Freudians like the anarchist psychoanalyst, Otto Gross (Volume One,

Selection 78), Stirner observed that everyone “carries his gendarme

within his breast.”

Stirner advocated freedom “from the State, from religion, from

conscience,” and from any other power or end to which the individual can

be subjected. He rejected any concept of justice or rights, arguing that

the unique individual is free to take whatever is in his or her power.

Whenever the egoist’s “advantage runs against the State’s,” he “can

satisfy himself only by crime.” After Stirner’s writings were

rediscovered in the late 1890s, this aspect of his critique was

developed by individualist anarchists, such as Albert Joseph

(“Libertad”), into the doctrine of “illegalism,” which was used by the

Bonnot Gang as an ideological cloak for their bank robberies in the

early 1900s in France (Perry, 1987).

Stirner denounced socialism for seeking to replace the individual

capitalist with a collective owner, “society,” to which the individual

will be equally subject, but nevertheless argued that the workers need

only stop labouring for the benefit of their employers and “regard the

product of their labour” as their own in order to bring down the State,

the power of which rests on their slavery.

Another aspect of Stirner’s thought that was to have some influence on

later anarchists is his distinction between insurrection and revolution.

Revolutions seek to rearrange society into a new order. Insurrection or

rebellion, by contrast, is “a rising of individuals… without regard to

the arrangements that spring from it” (Volume One, Selection 11). In

light of the defeats of the anarchists in the Russian and Spanish

Revolutions, Herbert Read (1893–1968) sought to revive Stirner’s

distinction, arguing that anarchists must avoid creating “the kind of

machinery which, at the successful end of a revolution, would merely be

taken over by the leaders of the revolution, who then assume the

functions of government” (Volume Two, Selection 1). During the 1960s,

many of the younger anarchists endorsed the notion of “spontaneous

insurrection” (Volume Two, Selection 51). More recently, Hakim Bey has

argued in favour of the creation of “temporary autonomous zones,” which

can be seen as “an uprising which does not engage directly with the

State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time,

of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen,

before the State can crush it” (Volume Three, Selection 11).

Proudhon: Machinery and Worker Self-Management

In one passage in The Ego and Its Own, Stirner described individuals as

mere cogs in the “State machine.” In Proudhon’s 1846 publication, The

System of Economic Contradictions, he argued that the first and “most

powerful of machines is the workshop” The workshop degrades “the worker

by giving him a master.” The “concentration of forces in the workshop”

and the introduction of machinery “engender at the same time

overproduction and destitution,” rendering more and more workers

redundant, such that in a capitalist economy it is continually necessary

to “create new machines, open other markets, and consequently multiply

services and displace other” workers. Industry and wealth, population

and misery, “advance, so to speak, in procession, one always dragging

the other after it” (Volume One, Selection 9).

This focus on and opposition to relationships of subordination in both

the economic and political spheres sharply distinguished Proudhon and

the anarchists from many of their socialist contemporaries. In his

sarcastic attempt to demolish Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy

(1847), Marx dismissed Proudhon’s critique of factory organization and

machinery as a reactionary demand for a return to a pre-industrial

utopia of skilled craft production. In the Manifesto of the Communist

Party (1848), co-written with Friedrich Engels, Marx called for the

centralization of “all instruments of production in the hands of the

State… to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as

possible.” This would require the establishment of “industrial armies,

especially for agriculture.”

Proudhon’s solution to this problem was neither to advocate a return to

a pre-industrial craft economy nor the creation of industrial armies,

“for it is with a machine as with a piece of artillery: the captain

excepted, those whom it occupies are servants, slaves” (Volume One,

Selection 9). While Proudhon argued that free credit should be made

available so that everyone would have the opportunity to engage in

whatever productive activity they chose, he recognized from the outset

the advantages of combining one’s labour with the labour of others,

creating a “collective force” that in existing society was being

exploited by the capitalists who reaped the benefit of the resulting

increase in productive power. “Two hundred grenadiers stood the obelisk

of Luxor upon its base in a few hours,” Proudhon wrote in What Is

Property, “do you suppose that one man could have accomplished the same

task in two hundred days?” (Volume One, Selection 8).

Proudhon therefore advocated workers’ control or worker self-management

of industry, later referred to in France as “autogestion,” an idea that

became a major tenet of subsequent anarchist movements (Guérin, Volume

Two, Selection 49). In Proudhon’s proposals, all positions in each

enterprise would be elected by the workers themselves, who would approve

all by-laws, each worker would have the right to fill any position,

“unpleasant and disagreeable tasks” would be shared, and each worker

would be given a “variety of work and knowledge” so as to avoid a

stultifying division of labour. Everyone would “participate in the gains

and in the losses” of the enterprise “in proportion to his services,”

with pay being “proportional to the nature of the position, the

importance of the talents, and the extent of responsibility” (Volume

One, Selection 12).

1848: Anarchism and Revolution in Europe

In early 1848, revolution broke out in Sicily, quickly spreading

throughout the Italian peninsula. The February 1848 Revolution soon

followed in France, with the king being overthrown and a provisional

republican government proclaimed. There were revolutions in various

parts of Germany and Eastern Europe (with Bakunin somehow managing to

take a part in most of them until his arrest in Dresden in May 1849).

Anarchist ideas began to gain some currency, particularly in France, in

no small part due to Proudhon’s own efforts.

The provisional government in France instituted universal male suffrage,

which Proudhon referred to as “the counter-revolution” because the

election of representatives, no matter how broad the electoral base,

gives power to those representatives, not of the people, but of

particular interests, legitimizing rule by those interests by making it

appear that a government elected by universal suffrage represents the

interests of the people. In fact, the Constituent Assembly elected in

April 1848 was dominated by right-wing and bourgeois representatives.

Rejection of and opposition to representative government and

participation in parliamentary politics distinguished the anarchists

from other socialist currents and helped lead to the split in the First

International between Marx and his followers, who advocated the creation

of national political parties to represent the interests of the working

class, and the proto-anarchist anti-authoritarian federalists associated

with Bakunin (Volume One, Chapters 5 & 6).

In Confessions of a Revolutionary (1849), Proudhon denounced the

alliance between capital, religion and the state:

“Capital, which in the political field is analogous to government, in

religion has Catholicism as its synonym. The economic idea of

capitalism, the politics of government or of authority, and the

theological idea of the Church are three identical ideas, linked in

various ways. To attack one of them is equivalent to attacking all of

them… What capital does to labour, and the State to liberty, the Church

does to the spirit. This trinity of absolutism is as baneful in practice

as it is in philosophy. The most effective means for oppressing the

people would be simultaneously to enslave its body, its will and its

reason.” (Nettlau: 43–44)

In The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19^(th) Century, written

from prison while Proudhon was incarcerated for having denounced

Napoleon III as the personification of reaction, Proudhon wrote that the

“fundamental, decisive idea” of the Revolution is this: “NO MORE

AUTHORITY, neither in the Church, nor in the State, nor in land, nor in

money” (Volume One, Selection 12). He described the law as “spider webs

for the rich and powerful, steel chains for the weak and poor, fishing

nets in the hands of the government,” advocating in their place a

“system of contracts” based on the notion of equivalent exchange (Volume

One, Selection 12). While subsequent anarchists were, for the most part,

to reject Proudhon’s notion of equivalent exchange, they concurred with

Proudhon that social relationships should be based on free agreements

between individuals directly and between the various voluntary

associations to which they may belong (Graham, 1989).

In Spain, anarchists referred to these agreements as “pacts” (pactos).

In 1854, Francisco Pi y Margall (1824–1901), who introduced Proudhon’s

ideas to a Spanish audience, argued that between “two sovereign entities

there is room only for pacts. Authority and sovereignty are

contradictions. Society based on authority ought, therefore, to give way

to society based upon contract” (Volume One, Selection 15).

Not only in Spain, but throughout the nascent international anarchist

movements, anarchists advocated contract, conceived as free agreement,

as the means by which people would voluntarily federate into broader

trade union, communal, regional and international organizations with no

central authority above them, with each person and federated group being

free to disassociate or secede from any federalist organization (Graham,

1989). They agreed with the argument put forward by Proudhon in his

influential book, On the Political Capacity of the Working Classes

(1865), that without the right of secession, federalism would be “merely

an illusion, empty boasting, a lie” (Volume One, Selection 18).

In the aftermath of the 1848 French Revolution, Proudhon was not alone

in advocating anarchy as a positive ideal. In 1850, the young

journalist, Anselme Bellegarrigue, briefly published a newspaper,

L’Anarchie, in which he argued that “anarchy is order, whereas

government is civil war” (Volume One, Selection 13), echoing Proudhon’s

comment in What Is Property that society “finds its highest perfection

in the union of order with anarchy” (Volume One, Selection 8).

The Italian revolutionary, Carlo Pisacane (1818–1857), demanded the

abolition of all hierarchy and authority, to be replaced by a form of

socialism similar to Proudhon’s mutualism, based on voluntary contract

and “free association”. Anticipating the doctrine of “propaganda by the

deed,” Pisacane argued that the most effective propaganda is

revolutionary action, for ideas “spring from deeds and not the other way

around” (Volume One, Selection 16).

Joseph Déjacque (1821–1864), the first person to use the word

“libertarian” as a synonym for “anarchist,” conceived of anarchy as the

“complete, boundless, utter freedom to do anything and everything that

is in human nature” (Volume One, Selection 14). Exiled from France after

the 1848 Revolution, he called for the abolition of religion, private

property, the patriarchal nuclear family, all authority and privilege,

and for the “liberation of woman, the emancipation of the child.”

Déjacque’s Critique of Proudhon

Déjacque’s anarchist critique was much broader than Proudhon’s. Proudhon

saw the patriarchal nuclear family as the basis of society, and argued

that woman’s place was in the home. He did not advocate the complete

abolition of property, arguing instead for a fairer distribution of

wealth based on individual contribution and equivalent exchange.

Déjacque took Proudhon to task on both points, arguing for the complete

abolition of “property and authority in every guise” (Volume One,

Selection 17). He rejected Proudhon’s mutualism as a “system of

contracts” for determining each person’s “allotted measure” of things

instead of everyone having access to whatever their “nature or

temperament requires.” Déjacque believed that everyone should be “free

to consume and to produce as they see fit,” advocating a form of

anarchist communism twenty years before similar views were to be adopted

by anarchists associated with the anti-authoritarian wing of the First

International (Volume One, Chapter 8).

Rejecting Proudhon’s views on women, Déjacque argued that “the issue of

woman’s emancipation” must be placed “on the same footing as the issue

of emancipation of the proletarian” (Volume One, Selection 17). He

looked forward to “man and woman striding with the same step and heart…

towards their natural destiny, the anarchic community; with all

despotism annihilated, all social inequalities banished.”

Ernest Coeurderoy: Citizen of the World

Another French exile with anarchist sensibilities was Ernest Coeurderoy

(1825–1862). In a passage from his Days of Exile, remarkably similar to

comments made by Subcomandante Marcos in the 1990s, Coeurderoy

identified himself with all of the oppressed, writing that:

“In every land there are folk who are kicked out and driven away, killed

and burnt out without a single voice of compassion to speak up for them.

They are the Jews.—I am a Jew.

Skinny, untamed, restless men, sprightlier than horses and as dusky as

the bastards of Shem, roam through the Andalusian countryside… The doors

of every home are barred to them, in hamlet and town alike. A widespread

disapproval weighs upon their breed… Such men are known as Gitanos.—I am

a Gitano…

In Paris one can see wayward boys, naked, who hide under the bridges

along the canal in the mid-winter and dive into the murky waters in

search of a sou tossed to them by a passing onlooker… Their trade

consists in purloining scarves and pretending to ask for a light but

swapping cigarettes. These are the Bohemians.—I am a Bohemian…

Everywhere, there are people banned from promenades, museums, cafes and

theatres because a heartless wretchedness mocks their day wear. If they

dare to show themselves in public, every eye turns to stare at them; and

the police forbid them to go near fashionable locations. But, mightier

than any police, their righteous pride in themselves takes exception to

being singled out for widespread stigma.—I am one of that breed” (1854).

The First International and the Emergence of the Anarchist Movement

Bellegarrigue, Déjacque and Coeurderoy were dead or forgotten by the

time the International Association of Workingmen (the First

International) was founded in 1864 (Volume One, Selection 19). It was

only after the emergence in Europe of self-identified anarchist

movements in the 1870s that Pisacane’s writings were rediscovered. Of

the anarchists from the 1840s and 50s, only Proudhon and Pi y Margall

continued to exercise some influence, but by then both identified

themselves as federalists rather than anarchists (Volume One, Selection

18). Prouhon’s followers in the First International supported his

mutualist ideas, advocating free credit, small property holdings and

equivalent exchange. They agreed with Proudhon that a woman’s place was

in the home and argued that only workingmen should be allowed into the

First International, which meant that intellectuals, such as Karl Marx,

should also be excluded. They shared Proudhon’s critical view of

strikes, regarding them as coercive and ineffective, but in practice

provided financial and other support to striking workers.

Within the First International there were more radical elements that

gave expression to a renewed sense of militancy among European workers.

These Internationalists, such as Eugène Varlin (1839–1871) in France,

were in favour of trade unions, seeing them as a means for organizing

the workers to press their demands through collective direct action,

such as strikes and boycotts. The ultimate aim was for the workers to

take control of their workplaces, replacing the state and capitalism

with local, regional, national and international federations of

autonomous workers’ organizations.

Opposing these “anti-authoritarian” Internationalists were not only the

orthodox Proudhonists, but Karl Marx and his followers, as well as some

Blanquists, who favoured centralized organization and the subordination

of the trade unions to political parties that would coordinate

opposition to capitalism and seek to achieve state power, either through

participation in bourgeois politics, revolution or a combination of

both. Disagreements over the International’s internal form of

organization and participation in politics would lead to the split in

the International in 1872.

By 1868 the International had adopted a policy in favour of strikes and

collective ownership of the means of production. However, collective

ownership did not necessarily mean state ownership, as many

Internationalists advocated workers’ control of industry through the

workers’ own organizations and continued to support other aspects of

Proudhon’s mutualism, such as workers’ mutual aid societies,

cooperatives and credit unions. Varlin, for example, organized a

cooperative restaurant with Nathalie Lemel (who later converted Louise

Michel to anarchism). Some Geneva Internationalists proposed that half

of the cooperatives’ profits be paid into the workers’ “resistance”

funds, with the cooperatives also providing workers with financial aid

and credit during strikes (Cutler, 1985: 213, fn. 69).

Bakunin: “We do not fear anarchy, we invoke it”

Bakunin had begun to articulate a revolutionary anarchist position in

the mid-1860s, prior to his entry into the International in 1868. He

advocated socialism and federalism based on “the most complete liberty

for individuals as well as associations,” rejecting both bourgeois

republicanism and state socialism (Volume One, Selection 20). He

rejected any “call for the establishment of a ruling authority of any

nature whatsoever,” denouncing those revolutionaries who “dream of

creating new revolutionary states, as fully centralized and even more

despotic than the states we now have” (Volume One, Selections 20 & 21).

“We do not fear anarchy,” declared Bakunin, “we invoke it. For we are

convinced that anarchy, meaning the unrestricted manifestation of the

liberated life of the people, must spring from liberty, equality, the

new social order, and the force of the revolution itself against the

reaction.” The new social order will be created “from the bottom up,

from the circumference to the center… not from the top down or from the

center to the circumference in the manner of all authority” (Volume One,

Selection 21).

Bakunin opposed any attempts to justify the sacrifice of human lives in

the name of some ideal or “abstraction,” including patriotism, the

state, God or even science. Someone who is “always ready to sacrifice

his own liberty… will willingly sacrifice the liberty of others” (Volume

One, Selection 20). The revolutionary socialist, “on the contrary,

insists upon his positive rights to life and to all its intellectual,

moral, and physical joys.” In addition to rejecting any notions of

individual self-sacrifice, Bakunin argued against revolutionary

terrorism as counter-revolutionary. To “make a successful revolution, it

is necessary to attack conditions and material goods, to destroy

property and the State. It will then become unnecessary to destroy men

and be condemned to suffer the sure and inevitable reaction which no

massacre had ever failed and ever will fail to produce in every society”

(Volume One, Selection 21).

Bakunin argued that the means adopted by revolutionaries should be

consistent with their ends. Accordingly, the International should itself

be organized “from the bottom up… in accordance with the natural

diversity of [the workers’] occupations and circumstances.” The workers’

organizations would “bear in themselves the living seeds of the new

society which is to replace the old world. They are creating not only

the ideas, but also the facts of the future itself.” Consequently, he

rejected the view that the majority of the workers, even within the

International itself, should accept the “fraternal command” of those who

claimed to know what is best for them, as this would divide the

International “into two groups—one comprising the vast majority… whose

only knowledge will be blind faith in the theoretical and practical

wisdom of their commanders,” and a minority of “skilled manipulators” in

control of the organization (Volume One, Selection 25).

Bakunin’s anarchist critique went well beyond attacking property,

religion and the state. In addition to arguing against hierarchical and

authoritarian organization within the revolutionary movement itself,

Bakunin sought to free women from their domestic burdens, with society

taking collective responsibility for raising and educating children,

enabling women to marry and divorce as they please. Bakunin rejected

patriarchy in general, denouncing the “despotism of the husband, of the

father, of the eldest brother over the family,” which turns the family

“into a school of violence and triumphant bestiality, of cowardice and

the daily perversions of the family home” (Volume One, Selection 67).

With respect to education, Bakunin argued that “one who knows more will

naturally rule over the one who knows less.” After the revolution,

unless differences in education and upbringing are eliminated, “the

human world would find itself in its present state, divided anew into a

large number of slaves and a small number of rulers” (Volume One,

Selection 64). Bakunin looked forward to the day when “the masses,

ceasing to be flocks led and shorn by privileged priests,” whether

secular or religious, “may take into their own hands the direction of

their destinies” (Volume One, Selection 24).

Bakunin argued against the rule of the more learned, the savants, the

intellectuals and the scientists, whether within the International or in

society at large. His targets here were the followers of Auguste Comte

(1798–1857) and Karl Marx, with their pretensions to “scientific

government” and “scientific socialism.” To confide “the government of

society” to any scientific body, political party or group would result

in the “eternal perpetuation” of that group’s power “by rendering the

society confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently in need

of its government and direction” (Volume One, Selection 24). Bakunin was

perhaps the first to develop this critique of the role of intellectuals,

the “new class,” and their rise to power, either by taking over

leadership of the revolutionary workers’ movement or through control of

the state bureaucracy, for the “State has always been the patrimony of

some privileged class: the priesthood, the nobility, the bourgeoisie,

and finally, after every other class has been exhausted, the

bureaucratic class, when the State falls or rises… into the condition of

a machine” (Volume One, Selection 22).

Noam Chomsky has described Bakunin’s analyses and predictions in this

regard as being perhaps “among the most remarkable within the social

sciences” (Volume Two, Selection 68). Subsequent anarchists adopted

Bakunin’s critique (Berti, Volume Two, Selection 67) and his suggestion

that the inequalities that arise from differences in knowledge can be

prevented by “integral education,” which breaks down the barriers

between practical and scientific education, and by the elimination of

any distinction between manual and “intellectual” or “brain” work

(Volume One, Selection 64). In his highly influential book, Fields,

Factories and Workshops (1898), Peter Kropotkin set forth practical

alternatives to the present “division of society into brain workers and

manual workers,” with all its “pernicious” distinctions, advocating,

much like Fourier had before him, a daily combination of manual and

intellectual work, human-scale technology and the integration of the

fields, factories and workshops in a decentralized system of production,

providing for “the happiness that can be found in the full and varied

exercise of the different capacities of the human being” (Volume One,

Selection 34).

Bakunin was instrumental in spreading anarchist ideas among

revolutionary and working class movements in Italy, Spain, Switzerland

and Russia and within the International itself. According to Kropotkin,

it was Bakunin more than anyone else who “established in a series of

powerful pamphlets and letters the leading principles of modern

anarchism” (1912).

The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune

The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1870–1871 had a

significant impact on emerging anarchist movements. Bakunin argued that

the War should be turned into a mass uprising by the French workers and

peasants against their domestic and foreign masters. To bring the

peasants over to the side of the social revolution, Bakunin urged his

fellow revolutionaries to incite the peasantry “to destroy, by direct

action, every political, judicial, civil and military institution,” to

“throw out those landlords who live by the labour of others” and to

seize the land. He rejected any notion of revolutionary dictatorship,

warning that any attempt “to impose communism or collectivism on the

peasants… would spark an armed rebellion” that would only strengthen

counter-revolutionary tendencies (Volume One, Selection 28).

Although it was Proudhon who had first proposed an alliance between the

workers and peasants, it was Bakunin who saw the peasantry as a

potentially revolutionary force. Bakunin and subsequent anarchists did

not believe that a social revolution was only possible in advanced

capitalist societies with a large industrial proletariat, as Marxists

claimed, but rather looked to the broad masses of the exploited and

downtrodden to overthrow their oppressors. Consequently, anarchists

supported the efforts of indigenous peoples to liberate themselves from

colonial domination and the local elites which benefitted from

colonialism at their expense, particularly in Latin America with its

feudalist latifundia system which concentrated ownership of the land in

the hands of a few (Volume One, Selections 71, 76 & 91). In Russia,

Italy, Spain and Mexico, anarchists sought to incite the peasants to

rebellion with the battle cry of “Land and Liberty” (Volume One,

Selections 71, 73, 85, 86, & 124), while anarchists in China, Japan and

Korea sought the liberation of the peasant masses from their feudal

overlords (Volume One, Selections 97, 99, 101, 104 & 105).

Bakunin argued that the best way to incite the masses to revolt was “not

with words but with deeds, for this is the most potent, and the most

irresistible form of propaganda” (Volume One, Selection 28). In Mexico,

the anarchist Julio Chavez Lopez led a peasant uprising in 1868–1869, in

which the insurgents would occupy a village or town, burn the land

titles and redistribute the land among the peasants (Hart: 39). In

September 1870, Bakunin participated in a short-lived attempt to create

a revolutionary Commune in Lyon, proclaiming the abolition of mortgages

and the judicial system (Leier: 258). He made a similar attempt with his

anarchist comrades in Bologna in 1874.

In 1877, Bakunin’s associates, Carlo Cafiero (1846–1892), Errico

Malatesta (1853–1932) and a small group of anarchists tried to provoke a

peasant uprising in Benevento, Italy, by burning the local land titles,

giving the villagers back their tax moneys and handing out whatever

weapons they could find. Paul Brousse (1844–1912) described this as

“propaganda by the deed,” by which he did not mean individual acts of

terrorism but putting anarchist ideas into action by seizing a commune,

placing “the instruments of production… in the hands of the workers,”

and instituting anarchist communism (Volume One, Selection 43).

The inspiration for this form of propaganda by the deed was the Paris

Commune of 1871, when the people of Paris proclaimed the revolutionary

Commune, throwing out their national government. Varlin and other

Internationalists took an active part in the Commune. After its bloody

suppression by the Versailles government, during which Varlin was

killed, several Communards were to adopt an explicitly anarchist

position, including Elisée Reclus and Louise Michel.

The anti-authoritarian sections of the First International supported the

Commune and provided refuge for exiled Communards. Bakunin commended the

Communards for believing that the social revolution “could neither be

made nor brought to its full development except by the spontaneous and

continued action of the masses” (Volume One, Selection 29). James

Guillaume thought that the Commune represented the revolutionary

federalist negation of the nation State that “the great socialist

Proudhon” had been advocating for years. By 1873, the Jura Federation of

the International was describing the Commune as the first practical

realization of the anarchist program of the proletariat. However, as

David Stafford points out, the “massacre of the Communards and the

savage measures which followed it (it has been estimated that 30,000

people were killed or executed by the Versailles forces)” helped turn

anarchists further away from Proudhon’s pacifist mutualism, which was

seen as completely unable to deal with counter-revolutionary violence

(Stafford: 20).

Louise Michel (1830–1905) had fought on the barricades when the French

government sent in its troops to put down the Commune. The Union of

Women for the Defence of Paris and the Care of the Wounded issued a

manifesto calling for “the annihilation of all existing social and legal

relations, the suppression of all special privileges, the end of all

exploitation, the substitution of the reign of work for the reign of

capital” (Volume One, Selection 30). At Michel’s trial after the

suppression of the Commune, she declared that she belonged “completely

to the Social Revolution,” vowing that if her life were spared by the

military tribunal, she would “not stop crying for vengeance,” daring the

tribunal, if they were not cowards, to kill her (Volume One, Selection

30).

Anarchists drew a number of lessons from the Commune. Kropotkin argued

that the only way to have consolidated the Commune was “by means of the

social revolution” (Volume One, Selection 31), with “expropriation”

being its “guiding word.” The “coming revolution,” Kropotkin wrote,

would “fail in its historic mission” without “the complete expropriation

of all those who have the means of exploiting human beings; [and] the

return to the community… of everything that in the hands of anyone can

be used to exploit others” (Volume One, Selection 45).

With respect to the internal organization of the Commune, Kropotkin

noted that there “is no more reason for a government inside a commune

than for a government above the commune.” Instead of giving themselves a

“revolutionary” government, isolating the revolutionaries from the

people and paralyzing popular initiative, the task is to abolish

“property, government, and the state,” so that the people can

“themselves take possession of all social wealth so as to put it in

common,” and “form themselves freely according to the necessities

dictated to them by life itself” (Volume One, Selection 31).

The Split in the First International

Following the suppression of the Commune, the conflict in the

International between the anti-authoritarians and the supporters of top

down political organization, such as Marx and his followers, came to a

head. In response to Marx’s attempt to consolidate power in the

International’s General Council, and to make the conquest of political

power by the working class a mandatory policy of the International, the

Swiss Jura Federation denounced the fictitious unity the Council sought

to create through “centralization and dictatorship,” arguing that the

“International, as the embryo of the human society of the future, is

required in the here and now to faithfully mirror our principles of

freedom and federation” (Volume One, Selection 26).

After Bakunin and Guillaume were expelled, largely at Marx’s

instigation, from the International on trumped up charges at the 1872

Hague Congress, the anti-authoritarian sections of the International

held their own congress at St. Imier in Switzerland. The Congress

declared “the destruction of all political power,” rather than its

conquest, as “the first duty of the proletariat,” whose “aspirations…

can have no purpose other than the establishment of an absolutely free

economic organization and federation, founded upon the labour and

equality of all” (Volume One, Selection 27).

The St. Imier Congress extolled the benefits of militant trade union

organization, for “it integrates the proletariat into a community of

interests, trains it in collective living and prepares it for the

supreme struggle.” The Congress embraced strike action “as a precious

weapon in the struggle,” because it exposes “the antagonism between

labour and capital” and prepares “the proletariat for the great and

final revolutionary contest” (Volume One, Selection 27). Whether the

final revolutionary contest would be an insurrection, a general strike,

or a combination of the two remained open to debate. At the time, many

anarchists favoured insurrection, particularly those associated with the

Italian Federation, which attempted insurrections in Bologna in 1874 and

Benevento in 1877.

The proto-syndicalist elements in the anti-authoritarian wing of the

International, exemplified by Guillaume, emphasized the need for

organized working class resistance to the State and capital. This

approach was particularly prominent in Spain and various parts of Latin

America, where anarchists were involved in creating some of the first

trade unions and workers’ federations.

In Spain this doctrine became known as anarchist “collectivism,” which

the Spanish veteran of the First International, José Llunas Pujols

(1850–1905), defined as “a society organized on the basis of collective

ownership, economic federation and the complete emancipation of the

human being” (Volume One, Selection 36). The “unit of organization

would… be the trades section in each locality,” with administrative

tasks performed by delegates who would be replaced if they failed to

adhere to the mandates given to them by their respective sections

(Volume One, Selection 36). This form of working class direct democracy,

similar to the “Worker Democracy” advocated by Proudhon in On the

Political Capacity of the Working Classes (Volume One, Selection 18),

was later taken up by the anarcho-syndicalists (Volume One, Chapter 12).

Following the defeat of the Paris Commune, the International was

outlawed in much of Europe, making it extremely difficult for anarchists

to maintain or create revolutionary working class organizations.

Although the anti-authoritarian International outlasted the Marxist wing

by several years, it eventually split between the anarchist communists,

who favoured insurrectionary methods, the proto-syndicalists who

favoured federations of revolutionary unions, and more moderate

federalists who eventually embraced state socialism, such as César de

Paepe from Belgium.

Anarchist Communism

It was from among the debates within the anti-authoritarian

International that the doctrine of anarchist communism emerged in the

1870s. François Dumartheray published a pamphlet in February 1876

advocating anarchist communism, and Elisée Reclus spoke in favour of it

at the March 1876 Lausanne Congress of the anti-authoritarian

International. By the fall of 1876, the Italian Federation considered

“the collective ownership of the products of labour to be the necessary

complement of the [anarchist] collectivist” program of common ownership

of the means of production (Nettlau: 139). Anarchist communism was

debated at the September 1877 Verviers Congress of the

anti-authoritarian International, with Paul Brousse and the Italian

anarchist, Andrea Costa, arguing in favour, and the Spanish anarchists,

Tomás González Morago and José García Viñas, defending the collectivist

view, shared by Proudhon and Bakunin, that each person should be

entitled to the full product of his or her labour.

At the October 1880 Congress of the Jura Federation, the delegates

adopted an anarchist communist position, largely as the result of

Cafiero’s speech, “Anarchy and Communism” (Volume One, Selection 32).

Cafiero defined the communist principle as “from each and to each

according to his will,” with everyone having the right to take what they

will “without demanding from individuals more work than they would like

to give.” With production being geared towards satisfying people’s wants

and needs, instead of the financial demands of the military, the state

and the wealthy few, there will be no “need to ask for more work than

each wants to give, because there will be enough products for the

morrow.”

Cafiero argued against the collectivist position on the basis that

“individual distribution of products would re-establish not only

inequality between men, but also inequality between different kinds of

work,” with the less fortunate being relegated the “dirty work,” instead

of it being “vocation and personal taste which would decide a man to

devote himself to one form of activity rather than another.”

Furthermore, with “the ever-increasing tendency of modern labour to make

use of the labour of previous generations” embodied in the existing

economic infrastructure, “how could we determine what is the share of

the product of one and the share of the product of another? It is

absolutely impossible.” With respect to goods which are not sufficiently

abundant to permit everyone to take what they will, Cafiero suggested

that such goods should be distributed “not according to merit but

according to need,” much as they are in present-day families, with those

in greater need, such as children and the elderly, being given the

larger portions during periods of scarcity (Volume One, Selection 32).

Kropotkin further developed the theory of anarchist communism in a

series of pamphlets and books, the best know and most influential being

The Conquest of Bread (Volume One, Selection 33), and Fields, Factories

and Workshops (Volume One, Selection 34). The Conquest of Bread helped

persuade many anarchists, including former collectivists in Spain,

anarcho-syndicalists (Volume One, Selections 58, 84, 95 & 114), and

anarchists in Japan, China and Korea (Volume One, Selections 99, 106 &

108), to adopt an anarchist communist position, sometimes referred to,

particularly in Spain, as “libertarian communism” (Volume One, Selection

124).

In Fields, Factories and Workshops, Kropotkin set forth his vision of a

decentralized anarchist communist society “of integrated, combined

labour… where each worker works both in the field and in the workshop,”

and each region “produces and itself consumes most of its own

agricultural and manufactured produce.” At “the gates of your fields and

gardens,” there will be a “countless variety of workshops and factories…

required to satisfy the infinite diversity of tastes… in which human

life is of more account than machinery and the making of extra profits…

into which men, women and children will not be driven by hunger, but

will be attracted by the desire of finding an activity suited to their

tastes” (Volume One, Selection 34). This remarkably advanced conception

of an ecologically sustainable society inspired many subsequent

anarchists, including Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) in Germany (Volume

One, Selection 111), and through him the kibbutz movement in Palestine

(Buber, Volume Two, Selection 16, and Horrox, 2009), the anarchist

communists in China (Volume One, Selection 99), the “pure” anarchists of

Japan (Volume One, Selection 106), and the anarchist advocates of

libertarian communism in Spain (Volume One, Selection 124).

Paul and Percival Goodman updated Kropotkin’s ideas in Communitas

(1947), proposing not only the integration of the fields, factories and

workshops, but also the home and the workplace, providing for

decentralized, human-scale production designed “to give the most

well-rounded employment to each person, in a diversified environment,”

based on “small units with relative self-sufficiency, so that each

community can enter into a larger whole with solidarity and independence

of viewpoint” (Volume Two, Selection 17). In the 1960s, Murray Bookchin

(1921–2006) argued that “the anarchist concepts of a balanced community,

a face-to-face democracy, a humanistic technology, and a decentralized

society… are not only desirable, they are also necessary” to avoid

ecological collapse and to support a libertarian society (Volume Two,

Selection 48), a point made earlier by Ethel Mannin (Volume Two,

Selection 14). Kropotkin continues to influence and inspire “green”

anarchists, such as Graham Purchase, who advocates an anarchist form of

bioregionalism (Volume Three, Selection 28), and Peter Marshall, with

his “liberation ecology” (Volume Three, Selection 30).

There is another aspect of Kropotkin’s conception of anarchist communism

that had far-reaching implications, and this is his vision of a free

society which “seeks the most complete development of individuality

combined with the highest development of voluntary association in all

its aspects.” These “ever changing, ever modified associations” will

“constantly assume new forms which answer best to the multiple

aspirations of all” (Volume One, Selection 41). Some Italian anarchist

communists, such as Luigi Galleani (1861–1931), argued for an even more

fluid concept of voluntary association, opposing any attempts to create

permanent organizations, whether an anarchist federation or a

revolutionary trade union, arguing that any formal organization

inevitably requires its members to “submit for the sake of discipline”

and unity to “provisions, decisions, [and] measures… even though they

may be contrary to their opinion and their interest” (Volume One,

Selection 35).

As Davide Turcato points out (2009), the debate between

“anti-organizationalists,” such as Galleani, and the

“organizationalists,” such as Malatesta, “was a debate of great

sophistication,” which developed many ideas which were to “become common

currency in the sociological literature, particularly through the work

of Robert Michels,” who recognized that “anarchists were the first to

insist upon the hierarchical and oligarchic consequences of party

organization.”

Most anarchist communists, including Kropotkin and Malatesta, believed

that nonhierarchical organization is possible and desirable, although

one must always be on guard against oligarchic and bureaucratic

tendencies. In our day, Colin Ward (1924–2010), drawing explicitly on

Kropotkin’s theory of voluntary association, has endeavoured to show

that anarchist ideas regarding “autonomous groups, workers’ control,

[and] the federal principle, add up to a coherent theory of social

organization which is a valid and realistic alternative to the

authoritarian, hierarchical institutional philosophy which we see in

application all around us” (Volume Two, Selection 63).

Means and Ends

There were ongoing debates among anarchists regarding methods and

tactics. Cafiero agreed with the late Carlo Pisacane that “ideals spring

from deeds, and not the other way around” (Volume One, Selections 16 &

44). He argued that anarchists should seize every opportunity to incite

“the rabble and the poor” to violent revolution, “by word, by writing,

by dagger, by gun, by dynamite, sometimes even by the ballot when it is

a case of voting for an ineligible candidate” (Volume One, Selection

44).

Kropotkin argued that by exemplary actions “which compel general

attention, the new idea seeps into people’s minds and wins converts. One

such act may, in a few days, make more propaganda than thousands of

pamphlets” (1880).

Jean Grave (1854–1939) explained that through propaganda by the deed,

the anarchist “preaches by example.” Consequently, contrary to Cafiero,

“the means employed must always be adapted to the end, under pain of

producing the exact contrary of one’s expectations”. For Grave, the

“surest means of making Anarchy triumph is to act like an Anarchist”

(Volume One, Selection 46). Some anarchists agreed with Cafiero that any

method that brought anarchy closer was acceptable, including bombings

and assassinations. At the 1881 International Anarchist Congress in

London, the delegates declared themselves in favour of “illegality” as

“the only way leading to revolution” (Cahm: 157–158), echoing Cafiero’s

statement from the previous year that “everything is right for us which

is not legal” (Volume One, Selection 44).

After years of state persecution, a small minority of self-proclaimed

anarchists adopted terrorist tactics in the 1890s. Anarchist groups had

been suppressed in Spain, Germany and Italy in the 1870s, particularly

after some failed assassination attempts on the Kaiser in Germany, and

the Kings of Italy and Spain in the late 1870s, even before Russian

revolutionaries assassinated Czar Alexander II in 1881. Although none of

the would be assassins were anarchists, the authorities and capitalist

press blamed the anarchists and their doctrine of propaganda by the deed

for these events, with the Times of London describing anarchism in 1879

as having “revolution for its starting point, murder for its means, and

anarchy for its ideals” (Stafford: 131).

Those anarchists in France who had survived the Paris Commune were

imprisoned, transported to penal colonies, or exiled. During the 1870s

and 1880s, anarchists were prosecuted for belonging to the First

International. In 1883, several anarchists in France, including

Kropotkin, were imprisoned on the basis of their alleged membership,

despite the fact that the anti-authoritarian International had ceased to

exist by 1881. At their trial they declared: “Scoundrels that we are, we

claim bread for all, knowledge for all, work for all, independence and

justice for all” (Manifesto of the Anarchists, Lyon 1883).

Perhaps the most notorious persecution of the anarchists around this

time was the trial and execution of the four “Haymarket Martyrs” in

Chicago in 1887 (a fifth, Louis Lingg, cheated the executioner by

committing suicide). They were convicted and condemned to death on

trumped up charges that they were responsible for throwing a bomb at a

demonstration in the Chicago Haymarket area in 1886.

When Emile Henry (1872–1894) threw a bomb into a Parisian café in 1894,

describing his act as “propaganda by the deed,” he regarded it as an act

of vengeance for the thousands of workers massacred by the bourgeoisie,

such as the Communards, and the anarchists who had been executed by the

authorities in Germany, France, Spain and the United States. He meant to

show to the bourgeoisie “that those who have suffered are tired at last

of their suffering” and “will strike all the more brutally if you are

brutal with them” (1894). He denounced those anarchists who eschewed

individual acts of terrorism as cowards.

Malatesta, who was no pacifist, countered such views by describing as

“ultra-authoritarians” those anarchists who try “to justify and exalt

every brutal deed” by arguing that the bourgeoisie are just “as bad or

worse.” By doing so, these self-described anarchists had entered “on a

path which is the most absolute negation of all anarchist ideas and

sentiments.” Although they had “entered the movement inspired with those

feelings of love and respect for the liberty of others which distinguish

the true Anarchist,” as a result of “a sort of moral intoxication

produced by the violent struggle” they ended up extolling actions

“worthy of the greatest tyrants.” He warned that “the danger of being

corrupted by the use of violence, and of despising the people, and

becoming cruel as well as fanatical prosecutors, exists for all” (Volume

One, Selection 48).

In the 1890s, the French state brought in draconian laws banning

anarchist activities and publications. Bernard Lazare (1865–1903), the

writer and journalist then active in the French anarchist movement,

denounced the hypocrisy of the defenders of the status quo who, as the

paid apologists for the police, rationalized the far greater violence of

the state. He defiantly proclaimed that no “law can halt free thought,

no penalty can stop us from uttering the truth… and the Idea, gagged,

bound and beaten, will emerge all the more lively, splendid and mighty”

(Volume One, Selection 62).

Malatesta took a more sober approach, recognizing that “past history

contains examples of persecutions which stopped and destroyed a movement

as well as of others which brought about a revolution.” He criticized

those “comrades who expect the triumph of our ideas from the

multiplication of acts of individual violence,” arguing that “bourgeois

society cannot be overthrown” by bombs and knife blows because it is

based “on an enormous mass of private interests and prejudices…

sustained… by the inertia of the masses and their habits of submission.”

While he argued that anarchists should ignore and defy anti-anarchist

laws and measures where able to do so, he felt that anarchists had

isolated themselves from the people. He called on anarchists to “live

among the people and to win them over… by actively taking part in their

struggles and sufferings,” for the anarchist social revolution can only

succeed when the people are “ready to fight and… to take the conduct of

their affairs into their own hands” (Volume One, Selection 53).

Anarchism and the Workers’ Struggles

The Haymarket Martyrs were part of the so-called “Black International,”

the International Working People’s Association. The IWPA drew its

inspiration from the anti-authoritarian International, and adopted a

social revolutionary anarchist program at its founding Congress in

Pittsburgh in 1883, openly advocating armed insurrection and the

revolutionary expropriation of the capitalists by the workers themselves

(Volume One, Selection 55). Following the example of the

anti-authoritarian International of the 1870s, the IWPA sought to create

revolutionary trade unions that would press for the immediate demands of

the workers, for example the 8 hour day, while preparing for the social

revolution. Around the same time, similar ideas were being propounded by

the Workers’ Federation of the Spanish Region (Volume One, Selection

36), and by anarchists involved in working class movements in Latin

America.

But by 1894 in Europe, when Malatesta again urged anarchists to go to

the people, many agreed with him that after “twenty years of propaganda

and struggle… we are today nearly strangers to the great popular

commotions which agitate Europe and America” (Volume One, Selection 53).

One of those anarchists was Fernand Pelloutier (1867–1901). Sensing

growing disillusionment among the workers with the electoral tactics of

the socialist parties, some anarchists had again become involved in the

trade union movement. Pelloutier argued that through participation in

the trade unions, anarchists “taught the masses the true meaning of

anarchism, a doctrine” which can readily “manage without the individual

dynamiter” (Volume One, Selection 56). It was from this renewed

involvement in the workers’ struggles that anarcho-syndicalism was born

(Volume One, Chapter 12).

Pelloutier argued, as Bakunin had before him (Volume One, Selection 25),

that revolutionary trade union organizations, unlike the state, are

based on voluntary membership and therefore operate largely on the basis

of free agreement. Any trade union “officials” are subject to “permanent

revocability,” and play a coordinating rather than a “directorial” role.

Through their own autonomous organizations, the workers will come “to

understand that they should regulate their affairs for themselves,” and

will be able to prevent the reconstitution of state power after the

revolution by taking control of “the instruments of production,” seeing

“to the operation of the economy through the free grouping,” rendering

“any political institution superfluous,” with the workers having already

become accustomed “to shrug off tutelage” through their participation in

the revolutionary trade union, or “syndicalist,” movement (Volume One,

Selection 56).

Also noteworthy in Pelloutier’s call for renewed anarchist involvement

in the workers’ movement was his endorsement of anarchist communism as

the ultimate goal of the revolutionary syndicalist movement. However, in

France, after Pelloutier’s death, the revolutionary syndicalist

organization, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), adopted a

policy of nonaffiliation with any party or doctrine, including

anarchism. CGT militants, such as Pierre Monatte, claimed that within

the CGT all doctrines enjoyed “equal tolerance” (Volume One, Selection

60). The CGT focused on the means of revolutionary action, such as

direct action and the general strike, instead of arguing over ideology.

This was in contrast to anarcho-syndicalist union federations, such as

the Workers’ Federations of the Argentine Region (FORA) and the

Uruguayan Region (FORU), which, as with Pelloutier, recommended “the

widest possible study of the economic-philosophical principles of

anarchist communism” (Volume One, Selection 58). The

anarcho-syndicalists sought to organize the workers into revolutionary

trade unions through which they would abolish the state and capitalism

by means of general strikes, factory occupations, expropriation and

insurrection. For the most part, their ultimate goal was anarchist

communism, the abolition of wage labour, private property and the state,

and the creation of free federations of worker, consumer and communal

associations, whether in Latin America (Volume One, Selection 95),

Russia (Volume One, Selection 84), Japan (Volume One, Selection 107),

Spain (Volume One, Selection 124), or elsewhere.

Anarcho-syndicalists were behind the reconstitution of the International

Workers’ Association (IWA/AIT) in 1922, with a membership of about two

million workers from 15 countries in Europe and Latin America. At their

founding Congress, they explicitly endorsed “libertarian communism” as

their goal and rejected any “form of statism, even the so-called

‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’,” because dictatorship “will always be

the creator of new monopolies and new privileges” (Volume One, Selection

114).

Anarchists who sought to work within revolutionary working class

organizations or popular movements adopted different approaches

regarding the proper relationship between their anarchist ideals and

these broader based social movements. Some, such as Amadée Dunois

(1878–1945), argued that anarchists needed their own organizations to

coordinate their activities, to support their work within the trade

unions and to spread their ideas, infusing the workers’ organizations

“with the anarchist spirit” (Dunois, 1907). This model of dual

organization was similar to what Bakunin had advocated during the First

International, when he urged his comrades in his revolutionary

brotherhood, the Alliance of Social Revolutionaries, which adhered to

Bakunin’s anarchist program, to join the International in order to steer

it in an anarchist direction.

Antonio Pellicer Paraire (1851–1916), a veteran of the anarchist

Workers’ Federation of the Spanish Region (Volume One, Selection 36),

acknowledged in an article from 1900 that, given the existing state of

the workers’ movement, “parallel or dual organization has to be

accepted,” with the anarchists maintaining their own revolutionary

groups, but he argued that the primary focus must be on creating

libertarian workers’ federations in which each worker is an equal and

active participant, so as to prevent the development of a trade union

bureaucracy and a de facto executive assuming control of the

organization. Each organization must in turn retain “their autonomy and

independence, free of meddling by other groups and with no one having

methods, systems, theories, schools of thought, beliefs, or any faith

shoved down his throat” (Volume One, Selection 57). Only through the

self-activity of the masses can an anarchist society hope to be

achieved.

In his posthumously published work, The Anarchist Conception of

Syndicalism (1920), Neno Vasco (1878–1920), who was active in the

Brazilian and Portuguese anarchist movements, warned of the dangers of

self-proclaimed anarchist groups, “populated more by rebels than by

anarchists,” seizing the initiative and forcing “emancipation” on the

people by claiming “the right to act on its behalf,” instead of

prompting the people “to look to its own liberation,” with “the persons

concerned” taking matters “directly in hand.” For example, the provision

of suitable housing “should be left to the tenants themselves,” a point

later emphasized by Giancarlo de Carlo (Volume Two, Selection 18) and

Colin Ward (1983), and “all the other production, transport and

distribution services… should be entrusted to the workers working in

each sector.”

Libertarian Education

Anarchists did not limit their involvement in popular struggles to the

workers’ movement. Anarchists were also involved in various libertarian

education movements that sought to bring to the masses the “integral

education” of which Bakunin spoke, in order to ensure “that in the

future no class can rule over the working masses, exploiting them,

superior to them because it knows more” (Volume One, Selection 64).

In Europe, North America, Latin America, China and Japan, Francisco

Ferrer (1859–1909) inspired the “Modern School” movement which sought to

liberate children from the authoritarian strictures of religious and

state controlled schools by creating schools outside of the existing

education system in which children would be free to pursue their

individual inclinations and interests. Ferrer argued that, in contrast,

religious and state schools imprison “children physically,

intellectually, and morally, in order to direct the development of their

faculties in the paths desired” by the authorities, making children

“accustomed to obey, to believe, to think according to the social dogmas

which govern us,” and education “but a means of domination in the hands

of the governing powers” (Volume One, Selection 65).

Ferrer had himself been influenced by earlier experiments in libertarian

education in England and France by anarchists like Louise Michel and

Paul Robin (1837–1912). His execution by Spanish authorities in 1909,

rather than putting an end to the Modern School movement, gave it

renewed inspiration.

In France, Sébastien Faure (1858–1942) founded the “la Ruche” (Beehive)

free school in 1904. La Ruche was noteworthy for providing boys and

girls with equal educational opportunities, sex education, and for its

rejection of any form of punishment or constraint, all very radical

approaches during an era when girls were either excluded or segregated,

information regarding sex and contraception was censored, even for

adults, and corporal punishment of students was routine. Faure, as with

Godwin before him, rejected any system of punishments and rewards

because “it makes no appeal” to the child’s reasoning or conscience,

producing “a slavish, cowardly, sheepish breed… capable of cruelty and

abjection” (Volume One, Selection 66)…

Herbert Read (1893–1968) later expanded on the role of modern education

in creating a submissive populace, much as Ferrer and Faure had before

him. Through the education system, “everything personal, everything

which is the expression of individual perceptions and feelings, is

either neglected, or subordinated to some conception of normality, of

social convention, of correctness.” Read therefore advocated libertarian

education, emphasizing the creative process and “education through art,”

arguing that it “is only in so far as we liberate” children, “shoots not

yet stunted or distorted by an environment of hatred and injustice, that

we can expect to make any enduring change in society” (Volume Two,

Selection 36).

Paul Goodman (1911–1972) described the school system as “compulsory

mis-education,” which perpetuated a society in which youth are “growing

up absurd.” His friend Ivan Illich (1926–2002) was later to advocate

“deschooling society” as a way of combating the commodification of

social life, where everything, and everybody, becomes a commodity to be

consumed (Volume Two, Selection 73). By the 1960s and 1970s, people were

again experimenting in libertarian education (Volume Two, Selection 46),

something which anarchists had been advocating since the time of William

Godwin.

Women’s Liberation

Louise Michel felt that women were “famished for learning” and could not

understand why men would try to cripple women’s intelligence, “as if

there were already too much intelligence in the world.” For Michel,

discrimination against girls and women was the greatest barrier to “the

equality of the sexes.” What women “want is knowledge and education and

liberty.” She looked forward to the day when men and women “will no more

argue about which sex is superior than races will argue about which race

is foremost in the world” (Volume One, Selection 68).

Bakunin opposed the legal institution of marriage, arguing that the

“union of a man and a woman must be free” (Volume One, Selection 67).

Carmen Lareva, an early anarchist feminist in Argentina who wrote for La

Voz de la Mujer in the 1890s, one of the first explicitly anarchist

feminist papers written by and for women, decried how the anarchist

advocacy of “free love” was distorted by opponents of anarchism into the

claim that anarchists wanted to liberate women only to turn them “into

concubines, sordid playthings for man’s unrestrained passions.” Lareva

argued that it was existing society, with its inequality, sexual

hypocrisy and exploitation, which drove women to prostitution and forced

them into marriages in which the woman “is required to feign love of

someone she simply detests” in exchange for food and housing (Volume

One, Selection 69).

Emma Goldman (1869–1940) argued that the only difference between a

married woman and a prostitute was “that the one has sold herself into

chattel slavery during life, for a home or a title, and the other one

sells herself for the length of time she desires.” She demanded “the

independence of woman; her right to support herself; to live for

herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases,” in

the here and now, not after the revolution (Volume One, Selection 70).

Real sexual liberation meant that women should have free access to

contraception so that they could be sexually active while still being

free to decide whether and when to have children. Both Goldman and the

American anarchist, Ezra Heywood (1829–1893), were imprisoned by U.S.

authorities for trying to make birth control information and devices

available to women.

Anarchist Morality

“Official morality,” wrote Elisée Reclus in 1894, “consists in bowing

humbly to one’s superiors and in proudly holding up one’s head before

one’s subordinates” (Volume One, Selection 38). True morality can only

exist between equals. “It is not only against the abstract trinity of

law, religion, and authority” that anarchists declare war, according to

Kropotkin, but the inequality that gives rise to “deceit, cunning,

exploitation, depravity, vice… It is in the name of equality that we are

determined to have no more prostituted, exploited, deceived and governed

men and women.”

This sense of justice and solidarity, “which brings the individual to

consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own,” has

been successively widened, from the clan, to the tribe, to the nation,

to the whole of humankind, until it is transcended by a “higher

conception of ‘no revenge for wrongs,’ and of freely giving more than

one expects to receive from his neighbours” (Volume One, Selection 54).

For Kropotkin, acting morally is not only natural, but a means of

self-fulfillment.

What anarchists sought to achieve was a world in which everyone is free

to develop his or her talents and abilities to their fullest. This is

impossible as long as workers are required to engage in labour merely to

eke out an existence, taking whatever jobs they can get, women must work

at home and in the factory or office, subject to their husbands and

fathers at home, to their bosses at work, and to conventional morality

always, and children must be trained to accept their lot in life and to

obey their “betters.”

It is for these reasons that anarchism, Kropotkin wrote, “refuses all

hierarchical organization” (Volume One, Selection 41). As Charlotte

Wilson (1854–1944), who helped found the English language anarchist

newspaper, Freedom, with Kropotkin in 1886, explained, “all coercive

organization” with its “machine-like regularity is fatal to the

realization” of the anarchist ideal of self-fulfillment for all, not

just the privileged few (Volume One, Selection 37).

Art and Anarchy

The English anarchist, Charlotte Wilson, argued that when “each worker

will be entirely free to do as nature prompts… to throw his whole soul

into the labour he has chosen, and make it the spontaneous expression of

his intensest purpose and desire… labour becomes pleasure, and its

produce a work of art” (Volume One, Selection 37). For artists in

bourgeois society, Jean Grave observed that they must sell their works

to survive, “a situation which leads those who would not die of hunger

to compromise, to vulgar and mediocre art.” To “live their dream,

realize their aspirations, they, too, must work” for the social

revolution. Even when possible, it “is vain for them to entrench

themselves behind the privileges of the ruling classes,” for “if there

is debasement for him who is reduced to performing the vilest tasks to

satisfy his hunger, the morality of those who condemn him to it is not

superior to his own; if obedience degrades, command, far from exalting

character, degrades it also” (Volume One, Selection 63).

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), who for a time described himself as an

anarchist, agreed with Grave, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, that

with the abolition of private property, all will be free “to choose the

sphere of activity that is really congenial to them, and gives them

pleasure.” However, Wilde did not look forward to the day when manual

and intellectual labour would be combined, for some forms of manual

labour are so degrading that they cannot be performed with dignity or

joy: “Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of

that kind should be done by machine.”

Wilde spoke in favour of anarchist socialism as providing the basis for

true individualism and artistic freedom. He believed that the only form

of government suitable to the artist “is no government at all. Authority

over him and his art is ridiculous,” whether exercised by a government

or by public opinion (Volume One, Selection 61). Wilson agreed that

public opinion, “the rule of universal mediocrity,” is “a serious danger

to individual freedom,” but in a free society “it can only be

counteracted by broader moral culture” (Volume One, Selection 37). For

Wilde, this meant that “Art should never try to be popular. The public

should try to make itself artistic” (Volume One, Selection 61).

In turn of the century France, much of the artistic avant-garde allied

themselves with anarchism, including such painters as Camille Pissarro,

Paul Signac, Charles Maurin and Maximilien Luce, and writers like Paul

Adam, Adolphe Retté, Octave Mirbeau and Bernard Lazare. Jean Grave would

include their work in his anarchist papers, La Révolte, and later, Les

Temps Nouveaux. When the French authorities again prosecuted anarchists

simply for expressing their subversive ideas in the mid-1890s, Lazare

wrote in La Révolte: “We had the audacity to believe that not everything

was for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and we stated and

state still that modern society is despicable, founded upon theft,

dishonesty, hypocrisy and turpitude” (Volume One, Selection 62).

As can be seen, the anarchist critique of existing society was never

limited to denouncing the state, capitalism and the church. It extended

to the patriarchal family, the sexual exploitation and subjection of

women, censorship, conformism, authoritarian education, and hierarchical

and coercive forms of organization in general, no matter where they

might be found, whether in the school, at the workplace or within the

revolutionary movement itself.

Science and Technology: Anarchist Perspectives

The anarchist critique of science and technology goes back at least to

Proudhon, who denounced machinery which, “after having degraded the

worker by giving him a master, completes his degeneracy by reducing him

from the rank of artisan to that of common labourer” (Volume One,

Selection 9). Carlo Pisacane argued that technological innovation under

capitalism simply concentrates economic power and wealth “in a small

number of hands,” while leaving the masses in poverty (Volume One,

Selection 16).

Other anarchists have argued that once the people take control of

technology, it can be redesigned to eliminate onerous toil, much like

Oscar Wilde suggested, to make workplaces safer and to increase

production for the benefit of all. Carlo Cafiero recognized that in

capitalist economies, the worker has reason to oppose the machinery

“which comes to drive him from the factory, to starve him, degrade him,

torture him, crush him. Yet what a great interest he will have, on the

contrary, in increasing their number when he will no longer be at the

service of the machines and when… the machines will themselves be at his

service, helping him and working for his benefit” (Volume One, Selection

32).

Gustav Landauer took a more critical position, arguing in 1911 that “the

capitalist system, modern technology and state centralism go hand in

hand… Technology, allied with capitalism, makes [the worker] a cog in

the wheels of the machine.” Consequently, the technology developed under

capitalism cannot provide the basis for a free society. Rather, workers

must “step out of capitalism mentally and physically,” and begin

creating alternative communities and technologies designed to meet their

needs in conditions which they themselves find agreeable (Volume One,

Selection 79). In the early 1960s, Paul Goodman (1911–1972) suggested

some criteria “for the humane selection of technology: utility,

efficiency, comprehensibility, repairability, ease and flexibility of

use, amenity and modesty” (Volume Two, Selection 70), the use of which

would result in something which Goodman’s friend, Ivan Illich

(1926–2002), described as “convivial tools,” enabling “autonomous and

creative intercourse among persons and… with their environment” (Volume

Two, Selection 73).

Nineteenth century anarchists often extolled the virtues of modern

science, particularly in contrast to religious belief, as part of their

critique of the role of organized religion in supporting the status quo.

In What is Property, Proudhon looked forward to the day when “the

sovereignty of the will yields to the sovereignty of reason, and must at

last be lost in scientific socialism” (Volume One, Selection 8). José

Llunas Pujols wrote in 1882 that in an anarchist society, “the political

State and theology would… be supplanted by Administration and Science”

(Volume One, Selection 36), echoing Saint Simon’s comment that in an

enlightened society, the government of man will be replaced by the

“administration of things”. In the conclusion to his 1920 anarchist

program, Malatesta summed up what anarchists want as “bread, freedom,

love, and science for everybody” (Volume One, Selection 112).

However, this did not mean that anarchists were uncritical supporters of

science. One of the most widely published and translated anarchist

pamphlets in the late 19^(th) and early 20^(th) centuries was Bakunin’s

essay, God and the State, in which he discussed the limitations of

scientific theory and research, and warned against the danger of

entrusting our affairs to scientists and intellectuals. Bakunin argued

that science “cannot go outside the sphere of abstractions,” being “as

incapable of grasping the individuality of a man as that of a rabbit.”

Because science cannot grasp or appreciate the existential reality of

individual human beings, “it must never be permitted, nor must anyone be

permitted in its name, to govern” individuals. Those claiming to govern

in the name of science would yield “to the pernicious influence which

privilege inevitably exercises upon men,” fleecing “other men in the

name of science, just as they have been fleeced hitherto by priests,

politicians of all shades, and lawyers, in the name of God, of the

State, of judicial Right” (Volume One, Selection 24).

Even Kropotkin, who argued in Modern Science and Anarchism (1912) that

anarchism “is a conception of the Universe based on the mechanical

[kinetic] interpretation of phenomena” that “recognizes no method of

research except the scientific one,” never suggested that scientists

should have a privileged role in society, nor that scientific hypotheses

should be regarded as akin to human laws that need to be enforced by

some authority. He decried the introduction of “artificial modes of

expression, borrowed from theology and arbitrary power, into

[scientific] knowledge which is purely the result of observation”

(Volume One, Selection 52), and argued that all theories and

conclusions, including those of the anarchists, are subject to criticism

and must be verified by experiment and observation.

Kropotkin no more endorsed “the government of science” than Bakunin did

(Volume One, Selection 24). Instead, he looked forward to:

“A society in which all the mutual relations of its members are

regulated, not by laws, not by authorities, whether self-imposed or

elected, but by mutual agreement… and by a sum of social customs and

habits—not petrified by law, routine, or superstition, but continually

developing and continually readjusted, in accordance with the

ever-growing requirements of a free life, stimulated by the progress of

science, invention, and the steady growth of higher ideals” (Modern

Science and Anarchism: 59).

Evolution and Revolution

The anarchist communist revolutionary Peter Kropotkin noted in Modern

Science and Anarchism that among the scientific works that appeared in

the mid-19^(th) century, “there was none which exercised so deep an

influence as The Origins of Species, by Charles Darwin.” What Darwin

demonstrated, Kropotkin argued, was that “man… was the product of a slow

physiological evolution; that he drew his origin from a species of

animals which gave birth both to man and the now-living apes and

monkeys; that the ‘immortal mind’ and the ‘moral sense’ of man had

developed in the same way as the intelligence and the social instincts

of a chimpanzee or an ant.”

While anarchists welcomed Darwin’s ideas regarding evolution because

they undermined the authority of religion by discrediting notions of

divine creation and design, they also had to contend with the apologists

of a rapacious capitalism, the “Social Darwinists,” who used Darwin’s

notion of “the struggle for existence” to attack egalitarianism and to

argue against social reform in general. As Kropotkin put it, there was

“no infamy in civilized society, or in the relations of the whites

towards the so-called lower races, or of the strong towards the weak,

which would not have found its excuse in this formula.”

To combat the ideas of the Social Darwinists, Kropotkin wrote a series

of essays, later published as Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902),

in which he sought to demonstrate “the overwhelming importance which

sociable habits play in Nature and in the progressive evolution of both

the animal species and human beings.” It is from these practices of

mutual aid, Kropotkin argued, that moral feelings are developed, leading

him to conclude that “in the ethical progress of man, mutual support—not

mutual struggle—has had the leading part” (Volume One, Selection 54).

Kropotkin’s notion of mutual aid and his critique of Social Darwinism

was very influential in anarchist circles, not only in Europe but also

in Latin America and Asia.

Some opponents of revolutionary change argued that the notion of

“progressive evolution” was inconsistent with the anarchist commitment

to social revolution. As Elisée Reclus observed in 1891, the “word

Evolution, synonymous with gradual and continuous development in morals

and ideas, is brought forward in certain circles as though it were the

antithesis of that fearful word, Revolution, which implies changes more

or less sudden in their action… entailing some sort of catastrophe.” It

was Reclus, not Kropotkin, who first developed the idea that

revolutionary upheavals are part of a natural evolutionary process, an

accelerated period of evolutionary change, such that revolution and

evolution “are fundamentally one and the same thing, differing only

according to the time of their appearance.” Turning Social Darwinism on

its head, he argued that as “powerful as may be the Master,” and the

“privileged classes” in general, they “will be weak before the starving

masses leagued against” them. “To the great evolution now taking place

will succeed the long expected, the great revolution” (Volume One,

Selection 74). This was a common theme among late 19^(th) and early

20^(th) century anarchists, including anarchists in Japan (Volume One,

Selection 102) and China (Volume One, Selections 97, 100 & 102).

Against Racism

Anarchist supporters of science also had to contend with the development

of a racist ethnology, purportedly based on scientific theory and

research, which was used to justify colonial exploitation and war

against the so-called “inferior” races. In his 1904 essay, ironically

entitled “Our Indians,” the Peruvian anarchist intellectual, Manuel

González Prada (1848–1919), marveled at what “a handy invention”

ethnology was in the hands of those who seek to justify white

domination: “Once one has accepted that Mankind is divided into superior

and inferior races and acknowledged the white man’s superiority and thus

his right to sole governance of the Planet, there cannot be anything

more natural than suppression of the black man in Africa, the redskin in

the United States, the Tagalog in the Philippines and the Indian in

Peru” (Volume One, Selection 91).

While González Prada questioned the “science” behind racist doctrines,

pointing out that there “is such a mish-mash of blood and colouring,

every individual represents so many licit or illicit dalliances, that

when faced by many a Peruvian we would be baffled as to the contribution

of the black man or the yellow man to their make-up: none deserves the

description of pure-bred white man, even if he has blue eyes and blond

hair,” he argued that rather than “going around the world spreading the

light of [European] art and science, better to go around dispensing the

milk of human kindness,” for “where the ‘struggle for existence’ is

enunciated as the rule of society, barbarism rules.” González Prada

agreed with Kropotkin that the true mark of progress and civilization is

the degree to which practices and institutions of mutual aid are spread

throughout society, such that “doing good has graduated from being an

obligation to being a habit” (Volume One, Selection 91).

Nationalism and Colonialism

From the time that explicitly anarchist ideas emerged from Europe in the

1840s, anarchists have denounced the artificial division of peoples into

competing nations and states as an unceasing source of militarism, war

and conflict, and as a means by which the ruling classes secure the

obedience of the masses. “It is the governments,” Proudhon wrote in

1851, “who, pretending to establish order among men, arrange them

forthwith in hostile camps, and as their only occupation is to produce

servitude at home, their art lies in maintaining war abroad, war in fact

or war in prospect. The oppression of peoples and their mutual hatred

are two correlative, inseparable facts, which reproduce each other, and

which cannot come to an end except simultaneously, by the destruction of

their common cause, government” (Volume One, Selection 12).

In Moribund Society and Anarchy (1893), Jean Grave asked, “what can be

more arbitrary than frontiers? For what reason do men located on this

side of a fictitious line belong to a nation more than those on the

other side? The arbitrariness of these distinctions is so evident that

nowadays the racial spirit is claimed as the justification for parceling

peoples into distinct nations. But here again the distinction is of no

value and rests upon no serious foundation, for every nation is itself

but an amalgamation of races quite different from each other, not to

speak of the interminglings and crossings which the relations operating

among nations, more and more developed, more and more intimate, bring

about everyday… To the genuine individual all men are brothers and have

equal rights to live and to evolve according to their own wills, upon

this earth which is large enough and fruitful enough to nourish all…

Instead of going on cutting each other’s throats [the workers] ought to

stretch out their hands across the frontiers and unite all their efforts

in making war upon their real, their only enemies: authority and

capital” (Volume One, Selection 76).

Having drawn the connection between racism, patriotism and war, Grave

went on to deal with colonialism, “this hybrid product of patriotism and

mercantilism combined—brigandage and highway robbery for the benefit of

the ruling classes!” Bakunin had earlier remarked that “to offend, to

despoil, to plunder, to assassinate or enslave one’s fellowman is

ordinarily regarded as a crime. In public life, on the other hand, from

the standpoint of patriotism, when these things are done for the greater

glory of the State, for the preservation or the extension of its power,

it is all transformed into duty and virtue” (Volume One, Selection 20).

In his discussion of colonialism, Grave observed in a similar vein that

when someone breaks “into his neighbour’s house,” stealing whatever he

can, “he is a criminal; society condemns him. But if a government finds

itself driven to a standstill by an internal situation which

necessitates some external ‘diversion’; if it be encumbered at home by

unemployed hands of which it knows not how to rid itself; of products

which it cannot get distributed; let this government declare war against

remote peoples which it knows to be too feeble to resist it, let it take

possession of their country, subject them to an entire system of

exploitation, force its products upon them, massacre them if they

attempt to escape this exploitation with which it weighs them down… It

is no longer called robbery or assassination… this is called

‘civilizing’ undeveloped peoples” (Volume One, Selection 76).

Anarchists opposed colonial domination and exploitation, as well as

militarism, war and the State. At the 1907 International Anarchist

Congress in Amsterdam, the delegates declared themselves “enemies of all

armed force vested in the hands of the State—be it army, gendarmerie,

police or magistracy” and expressed their “hope that all the peoples

concerned will respond to any declaration of war by insurrection”

(Volume One, Selection 80). Unfortunately, when war broke out in Europe

in 1914, the peoples concerned did not respond with insurrection against

their warring masters but for the most part rushed off to slaughter.

This caused a very small minority of anarchists, including some very

prominent ones, such as Grave and Kropotkin, to support the war against

Germany in order to defend English and French “liberties” against German

imperialism.

Most anarchists opposed the war, with a group including Malatesta, Emma

Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Luigi Bertoni, George Barrett, Ferdinand

Domela Niewenhuis and Alexander Schapiro issuing an International

Anarchist Manifesto Against War (1915), in which they argued that

France, with “its Biribi [penal battalions in Algeria], its bloody

conquests in Tonkin, Madagascar, Morocco, and its compulsory enlistment

of black troops,” and England, “which exploits, divides, and oppresses

the population of its immense colonial Empire,” were hardly deserving of

anarchist support (Volume One, Selection 81). Rather, it is the mission

of anarchists who, Malatesta wrote, “wish the end of all oppression and

of all exploitation of man by man… to awaken a consciousness of the

antagonism of interests between dominators and dominated, between

exploiters and workers, and to develop the class struggle inside each

country, and the solidarity among all workers across the frontiers, as

against any prejudice and passion of either race or nationality” (Volume

One, Selection 80).

The Spread of Anarchism

Prior to the First World War, anarchism had become an international

revolutionary movement, with the largest anarchist movements in

countries with anarcho-syndicalist trade union organizations, such as

Spain, Italy, Portugal, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay, or like

minded revolutionary syndicalist movements, as in France. In the early

1900s, anarchist ideas were introduced to Japan (Volume One, Selection

102) and China (Volume One, Selections 96–99). Anarchists and

syndicalists, despite the efforts of the Marxists and social democrats

to exclude the anarchists from the international socialist movement,

formed the extreme left wing of the socialist and trade union movements.

Anarchist ideas regarding direct action, autonomous social organization,

anti-parliamentarianism, expropriation, social revolution and the

general strike were gaining more currency, particularly after the 1905

Russian Revolution, and the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

The 1905 Russian Revolution

In January 1905, Czarist troops massacred scores of protesters at a

demonstration in St. Petersburg, precipitating a general strike and the

formation of the first “soviets,” or workers’ councils in Russia

(Voline, 1947: 96–101). Following Russia’s defeat in its war against

Japan in February 1905, unrest spread throughout Russia, culminating in

a countrywide general strike in October 1905. The Czar was forced to

promise constitutional reforms, which he soon reneged upon.

Nevertheless, the great general strike of October 1905 made a deep

impression on workers and revolutionaries around the world, giving

renewed credence to anarchist ideas, for it was the anarchists who had

been advocating the general strike as a revolutionary weapon since the

time of the First International (Volume One, Selection 27). The Marxist

social democrats had been dismissing the general strike as “general

nonsense” for years (Joll: 193).

Kropotkin observed that “what exasperated the rulers most” about the

general strike “was that the workers offered no opportunity for shooting

at them and reestablishing ‘order’ by massacres. A new weapon, more

terrible than street warfare, had thus been tested and proved to work

admirably” (1905: 280). Despite this practical vindication of anarchist

ideas, Malatesta was careful to point out the limitations of the general

strike. Instead of “limiting ourselves to looking forward to the general

strike as a panacea for all ills,” Malatesta warned, anarchists needed

to prepare for the insurrection or civil war which would inevitably

follow the workers’ seizure of the means of production. For it is not

enough for the workers to halt production; to avoid being forced by

their own hunger back to work, the workers need to provide for

themselves (Volume One, Selection 60).

As the anarchist pacifist Bart de Ligt (1883–1938) put it in the 1930s,

“the workers must not strike by going home or into the streets, thus

separating themselves from the means of production and giving themselves

over to dire poverty but… on the contrary, they must stay on the spot

and control these means of production” for their own benefit (Volume

One, Selection 120). Maurice Joyeux (1910–1991), following the May-June

1968 events in France, described such action as the “self-managerial”

general strike, by which the workers directly take control of the means

of production (Volume Two, Selection 61).

No revolutionary group could claim credit for the 1905 Russian

Revolution. As Kropotkin noted, the October 1905 general strike “was not

the work of any revolutionary organization. It was entirely a

workingmen’s affair” (1905: 278). What the anarchists could do was point

to the 1905 Russian Revolution as a practical vindication of their

ideas, enabling them to reach a much broader audience inspired by these

events.

Revolution in Mexico

While the Russian workers were able to bring Russia to a standstill in

October 1905, it was during the 1910 Mexican Revolution that

expropriation was first applied on a wide scale by landless peasants and

indigenous peoples. Anarchists in Mexico had been advocating that the

people seize the land and abolish all government since the late 1860s,

when Julio Chavez Lopez declared that what they wanted was “the land in

order to plant it in peace and harvest it in tranquility; to leave the

system of exploitation and give liberty to all” (Volume One, Selection

71).

In 1878, the anarchist group La Social advocated the abolition of the

Mexican state and capitalism, the creation of autonomous federated

communes, equal property holdings for those who worked the land, and the

abolition of wage labour. When the government renewed its campaign of

expropriation of peasant lands in favour of foreign (primarily U.S.)

interests and a tiny group of wealthy landowners, the anarchists urged

the peasants to revolt. Anarchist inspired peasant rebellions spread

throughout Mexico, lasting from 1878 until 1884 (Hart: 68–69). Another

peasant rebellion broke out in Veracruz in 1896, leading to a lengthy

insurgency that continued through to the 1910 Mexican Revolution (Hart:

72).

In 1906 and 1908, the anarchist oriented Liberal Party of Mexico (PLM)

led several uprisings in the Mexican countryside. On the eve of the 1910

Mexican Revolution, the PLM issued a manifesto, “To Arms! To Arms for

Land and Liberty,” written by the anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón

(1874–1922). He urged the peasants to take “the Winchester in hand” and

seize the land, for the land belongs “to all men and women who, by the

very fact that they are living, have a right to share in common, by

reason of their toil, all that wealth which the Earth is capable of

producing” (Volume One, Selection 73). The PLM organized the first armed

insurrections against the Díaz dictatorship in the late fall of 1910,

beginning a revolution that was to last until 1919. Throughout Mexico,

the largely indigenous peasantry arose in rebellion, seizing the land

and redistributing it among themselves.

Anarchists outside of Mexico regarded this expropriation of the land by

the Mexican peasantry as yet another vindication of their ideas. As

Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) put it, “peasants who know nothing

about the jargon of the land reformers or of the Socialists” knew better

than the “theory spinners of the cities” how to “get back the land… to

ignore the machinery of paper landholding (in many instances they have

burned the records of the title deeds) and proceed to plough the ground,

to sow and plant and gather, and keep the product themselves” (Volume

One, Selection 71). This was the model of the peasant social revolution

that Chavez Lopez had tried to instigate in 1869, that Bakunin had

advocated during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War (Volume One, Selection

28), and that anarchists in Europe and Latin America had been trying to

instigate for years.

Anarchism in Asia

In Japan, Kôtoku Shûsui (1871–1911), who had begun his political career

as an orthodox Marxist, embraced anarchism in 1905, introducing

anarchist communist and anarcho-syndicalist ideas to Japanese radicals.

Kôtoku advocated the creation of interlinked trade union and cooperative

organizations to provide the basis for anarchist communes “at the time

of or in the aftermath of a revolution,” an idea that can be traced back

to Bakunin, Guillaume and the anarchist currents in the First

International. He argued in favour of working class direct action and

anti-parliamentarianism: the workers “must act for themselves without

relying on slow moving parliaments.” The workers would strike to improve

their working conditions while pushing “on to the general strike,” while

the hungry would expropriate food from the rich, instead of waiting for

legal reforms (Volume One, Selection 102). He translated Kropotkin into

Japanese, and anarcho-syndicalist material, such as Siegfried Nacht’s

1905 pamphlet, The Social General Strike.

In 1910, Akaba Hajime, another Japanese anarchist, published The

Farmers’ Gospel, in which he called for the “return to the ‘village

community’ of long ago, which our remote ancestors enjoyed. We must

construct the free paradise of ‘anarchist communism,’ which will flesh

out the bones of the village community with the most advanced scientific

understanding and with the lofty morality of mutual aid” (Crump, 1996).

The Japanese anarchist feminist, Itô Noe (1895–1923), pointed to the

Japanese peasant village as an example of living anarchy, “a social life

based on mutual agreement” and mutual aid (Volume One, Selection 104).

As with anarchists in Europe and Latin America, the Japanese anarchists

sought to unite the workers and peasants in the struggle for a free

society.

Despite the execution of Kôtoku in 1911 following the infamous Japanese

treason trials, which were used to smash the nascent Japanese anarchist

movement, Akaba’s imprisonment and death in 1912, and the 1923 police

murder of Itô Noe and her companion, Ōsugi Sakae, another prominent

anarchist (Volume One, Selection 103), the anarchists remained a

significant force on the Japanese left throughout the 1920s.

In 1907, a group of Chinese anarchists created the Society for the Study

of Socialism in Tokyo. Two of the Society’s founders, Liu Shipei

(1884–1919) and Zhang Ji (1882–1947), were in contact with Kôtoku

Shûsui, who introduced them to the ideas of Kropotkin and the

anarcho-syndicalists. Liu, Zhang and Kôtoku all spoke about anarchism at

the Society’s founding meeting (Scalapino & Yu). Zhang contributed to

Balance, a Chinese anarchist journal published in Tokyo, which in 1908

ran a series of articles calling for a peasant revolution in China and

“the combination of agriculture and industry,” as proposed by Kropotkin

in Fields, Factories and Workshops (Dirlik: 104). Following Kôtoku’s

example, Zhang also translated Nacht’s pamphlet on The Social General

Strike into Chinese.

Liu and his wife, He Zhen, published another Chinese anarchist journal

in Tokyo, Natural Justice. He Zhen advocated women’s liberation, a

particularly pressing concern in China, where foot-binding and

concubinage were still common practices. She was familiar with the

debates in Europe regarding women’s suffrage but argued that “instead of

competing with men for power, women should strive for overthrowing men’s

rule,” a position close to that of Louise Michel and Emma Goldman. She

criticized those women who advocated sexual liberation merely “to

indulge themselves in unfettered sexual desires,” comparing them to

prostitutes, a view similar to that of European and Latin American

anarchist women, such as Carmen Lareva, who were also concerned that the

anarchist notion of “free love” not be confused with making women

sexually available to men (Volume One, Selection 69). He Zhen insisted

that “women should seek their own liberation without relying on men to

give it to them” (Volume One, Selection 96). Women’s liberation became a

common cause for the Chinese anarchists, who rejected the traditional

patriarchal family and often lived in small communal groups.

Chinese anarchists in Guangzhou began labour organizing in 1913,

creating the first Chinese trade unions, inspired by Shifu (1884–1915),

the anarchist communist who became known as “the soul of Chinese

anarchism” (Krebs). Heavily influenced by Kropotkin, Shifu advocated

anarchist communism, the abolition of all coercive institutions, freedom

and equality for men and women, and voluntary associations where no one

will “have the authority to manage others,” and in which there will “be

no statutes or regulations to restrict people’s freedom” (Volume One,

Selection 99).

In the conclusion to his 1914 manifesto, “The Goals and Methods of the

Anarchist-Communist Party,” Shifu referred to the “war clouds [filling]

every part of Europe,” with “millions of workers… about to be sacrificed

for the wealthy and the nobility” (Volume One, Selection 99).

Kropotkin’s subsequent support for the war against Germany shocked

anarchists throughout the world, and was particularly damaging in Russia

where his position was seen as support for Czarist autocracy (Avrich,

1978: 116–119; 136–137). However, as the war continued, the anarchists

who maintained their anti-war, anti-militarist and anti-statist position

began again to find a sympathetic ear among the workers and peasants who

bore the brunt of the inter-imperialist slaughter in Europe, and who

were to arise en masse in February 1917 in Russia, overthrowing the

Czar.

Individualist Anarchism

In addition to the various revolutionary currents that existed within

the anarchist movement prior to the outbreak of World War I,

individualist anarchism began to emerge as a distinct current in the

United States and Europe. In contrast to many contemporary

individualists, particularly in the United States, who sometimes

identify themselves as “anarcho-capitalists,” a concept most anarchists

would regard as hopelessly self-contradictory (Volume Three, Chapter 9),

the individualist anarchists of the late 19^(th) and early 20^(th)

centuries were anti-capitalist.

The leading individualist anarchist in the United States was Benjamin

Tucker (1854–1939). Tucker was a great admirer of Proudhon, translating

What Is Property (1876) and Volume One of The System of Economic

Contradictions (1888) into English. Nevertheless, when describing

Proudhon’s anarchism, Tucker in reality set forth his own view of

anarchism as “the logical carrying out of the Manchester doctrine;

laissez faire the universal rule,” a position which Proudhon would have

rejected. Tucker was opposed to compulsory taxation, state currencies,

regulation of the banking system, tariffs, patents, and the large

corporations, the “trusts,” that were building their own monopolies on

the basis of these state “monopolies.” He denounced revolutionary

anarchists, such as Kropotkin and Johann Most, as “Communists who

falsely call themselves anarchists,” particularly for their advocacy of

expropriation, which Tucker regarded as inconsistent with anarchist ends

(Tucker, 1888).

Yet despite Tucker’s discovery of Max Stirner’s egoism in the late 1880s

(Martin: 249–254), Tucker remained a self-righteous ideologue

disapproving of those anarchists who advocated armed struggle,

expropriation and social revolution. Stirner, on the other hand, would

have had no reason to condemn expropriation or the use of force, having

suggested that the dispossessed simply take from the rich because “I

give myself the right of property in taking property to myself.” In

fact, Stirner can be seen as the original advocate of anarchist

“illegalism,” when he argued that “in all cases where [the egoist’s]

advantage runs against the State’s,” the egoist “can satisfy himself

only by crime” (Volume One, Selection 11). It was this aspect of

Stirner’s egoism that was seized upon by individualist anarchists in

Europe around the turn of the century, who articulated and sometimes put

into practice a much more radical conception of individualist anarchism

than had been developed in the United States by Tucker and his

associates, one which did not shy away from violence and which regarded

itself as revolutionary.

In 1909, the then individualist anarchist, Victor Kibalchich (better

known by his later moniker, Victor Serge (1890–1947), after he went over

to Bolshevism), wrote in France that the anarchist “chooses the methods

of struggle, according to his power and circumstance. He takes no

account of any conventions which safeguard property: for him, force

alone counts. Thus, we have neither to approve or disapprove of illegal

actions… The anarchist is always illegal—theoretically. The sole word

‘anarchist’ means rebellion in every sense” (Perry: 50).

Kibalchich was associated with some of the future members of the “Bonnot

Gang,” which conducted the first bank robbery using getaway cars in late

December 1911. Soon after the robbery, during which a bank clerk was

shot, Kibalchich wrote that the shooting “proved that some men have at

least understood the virtues of audacity. I am not afraid to own up to

it: I am with the bandits” (Perry: 90). However, after Bonnot was killed

in a shoot out and Kibalchich was put on trial along with survivors of

the gang, he tried to distance himself from the “bandits,” claiming that

he was merely an anarchist “propagandist” who did “not pretend to

defend” his former comrades, “for a gulf separates philosophical

anarchists” from those who seek to justify their crimes in the name of

anarchism (Perry: 158–159).

It was the kind of betrayal Kibalchich was to repeat in Russia after the

1917 Revolution when he renounced anarchism altogether, throwing his

support behind the Bolshevik dictatorship. When justifying the

Bolsheviks’ violent suppression of the anarchist movement, Kibalchich

(now Serge) again drew a distinction between “counter-revolutionary”

armed anarchist groups who hid common criminals within their ranks, and

“ideological” anarchists, who were allegedly left alone to make their

“ineffective” propaganda (Serge, 1930). It was a distinction Lenin and

the Bolsheviks were happy to make, but never honour (Berkman, 1925: 91 &

142–151).

Emile Armand (1872–1962), a more consistent individualist anarchist

writing in France in 1911, supported “illegalism… with certain

reservations.” For him, the individualist “anarchist seeks to live

without gods or masters; without bosses or leaders; a-legally, bereft of

laws as well as of prejudices; amorally, free of obligations as well as

of collective morality.” The European individualists shared the

anti-organizationalist critique of all formal organization but, as with

Tucker and his associates, opposed anarchist communism. The individual,

Armand wrote, “would be as much of a subordinate under a communist

system as he is today.” Armand believed that individual autonomy could

only be guaranteed by individual ownership of the means necessary to

support oneself, the product of one’s own labour, and the goods one

receives in exchange with others. He was much clearer than Tucker in

opposing “the exploitation of anyone by one of his neighbours who will

set him to work in his employ and for his benefit” (Volume One,

Selection 42).

Both Tucker and the European individualists developed a conception of

anarchism representing an incoherent amalgam of Stirnerian egoism and

Proudhonian economics, although the European individualists were more

consistent in their extremism. The problem for both is that while an

egoist will not want to be exploited or dominated by anyone else, there

is no reason why he or she would not exploit or dominate others. If the

egoist can use existing power structures, or create new ones, to his or

her advantage, then there is no reason for the egoist to adopt an

anarchist stance. Furthermore, when each person regards the other simply

as a means to his or her ends, taking and doing whatever is in his or

her power, as Stirner advocated, it would seem unlikely that a

Proudhonian economy of small property holders exchanging their products

among one another would be able to function, for Proudhon’s notions of

equivalent exchange and economic justice would carry no weight, even if

they were feasible in a modern industrial economy.

Armand rejected Proudhon’s notion of contract, arguing that “every

contract can be voided the moment it injures one of the contracting

parties,” since the individual is “free of all obligations as well as of

collective morality.” At most, the individualist “is willing to enter

into short-term arrangements only” as “an expedient,” being “only ever

answerable to himself for his deeds and actions” (Volume One, Selection

42).

Tucker, despite his attempts to base his anarchism on Stirner’s egoism,

believed that contracts freely entered into should be binding and

enforceable. In addition, he advocated the creation of “self-defence”

associations to protect people’s property, opening the way, Kropotkin

argued, “for reconstituting under the heading of ‘defence’ all the

functions of the state” (1910: 18). Anarchist communists, such as

Kropotkin, did not “see the necessity of… enforcing agreements freely

entered upon” by people in an anarchist society, for even in existing

society the “simple habit of keeping one’s word, the desire of not

losing confidence, are quite sufficient in an overwhelming majority of

cases to enforce the keeping of agreements” (1887: 47 & 53). Force is

only necessary to maintain relationships of subordination and

exploitation, “to prevent the labourers from taking possession of what

they consider unjustly appropriated by the few; and… to continually

bring new ‘uncivilized nations’ under the same conditions” (1887: 52).

The Russian Revolution

In 1916, echoing Bakunin’s position during the Franco-Prussian War,

Russian anarchists who rejected Kropotkin’s pro-war stance called for

the “imperialist war” in Europe to be transformed into an all embracing

social revolution (Geneva Group of Anarchist-Communists, 1916: 44–47).

In February 1917, the long sought after Russian Revolution began with

relatively spontaneous uprisings for which, much like the 1905 Russian

Revolution, no particular group could claim credit.

For the anarchists, the “February Revolution” was another vindication of

their view of social revolution. “All revolutions necessarily begin in a

more or less spontaneous manner,” wrote the Russian anarchist Voline.

The task for revolutionary anarchists is to work with the insurgent

people to enable them to take control of their own affairs, without any

intermediaries, and to prevent the reconstitution of state power. For

Voline and the anarchists, effective “emancipation can be achieved only

by the direct, widespread, and independent action of those concerned, of

the workers themselves, grouped, not under the banner of a political

party or of an ideological formation, but in their own class

organizations (productive workers’ unions, factory committees,

co-operatives, etc.) on the basis of concrete action and

self-government, helped, but not governed, by revolutionaries working in

the very midst of, and not above the mass” (Volume One, Selection 87).

The anarchists therefore opposed the Provisional Government which

replaced the Czarist regime and pressed for the expropriation by the

workers and peasants themselves of the means of production and

distribution, a process the workers and peasants had already begun, with

workers taking over their factories and peasants seizing the land that

they had worked for generations. Anarchist communists expropriated the

homes of the rich and called for the creation of revolutionary communes

(Avrich, 1978: 125–126 & 130).

Many anarchists supported and participated in the peasant and worker

“soviets” that sprang up across Russia, following a pattern similar to

the 1905 Russian Revolution. The anarcho-syndicalist, Gregory Maksimov,

described the soviets as having “been brought into being by the

proletariat spontaneously, by revolutionary means, and with that element

of improvisation which springs from the needs of each locality and which

entails (a) the revolutionizing of the masses, (b) the development of

their activity and self-reliance, and (c) the strengthening of their

faith in their own creative powers” (Volume One, Selection 83).

When Lenin rejected the orthodox Marxist view that Russia had to proceed

through a “bourgeois” revolution and the development of a capitalist

economy before socialism could be implemented, calling for a proletarian

revolution that would replace the Russian state with worker and peasant

soviets modeled after the Paris Commune, he was not only recognizing

what was already happening, but adopting a position so close to the

anarchists that both orthodox Marxists and many anarchists regarded the

Bolsheviks as the anarchists’ allies (Avrich, 1978: 127–130). Many

anarchists worked with the Bolsheviks to overthrow the Provisional

Government in October 1917, and to dissolve the newly elected

Constituent Assembly in January 1918.

Factory Committees

Soon after the October Revolution, some anarchists began to realize that

rather than pushing the social revolution forward, the Bolsheviks were

seeking to establish their own dictatorship, subordinating the soviets

to their party organization. Maksimov therefore proclaimed in December

1917 that the anarchists “will go with the Bolsheviks no longer, for

their ‘constructive’ work has begun, directed towards what we have

always fought… the strengthening of the state. It is not our cause to

strengthen what we have resolved to destroy. We must go to the lower

classes to organize the work of the third—and perhaps the

last—revolution” (Volume One, Selection 83).

Because the soviets, as “presently constituted,” were being transformed

by the Bolsheviks into organs of state power, Maksimov argued that the

anarchists “must work for their conversion from centres of authority and

decrees into non-authoritarian centres,” linking the “autonomous

organizations” of the workers together (Volume One, Selection 83). But

as the Bolsheviks continued to consolidate their power, subordinating

not only the soviets but also the trade unions to their “revolutionary”

government, the anarcho-syndicalists began to emphasize the role of the

factory committees in furthering the cause of the anarchist social

revolution and in combatting both capitalism and the nascent Bolshevik

dictatorship.

At their August 1918 congress, the Russian anarcho-syndicalists

described the factory committee as “a fighting organizational form of

the entire workers’ movement, more perfect than the soviet of workers’,

soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies in that it is a basic self-governing

producers’ organization under the continuous and alert control of the

workers… With the aid of the factory committees and their industry-wide

federations, the working class will destroy both the existing economic

slavery and its new form of state capitalism which is falsely labelled

‘socialism’,” which the Bolsheviks were in the process of establishing

(Volume One, Selection 84).

A similar approach was put forward by anarchists in Italy during the

factory occupations in 1919–1920, and by anarchists in Germany.

Malatesta, returning to Italy in late 1919, argued, as he had before in

his debates with the syndicalists (Volume One, Selection 60), that

general strikes were not sufficient to bring about a revolution. The

anarchists therefore “put forward an idea: the take-over of factories,”

which would constitute “an exercise preparing one for the ultimate

general act of expropriation” (Malatesta, 1920: 134). The Italian

factory occupation movement peaked in September 1920, with armed workers

running their own factories using a factory committee form of

organization, but ended that same month when reformist trade union and

socialist leaders negotiated an agreement with the government that

returned control of the factories to their capitalist owners.

In Germany, anarchists fought to establish a system of workers’

councils, most notably in Bavaria, where Gustav Landauer and Erich

Muhsam were directly involved in the short lived Council Republic of

1919. However, the Bavarian Revolution was crushed by troops sent in by

the more conservative Social Democrats, whom Landauer had been

denouncing as the scourge of the socialist movement for years (Volume

One, Selections 79 & 111). Landauer was brutally murdered, and Muhsam

was imprisoned for several years (Kuhn, 2011: 8–10).

Both the soviet and factory committee models of revolutionary

organization were very influential in anarchist circles. At the founding

congress of the reconstituted anarcho-syndicalist International Workers’

Association in early 1922, the delegates declared themselves in favour

of “a system of free councils without subordination to any authority or

political party” (Volume One, Selection 114). Nevertheless, some

anarchists voiced concerns regarding the limitations of soviet and

factory council modes of organization.

Maksimov pointed to the danger of the soviets being transformed into

representative bodies instead of direct organs of libertarian

self-management (Volume One, Selection 83). More recently, Murray

Bookchin has argued that “council modes of organization are not immune

to centralization, manipulation and perversion. These councils are still

particularistic, one-sided and mediated forms of social management,”

being limited to the workers’ self-management of production, “the

preconditions of life, not the conditions of life” (Volume Two,

Selection 62). Following the May-June 1968 events in France, Maurice

Joyeux pointed out that factory committees need to coordinate their

actions during the revolutionary process in order to spread and succeed,

and then, after the revolution, to coordinate production and

distribution, leading him to suggest that broader trade union

federations would be better able to undertake this coordinating role

(Volume Two, Selection 61).

Counter-Revolution in Russia

The Russian Revolution raised another issue of fundamental importance to

revolutionary anarchists: how to deal with counter-revolution, whether

from the left or the right. From 1918 to 1921, Russia was racked by

civil war. Many anarchists took the position that in order to protect

the gains of the 1917 Revolution, they had no choice but to work with

the Bolsheviks (the “Reds”) in preventing Czarist

counter-revolutionaries (the “Whites”) from forcing a return to the old

order, with all the reprisals and massacres of the revolutionaries that

that would entail. According to Paul Avrich, during the civil war “a

large majority [of anarchists] gave varying degrees of support to the

beleaguered regime,” leading Lenin in 1919 to compliment some anarchists

for “becoming the most dedicated supporters of Soviet power” (1978:

196–197).

The Makhnovist Movement

Other anarchists argued that there were alternatives to simply

supporting the Bolsheviks in their struggle against the White

counter-revolutionaries, thereby strengthening the Bolshevik

dictatorship. Instead, they argued for “relentless partisan war, here,

there and everywhere,” as Voline put it in February 1918 (Avrich, 1973:

107). But it was only in Ukraine that anarchists were able to instigate

a popular insurgency, with the anarchist Nestor Makhno leading a peasant

and worker guerrilla army (the “Makhnovshchina”) against a variety of

forces, from occupying German and Austrian troops, to local strongmen

(the “Hetman”), to the Whites, and when necessary, to the Bolsheviks

themselves (Volume One, Selections 85 & 86).

When the Makhnovists liberated an area, they would abolish all decrees

issued by the Whites and the Reds, leaving it to “the peasants in

assemblies, [and] the workers in their factories and workshops” to

decide for themselves how to organize their affairs. The land was to be

returned to “those peasants who support themselves through their own

labour,” and the “factories, workshops, mines and other tools and means

of production” to the workers themselves (Volume One, Selection 85).

The Makhnovists denounced “the bourgeois-landlord authority on the one

hand and the Bolshevik-Communist dictatorship on the other.” They would

throw out the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, from areas that had

been under Bolshevik control and reopen the presses and meeting places

that the Bolsheviks had shut down, proclaiming that “freedom of speech,

press, assembly, unions and the like are inalienable rights of every

worker and any restriction on them is a counter-revolutionary act.” The

Makhnovists called upon the soldiers of the Red Army, sometimes with

some success, to desert and join the Makhnovists in their struggle for

“a non-authoritarian labourers’ society without parasites and without

commissar-bureaucrats” (Volume One, Selection 85).

Despite their opposition to “state militia, policemen and armies,” which

they would declare abolished in the areas they had liberated (Volume

One, Selection 85), the Makhnovist insurgents adopted some aspects of

more conventional military organization, including a chain of command

and conscription, and sometimes carried out “summary executions”

(Avrich, 1988: 114 & 121).

Many anarchists who were still free to do so, such as Voline, Aaron

Baron and Peter Arshinov, went to Ukraine to support the Makhnovists,

setting up the Nabat confederation, one of the more effective anarchist

organizations during the Revolution and Civil War. But as Peter Arshinov

noted, “three years of uninterrupted civil wars made the southern

Ukraine a permanent battlefield,” making it difficult for the anarchists

and Makhnovists to accomplish anything positive (Volume One, Selection

86). Yet for five months in early 1919, “the Gulyai-Polye region” where

Makhno was based “was virtually free of all political authority,” giving

the anarchists a chance, albeit a very brief one, to put their

constructive ideas into practice by helping the peasants and workers to

set up libertarian communes and soviets (Avrich, 1988: 114).

A “series of Regional Congresses of Peasants, Workers and Insurgents”

was held, the third in April 1919, “in defiance of a ban placed upon it”

by the Bolsheviks (Avrich, 1988: 114–115). After “two Cheka agents [who]

were sent to assassinate Makhno were caught and executed” in May 1919,

and the Makhnovists called upon the Red Army soldiers to join them,

Trotsky outlawed the Makhnovists, sending in troops to dismantle their

peasant communes (Avrich, 1988: 115). Despite subsequent temporary

alliances to fight the Whites, by early 1921, the Bolsheviks had crushed

the Makhnovist movement.

Unlike the Bolsheviks, the Makhnovists were able to garner significant

support among the Ukrainian peasantry, who resented Bolshevik seizures

of their grain and food, seeing that “the bread taken by force from

[them] nourishes mainly the enormous governmental machine” being created

by the Bolsheviks. For the revolution to succeed, the anarchists

believed that the masses “must feel truly free; they must know that the

work they do is their own; they must see in every social measure which

is adopted the manifestation of their will, their hopes and their

aspirations” (Volume One, Selection 86).

The Platform and Its Critics

The defeat of the Makhnovists in Ukraine and the anarchist movement in

Russia led Arshinov and Makhno to argue that anarchists needed to

rethink their approach. In 1926, now in exile, they published the

Organizational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, calling for the

creation of a General Union of anarchists based on theoretical and

tactical unity, collective responsibility and federalism (Volume One,

Selection 115). Although, for the most part, the Platform merely

restated the Makhnovist conception of anarchism, it generated

considerable controversy in anarchist circles. The Platform argued in

favour of military organization based on “unity in the plan of

operations and unity of common command,” “revolutionary

self-discipline,” and “total submission of the revolutionary army to the

masses of worker and peasant organizations common throughout the

country.” Despite its insistence on revolutionary self-discipline and

contrary to the practice of the Makhnovists during the Civil War, the

Platform rejected any form of conscription, stating that “all coercion

will be completely excluded from the work of defending the revolution,”

marking a return to rather than a departure from anarchist principles

(Volume One, Selection 115).

It was the Platform’s emphasis on the need for theoretical and tactical

unity, and the notion of “collective responsibility,” that caused the

greatest debate. The Platform argued that “the tactical methods employed

by separate members and groups within the Union should… be in rigorous

concord both with each other and with the general theory and tactic[s]

of the Union.” Collective responsibility “requires each member to

undertake fixed organizational duties, and demands execution of communal

decisions.” The Platform took the position that revolutionary activity

in collective areas of life “cannot be based on the personal

responsibility of individual militants,” describing such an approach as

“irresponsible individualism” (Volume One, Selection 115).

The General Union of anarchists was to strive “to realize a network of

revolutionary peasant [and worker] economic organizations” and unions,

“founded on anti-authoritarian principles,” with the General Union

serving as “the organized vanguard of their emancipating process”

(Volume One, Selection 115). Voline and several other exiled Russian

anarchists argued against any anarchist organization assuming a vanguard

role. For them, the social revolution “must be the free creation of the

masses, not controlled by ideological or political groups,” for the

“slightest suggestion of direction, of superiority, of leadership of the

masses… inevitably implies that the masses must… submit to it.” A

General Union of “anarchists” that “orients the mass organizations

(workers and peasants) in their political direction and is supported as

needed by a centralized army is nothing more than a new political power”

(Volume One, Selection 115).

Voline and his associates found the Platform’s conception of social and

economic organization “mechanical” and simplistic, with its scheme for

the coordination of production and consumption by workers’ and peasants’

soviets, committees and unions run by elected delegates subject to

recall. They saw in such organizations a danger of “immobility,

bureaucracy [and] a tendency to authoritarianism that will not be

changed automatically by the principle of voting.” They thought a

“better guarantee” of freedom lies “in the creation of a series of

other, more mobile, even provisional organs which arise and multiply

according to the needs that arise in the course of daily living and

activities,” offering “a richer, more faithful reflection of the

complexity of social life” (Volume One, Selection 115).

While the Voline group acknowledged that ideological differences among

anarchists, and the resulting disunity, were partly responsible for the

failure of the Russian anarchist movement, they argued that there were

other factors at play, including the “existing prejudices, customs [and]

education” of the masses, the fact that they “look for accommodation

rather than radical change,” and the repressive forces lined up against

them (Volume One, Selection 115). For Voline, what was needed was not a

more centralized and disciplined party type organization, but a

“synthesis” of all the “just and valid elements” of the various

anarchist currents, including syndicalism, communism and individualism

(Volume One, Selection 116). Foreshadowing subsequent ecological

conceptions of anarchism (Volume Two, Selection 48; Volume Three,

Chapter 6), Voline argued that anarchism should reflect the “creative

diversity” of life itself, achieving unity through “diversity and

movement” (Volume One, Selection 116).

Malatesta responded to the Platform by emphasizing that “in order to

achieve their ends, anarchist organizations must, in their constitution

and operation, remain in harmony with the principles of anarchism.” He

argued that the proposed General Union of anarchists should be seen for

what it really was, “the Union of a particular fraction of anarchists.”

He regarded as authoritarian the proposal for a “Union Executive

Committee” to “oversee the ‘ideological and organizational conduct’” of

the Union’s constitutive organizations and members, arguing that such an

approach would turn the Union into “a nursery for heresies and schisms”

(Volume One, Selection 115).

For Malatesta, what the Platformists were proposing was a form of

representative government based on majority vote, which “in practice

always leads to domination by a small minority.” While anarchist

organizations and congresses “serve to maintain and increase personal

relationships among the most active comrades, to coordinate and

encourage programmatic studies on the ways and means of taking action,

to acquaint all on the situation in the various regions and the action

most urgently needed in each; to formulate the various opinions current

among the anarchists… their decisions are not obligatory rules but

suggestions, recommendations, proposals to be submitted to all involved,

and do not become binding and enforceable except on those who accept

them, and for as long as they accept them” (Volume One, Selection 115).

Since the publication of the Platform in 1926, anarchists have continued

to debate which forms of organization are compatible with an anarchist

vision of a free society. Some have championed various forms of direct

democracy, whether in factory committees (Volume Two, Selection 59) or

community assemblies (Volume Two, Selection 62). Others have followed

Kropotkin, Voline and Malatesta in arguing in favour of more fluid, ad

hoc organizations forming complex horizontal networks of voluntary

associations (Volume Two, Selection 63; Volume Three, Selection 1).

Malatesta suggested that the Russian Platformists were “obsessed with

the success of the Bolsheviks,” hence their desire “to gather the

anarchists together in a sort of disciplined army which, under the

ideological and practical direction of a few leaders, would march

solidly to the attack of the existing regimes, and after having won a

material victory would direct the constitution of a new society” (Volume

One, Selection 115). But for those so inclined, there were other

organizations for them to join, namely the various Communist Parties

that were soon organized in Europe, Asia and the Americas under Russian

tutelage.

Despite the creation of an anarcho-syndicalist International in early

1922 (Volume One, Selection 114), many anarchists and syndicalists, and

the trade unions in which they were influential, affiliated instead with

the Comintern (Communist International) and its related organizations.

In addition, many anarchist and syndicalist groups and organizations

were forcibly suppressed, by the Bolsheviks in Russia, the Fascists in

Italy, the new “revolutionary” government in Mexico, military

dictatorships in Portugal, Spain and Latin America, and the “democratic”

government of the United States, which deported scores of radicals in

1919 (including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman), imprisoned Mexican

anarchists like Ricardo Flores Magón, and enacted “criminal syndicalism”

laws to prohibit revolutionary syndicalist speech and action.

The Transvaluation of Values

When Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman arrived in Russia in 1919, they

were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, whom they regarded as sincere

revolutionaries. They began to take a more critical stance after making

contact with those anarchists who still remained at liberty. Eventually

they realized that the Bolsheviks were establishing their own

dictatorship under the guise of fighting counter-revolution. Berkman

noted how the “civil war really helped the Bolsheviki. It served to keep

alive popular enthusiasm and nurtured the hope that, with the end of

war, the ruling Party will make effective the new revolutionary

principles and secure the people in the enjoyment of the fruits of the

Revolution.” Instead, the end of the Civil War led to the consolidation

of a despotic Party dictatorship characterized by the “exploitation of

labour, the enslavement of the worker and peasant, the cancellation of

the citizen as a human being… and his transformation into a microscopic

part of the universal economic mechanism owned by the government; the

creation of privileged groups favoured by the State; [and] the system of

compulsory labour service and its punitive organs” (Volume One,

Selection 88).

“To forget ethical values,” wrote Berkman, “to introduce practices and

methods inconsistent with or opposed to the high moral purposes of the

revolution means to invite counter-revolution and disaster… Where the

masses are conscious that the revolution and all its activities are in

their own hands, that they themselves are managing things and are free

to change their methods when they consider it necessary,

counter-revolution can find no support and is harmless… the cure for

evil and disorder is more liberty, not suppression” (Volume One,

Selection 117).

Emma Goldman drew similar lessons from the Russian Revolution, arguing

that “to divest one’s methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the

depths of utter demoralization… No revolution can ever succeed as a

factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in

spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved.” For Goldman, the

essence of revolution cannot be “a violent change of social conditions

through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over

another class,” as in the Marxist conception. For the social revolution

to succeed, there must be “a fundamental transvaluation of values…

ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and

of man to society,” establishing “the sanctity of human life, the

dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and

well-being” (Volume One, Selection 89).

In conceiving the social revolution as “the mental and spiritual

regenerator” of human values and relationships, Goldman was adopting a

position close to that of Gustav Landauer, the anarchist socialist

martyred during the short-lived Bavarian Revolution in 1919. Before the

war, he criticized those revolutionaries who regard the state as a

physical “thing—akin to a fetish—that one can smash in order to

destroy.” Rather, the “state is a relationship between human beings, a

way by which people relate to one another… one destroys it by entering

into other relationships, by behaving differently to one another.” If

the state is a kind of social relationship, then “we are the state” and

remain so “as long as we are not otherwise, as long as we have not

created the institutions that constitute a genuine community and society

of human beings” (Volume One, Selection 49).

This positive conception of social revolution as the creation of

egalitarian communities was later expanded upon by Landauer’s friend,

the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber (1878–1965). Consciously seeking to

build upon Landauer’s legacy, Buber called for the creation of “a

community of communities,” a federation of village communes “where

communal living is based on the amalgamation of production and

consumption, production being understood… as the organic union of

agriculture with industry and the handicrafts as well” (Volume Two,

Selection 16). Such a vision drew upon both Landauer and Kropotkin,

particularly the latter’s Fields, Factories and Workshops (Volume One,

Selection 34). This vision was shared by some of the early pioneers of

the kibbutz movement in Palestine (Horrox, 2009), and by Gandhi and his

followers in India (Volume Two, Selection 32). It received renewed

impetus after the Second World War, with the development of

communitarian and ecological conceptions of anarchism by people like

Paul Goodman (Volume Two, Selections 17 & 70) and Murray Bookchin

(Volume Two, Selections 48 & 74).

Fascism: The Preventive Counter-Revolution

Those anarchists who were not seduced by the seeming “success” of the

Bolsheviks in Russia were faced with an equally formidable opponent in

the various fascist movements that arose in the aftermath of the First

World War. As with the Communists, the Fascists championed centralized

command and technology, and did not hesitate to use the most brutal

methods to suppress and annihilate their opponents. One of the first and

most perceptive critics of fascism was the Italian anarchist, Luigi

Fabbri (1877–1935), who aptly described it as “the preventive

counter-revolution.” For him, fascism constituted “a sort of militia and

rallying point” for the “conservative forces in society,” “the

organization and agent of the violent armed defence of the ruling class

against the proletariat.” Fascism arose from the militarization of

European societies during the First World War, which the ruling classes

had hoped would decapitate “a working class that had become overly

strong, [by] defusing popular resistance through blood-letting on a vast

scale” (Volume One, Selection 113).

Fascism put the lie to the notion of a “democratic” state, with the

Italian judiciary, police and military turning a blind eye to fascist

violence while prosecuting and imprisoning those who sought to defend

themselves against it. Consequently, Fabbri regarded a narrow

“anti-fascist” approach as being completely inadequate. Seeing the

fascists as the only enemy “would be like stripping the branches from a

poisonous tree while leaving the trunk intact… The fight against fascism

can only be waged effectively if it is struck through the political and

economic institutions of which it is an outgrowth and from which it

draws sustenance,” namely “capitalism and the state.” While “capitalism

uses fascism to blackmail the state, the state itself uses fascism to

blackmail the proletariat,” dangling fascism “over the heads of the

working classes” like “some sword of Damocles,” leaving the working

class “forever fearful of its rights being violated by some unforeseen

and arbitrary violence” (Volume One, Selection 113).

The anarchist pacifist Bart de Ligt regarded fascism as “a

politico-economic state where the ruling class of each country behaves

towards its own people as for several centuries it has behaved to the

colonial peoples under its heel,” an inverted imperialism “turned

against its own people.” Yet fascism was not based on violence alone and

enjoyed popular support. As de Ligt noted, fascism “takes advantage of

the people’s increasing misery to seduce them by a new Messianism:

belief in the Strong Man, the Duce, the Führer” (Volume One, Selection

120).

The veteran anarcho-syndicalist, Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958), argued that

fascism was the combined result of the capitalists’ urge to dominate

workers, nations and the natural world, the anonymity and powerlessness

of “mass man,” the development of modern mass technology and production

techniques, mass propaganda and the substitution of bureaucratic state

control over every aspect of social life for personal responsibility and

communal self-regulation, resulting in the dissolution of “society into

its separate parts” and their incorporation “as lifeless accessories

into the gears of the political machine.” The reduction of the

individual to a mere cog in the machine, together with the constant

“tutelage of our acting and thinking,” make us “weak and irresponsible,”

Rocker wrote, “hence, the continued cry for the strong man who is to put

an end to our distress” (Volume One, Selection 121). Drawing on Freud,

Herbert Read argued that it is the “obsessive fear of the father which

is the psychological basis of tyranny” and “at the same time the

weakness of which the tyrant takes advantage” (Volume One, Selection

130).

The Triumph of the Irrational

Rocker noted how in Germany fascism had assumed a brutally racist

character, with German capitalists citing Nazi doctrines of racial

superiority to justify their own domination and to dismiss human

equality, and therefore socialism, as biological impossibilities.

Writing in 1937, Rocker foresaw the genocidal atrocities which were to

follow, citing this comment by the Nazi ideologue, Ernst Mann: “Suicide

is the one heroic deed available to invalids and weaklings” (Volume One,

Selection 121).

The Italian anarchist, Camillo Berneri (1897–1937), described fascism as

“the triumph of the irrational.” He documented and dissected the noxious

racial doctrines of the Nazis, which, on the one hand, portrayed the

“Aryan” and “Nordic” German people as a superior race, but then, in

order to justify rule by an elite, had to argue that the “ruling strata”

were of purer blood (Berneri, 1935). As Rocker observed, “every class

that has thus far attained to power has felt the need of stamping their

rulership with the mark of the unalterable and predestined.” The idea

that the ruling class is a “special breed,” Rocker pointed out,

originated among the Spanish nobility, whose “blue blood” was supposed

to distinguish them from those they ruled (Volume One, Selection 121).

It was in Spain that the conflict between the “blue bloods,” capitalists

and fascists, on the one hand, and the anarchists, socialists and

republicans, on the other, was to reach a bloody crescendo when

revolution and civil war broke out there in July 1936.

Authority and Sexuality

Anarchists who sought to understand the popular appeal of fascism turned

to the work of the dissident Marxist psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich

(1897–1957). Reich was unpopular in Marxist circles, having described

Soviet Communism as “red fascism,” which resulted in his expulsion from

the Communist Party. In his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich

discussed the role of the patriarchal nuclear family, legal marriage,

enforced monogamy, religion and sexual repression in creating an

authoritarian character structure (Volume One, Selection 119).

Reich’s work was similar to the earlier psychoanalytic anarchist

critique of Otto Gross (1877–1920), who argued on the eve of the First

World War, echoing Max Stirner, that previous revolutions “collapsed

because the revolutionary of yesterday carried authority within

himself.” Gross believed that “the root of all authority lies in the

family,” and that “the combination of sexuality and authority, as it

shows itself in the patriarchal family still prevailing today, claps

every individuality in chains” (Volume One, Selection 78). Although he

put greater emphasis than Reich on the “inner conflict” between “that

which belongs to oneself” and the “authority that has penetrated into

our own innermost self,” Gross also called for the sexual liberation of

women and for a struggle “against the father and patriarchy” (Volume

One, Selection 78).

The Japanese anarchist feminist, Takamure Itsue (1894–1964), argued that

the ruling class viewed sexual fulfillment “as a mere extravagance for

everyone except themselves” and “babies as eggs for their industrial

machines… to be chained up within the confinement of the marriage

system,” with the burdens of pregnancy, child birth and child rearing

being imposed on women. She acknowledged the changes in sexual relations

arising from the development of birth control, which potentially gave

women more control over their lives, but as with Carmen Lareva and He

Zhen before her, warned against mere “promiscuity.” For her, “genuine

anarchist love” was based on mutual respect, such that those who seek it

can “never be satisfied with recreational sex” (Volume One, Selection

109). The liberalization of marriage laws and the legalization of birth

control were not enough, for men would continue to view women as sex

objects and deny responsibility for child care.

In Spain, Félix Martí Ibáñez argued that sexual revolution, because it

involves the transformation of individual attitudes and relationships,

can neither be imposed from above nor completely suppressed by the

ruling authorities. The sexual revolution must begin now, “by means of

the book, the word, the conference and personal example.” Only then will

people be able to “create and forge that sexual culture which is the key

to liberation” (Volume One, Selection 121). That this would be no easy

task was highlighted by Lucía Sánchez Saornil, one of the founders of

the Mujeres Libres anarchist women’s group in Spain. She criticized

those anarchist men who used notions of sexual liberation as a pretext

for looking “upon every woman who passes their way as a target for their

appetites” (Volume One, Selection 123). Such conduct either results in

the reduction of women to “a plaything of masculine whims,” or alienates

them from participation in the anarchist movement.

Some anarchists felt that Reich’s analysis overemphasized the role of

sexual repression in the rise of fascism. A Spanish article suggested

that a “completely healthy and well-balanced individual in terms of his

sexual life may be a long way off from being a perfect socialist and a

convinced revolutionary fighter,” for “an individual free of bourgeois

sexual prejudice may lack all sense of human solidarity” (Volume One,

Selection 119).

Others were more enthusiastic. Marie Louise Berneri (1918–1949) endorsed

Reich’s argument that the “fear of pleasurable excitation” caused by

conventional morality and the legally mandated patriarchal family “is

the soil on which the individual re-creates the life-negating ideologies

which are the basis of dictatorship.” She also drew on the work of the

anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, whose studies indicated that in

those societies where people’s sex lives are “allowed to develop

naturally, freely and unhampered through every stage of life, with full

satisfaction” there are “no sexual perversions, no functional psychoses,

no psychoneuroses, no sex murder,” in marked contrast to societies based

on the “patriarchal authoritarian family organization.” Berneri accepted

Reich’s claim that when his patients “were restored to a healthy

sex-life, their whole character altered, their submissiveness

disappeared, they revolted against an absurd moral code, against the

teachings of the Church, against the monotony and uselessness of their

work” (Volume Two, Selection 75). In other words, they became social

revolutionaries.

Paul Goodman drew the connection between the repression of homosexual

impulses among adolescent males and the war machine. These “boys” are

made to feel “ashamed of their acts; their pleasures are suppressed and

in their stead appear fistfights and violence.” In the army, “this

violent homosexuality, so near the surface but always repressed and

thereby gathering tension, turns into a violent sadism against the

enemy: it is all knives and guns and bayonets, and raining bombs on

towns, and driving one’s lust in the guise of anger to fuck the Japs”

(Volume Two, Selection 11).

The libertarian communist, Daniel Guérin (1904–1988), wrote that

“patriarchal society, resting on the dual authority of the man over the

woman and of the father over the children, accords primacy to the

attributes and modes of behaviour associated with virility.

Homosexuality is persecuted to the extent that it undermines this

construction. The disdain of which woman is the object in patriarchal

societies is not without correlation with the shame attached to the

homosexual act.” While Guérin urged people “to pursue simultaneously

both the social revolution and the sexual revolution, until human beings

are liberated completely from the two crushing burdens of capitalism and

puritanism,” he agreed with Emma Goldman, Martí Ibáñez, and Paul Goodman

that the process of sexual liberation must begin now, not after the

revolution. Yet, as with Goodman, he also recognized that the gay

liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s “created a whole generation of

‘gay’ young men, profoundly apolitical… a million miles from any

conception of class struggle,” casting doubt on the Reichian view that

sexual liberation leads to social revolution (Volume Two, Selection 76).

Alex Comfort (1920–2000), who was also a pioneer of sexual liberation,

suggested that part of the appeal of fascism lay in people’s

consciousness of their own mortality and fear of death. Since “to admit

that I am an individual I must also admit that I shall cease to exist,”

people take refuge in the belief in “an immortal, invisible and only

wise society, which can exact responsibilities and demand allegiances…

Each sincere citizen feels responsibility to society in the abstract,

and none to the people he kills… Fascism is a refuge from Death in

death.” (Volume Two, Selection 20).

Anarchism in China Before the 1949 Revolution

In Asia during the 1920s and 30s, the anarchists faced obstacles similar

to those of their European comrades. The success of the Bolsheviks in

Russia led to the creation of Marxist-Leninist Communist parties in

various parts of Asia. The anarchists had until then been the most

influential revolutionary movement in China. By the late 1920s, the

anarchists had been eclipsed by the Chinese Communist Party and the

Guomindang, who fought each other, and the Japanese, for control of

China over the next twenty years.

Chinese anarchists rejected the Marxist notion of the dictatorship of

the proletariat, concentrating all power “in the hands of the state,”

because this would result in the “suppression of individual freedom”

(Volume One, Selection 100). The Chinese anarchists did not regard

Marxist state socialism as sufficiently communist, for during the

alleged “transition” from socialism to communism, a wage system and some

forms of private property would be retained.

Huang Lingshuang (1898–1982), one of the more noteworthy Chinese

anarchist critics of Marxism, rejected the Marxist view that society

must progress through successive stages of economic and technological

development before communism can be achieved. Drawing on the work of

European anthropologists, Huang Lingshuang was able to more clearly

distinguish between cultural change and biological evolution than

Kropotkin, who had largely conflated the two. Huang Lingshuang argued

that, contrary to the Marxist theory of historical materialism, the

“same economic and technological conditions do not necessarily result in

the same culture,” cultural and economic changes do “not occur at the

same rate,” and not every society goes through the same economic stages

of development in the same order (Volume One, Selection 100). Rudolf

Rocker made similar arguments in Nationalism and Culture (Volume One,

Selection 121).

Class Struggle and ‘Pure’ Anarchism in Japan

In contrast to the decline of the Chinese anarchist movement in the

1920s, according to John Crump, “the anarchists in Japan were

organisationally stronger than ever before, and there was a

corresponding flowering of ideas and theories, particularly among the

anarchist communists” (Crump, 1996). The anarchist communists identified

themselves as “pure anarchists.” They criticized the anarcho-syndicalist

concept of workers’ control of the existing means of production. As

Hatta Shûzô (1886–1934) put it, “in a society which is based on the

division of labour, those engaged in vital production… would have more

power over the machinery of coordination than those engaged in other

lines of production.”

The Japanese “pure anarchists” therefore proposed a decentralized system

of communal production “performed autonomously on a human scale,” where

“production springs from consumption,” being designed to meet local and

individual wants and needs, in contrast to existing systems of

production, where consumption is driven by the demands of production.

Under such a system of decentralized human scale production, people “can

coordinate the work process themselves,” such that there is no need for

a “superior body and there is no place for power” (Volume One, Selection

106).

Japanese anarcho-syndicalist advocates of class struggle agreed that the

existing authoritarian system of production should be replaced by

“communal property… where there is neither exploiter nor exploited,

neither master nor slave,” with society being “revived with spontaneity

and mutual free agreement as an integral whole” (Volume One, Selection

107). However, in order to create such a society a profound

revolutionary transformation was required. The anarcho-syndicalists

argued that it was only by participating in the workers’ daily struggles

against the capitalist system that anarchists would be able to inspire a

revolutionary movement capable of creating the anarchist community to

which the “pure anarchists” aspired.

Contrary to the claims of the “class struggle” anarcho-syndicalists

though, the “pure anarchists” did not hold themselves aloof from the

workers’ struggles but convinced the anarchist Zenkoku Jiren labour

federation to adopt a “pure anarchist” position which emphasized that

their goal was not to take over the existing means of production,

replacing the capitalists and the government with a trade union

administration, but to create a decentralized system of communal

production based on human-scale technology, a position similar to that

developed by Murray Bookchin in the 1960s (Volume Two, Selections 48, 62

& 74).

The Zenkoku Jiren reached out to Japanese tenant farmers, seeing them

“as the crucial social force which could bring about the commune-based,

alternative society to capitalism” advocated by the “pure anarchists”

(Crump, 1996). The appeal of this vision to radical Japanese workers and

farmers is illustrated by the fact that by 1931, the Zenkoku Jiren had

about 16,000 members, whereas the more conventional anarcho-syndicalist

federation, the Jikyô, had only 3,000.

In the early 1930s, as the Japanese state began a concerted push for

imperialist expansion by invading Manchuria, the state authorities

renewed their campaign against the Japanese anarchist movement, which

was staunchly anti-imperialist. In the face of the Japanese occupation

of Manchuria, the Japanese Libertarian Federation had called on all

people to “cease military production, refuse military service and

disobey the officers” (Volume One, Selection 110). Anarchist

organizations were banned and hundreds of anarchists arrested. By 1936,

the organized anarchist movement in Japan had been crushed.

Anarchism in the Korean Liberation Movement

Japan annexed Korea in 1910, around the same time that Japanese

authorities had made their first attempt to destroy the nascent Japanese

anarchist movement by executing several leading anarchists, including

Kôtoku Shûsui (Volume One, Selection 102). The Japanese occupation of

Korea gave rise to a national liberation movement to free the Korean

people from Japanese exploitation and domination. Some of the more

radical elements in the liberation movement gravitated toward anarchism.

In 1923, a prominent member of the movement, Shin Chaeho (1880–1936),

published his “Declaration of the Korean Revolution” in which he argued

that when driving out their Japanese exploiters, the Korean people must

be careful not to “replace one privileged group with another.” The goal

of the Korean revolution should be the creation of a world in which “one

human being will not be able to oppress other human beings and one

society will not be able to exploit other societies.” The revolution

must therefore be a “revolution of the masses.” To succeed in

constructing a free society, the revolution must destroy foreign rule,

the “privileged class” that benefits from it, the “system of economic

exploitation,” “social inequality” and “servile cultural thoughts”

created by conformist forms of “religion, ethics, literature, fine arts,

customs and public morals” (Volume One, Selection 105).

In emphasizing the constructive role of destruction, Shin Chaeho was

expressing a viewpoint shared by many anarchists that can be traced back

to Proudhon and Bakunin (Volume One, Selection 10). He also recognized

that to win the masses over to the cause of the revolution, they must be

convinced that the revolution will result in material improvements and

greater freedom for themselves, not simply the expulsion of their

foreign rulers. As Kropotkin put it, for “the revolution to be anything

more than a word… the conquest of the day itself must be worth the

trouble of defending; the poor of yesterday must not find themselves

even poorer today” (Volume One, Selection 45).

This was one of the reasons why Kropotkin had entitled his most

sustained argument in favour of anarchist communism The Conquest of

Bread (Volume One, Selection 33). When Korean anarchists began

publishing their own paper in 1928, they called it Talhwan, or Conquest,

and championed anarchist communism, calling for the abolition of

capitalism and government (Volume One, Selection 108). They also

rejected the Marxist “state capitalism” that was being created in the

Soviet Union through the “despotic and dictatorial” policies of the

Soviet Communist Party (the Bolsheviks).

Korean anarchists, including Shin Chaeho, were instrumental in forming

the Eastern Anarchist Federation in 1927, which had members from Korea,

China, Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan. Most of their work and publications

had to be carried out from exile, and even then at great risk to

themselves. Shin Chaeho was arrested by Japanese authorities in Taiwan

in 1928 and died in prison in 1936. However, after the defeat of Japan

in the Second World War, it was only in Korea that a significant

anarchist movement reemerged in southeast Asia.

In China, the Marxist Communists under the leadership of Mao Zedong had

seized control by 1949. They no more tolerated an independent anarchist

movement than had the Communists in the Soviet Union. In Japan, the U.S.

occupiers engineered the purging of radicals, whether Marxist or

anarchist, from positions of influence within the trade union movement,

and the reform of rural landholdings, creating “a new class of

landowning small farmers” who “then became a bastion of political

conservatism” hostile rather than sympathetic toward anarchism (Crump,

1996).

During the war, some Korean anarchists participated in the Korean

Provisional Government in exile. Their desire for Korean independence

superseded their commitment to anarchist ideals. Before the war, the

Korean Anarchist Federation had rejected the establishment of a

“national united front” (Volume One, Selection 108). After the war, Yu

Lim, who had served as a cabinet minister in the Provisional Government,

urged the anarchists to support an independent Korean government to

prevent Korea from falling “into the hands of either the Stalinists to

the north or the imperialistic compradore-capitalists to the south”

(Volume Two, Selection 9).

Other Korean anarchists, while seeking “to cooperate with all genuinely

revolutionary nationalist groups of the left,” continued to call for

“total liberation” through the “free federation of autonomous units

covering the whole country” (Volume Two, Selection 9). At the conclusion

of the war in 1945, grass roots committees for the reconstruction of

Korea sprang up across the country, and peasants and workers began

forming independent unions. However, this process of social

reconstruction “from the bottom upward” came to a halt after the Soviet

Union and the United States imposed their own “national” governments in

the north and south in 1948, leading to the divisive and inconclusive

Korean War (1950–1953).

Spanish Anarchism: Prelude to Revolution

The Spanish anarchist movement which Bakunin had helped inspire

experienced its greatest triumphs and most tragic defeats during the

Spanish Revolution and Civil War (1936–1939). The two most prominent

anarchist groups in Spain were the Iberian Anarchist Federation (the

FAI) and the anarcho-syndicalist trade union confederation, the

Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (the CNT). The FAI was a federation

of anarchist revolutionaries which sought to foment social revolution

and to keep the CNT on an anarchist path. This “dual organization” model

had been followed in Spain since the days of the First International,

when Bakunin recruited Spanish radicals into his Alliance of Social

Revolutionaries. Members of the Alliance were to ensure that the Spanish

sections of the International adopted Bakunin’s collectivist anarchist

program.

By the 1930s, the Spanish anarchist movement had moved toward an

anarchist communist position, although the doctrine of “anarchism

without adjectives,” which originated in the debates between the

anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists in the 1890s, continued

to be influential. Diego Abad de Santillán (1897–1983), who played a

prominent role in the Argentine and Spanish anarchist movements, saw

anarchism as representing a broad “humanistic craving” which “seeks to

defend man’s dignity and freedom, regardless of circumstances and under

every political system, past, present and future.” Anarchism must

therefore be without adjectives because it is not tied to any particular

economic or political system, nor is anarchy only possible at a certain

stage of history or development. Abad de Santillán argued that anarchism

“can survive and assert its right to exist alongside plough and team of

oxen as readily as alongside the modern combine-harvester; its mission

in the days of steam was the same as it is in the age of the electric

motor or jet engine or the modern age of the computer and atomic power”

(Volume Two, Selection 53).

Despite his endorsement of “anarchism without adjectives,” Abad de

Santillán did not shy away from controversy. Although he participated in

the anarcho-syndicalist movements in Argentina and Spain, he urged

anarchists “not to forget that the Syndicate is, as an economic

by-product of capitalist organization, a social phenomenon spawned by

the needs of its day. Clinging to its structures after the revolution

would be tantamount to clinging to the cause that spawned it:

capitalism” (Volume One, Selection 94).

On the eve of the Spanish Revolution, when the CNT reaffirmed its

commitment to libertarian communism (Volume One, Selection 124), Abad de

Santillán argued not only that people should be free to choose between

“communism, collectivism or mutualism,” but that “the prerequisite” of

such freedom is a certain level of material abundance that can only be

achieved through an integrated economic network of productive units

(Volume One, Selection 125).

The CNT in the Spanish Civil War

The greatest controversy in which Abad de Santillán was involved arose

from the decisions by the CNT during the Spanish Civil War to accept

posts in the Catalonian governing council in September 1936 and, in

November 1936, the central government in Madrid. In December 1936, Abad

de Santillán became the Councillor of Economy in the regional government

in Catalonia (the Generalitat). Not only did the “militants” of the FAI

fail to prevent this fatal compromise of anarchist principles, some of

the CNT ministers were themselves members of the FAI (such as Juan

García Oliver, who became the Minister of Justice in the Madrid

government, and Abad de Santillán himself). The decision to join the

government was engineered by the National Committee of the CNT (which

became the de facto ruling council of the CNT during the course of the

Civil War) in order to obtain arms and financing, neither of which were

forthcoming.

The decision of the CNT leadership to join the Spanish government was

sharply criticized by many well known anarchists, including Camillo

Berneri, Sébastien Faure, and Alexander Schapiro. Writing for the IWA

publication, The International, the Swedish anarcho-syndicalist Albert

Jensen (1879–1957) pointed out that it was by way of revolution that the

workers in Catalonia had prevented General Franco from seizing power

when he began the military revolt against the republican government in

July 1936. Anarchists and syndicalists stormed military barracks, seized

weapons and began collectivizing industry, while the republican

government was in a state of virtual collapse. However, in order to

maintain a “united front” against fascism, and to avoid imposing their

own de facto dictatorship, the CNT-FAI decided it was better to work

within the republican government rather than against it.

The problem was that, as Jensen pointed out, during a civil war the

government “must have recourse always to dictatorship,” governing by

decree and imposing military discipline, so instead of imposing an

“anarchist” dictatorship the CNT-FAI was propping up a

“counter-revolutionary” dictatorship, which hardly constituted “loyalty

to [anarchist] ideas” and principles. “Wounded unto death, the State

received new life thanks to the governmental participation of the

CNT-FAI.” If the CNT-FAI had to work with other anti-fascists, whether

capitalists or the authoritarian Communists loyal to Moscow, it would

have been better for the CNT-FAI to remain outside the government,

taking the position that “under no pretext, would they tolerate any

attack on the revolutionary accomplishments and that they would defend

these with all the necessary means” (Volume One, Selection 127).

The Spanish Revolution

In the factories and in the countryside, in areas that did not

immediately fall under fascist control, there was a far-reaching social

revolution. Spanish peasants collectivized the land and workers took

over their factories. In the factories, the workers in assembly would

make policy decisions and elect delegates to coordinate production and

distribution. In the countryside, village and town assemblies were held

in which all members of the community were able to participate.

In “the agrarian regions and especially in Aragon,” observed Gaston

Leval (1895–1978), “a new organism appeared: the Collective.” The

collective was not a trade union or syndical organization, “for it

encompasses all those who wish to join it whether they are producers in

the classic economic sense or not.” Neither was it a commune or

municipal council, as it “encompasses at the same time the Syndicate and

municipal functions.” The “whole population,” not merely the producers,

“takes part in [the] management” of the collective, dealing with all

sorts of issues, “whether it is a question of policy for agriculture,

for the creation of new industries, for social solidarity, medical

service or public education” (Volume One, Selection 126).

Although the anarchist collectives were ultimately destroyed, first by

the Stalinist Communists in republican areas, and then by the fascists

as they subjugated all of Spain, they constitute the greatest

achievement of the Spanish anarchist movement. Through the crucible of

the social revolution itself, the Spanish people developed this new,

more inclusive form of libertarian organization which transcended the

limits of anarcho-syndicalist trade union and factory committee forms of

organization, inspiring generations to come.

Counter-Revolution in Spain

Those anarchists who attempted to work within the republican government

were consistently outmaneuvered by the Republicans, Socialists and

Communists. The areas in which anarchists were free to implement their

ideas continued to shrink, but it was the May Days in Barcelona in 1937

that effectively marked the end of the anarchist social revolution in

Spain. Factories and services under anarchist inspired workers’

self-management were attacked by Republican and Communist forces while

they did battle with the anarchist militias, and several prominent

anarchists were murdered, including Camillo Berneri and the Libertarian

Youth leader, Alfredo Martinez. The CNT leadership negotiated a truce

with the Republican government rather than engage in a “civil war”

within the civil war. Hundreds of anarchists were killed in the

fighting, and many more were imprisoned. The Socialists and Communists,

unsuccessful in having the CNT declared illegal, forced them out of the

government and continued their campaign of “decollectivization” and

disarmament of the anarchist groups.

Given this disastrous turn of events, Abad de Santillán had second

thoughts about the CNT’s policy of collaboration. By April 1937, he had

already ceased being a member of the Catalonian cabinet. The following

year he denounced those “anarchists” who had used their positions within

the movement “as a springboard to defect to the other side where the

pickings are easier and the thorns less sharp,” obtaining “high

positions of political and economic privilege.” The CNT-FAI’s

participation “in political power,” which he had also once “thought

advisable due to circumstances, in light of the war,” had demonstrated

“yet again what Kropotkin once said of the parliamentary socialists:

‘You mean to conquer the State, but the State will end up conquering

you’” (Volume One, Selection 128).

Abad de Santillán noted that the self-styled anarchist “avant-garde,”

who fancied themselves the “best trained, most prestigious, sharpest

witted,” himself included, were not “in the vanguard of economic and

social change” but instead “proved a hindrance, a brake, a hurdle to

that change.” He had to admit that the “broad masses” of the Spanish

people “were better prepared than their supposed mentors and guides when

it came to revolutionary reconstruction.” For Abad de Santillán, by

“standing with the State and thus against the people,” anarchists who

were working within the Republican government were “not only committing

an irreparable act of betrayal of the revolution,” they were “also

betraying the war effort, because we are denying it the active support

of the people,” who were becoming increasingly alienated from the

Republican government as it sought to dismantle the anarchist

collectives and other organs of self-management that had been created by

the people themselves (Volume One, Selection 128).

Under the pressure of civil war, the CNT-FAI came more and more to

resemble a conventional political party. The CNT’s National Committee

would negotiate with the Republican government, and then present

whatever deals they could get to the membership as a fait accompli. In

effect, the “inverse” pyramidal federalist structure of the CNT was

turned upside down, as the CNT began to function as a top-down political

organization. The anarchist militias were dissolved, broken up or

absorbed into the Communist dominated Republican army and subjected to

strict military discipline (Richards, 1972).

Looking back on the Revolution and Civil War, José Peirats (1908–1989),

active in the CNT and later its historian, believed that “those of us

who consistently opposed collaboration with the government had as our

only alternative a principled, heroic defeat.” Nevertheless, he was

sympathetic to those principled anarchists for whom “the only solution

was to leave an indelible mark on the present without compromising the

future,” through their “constructive revolutionary experiments like the

collectives, artistic and cultural achievements, new models of free,

communal living.” This entailed “staying out of intrigues, avoiding

complicity with the counterrevolution within the government, protecting

the organization and its militants from the vainglory of rulers or the

pride of the newly rich.” The seemingly insurmountable difficulties in

maintaining these revolutionary achievements in the midst of civil war

caused Peirats to question not these achievements, but “the idea of

revolution” itself, conceived as a mass armed uprising seeking to

overthrow the existing regime which inevitably degenerates into civil

war (Peirats: 188–189), a critique further developed by Luc Bonet

(Volume Three, Selection 12). This process of rethinking revolution was

to be continued by many anarchists after the Spanish Revolution and the

Second World War.

Poetry and Anarchism

One of the anarchists involved in rethinking anarchism around the time

of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War was the English poet, art critic

and essayist, Herbert Read (1893–1968). In Poetry and Anarchism (1938),

Read acknowledged that “to declare for a doctrine so remote as anarchism

at this stage of history will be regarded by some critics as a sign of

intellectual bankruptcy; by others as a sort of treason, a desertion of

the democratic front at the most acute moment of its crisis; by still

others as mere poetic nonsense.” Read sought to “balance anarchism with

surrealism, reason with romanticism, the understanding with the

imagination, function with freedom” (Volume One, Selection 130). He

developed an ecological conception of anarchism emphasizing spontaneity

and differentiation. He saw society as “an organic being” in which

communities “can live naturally and freely” and individuals can “develop

in consciousness of strength, vitality and joy,” with progress being

“measured by the degree of differentiation within a society” (Volume

Two, Selection 1). It was partly through Read’s writings that Murray

Bookchin was later inspired to draw the connections between ecology and

anarchism (Volume Two, Selection 48).

Read noted that even “if you abolish all other classes and distinctions

and retain a bureaucracy you are still far from the classless society,

for the bureaucracy is itself the nucleus of a class whose interests are

totally opposed to the people it supposedly serves.” Taking advantage of

the bureaucratic structure of the modern state, the professional

politician rises to power, “his motive throughout [being] personal

ambition and megalomania” (Volume One, Selection 130), a notion further

developed by Alex Comfort in his post-war book, Authority and

Delinquency in the Modern State, in which he argued that the

bureaucratic state, through its power structures, provides a ready

outlet for those with psychopathic tendencies (Volume Two, Selection

26).

Read sought to reverse the rise to power of professional politicians and

bureaucrats by advocating a “return to a functional basis of

representation,” by which he meant the development of decentralized but

federated organs of self-management, as had long been advocated by

anarchists from Proudhon and Bakunin to the anarcho-syndicalists. The

professional politician would be replaced by the “ad hoc delegate,” who

would continue to work within his or her area, such that there would be

“no whole-time officials, no bureaucrats, no politicians, no dictators”

(Volume One, Selection 130).

Arguing that “real politics are local politics,” Read proposed that

local councils or “governments” composed of delegates from the community

and the functional groups that comprise it “control all the immediate

interests of the citizen,” with “remoter interests—questions of

cooperation, intercommunication, and foreign affairs—[being] settled by

councils of delegates elected by the local councils and the [workers’]

syndicates.” Read admitted that this was a system of government, but

distinguished this conception of local and functional organization from

the “autonomous State,” which “is divorced from its immediate functions

and becomes an entity claiming to control the lives and destinies of its

subjects,” such that “liberty ceases to exist” (Volume One, Selection

130).

Drawing the Line

Bearing in mind the difficulties recently faced by the Spanish

anarchists in the Spanish Revolution and Civil War, at the beginning of

the Second World War Herbert Read warned against the revolutionary

seizure of power, instead looking forward to “a spontaneous and

universal insurrection” (Volume Two, Selection 1), but one which would

employ nonviolent methods, for people “cannot struggle against” the

modern state, armed with atomic bombs, “on the plane of force… Our

action must be piecemeal, non-violent, insidious and universally

pervasive” (Volume Two, Selection 36). Alex Comfort took a similar

position, arguing that the “very states which are able to make and use

atomic weapons are singularly vulnerable, by their very complexity, to

the attacks of individual disobedience” (Volume Two, Selection 12).

Paul Goodman described this process as “Drawing the Line, beyond which

[we] cannot cooperate.” But although we “draw the line in their

conditions; we proceed on our conditions,” replacing “the habit of

coercion [with] a habit of freedom… Our action must be aimed, not at a

future establishment; but… at fraternal arrangements today,

progressively incorporating more and more of the social functions into

our free society,” for the creation of a “free society cannot be the

substitution of a ‘new order’ for the old order; it is the extension of

spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life”

(Volume Two, Selection 11).

Read, Comfort and Goodman all advocated various forms of non-violent

direct action, including war resistance and opposition to conscription

through such means as draft evasion. Such attitudes were dangerous and

unpopular, particularly during the Second World War. Anarchists who

practiced draft resistance were imprisoned in France, England and the

United States. It was only in the early 1960s in France, and a few years

later in the United States, that mass draft resistance movements emerged

in opposition to the French war in Algeria and the U.S. war in Vietnam

(Volume Two, Selection 31).

Facing the War

At the beginning of the Second World War, a group of anarchists in

Geneva wrote that it is “an indispensable right, without which all other

rights are mere illusions”, that “no one should be required to kill

others or to expose themselves to being killed.” For them, the “worst

form of disorder is not anarchy,” as critics of anarchism claim, “but

war, which is the highest expression of authority” (Volume Two,

Selection 3). That expression of authority was to result in the loss of

tens of millions of lives in Europe and Asia during the next six years,

culminating in the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in

August 1945. As Marie Louise Berneri remarked, anarchist acts of

violence pale in comparison. A single bombing raid “kills more men,

women and children than have been killed in the whole history, true or

invented, of anarchist bombs.” When Italian anarchists tried to

assassinate Mussolini, they were denounced as terrorists, but when

“whole cities” are rubbed “off the map” as part of the war effort,

reducing “whole populations to starvation, with its resulting scourge of

epidemics and disease all over the world,” the workers “are asked to

rejoice in this wholesale destruction from which there is no escaping”

(Volume Two, Selection 4).

When anarchists resort to violence, they are held criminally

responsible, and their beliefs denounced as the cause. When government

forces engage in the wholesale destruction of war, no one (at least

among the victors) is held responsible, belief in authority is not seen

as the cause, and the very nation states which brought about the

conflict are supposed to bring, as Marie Louise Berneri remarked, “peace

and order… with their bombs” (Volume Two, Selection 4).

In response to the comments of a U.S. Army sergeant surveying a bombed

out area in Germany that in “modern war there are crimes not criminals…

Murder has been mechanized and rendered impersonal,” Paul Goodman wrote

that “it is ridiculous to say that the crime cannot be imputed or that

any one commits it without intent or in ignorance… The steps [the

individual] takes to habituation and unconsciousness are crimes which

entail every subsequent evil of enslavement and mass-murder” (Volume

Two, Selection 11).

Alex Comfort noted that modern bureaucratic societies “have removed at

least one of the most important bars to delinquent action by legislators

and their executive, in the creation of a legislature which can enact

its fantasies without witnessing their effects, and an executive which

abdicates all responsibility for what it does in response to superior

orders.” The “individual citizen contributes to [this] chiefly by

obedience and lack of conscious or effective protest” (Volume Two,

Selection 26). Comfort argued that the individual, by making “himself

sufficiently numerous and combative,” can render the modern state

impotent “by his withdrawal from delinquent attitudes,” undermining “the

social support they receive” and the power of the authorities “whose

policies are imposed upon society only through [individual] acquiescence

or co-operation” (Volume Two, Selection 26).

At the beginning of the war, Emma Goldman had written that the “State

and the political and economic institutions it supports can exist only

by fashioning the individual to their particular purpose; training him

to respect ‘law and order’; teaching him obedience, submission and

unquestioning faith in the wisdom and justice of government; above all,

loyal service and complete self-sacrifice when the State commands it, as

in war.” For her, “true liberation, individual and collective, lies in

[the individual’s] emancipation from authority and from belief in it”

(Volume Two, Selection 2).

Herbert Read held a similar position, but focused on the role of modern

education in creating a submissive populace, much had Francisco Ferrer

before him (Volume One, Selection 65). Through the education system,

“everything personal, everything which is the expression of individual

perceptions and feelings, is either neglected, or subordinated to some

conception of normality, of social convention, of correctness.” Read

therefore advocated libertarian education, emphasizing the creative

process and “education through art” (1943), arguing that it “is only in

so far as we liberate” children, “shoots not yet stunted or distorted by

an environment of hatred and injustice, that we can expect to make any

enduring change in society” (Volume Two, Selection 36).

Paul Goodman described the school system as “compulsory mis-education”

(1964), which perpetuated a society in which youth are “growing up

absurd” (1960). His friend Ivan Illich was later to advocate

“deschooling society” as a way of combating the commodification of

social life, where everything, and everybody, becomes a commodity to be

consumed (Volume Two, Selection 73). By the 1960s and 1970s, people were

again experimenting in libertarian education (Volume Two, Selection 46),

something which anarchists had been advocating since the time of William

Godwin.

Community and Freedom

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Dwight Macdonald

(1905–1982) wrote that the “brutality and irrationality of Western

social institutions has reached a pitch which would have seemed

incredible a short generation ago; our lives have come to be dominated

by warfare of a ferocity and on a scale unprecedented in history,”

leading him to conclude that the “Anarchists’ uncompromising rejection

of the State, the subject of Marxian sneers for its ‘absolutist’ and

‘Utopian’ character, makes much better sense in the present era than the

Marxian relativist and historical approach” (Volume Two, Selection 13).

Macdonald argued that in the face of these harsh realities, “we must

reduce political action to a modest, unpretentious, personal level—one

that is real in the sense that it satisfies, here and now, the

psychological needs, and the ethical values of the particular persons

taking part in it.” He suggested forming “small groups of individuals”

into “families” who “live and make their living in the everyday world

but who come together… to form a psychological (as against a

geographical) community.” Through these groups their “members could come

to know each other as fully as possible as human beings (the difficulty

of such knowledge of others in modern society is a chief source of

evil), to exchange ideas and discuss as fully as possible what is ‘on

their minds’ (not only the atomic bomb but also the perils of

child-rearing), and in general to learn the difficult art of living with

other people.” The members of these groups would “preach” their

“ideals—or, if you prefer, make propaganda—by word and by deed, in the

varied everyday contacts of the group members with their fellow men,”

working “against Jim Crow [racist laws]” in the United States, “or to

further pacifism,” and supporting individuals “who stand up for the

common ideals” (Volume Two, Selection 13).

The pacifist David Dellinger (1915–2004), writing a few years later in

the anarchist journal, Resistance, went a step further, arguing for the

creation of small communes “composed of persons who have the same type

of disgust at the economic selfishness of society that the conscientious

objector has concerning war and violence.” In these “experimental”

communities, “economic resources” would be shared, “so that the total

product provides greater strength and freedom for the members than they

would be able to achieve, ethically, as isolated individuals,” while

providing “daily pleasures and satisfactions” by “finding time to do

things together that are fun” (Volume Two, Selection 40).

The “families” of like minded individuals proposed by Macdonald would

today be described as affinity groups, a form of organization that had

been utilized for decades by anarchists, particularly anarchist

communists wary of the more formal organizational structures of the

anarcho-syndicalists (Grave, Volume One, Selection 46). As Murray

Bookchin pointed out, the FAI in Spain had been based on an affinity

group structure. In the 1960s, Bookchin helped to popularize this

intimate form of non-hierarchical organization, which combines

“revolutionary theory with revolutionary lifestyle in its everyday

behaviour.” Much like the “families” advocated by Macdonald, each

affinity group would seek “a rounded body of knowledge and experience in

order to overcome the social and psychological limitations imposed by

bourgeois society on individual development,” acting “as catalysts

within the popular movement.” For Bookchin, the aim of anarchist

affinity groups is not to subordinate “the social forms created by the

revolutionary people… to an impersonal bureaucracy” or party

organization, but “to advance the spontaneous revolutionary movement of

the people to a point where the group can finally disappear into the

organic social forms created by the revolution” itself (Volume Two,

Selection 62).

Similarly, the small-scale communes advocated by Dellinger had long been

a part of many anarchist movements, in Europe, the Americas, and in

China, arising from the need and desire of anarchists to create daily

living arrangements consistent with their ideals, and as an alternative

to hierarchical and authoritarian social institutions, such as the

patriarchal nuclear family. What distinguished these types of communes

from affinity groups were the factors highlighted by Dellinger himself,

primarily living together and sharing financial resources. In the 1960s

and early 1970s, there was a flourishing of communal groups,

particularly in North America, created by disaffected youth seeking to

create alternate lifestyles. In Europe, the various squatting movements

often adopted communal living arrangements, for example in the

Christiania “freetown” in Copenhagen.

While many anarchist communes were short-lived, some have been

remarkably resilient. In Uruguay, for example, the Communidad del Sur

group, which originated in the social struggles of the 1950s, sought to

create libertarian communities based on self-management, including

productive enterprises (Volume Three, Selection 56). Assets were shared,

compensation was based on need, education, work and art were integrated,

and people lived communally. Despite a long period of exile in Sweden

that began in the 1970s due to growing state repression, the Communidad

group eventually returned to Uruguay where it continues to promote the

creation of a self-managed ecological society through its own ongoing

experiments in community living. For the Communidad group, the

“revolution consists of changing social relationships,” much as Gustav

Landauer had argued previously (Volume One, Selection 49). Fleshing out

their “ideals of equality and sociability in a free space,” the

Communidad group has sought to inspire the creation of that “community

of communities” long envisioned by anarchists like Landauer, Martin

Buber, Paul Goodman and many others (Volume Two, Selection 60).

Neither East Nor West

After the Second World War, despite the “Cold War” between the Soviet

Union and the United States, anarchists sought to keep alive their

libertarian vision of a free and equal society in which every individual

is able to flourish. Marie Louise Berneri coined the phrase, “Neither

East nor West,” signifying anarchist opposition to all power blocs

(Volume Two, Selection 10). Anarchists continued to oppose colonialism

and the imperialist expansion of the Soviet and American empires (Volume

Two, Selections 8, 9, 28, 29 & 31).

Due to their opposition to both dominant power blocs, during the Cold

War organized anarchist movements faced almost insurmountable obstacles,

similar to the situation faced by the Spanish anarchists during the

Revolution and Civil War. In Bulgaria, there was a significant pre-war

anarchist communist movement which reemerged briefly after the defeat of

Nazi Germany, but which was quickly suppressed by their Soviet

“liberators.” The Bulgarian anarchists repudiated fascism as an “attempt

to restore absolutism [and] autocracy… with the aim of defending the

economic and spiritual dominance of the privileged classes.” They

rejected “political democracy” (representative government) because “its

social foundations [are] based on the centralized State and capitalism,”

resulting in “chaos, contradictions and crime.” As for State socialism,

“it leads to State capitalism—the most monstrous form of economic

exploitation and oppression, and of total domination of social and

individual freedom” (Volume Two, Selection 7).

The program of the Bulgarian Anarchist Communist Federation is

noteworthy today for its emphasis on anarchist federalism as “a dense

and complex network” of village communities, regional communes,

productive enterprises, trade unions, distribution networks and consumer

organizations that would be “grouped in a general confederation of

exchange and consumption for satisfying the needs of all inhabitants”

(Volume Two, Selection 7). Such network forms of organization mark an

advance over the “inverse pyramid” structure that had long been

advocated by anarcho-syndicalists, which was much more prone to being

transformed into a more conventional, hierarchical form of organization

during times of crisis, as in Spain. By the early 1950s, many

anarcho-syndicalists were advocating similar horizontal networks based

on factory councils and community assemblies, resembling a “honeycomb,”

as Philip Sansom put it, in which “all the cells are of equal importance

and fit into each other,” instead of control being “maintained from the

centre” (Volume Two, Selection 58).

Within their own organizations, the Bulgarian anarchist communists

advocated a form of consensus decision-making. However, while “the

decision of the majority is not binding on the minority,” in practice

“the minority generally rallies to the decision of the majority,” after

the majority has had an opportunity to demonstrate the wisdom of its

position. Thus, while the minority was not bound to follow the decisions

of the majority, the majority was not prevented from acting in

accordance with its own views, such that the minority could not assume

de facto authority over the majority by refusing to agree with the

majority decision, as sometimes happens under other forms of consensus

decision-making. The Bulgarian anarchist communists recognized that in

broader based mass organizations that were not specifically anarchist in

orientation, majority rule would generally prevail, but even then “the

minority may be freed from the obligation to apply a general decision,

on condition that it does not prevent the execution of such a decision”

(Volume Two, Selection 7). In this regard, their position is remarkably

similar to that of contemporary advocates of participatory democracy,

such as Carole Pateman (1985: 159–162; see also Graham, 1996), and

anarchist advocates of various forms of direct democracy (Volume Three,

Chapter 2).

Refusal Global/Global Refusal

Given the difficult political circumstances faced by anarchists in the

aftermath of the Second World War, it should not be surprising that

there was a resurgence of anarchist attitudes in the arts, for it was on

the cultural terrain that anarchists had the greatest freedom of action.

In Quebec, the Automatistes, who were loosely affiliated with the

Surrealists, issued their “ Global Refusal” manifesto in 1948, in which

they foresaw “people freed from their useless chains and turning, in the

unexpected manner that is necessary for spontaneity, to resplendent

anarchy to make the most of their individual gifts” (Volume Two,

Selection 22).

The Surrealists recognized their affinity with the anarchists, sharing

their “fundamental hostility towards both power blocs,” and seeking with

them to bring about “an era from which all hierarchy and all constraint

will have been banished” (Volume Two, Selection 23). André Breton

(1896–1966) noted that it was “in the black mirror of anarchism that

surrealism first recognized itself,” but admitted that the surrealists,

along with many others on the left, had for too long supported the

Soviet Union, mesmerized by “the idea of efficiency” and the hope for a

worldwide social revolution. Now it was time “to return to the

principles” which had allowed the libertarian ideal “to take form,”

arriving at a conception of anarchism as, in the words of Georges

Fontenis (1920–2010), “the expression of the exploited masses in their

desire to create a society without classes, without a State, where all

human values and desires can be realized” (Volume Two, Selection 23).

The Art of Living

In the 1940s, Herbert Read, who had helped introduce Surrealism to

English audiences, extolled modern art for breaking through “the

artificial boundaries and limitations which we owe to a one-sided and

prejudiced view of the human personality.” For Read, all “types of art

are not merely permissible, but desirable… Any kind of exclusiveness or

intolerance is just as opposed to the principles of liberty as social

exclusiveness or political intolerance.” He argued that only in an

anarchist society would everyone be free to develop “the artist latent

in each one of us” (Volume Two, Selection 19).

Alex Comfort agreed with Read that “in truly free communities art is a

general activity, far more cognate with craft than it can ever be in

contemporary organized life.” He looked forward to the creation of

communities in which “art could become a part of daily activity, and in

which all activity [is] potentially creative” (Volume Two, Selection

20).

As Richard Sonn has put it, “In the anarchist utopia the boundaries

between manual and intellectual labour, between art and craft, dissolve.

People are free to express themselves through their work. Artistry

pervades life, rather than being restricted to museum walls and bohemian

artist studios” (Volume Three, Selection 38). In contrast, as David

Wieck (1921–1997) noted, in existing society we “take it for granted

that a small number of people, more or less talented, shall make—one

would say ‘create’—under the usual consumption-oriented conditions of

the market, our ‘works of art,’ our ‘entertainment,’ while the rest of

us are spectators” (Volume Two, Selection 39).

Holley Cantine, Jr. (1911–1977) saw art as a form of play which “must

disguise itself” in adulthood “as useful work in order to be socially

acceptable.” The artist must either find a market for his or her art,

put him or herself at the service of some cause, or live the life of an

impoverished bohemian—in neither case “is the artist really free… Only a

relative handful of spontaneous artists, who give no thought to any

standards but their own satisfaction, can be said to function in the

realm of pure art.”

For Cantine, a free society is one in which everyone “works, according

to his capacity, when there is work to do, and everyone plays the rest

of the time,” much as people do in “non-status societies,” where “play

is regarded as natural for everyone, whenever the immediate pressure of

the environment permits” (Volume Two, Selection 21), an observation

confirmed by the anthropological studies conducted by Pierre Clastres

(1934–1977) in South America (Volume Two, Selection 64).

In New York, Julian Beck (1925–1985) and Judith Malina (1926–2015)

founded the Living Theatre in 1947, which sought to break down the

barriers between playwright and performer, and between performer and

audience. The Living Theatre staged plays by people like Paul Goodman,

whose use of “obscene” language in the late 1940s and 1950s helped keep

the Theatre in trouble with the authorities, when censorship laws were

much stricter than in the USA today.

The Theatre developed a more and more improvisational approach, with the

actors designing their own movements and the director ultimately

“resigning from his authoritarian position” (Volume Two, Selection 24).

By the late 1960s, the Theatre abandoned the confines of the playhouse

altogether, pioneering guerilla street theatre and performance art in

Europe and Latin America (Volume Two, Selection 25).

Richard Sonn has argued that only “anarchists can claim that not the

state, not the military, not even the economy, but rather culture is

central to it both as movement and as ideal” (Volume Three, Selection

38).

For Max Blechman, art “acts as a reminder of the potential joy of life,

and as an anarchic force against all that which usurps it. It functions

as a perpetual reminder that all meaningful life involves a stretching

of the limits of the possible, not toward an absolute, but away from

absolutes and into the depths of imagination and the unknown. This

creative adventure, at the bottom of all great art, is the power which,

if universalized, would embody the driving force of social anarchy”

(Volume Three, Selection 39).

Resistance or Revolution

Not all anarchists were enamoured with the turn toward personal

liberation, alternative lifestyles and cultural change in the aftermath

of the Second World War. In Italy, the class struggle anarchists of the

Impulso group denounced these anarchist currents as

counter-revolutionary, much as Murray Bookchin did many years later

(Bookchin, 1995).

The Impulso group described these approaches as “resistencialism,” a

term suggested in 1949 by the French anarchist paper, Études

Anarchistes, to describe the new perspectives and approaches being

developed by anarchists in the English speaking countries in the

aftermath of the Second World War which emphasized resistance to

authoritarian and hierarchical modes of thought and organization, and

the creation of libertarian alternatives here and now, regardless of the

prospects of a successful social revolution.

What the Impulso group’s critique illustrates is the degree to which

these new conceptions and approaches had spread beyond England and the

USA by 1950, when they published their broadside, for much of their

attack is directed toward the Italian anarchist journal, Volontà,

belying the claim that the “new” anarchism was a largely “Anglo-Saxon”

phenomenon (Volume Two, Selection 38).

The Volontà group, with which Camillo Berneri’s widow, and long time

anarchist, Giovanna Berneri (1897–1962) was associated, had begun

exploring new ideas and analyses which have since become the stock in

trade of so-called “post-modern” anarchists (Volume Three, Chapter 12),

including a critique of conventional conceptions of rationality and

intellectual constructs which seek to constrain thought and action

within a specific ideological framework. As one contributor to Volontà

put it, “All ideologues are potential tyrants” (Volume Two, Selection

38).

The Impulso group denounced Volontà for celebrating “irrationalism” and

“chaos,” turning anarchism into “a motley, whimsical subjective

representation,” and for abandoning any concept of class struggle. For

the Impulso group, anarchism was instead “the ideology of the working

and peasant class, the product of a reasoned re-elaboration of

revolutionary experiences, the theoretical weapon for the defence of the

unitary, ongoing interests of the labouring class, the objective outcome

of a specific historic process,” illustrating the degree to which the

class struggle anarchists had incorporated into their outlook several

Marxian elements (Volume Two, Selection 38).

For them, there were “three vital coefficients to the act of revolution:

the crisis in the capitalist system… active participation by the broad

worker and peasant masses… and the organized action of the activist

minority.” To the criticism that the “masses” can never become

self-governing if led by an elite activist minority, the Impulso group

responded that an informed, consciously anarchist minority cannot betray

the revolution because its theory “is not only the correct general

theory” but the correct theory “especially in relation to the activist

minority and its nature, its functions, [and] its limitations” (Volume

Two, Selection 38).

This claim that an activist minority of anarchists would never

effectively assume positions of authority because their general theory

eschews such a role is not particularly persuasive on either theoretical

or historical grounds. No matter how well informed by or committed to

anarchist principles, the “activist minority,” armed with their

“correct” theory will, as Malatesta had said of the Platformists, be

prone “to excommunicate from anarchism all those who do not accept their

program,” promoting sectarianism rather than creating a unified movement

(Volume One, Selection 115).

Neno Vasco (1920) and other anarchists had long argued that the focus of

anarchist minorities should instead be on fostering the self-activity of

the masses. This is because by “acting directly,” as Murray Bookchin has

written, “we not only gain a sense that we can control the course of

social events again; we recover a new sense of selfhood and personality

without which a truly free society, based on self-activity and

self-management, is utterly impossible” (Volume Three, Selection 10).

That being informed and guided by anarchist theory does not prevent one

from assuming a more conventional leadership role was demonstrated by

those CNT-FAI “militants” who joined the Republican government in Spain

during the 1936–39 Revolution and Civil War (Volume One, Selections 127

& 128).

The Impulso group saw themselves performing a “locomotive function,”

pulling the masses toward liberation through the revolutionary upheaval

that would inevitably result from the crisis of international

capitalism, committing themselves to “a harsh self-discipline” (Volume

Two, Selection 38), the kind of self-abnegation that Bakunin had warned

against earlier (Volume One, Selection 20).

Despite the denunciations of the Impulso group, it was the “new”

anarchism pioneered by the so-called “resistencialists” that was to

inspire radicals in the 1960s, with people like the Cohn-Bendit brothers

writing, “Act with others, not for them. Make the revolution here and

now,” for “it is for yourself that you make the revolution,” not some

abstract ideal to which all should be sacrificed (Volume Two, Selection

51).

The Poverty of Historicism

The Impulso group remained committed to an essentially Marxist view of

progressive historical development, the kind of view that Dwight

Macdonald argued had literally been exploded by the atomic bombings of

Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Volume Two, Selection 13). One can no longer

claim that from “out of present evil will come future good,” wrote

Macdonald, when “for the first time in history, humanity faces the

possibility that its own activity may result in the destruction not of

some people or some part of the world, but of all people and the whole

world for all time” (Volume Two, Selection 13).

The Impulso group clung to the view that as the result of an objective

historical process, the working class developed “unitary, ongoing

interests,” impelling it to fulfill its “historical role” of abolishing

capitalism (Volume Two, Selection 38). That the working class has

unitary interests is a concept that has been criticized by other

anarchists since at least the time of Bakunin, who argued against Marx

that city workers “who earn more and live more comfortably than all the

other workers,” by virtue of their “relative well-being and

semibourgeois position” form a kind of “aristocracy of labour…

unfortunately only too deeply saturated with all the political and

social prejudices and all the narrow aspirations and pretensions of the

bourgeoisie” (1872: 294).

Macdonald pointed to the post-War “failure of the European masses to get

excited about socialist slogans and programs,” suggesting that the “man

in the street” feels “as powerless and manipulated vis-à-vis his

socialist mass-organization as… towards his capitalistic employers and

their social and legal institutions” (Volume Two, Selection 13). For

Louis Mercier Vega (1914–1977), social stratification within the

“working class” makes it necessary “to speak of several working

classes,” each with conflicting interests. “Wage differentials,” for

example, “make class consciousness that much harder to achieve…

encouraging collusion between (private or state) management and

privileged brackets of wage-earners. They accentuate rather than curtail

the tendency to retain a sub-proletariat reduced to low wages and

readily disposed of in the event of a crisis or economic slow-down,

alongside groups of workers, employees and officials locked into complex

[regulatory] arrangements wherein their docility and diligence are

reflected in their wage levels” (Volume Two, Selection 45).

The Impulso group implicitly accepted the Marxist view of historical

stages of development which other anarchists, from Bakunin onward, have

also challenged. Even before Bakunin’s conflict with Marx in the First

International, one of the points of disagreement between Marx and

Proudhon was whether an anarchist form of socialism could be achieved

before capitalism created the technology that would produce an abundance

of goods allegedly necessary to sustain a socialist society (Marx,

1847). Anarchists promoted peasant revolutions in a variety of

circumstances, rather than waiting for the development of an urban

proletariat as suggested by the Marxist view of history.

Gustav Landauer rejected that “artifice of historical development, by

which—as a matter of historical necessity—the working class, to one

extent or another, is called by Providence to take for itself the role

of the present day ruling class” (Volume One, Selection 40). For

Landauer, “the miracle that materialism and mechanism assume—that…

fully-grown socialism grows not out of the childhood beginnings of

socialism, but out of the colossal deformed body of capitalism—this

miracle will not come, and soon people will no longer believe in it”

(Volume One, Selection 49). Huang Lingshuang and Rudolf Rocker later put

forward similar critiques of the Marxist theory of history.

In the 1950s, some anarchists were influenced by the contemporaneous

critique of Marxist “historicism” that was being developed by

philosophers such as Karl Popper (1957). Writing in the early 1960s, the

Chilean anarchist Lain Diez urged anarchists to reject all “historicist

systems” based on “the supremacy (in terms of decision making in men’s

affairs) of History… which, unknown to men, supposedly foists its law

upon them,” for this “new and jealous divinity has its intermediaries

who, like the priests of the ancient religions, interpret its

intentions, prophesying as they did and issuing thunderous anathemas

against miscreants refusing to be awed by their revelations” (Volume

Two, Selection 47). More recently, Alan Carter has presented a

thoroughgoing anarchist critique of Marxist “technological determinism”

(1988), emphasizing the role of the state in creating and enforcing “the

relations of production that lead to the creation of the surplus that

the state requires” to finance the “forces of coercion” necessary to

maintain state power, turning Marx’s theory of history on its head

(Volume Three, Selection 19).

Permanent Protest

The Impulso group was most concerned that the “new” anarchism

represented by the “resistencialists” would lead anarchists away from

their historic commitment to revolution, a concern not without

foundation. In the 1950s in Australia, for example, the Sydney

Libertarians developed a critique of anarchist “utopianism,” which for

them was based on the supposed anarchist over-emphasis on “co-operation

and rational persuasion” (Volume Two, Selection 41), a critique later

expanded upon by post-modern anarchists (Volume Three, Chapter 12). In

response, without endorsing the more narrow approach of the Impulso

group, one can argue that these sorts of critiques are themselves

insufficiently critical because they repeat and incorporate common

misconceptions of anarchism as a theory based on an excessively naïve

and optimistic view of human nature (Jesse Cohen, Volume Three,

Selection 67).

For the Sydney Libertarians, not only is it unlikely that a future

anarchist society will be achieved, it is unnecessary because “there are

anarchist-like activities such as criticizing the views of

authoritarians, resisting the pressure towards servility and conformity,

[and] having unauthoritarian sexual relationships, which can be carried

on for their own sake, here and now, without any reference to supposed

future ends.” They described this kind of anarchism as “anarchism

without ends”, “pessimistic anarchism” and “permanent protest,”

stressing “the carrying on of particular libertarian activities within

existing society” regardless of the prospects of a successful social

revolution (Volume Two, Selection 41).

New Social Movements

The resurgence of anarchism during the1960s surprised both “pessimistic

anarchists” and the more traditional “class struggle” anarchists

associated with the Impulso group, some of whom, such as Pier Carlo

Masini, abandoned anarchism altogether when it appeared to them that the

working class was not going to embrace the anarchist cause. Other class

struggle anarchists, such as André Prudhommeaux (1902–1968), recognized

that the masses were “unmoved” by revolutionary declamations “heralding

social revolution in Teheran, Cairo or Caracas and Judgment Day in Paris

the following day at the latest,” because when “nothing is happening,”

to make such claims is “like calling out the fire brigade on a hoax.” To

gain the support of the people, anarchists must work with them to

protect their “civil liberties and basic rights by means of direct

action, civil disobedience, strikes and individual and collective

revolution in all their many forms” (Volume One, Selection 30).

By the early 1960s, peace and anti-war movements had risen in Europe and

North America in which many anarchists, following Prudhommeaux’s

suggestion, were involved. Anarchist influence within the social

movements of the 1960s did not come out of nowhere but emerged from the

work of anarchists and like-minded individuals in the 1950s, most of

whom, like Prudhommeaux, had connections with the various pre-war

anarchist movements. There was growing dissatisfaction among people

regarding the quality of life in post-war America and Europe and their

prospects for the future, given the ongoing threat of nuclear war and

continued involvement of their respective governments, relying on

conscript armies, in conflicts abroad as various peoples sought to

liberate themselves from European and U.S. control.

20th Century Liberation Struggles

In the post-WW II era, anarchists continued to oppose colonialism and

imperial domination but were wary of those who sought to take advantage

of national liberation struggles to facilitate their own rise to power,

much like the state socialists had tried to harness popular discontent

in Europe, and had succeeded in doing in Russia and China.

Drawing on James Burnham’s concept of the managerial revolution (1941),

while rejecting his pessimistic and politically conservative

conclusions, the anarcho-syndicalist Geoffrey Ostergaard (1926–1990)

warned of the “increasingly powerful managerial class” which holds out

the prospect of “emancipation but in reality hands over the workers to

new masters,” turning trade unions and other popular forms of

organization into “more refined instruments for disciplining the

workers” after the intellectuals, trade union leaders and party

functionaries succeed in riding waves of popular discontent to assume

positions of power (Volume Two, Selection 27).

French anarchists associated with the Groupe Anarchiste d’Action

Revolutionnaire recognized the “proliferation of nation-states” as “an

irreversible historical trend, a backlash against world conquest” by

European powers, and that although “national emancipation movements do

not strive for a libertarian society,” such a society “is unattainable

without them. Only at the end of a widespread process of geographical,

egalitarian redistribution of human activities can a federation of

peoples supplant the array of states.”

Nevertheless, anarchists could afford “national liberation movements

only an eminently critical support,” for the mission of anarchists

remains “to undermine the foundations of all… nationalist world-views,

as well as every colonial and imperial institution. The bulwark of

exploitation and oppression, injustice and misery, hatred and ignorance

is still the State whosoever it appears with its retinue—Army, Church,

Party—thwarting men and pitting them against one another by means of

war, hierarchy and bureaucracy, instead of binding them together through

cooperation, solidarity and mutual aid “ (Volume Two, Selection 31).

Mohamed Saïl (1894–1953), an Algerian anarchist who fought with the

Durruti Column in Spain, regarded Algerian nationalism as “the bitter

fruit of French occupation.” He suggested that “the Algerian people,

released from one yoke, will hardly want to saddle itself with another

one,” given their strong village ties and historic resistance to central

authorities, whether Turk, Arab or French. While things did not work out

as he had hoped, his fellow Kabyles have continued the “revolt against

authoritarian centralism” for which he praised them (Volume Two,

Selection 28; Volume Three, Selection 50).

During the 1950s, Cuban anarchists were directly involved in the

struggle to overthrow the U.S. supported Batista dictatorship but at the

same time had to fight against Marxist domination of the revolutionary

and labour movements. They encouraged the “workers to prepare themselves

culturally and professionally not only to better their present working

conditions, but also to take over the technical operation and

administration of the whole economy in the new libertarian society”

(Volume Three, Selection 55).

After Castro seized power, they struggled in vain to maintain an

independent labour movement and to prevent the creation of a socialist

dictatorship. Outside of Cuba, Castro’s victory divided anarchists,

particularly in Latin America, with some arguing that to support the

revolution one must support the Castro regime, similar to the arguments

that had been made earlier by the “Bolshevik” anarchists in Russia.

Others came to doubt the efficacy of armed struggle and violent

revolution, such as the anarchists associated with the Comunidad del Sur

group in Uruguay, who turned their focus towards building alternative

communities (Volumes Two and Three, Selection 60).

Non-Violent Revolution

In post-independence India, the Gandhian Sarvodaya movement provided an

example of a non-violent movement for social change which aspired to a

stateless society. Vinoba Bhave (1895–1982), one of the movement’s

spiritual leaders, noted that “sarvodaya does not mean good government

or majority rule, it means freedom from government,” with decisions

being made at the village level by consensus, for self-government “means

ruling you own self,” without “any outside power.”

What seemed wrong to Bhave was not that the Indian people were governed

by this or that government, but that “we should allow ourselves to be

governed at all, even by a good government” (Volume Two, Selection 32).

He looked forward to the creation of a stateless society through the

decentralization of political power, production, distribution, defence

and education to village communities.

Bhave’s associate, Jayaprakash Narayan (1902–1979), drew the connections

between their approach, which emphasized that a “harmonious blending of

nature and culture is possible only in comparatively smaller

communities,” and Aldous Huxley’s anarchist tinged vision of a future in

which each person “has a fair measure of personal independence and

personal responsibility within and toward a self-governing group,” in

which “work possesses a certain aesthetic value and human significance,”

and each person “is related to his natural environment in some organic,

rooted and symbiotic way” (Volume Two, Selection 32).

The Sarvodaya movement’s tactics of Gandhian non-violence influenced the

growing anarchist and peace movements in Europe and North America

(Volume Two, Selection 34), while the Sarvodayans shared the antipathy

of many anarchists toward the centralization, bureaucratic organization,

technological domination, alienation and estrangement from nature found

in modern industrial societies.

Paul Goodman summed up the malaise affecting people in advanced

industrial societies during the 1950s in his essay, “A Public Dream of

Universal Disaster” (Volume Two, Selection 37), in which he noted that

despite technological advances and economic growth, “everywhere people

are disappointed. Even so far, then, there is evident reason to smash

things, to destroy not this or that part of the system (e.g., the upper

class), but the whole system en bloc; for it offers no promise, but only

more of the same.”

With people paralyzed by the threat of nuclear annihilation, seeking

release from their pent up hostility, frustration, disappointment and

anger through acquiescence to “mass suicide, an outcome that solves most

problems without personal guilt,” only “adventurous revolutionary social

and psychological action” can have any prospect of success (Volume Two,

Selection 38).

As Goodman’s contemporary, Julian Beck, put it, we need to “storm the

barricades,” whether military, political, social or psychological, for

“we want to get rid of all barricades, even our own and any that we

might ever setup” (Volume Two, Selection 24). What is necessary,

according to Dwight Macdonald, is “to encourage attitudes of disrespect,

skepticism [and] ridicule towards the State and all authority” (Volume

Two, Selection 13).

This challenge to conventional mores, fear and apathy came to fruition

in the 1960s as anarchists staged various actions and “happenings,”

often in conjunction with other counter-cultural and dissident political

groups, from the Yippies showering the floor of the New York Stock

Exchange with dollar bills, causing chaos among the stock traders, to

the Provos leaving white bicycles around Amsterdam to combat

“automobilism” and to challenge public acceptance of private property

(Volume Two, Selection 50).

Macdonald thought that the “totalization of State power today means that

only something on a different plane can cope with it, something which

fights the State from a vantage point which the State’s weapons can

reach only with difficulty,” such as “non-violence, which… confuses [the

state’s] human agents, all the more so because it appeals to traitorous

elements in their own hearts” (Volume Two, Selection 13). As Richard

Gregg described it, non-violent resistance is a kind of “moral ju-jitsu”

which causes “the attacker to lose his moral balance” by taking away

“the moral support which the usual violent resistance… would render him”

(Volume Two, Selection 34).

Resisting the Nation State

The anti-war movements in Europe and North America that began to emerge

during the late 1950s started as “Ban the Bomb” or anti-nuclear peace

movements, the primary aim of which was to reduce and eliminate nuclear

weapons. These movements began to adopt a more expansive anti-war

approach as draft resistance movements also began to emerge, first in

France in response to the war in Algeria, and then in the U.S. as the

war in Vietnam escalated and intensified.

Many people in the various peace movements were pacifists. Some of them

began to move towards an anarchist position as they came to realize that

the banning of nuclear weapons was either unlikely or insufficient given

the existing system of international power relations. Many came to agree

with Randolf Bourne that “war is the health of the state” and became

advocates of non-violent revolution, for one “cannot crusade against war

without crusading implicitly against the State” (Volume Two, Selection

34).

Veteran anarchists, such as Vernon Richards, despite recognizing the

limitations of peace marches, realized that for “some the very fact of

having broken away from the routine pattern of life to take part” in a

march, and “for others the effort of will needed to join a demonstration

for the first time in their lives, are all positive steps in the

direction of ‘rebellion’ against the Establishment,” for there “are

times when the importance of an action is for oneself” (Volume Two,

Selection 33).

Some of the people opposed to conscription in France and the U.S. also

gravitated toward anarchism, as they came to realize not only that

meaningful draft resistance was illegal, thereby making them criminals,

but also the degree to which those in positions of power were prepared

to use force not only against their “external” enemies but against their

own people to prevent the undermining of their authority. As Jean Marie

Chester wrote in France in the early 1960s, the young draft resisters

had, “through their refusal, unwittingly stumbled upon anarchism”

(Volume Two, Selection 31).

Unlike more conventional conceptions of civil disobedience, where

demonstrators emphasize that their disobedience is an extraordinary

reaction to an extreme policy, accepting the punishment meted out to

them because they do not want to challenge the legitimacy of authority

in general, anarchist disobedience and direct action suffer from no such

contradictions but instead seek to broaden individual acts of

disobedience into rejection of institutional power by encouraging people

to question authority in all its aspects. From individual acts of revolt

and protest, and experience of the repressive measures the State is

prepared to resort to in response, will come a growing recognition of

the illegitimacy of State power and the hierarchical and exploitative

relationships which that power protects. As the Dutch Provos put it, the

“means of repression” the authorities “use against us” will force them

“to show their real nature,” making “themselves more and more

unpopular,” ripening “the popular conscience… for anarchy” (Volume Two,

Selection 50).

During the 1960s, anarchist ideas were reintroduced to student rebels,

anti-war protesters, environmentalists and a more restless general

public by people like Murray Bookchin (Volume Two, Selection 48), Daniel

Guérin (Volume Two, Selection 49), the Cohn-Bendit brothers (Volume Two,

Selection 51), Jacobo Prince (Volume Two, Selection 52), Nicolas Walter

(Volume Two, Selection 54) and Noam Chomsky (Volume Two, Selection 55).

While libertarian socialist intellectuals such as Claude Lefort from the

Socialisme ou Barbarie group, who came from a Marxist background,

regarded the anarchist ideas and actions of the student radicals of the

May-June 1968 events in France as the “brilliant invention” of “naïve

prodigies,” the Cohn-Bendit brothers, who were directly involved,

replied that, to the contrary, those events were “the result of arduous

research into revolutionary theory and practice,” marking “a return to a

revolutionary tradition” that the Left had long since abandoned, namely

anarchism (Volume Two, Selection 51).

Anarchy and Ecology

Anarchists had long been advocates of decentralized, human scale

technology and sustainable communities. In the 1940s, Ethel Mannin drew

the connections between increasing environmental degradation, existing

power structures and social inequality, writing that as long as “Man

continues to exploit the soil for profit he sows the seeds of his own

destruction, not merely because Nature becomes his enemy, responding to

his machines and his chemicals by the withdrawal of fertility, the dusty

answer of an ultimate desert barrenness, but because his whole attitude

to life is debased; his gods become Money and Power, and wars and

unemployment and useless toil become his inevitable portion” (Volume

Two, Selection 14). Murray Bookchin expanded on this critique in the

1960s, arguing that the “modern city… the massive coal-steel technology

of the Industrial Revolution, the later, more rationalized systems of

mass production and assembly-line systems of labour organization, the

centralized nation, the state and its bureaucratic apparatus—all have

reached their limits,” undermining “not only the human spirit and the

human community but also the viability of the planet and all living

things on it” (Volume Two, Selection 48).

Bookchin was fundamentally opposed to those environmentalists who looked

to existing power structures to avert ecological collapse or

catastrophe. This was because the “notion that man is destined to

dominate nature stems from the domination of man by man—and perhaps even

earlier, by the domination of woman by man and the domination of the

young by the old” (Volume Three, Selection 26). Consequently, the way

out of ecological crisis is not to strengthen or rely on those

hierarchical power structures which have brought about that crisis, but

through direct action, which for Bookchin is “the means whereby each

individual awakens to the hidden powers within herself and himself, to a

new sense of self-confidence and self-competence; it is the means

whereby individuals take control of society directly, without

‘representatives’ who tend to usurp not only the power but the very

personality of a passive, spectatorial ‘electorate’ who live in the

shadows of an ‘elect’”(Volume Three, Selection 10).

In Mutual Aid, Kropotkin argued not only that the state was unlikely to

effect positive social change, given the interests it represents, but

that reliance on state power renders people less and less capable of

collectively managing their own affairs, for in “proportion as the

obligations towards the State [grow] in numbers the citizens [are]

evidently relieved from their obligations towards each other.” As

Michael Taylor puts it, under “the state, there is no practice of

cooperation and no growth of a sense of the interdependence on which

cooperation depends.” Because environmental crisis can only be resolved

through the action and cooperation of countless individuals, instead of

strengthening the state people should heed the anarchist call for

decentralization, by seeking to disaggregate “large societies… into

smaller societies,” and by resisting “the enlargement of societies and

the destruction of small ones,” thereby fostering the cooperation and

self-activity upon which widespread social change ultimately depends

(Volume Two, Selection 65). Otherwise, as Paul Goodman argued, we are

stuck in “a vicious circle, for… the very exercise of abstract power,

managing and coercing, itself tends to stand in the way and alienate, to

thwart function and diminish energy… the consequence of the process is

to put us in fact in a continual emergency, so power creates its own

need.” For the emergency or crisis to be effectively resolved, there

must be “a profound change in social structure, including getting rid of

national sovereign power” (Volume Two, Selection 36).

Patriarchy

In his discussion of the emergence of hierarchical societies which

“gradually subverted the unity of society with the natural world,”

Murray Bookchin noted the important role played by “the patriarchal

family in which women were brought into universal subjugation to men”

(Volume Three, Selection 26). Rossella Di Leo has suggested that

hierarchical societies emerged from more egalitarian societies in which

there were “asymmetries” of authority and prestige, with men holding the

social positions to which the most prestige was attached (Volume Three,

Selection 32). In contemporary society, Nicole Laurin-Frenette observes,

“women of all classes, in all trades and professions, in all sectors of

work and at all professional levels [continue] to be assigned tasks

which are implicitly or explicitly defined and conceived as feminine.

These tasks usually correspond to subordinate functions which entail

unfavourable practical and symbolic conditions” (Volume Three, Selection

33).

Radical Feminism

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a radical feminist movement emerged

that shared many affinities with anarchism and the ecology movement.

Peggy Kornegger argued that “feminists have been unconscious anarchists

in both theory and practice for years” (Volume Two, Selection 78).

Radical feminists regarded “the nuclear family as the basis for all

authoritarian systems,” much as earlier anarchists had, from Otto Gross

(Volume One, Selection 78), to Marie Louise Berneri (Volume Two,

Selection 75) and Daniel Guérin (Volume Two, Selection 76). Radical

feminists also rejected “the male domineering attitude toward the

external world, allowing only subject/object relationships,” developing

a critique of “male hierarchical thought patterns—in which rationality

dominates sensuality, mind dominates intuition, and persistent splits

and polarities (active/passive, child/adult, sane/insane, work/play,

spontaneity/organization) alienate us from the mind-body experience as a

Whole and from the Continuum of human experience,” echoing the much

older critique of Daoist anarchists, such as Bao Jingyan (Volume One,

Selection 1).

Kornegger noted that as “the second wave of feminism spread across the

[U.S.] in the late 60s, the forms which women’s groups took frequently

reflected an unspoken libertarian consciousness,” with women breaking

off “into small, leaderless, consciousness-raising groups, which dealt

with personal issues in our daily lives,” and which “bore a striking

resemblance” to “anarchist affinity groups” (see Bookchin, Volume Two,

Selection 62), with their “emphasis on the small group as a basic

organizational unit, on the personal and political, on

antiauthoritarianism, and on spontaneous direct action” (Volume Two,

Selection 78).

As Carol Ehrlich notes, radical feminists and anarchist feminists “are

concerned with a set of common issues: control over one’s body;

alternatives to the nuclear family and to heterosexuality; new methods

of child care that will liberate parents and children; economic

self-determination; ending sex stereotyping in education, in the media,

and in the workplace; the abolition of repressive laws; an end to male

authority, ownership, and control over women; providing women with the

means to develop skills and positive self-attitudes; an end to

oppressive emotional relationships; and what the Situationists have

called ‘the reinvention of everyday life’.” Despite the Situationists’

hostility toward anarchism, many anarchists in the 1960s and 70s were

influenced by the Situationist critique of the “society of the

spectacle,” in which “the stage is set, the action unfolds, we applaud

when we think we are happy, we yawn when we think we are bored, but we

cannot leave the show, because there is no world outside the theater for

us to go to” (Volume Two, Selection 79).

Some anarchist women were concerned that the more orthodox “feminist

movement has, consciously or otherwise, helped motivate women to

integrate with the dominant value system,” as Ariane Gransac put it, for

“if validation through power makes for equality of the sexes, such

equality can scarcely help but produce a more fulsome integration of

women into the system of man’s/woman’s domination over his/her

fellow-man/woman” (Volume Three, Selection 34). “Like the workers’

movement in the past, especially its trade union wing,” Nicole

Laurin-Frenette observes, “the feminist movement is constantly obliged

to negotiate with the State, because it alone seems able to impose

respect for the principles defended by feminism on women’s direct and

immediate opponents, namely men—husbands, fathers, fellow citizens,

colleagues, employers, administrators, thinkers” (Volume Three,

Selection 33). For anarchists the focus must remain on abolishing all

forms of hierarchy and domination, which Carol Ehrlich has described as

“the hardest task of all” (Volume Two, Selection 79). Yet, as Peggy

Kornegger reminds us, we must not give up hope, that “vision of the

future so beautiful and so powerful that it pulls us steadily forward”

through “a continuum of thought and action, individuality and

collectivity, spontaneity and organization, stretching from what is to

what can be” (Volume Two, Selection 78).

The Sexual Contract

In criticizing the subordinate position of women, particularly in

marriage, anarchist feminists often compared the position of married

women to that of a prostitute (Emma Goldman, Volume One, Selection 70).

More recently, Carole Pateman has developed a far-reaching feminist

critique of the contractarian ideal of reducing all relationships to

contractual relationships in which people exchange the “property” in

their persons, with particular emphasis on prostitution, or contracts

for sexual services, noting that: “The idea of property in the person

has the merit of drawing attention to the importance of the body in

social relations. Civil mastery, like the mastery of the slave-owner, is

not exercised over mere biological entities that can be used like

material (animal) property, nor exercised over purely rational entities.

Masters are not interested in the disembodied fiction of labour power or

services. They contract for the use of human embodied selves. Precisely

because subordinates are embodied selves they can perform the required

labour, be subject to discipline, give the recognition and offer the

faithful service that makes a man a master” (Volume Three, Selection

35).

What distinguishes prostitution contracts from other contracts involving

“property in the person” is that when “a man enters into the

prostitution contract he is not interested in sexually indifferent,

disembodied services; he contracts to buy sexual use of a woman for a

given period… When women’s bodies are on sale as commodities in the

capitalist market… men gain public acknowledgment as women’s sexual

masters.” Pateman notes that “contracts about property in persons

[normally] take the form of an exchange of obedience for protection,”

but the “short-term prostitution contract cannot include the protection

available in long-term relations.” Rather, the “prostitution contract

mirrors the contractarian ideal” of “simultaneous exchange” of property

or services, “a vision of unimpeded mutual use or universal

prostitution” (Volume Three, Selection 35).

Toward a Convivial Society

In the 1970s, Ivan Illich, who was close to Paul Goodman, called for the

“inversion of present institutional purposes,” seeking to create a

“convivial society,” by which he meant “autonomous and creative

intercourse among persons, and intercourse of persons with their

environment.” For Illich, as with most anarchists, “individual freedom

[is] realized in mutual personal interdependence,” the sort of

interdependence which atrophies under the state and capitalism. The

problem with present institutions is that they “provide clients with

predetermined goods,” making “commodities out of health, education,

housing, transportation, and welfare. We need arrangements which permit

modern man to engage in the activities of healing and health

maintenance, learning and teaching, moving and dwelling.” He argued that

desirable institutions are therefore those which “enable people to meet

their own needs.”

Where Illich parted company with anarchists was in his endorsement of

legal coercion to establish limits to personal consumption. He proposed

“to set a legal limit to the tooling of society in such a way that the

toolkit necessary to conviviality will be accessible for the autonomous

use of a maximum number of people” (Volume Two, Selection 73). For

anarchists, one of the problems with coercive legal government is that,

in the words of Allan Ritter, the “remoteness of its officials and the

permanence and generality of its controls cause it to treat its subjects

as abstract strangers. Such treatment is the very opposite of the

personal friendly treatment” appropriate to the sort of convivial

society that Illich sought to create (Volume Three, Selection 18).

Anarchists would agree with Illich that existing political systems

“provide goods with clients rather than people with goods. Individuals

are forced to pay for and use things they do not need; they are allowed

no effective part in the process of choosing, let alone producing them.”

Anarchists would also support “the individual’s right to use only what

he [or she] needs, to play an increasing part as an individual in its

production,” and the “guarantee” of “an environment so simple and

transparent that all [people] most of the time have access to all the

things which are useful to care for themselves and for others.” While

Illich’s emphasis on “the need for limits of per capita consumption” may

appear to run counter to the historic anarchist communist commitment to

a society of abundance in which all are free to take what they need,

anarchists would agree with Illich that people should be in “control of

the means and the mode of production” so that they are “in the service

of the people” rather than people being controlled by them “for the

purpose of raising output at all cost and then worrying how to

distribute it in a fair way” (Volume Two, Selection 73).

Illich proposed that “the first step in a more general program of

institutional inversion” would be the “de-schooling of society.” By this

he meant the abolition of schools which “enable a teacher to establish

classes of subjects and to impute the need for them to classes of people

called pupils. The inverse of schools would be opportunity networks

which permit individuals to state their present interest and seek a

match for it.” Illich therefore went one step beyond the traditional

anarchist focus on creating libertarian schools that students are free

to attend and in which they choose what to learn (Volume One, Selections

65 & 66), adopting a position similar to Paul Goodman, who argued that

children should not be institutionalized within a school system at all

(1964).

By replacing the commodity of “education” with “learning,” which is an

activity, Illich hoped to move away from “our present world view, in

which our needs can be satisfied only by tangible or intangible

commodities which we consume” (Volume Two, Selection 73). The

“commodification” of social life is a common theme in anarchist

writings, from the time when Proudhon denounced capitalism for reducing

the worker to “a chattel, a thing” (Volume One, Selection 9), to George

Woodcock’s critique of the “tyranny of the clock,” which “turns time

from a process of nature into a commodity that can be measured and

bought and sold like soap or sultanas” (Volume Two, Selection 69).

Illich criticized those anarchists who “would make their followers

believe that the maximum technically possible is not simply the maximum

desirable for a few, but that it can also provide everybody with maximum

benefits at minimum cost,” describing them as “techno-anarchists”

because they “have fallen victim to the illusion that it is possible to

socialize the technocratic imperative” (Volume Two, Selection 73). It is

not clear to whom Illich was directing these comments, but a few years

earlier Richard Kostelanetz had written an article defending what he

described as “technoanarchism,” in which he criticized the more common

anarchist stance critical toward modern technology (Volume Two,

selection 72).

Kostelanetz suggested that “by freeing more people from the necessity of

productivity, automation increasingly permits everyone his artistic or

craftsmanly pursuits,” a position similar to that of Oscar Wilde (Volume

One, Selection 61). Instead of criticizing modern technology, anarchists

should recognize that the “real dehumanizer” is “uncaring bureaucracy.”

Air pollution can be more effectively dealt with through the development

of “less deleterious technologies of energy production, or better

technologies of pollutant-removal or the dispersion of urban industry.”

Agreeing with Irving Horowitz’s claim that anarchists ignored “the

problems of a vast technology,” by trying to find their way back “to a

system of production that was satisfactory to the individual producer,

rather than feasible for a growing mass society,” Kostelanetz argued

that anarchists must now regard technology as “a kind of second nature…

regarding it as similarly cordial if not ultimately harmonious, as

initial nature” (Volume Two, Selection 72).

In response to Horowitz’s comments, David Watson later wrote that the

argument “is posed backwards. Technology has certainly transformed the

world, but the question is not whether the anarchist vision of freedom,

autonomy, and mutual cooperation is any longer relevant to mass

technological civilization. It is more pertinent to ask whether freedom,

autonomy, or human cooperation themselves can be possible in such a

civilization” (Watson: 165–166). For Murray Bookchin, “the issue of

disbanding the factory—indeed, of restoring manufacture in its literal

sense as a manual art rather than a muscular ‘megamachine’—has become a

priority of enormous social importance,” because “we must arrest more

than just the ravaging and simplification of nature. We must also arrest

the ravaging and simplification of the human spirit, of human

personality, of human community… and humanity’s own fecundity within the

natural world” by creating decentralized ecocommunities “scaled to human

dimensions” and “artistically tailored to their natural surroundings”

(Volume Two, Selection 74).

Community Assemblies

The contractarian ideal seeks to reduce all relationships to contractual

relationships, ultimately eliminating the need for any public political

process. Murray Bookchin has argued to the contrary that there is, or

should be, a genuine public sphere in which all members of a community

are free to participate and able to collectively make decisions

regarding the policies that are to be followed by that community.

Community assemblies, in contrast to factory councils, provide everyone

with a voice in collective decision making, not just those directly

involved in the production process (Volume Two, Selection 62). Such

assemblies would function much like the anarchist “collectives” in the

Spanish Revolution documented by Gaston Leval (Volume One, Selection

126).

Questions arise however regarding the relationship between community

assemblies and other forms of organization, whether workers’ councils,

trade unions, community assemblies in other areas, or voluntary

associations in general. In addition to rejecting simple majority rule,

anarchists have historically supported not only the right of individuals

and groups to associate, network and federate with other individuals and

groups but to secede or disassociate from them. One cannot have

voluntary associations based on compulsory membership (Ward: Volume Two,

Selection 63).

Disregarding the difficulties in determining the “will” of an assembly

(whether by simple majority vote of those present, as Bookchin

advocated, or by some more sophisticated means), except in rare cases of

unanimity one would expect genuine and sincere disagreements over public

policy decisions to continue to arise even after the abolition of class

interests. The enforcement of assembly decisions would not only

exacerbate conflict, it would encourage factionalism, with people

sharing particular views or interests uniting to ensure that their views

predominate. In such circumstances, “positive altruism and voluntary

cooperative behaviour” tend to atrophy (Taylor, Volume Two, Selection

65), as the focus of collective action through the assemblies becomes

achieving coercive legal support for one’s own views rather than

eliciting the cooperation of others (Graham, 2004).

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