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Title: From Stirner to Mussolini
Author: William Gillis
Date: March 28th, 2022
Language: en
Topics: fascism, anti-fascism, Italy, fascist creep, analysis, book review, Benito Mussolini, individualism, Max Stirner
Source: Retrieved on March 28th, 2022 from https://c4ss.org/content/56480

William Gillis

From Stirner to Mussolini

In 1910 Luigi Fabbri and Armando Borghi abducted an anarchist woman who

had shamed their friend by divorcing him. Together, they forced her into

a gynecological exam so the doctor could publicly pronounce her deformed

and incapable of sex.

All three were prominent leaders in the Italian anarchist scene and

involved in criminal activities. Despite having been abducted, medically

raped, and slandered by her scene rivals, when the cops raided them for

publishing anti-war articles, Maria Rygier refused to turn on anyone and

tried to take full responsibility. She was sentenced to three years in

prison where she was again medically raped, this time by representatives

of the state.

Disenchanted with the anarchist scene’s patriarchs and looking for

support from dissidents within the movement, upon release Rygier took up

with a prominent Stirnerite, Massimo Rocca. But if you’re looking for a

triumphant vindication of individualist underdogs against rapist scene

patriarchs, this is not that story. Despite their origins in the

anarchist movement, Rygier and Rocca would go on to play central roles

in the emergence and establishment of fascism. Many of their followers

would join them as fascists, with one, Leandro Arpinati, even rising to

the status of “second Duce,” just behind Mussolini in power and

popularity.

Stephen B. Whitaker’s obscure book The Anarchist-Individualist Origins

of Italian Fascism has been cited on occasion by communist reactionaries

as a cudgel against anarchism and individualism. Yet whatever their

misappropriations, the title shouldn’t be read to imply this is a book

blaming individualist anarchism for the rise of fascism, it merely

focuses on one specific ideological arena among many others (like

syndicalism and communism) where fascists found root and that

contributed to the stew of early fascist ideology. There are many

origins of fascism. Whitaker is quite clear from the outset, “I believe

[anarchism’s] intellectual influence on fascism was quite small,” on the

other hand, certain readings of Stirner and certain fringe currents in

the anarchist movement, “were quite influential.” No one should be under

the illusion that influence is the same thing as causal blame, yet, at

the same time, the specific social points of overlap and mutations of an

ideological current can be critical to understanding the initial rise of

fascism and continuing weak points for entryism today.

Whitaker is not particularly hostile to anarchism or its individualist

currents, but at the same time is very clearly ignorant of it; his

understanding of anarchism as a philosophy seemingly stems entirely from

reading George Woodcock, Max Stirner, and a couple haughtily ignorant

liberal commentators in political science journals clumsily trying to

categorize anarchism within their discursive frameworks. (More on how

badly he butchers Stirner later.) Unsurprisingly his ideological

contextualizations are often impaired as a result. But Whitaker also

appears to be a sincere historian and his book is still a treasure trove

of references to interviews, letters, and articles nowhere else

translated to English. Of course I’m not fluent in Italian, and was

limited in how much I could verify via google translate and via other

sources, but together the book’s references reveal a deeply

dysfunctional anarchist scene, undermined by toxic personalities,

powerful patriarchs, and horrible edgelord takes that it’s unfortunately

quite easy to see contemporary parallels to.

Again I must emphasize that similar specialized historical accounts can

and have been written of Fascism’s parallel origins in liberal,

communist, and conservative circles. The question that antifascist

anarchists should zero in on is what can we learn from this?

The standard defensive take is that every sort of person can take a

reactionary turn. If fascism can win converts from every ideology that

just goes to show such conversions have non-ideological or

pre-ideological motivations. But this is a plainly spurious defense.

Anarchism, Communism, and Liberalism have won proponents from every

single ideology under the sun, including the ranks of fascists. This

does not mean that there are not specific things that can be said,

specific dynamics or tendencies that can be analyzed, about how a

specific ideology most often wins converts from another specific

ideology, to what degree it is successful, and through what arguments or

conceptual dynamics. Moreover ideologies and movements are not

homogeneous, that anarchism, communism, and liberalism may each have

corners or failure modes particularly conducive to corruption in

specific ways is all the more imperative to examine such rather than

sweeping everything under a rug.

Nothing is more inane and anti-individualist than defensive closing of

ranks. Why should it remotely matter if a communist or liberal might

attempt to utilize factoids about the individualist anarchists who

joined fascism as some kind of rhetorical cudgel against us? Why should

we care more about what liberals or communists think and say than we

care about finding the truth for ourselves?

Whitaker’s historical account focuses on four individuals – Massimo

Rocca, Maria Rygier, Torquato Nanni (a socialist politician with some

anarchist inclinations), and Leandro Arpinati – and traces their

personal trajectories around and through the Italian anarchist scene and

the early fascist movement. It’s important to note that each of these

figures had a rocky relationship with fascism as it developed and

ultimately felt jilted by certain developments, but it is just as

important to note that their objections were not grounded in anything

like anarchist principles. These were not hybrids of anarchism and

fascism, but straight up fascists, even if they occupied contentious

sub-positions within fascism. And sadly they were not isolated wingnuts,

but important and influential individuals with supporters. Rocca and

Rygier were internationally respected and published anarchist voices.

Arpinati served as Undersecretary to the Minister of the Interior where

he acquired his title as “second Duce of fascism.” Rocca pushed

Mussolini into his pivot to a pro-war socialism. All were friends with

Mussolini.

While their individual reasons and arguments differed in some ways, in

broad strokes there was a subsection of the egoist anarchist scene in

Italy that embraced participation in the First World War and used their

printing presses and clandestine distribution capacity to disrupt the

Italian Left and strengthen Mussolini as a champion. Partially as a

result of this defection of individualist printmakers & distroists,

between 1915 and 1920 no significant anarchist journals were published

in Bologna. This turn to warmongering was a conjunction of a

fetishization of violence among some individualists and a broader

populist perception of Italy as a poor nation revolting against the rich

through the medium of national conflict in sections of the wider Left

(particularly among syndicalists). Mixed up and loosely cited Nietzsche

and Stirner were leveraged to defend a haughty elitism of the ubermensch

while the charisma of militancy brought prestige and followers.

In some cases the mutations and contortions were clearly venal and

opportunistic, the result of specific types of rotten character that had

regrettably found a place in the milieu, but in many cases it seems like

certain ideological formulations ratcheted themselves.

It’s worth going through the individuals Whitaker traces with some

depth, if only because there’s so little coverage of them in English.

The most important for an ideological autopsy, in my opinion, was

Massimo Rocca (who went by Libero Tancredi while he identified as an

anarchist but swapped back to his legal name as a fascist). This

asshole’s roots as an anarchist ideologue are sharp and colorful, and

show his early differences from the mainstream anarchist scene.

“In 1905 , Rocca moved to Milan to become editor of Li Grido della

folla. Under his leadership the newspaper began to take on a more

belligerent tone, exalting regenerative violence and chaos; referring to

dynamite as “holy”; and, condemning basic legal rights, humanitarianism,

and ethics. … He and others like him distributed pamphlets and put up

posters which spoke of rebellion against the “myth of positive evolution

in society, naturalism in science, society’s ingenious faith in

progress””

Rocca was expelled from Il Grido della folla and left Milan, the

heartland of individualist anarchism in Italy, for Rome to found Il

Novatore anarchico.

“At the 1906 anarchist congress of Monino, near Rome, supporters of

Rocca’s newspaper, the novatoriani, started a massive fistfight during

which pistol shots were fired and at least one person received knife

wounds.”

The novatori proclaimed that “a war today is more fatal to the

bourgeoisie than the proletariat and is a favorable occasion for

starting a revolution.” And Rocca declared that “anarchism in the truest

sense of the word, is the revolt of the ego against altruism.” (Abele

Rizieri Ferrari, who a little later came to be known under the pen name

“Renzo Novatore,” would have been 16 at the time; Rocca, his senior, was

just 22.)

Despite Rocca having a militant following within the scene, he got into

serious conflicts with other individualists (a far more diverse lot,

including many sharply altruistic and focused on morality) and he was

accused of looting funds from Rome’s Libertarian Youth newspaper to fill

the coffers of Il Novatore. This was a pattern, to say the least.

“he would convince anarchist colleagues to pay for his meals in the

local trattoria by railing against them during the meal with snippets of

his Stirnerian-Neitzschean logic such as, “You pay for my lunch because

you’re weak. I, on the other hand, am strong.””

When the outcry at his general scumfuckery built to a sufficient level,

Rocca skipped town, moving to the US, where he contributed to other

anarchist publications (from Paris to Chicago) and continued to publish

Il Novatore. His popular notion of an elite rebellious minority, a

libertarian aristocracy, seeking to elevate themselves slowly drifted

over time, with the Italian race increasingly filling the role of this

minority on the global stage. Similarly, as Whitaker puts it, he urged

folks to

“abandon intellect and focus on instinct which, according to Rocca,

leads people to think of themselves as Unique Ones, to revert to their

more “natural” state, rejecting the abstract structures of the

intellect.”

This reading of Stirner as a rejection of reason for nature/instinct was

not the only hot take he had percolating. Achieving the union of egos,

Rocca speculated, would require the inception of a truly brutal and

total war of all against all, with the eventual survivors finding

themselves balanced in detentes with one another. Thus: cynical egoism

and violence – even on the part of conservatives and the state – is only

ever good because it ratchets society towards this rupture.

And ultimately one final breach grew: Rocca fervently believed that

morality was a spook, and humanitarianism or altruism particularly

pernicious, but he struggled with inevitable critiques that any position

one might take (like rejection of altruism) would still itself

constitute a morality. And so Rocca finally came to accept that the best

way to smash the most repugnant morality was to replace it with an

explicitly and consciously fake, arbitrary, and hollow morality.

Humanitarianism was too potent and perpetually reemergent a spook, the

only way to smash it was to replace it with blind duty, with the

arationality of obedience to the collective will the best possible

escape from spooked thinking. Nationalism was thus a useful tool to

suppress the intellect and return to instinct/nature.

If this sounds too severe a contortion to warrant any consideration

besides a laugh, consider the tens of millions who praised Trump’s

honesty because his flagrant lies didn’t hide that they were lies. It is

sometimes argued in certain lazy currents of philosophy that reason

constitutes a tyranny because it has an overwhelming and almost

inescapable force in our minds. The compulsion that reasoned argument

exerts on us is starkly unique, and thus unfair. Through reason we are

not just forced into a single path, we are forced in the most intimate

and mentally demanding way possible. Reason, once it sinks its teeth

into us, never lets us go, never grants us a moment’s release, instead

it ratchets in reinforcing spirals that consume our minds. Stirner uses

the phrase “the rule of absolute thought.” It’s easy to see how reason

is self-reinforcing. Doubt, curiosity and the care to get things right

reinforce themselves; a little investigation proves how much more

investigation is required. Many of us embrace this and see such

reflection and vigilance as the very core of agency and freedom. But in

Stirner’s language, the “labor of thought” is a sanctified spook that

“misleads people into scrupulousness and deliberation.” Of course

there’s many ways to read Stirner’s passages on “thought” as itself a

fixed idea and few of them look anything like an endorsement of Rocca’s

flight. Yet it is true that many feel a certain kind of release from the

tyranny of responsibility and diligence when they embrace a self-aware

lie. Every day that you renew your service to the lie, its blatant

nature is inescapable and reminds you of your conscious rejection of

scruples. Escaping the “tyranny of thought” back to instinct is no easy

task and Rocca believed he’d found the path. What’s a little absolute

authoritarianism if it allows you the “freedom” of turning your brain to

goo?

And of course who would drive and sit on top of this authoritarian beast

besides the elite rebels, the truly unique ones:

“It is useful to note the difference between single rebels and the great

mass of subversives. It is necessary to distinguish between those who

know how to be uniquely themselves… These are the only ones who have the

right not to obey the law. The others… deserve the intervention of

social coercion to force them to submit to the consequences and

responsibility of their actions, which they do not know how to take

freely,”

It was this language of elites that Rocca was able to make palatable to

the existing forces of the right as he pivoted politically. What once

had been a moral or rebel aristocracy of enlightened insurrectionaries

could hook up with the self-legitimizing narratives of the actual ruling

aristocracy. In this way the scandalously militant and revolutionary

rhetoric of the left could be repackaged in ways the right could

actually embrace. This is perhaps one of the most key aspects of fascism

that distinguishes it from mere militant reaction or hypernationalism:

the palingenesis. Fascism is not just an embrace of hierarchy and raw

power, a rejection of modernism or the enlightenment project, a

shrinking of empathy and care to just “one’s own”; it supercharged

existing reactionary forces by giving them a revolutionary project. No

longer pallid defenders of the status quo, reactionaries could finally

dream about their own violent rupture to a fantastical future.

It’s important to emphasize that, despite being a complete asshole whose

self-serving actions repeatedly burned bridges and whose ideology was

almost as toxic as it gets, Rocca was not a marginal and isolated

wingnut but a prominent figure in the anarchist movement who gave

speeches and contributed to numerous journals and had a militant base of

friends and followers. Rocca and Rygier existed alongside Fabbri and

Borghi on a shortlist of anarchist intellectuals who debated publicly,

mobilized followers, and whose words were carried across Italy.

The fact that their distros/journals were quite active and they drew

crowds and speaking opportunities has been largely obscured by

anarchists who have, from the start, emphasized the (also valid) degree

to which these assholes were marginal. A good example of early language

dismissing them can be found in the very fun Living Like Nomads: The

Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism by Fausto Butta, where he

quotes Luigi Molinari,

“It is time to end this opportunistic lie that a considerable number of

anarchists support the war … Who are, then, these warmonger anarchists?

Maria Rygier and Libero Tancredi! The former represents nobody but

herself; she is free to contradict her noble past and abandon to their

destiny those proletarians in whom she had instilled an anti-militarist

consciousness. The latter has never been an anarchist, in scientific

terms. His anarchism really is a synonym of chaos, and on this point he

surely agrees with the bourgeois newspapers, to which he has always

contributed and to which he is giving a benevolent service“

But while it’s true the overwhelming majority of the Italian anarchist

movement (individualists included) sided with Malatesta against the war,

it’s hardly like Rygier and Rocca had no followers or compatriots.

Prominent individualist writers like Oberdan Gigli and Mario Gioda

joined the pro-war anarchists and their current had a whole newspaper,

La Guerra Sociale (whose director Edoardo Malusardi also went from

individualist anarchism to fascism).

Rocca would eventually stray so far as to be repeatedly attacked and

hospitalized by anarchists, but it’s a testament to his influence and

status that he continued to get invitations to give addresses at

anarchist meetings, even while his crew was increasingly socially

shunned.

When the fascios were founded Rocca was one of the core founding members

in Rome, and he managed to become seen as fascism’s leading economic

proponent. Rocca’s downfall with fascist ranks came from his sharper

elitism. He led a faction that believed fascists – not their wider base

of support – were Nietzschean elites who should eliminate all others

from political power, disdaining the non-mobilized middle class that

merely supported the fascists rather than leading their streetfighting.

This, of course, was not a politically opportune stance for Mussolini,

so Rocca was pushed out in 1924. He continued to push his same line and

became denounced as “antifascist” for it. But even exiled to France in

1926 he continued to push for Mussolini to return to “true fascism” and

take more power for the true elites, writing multiple fascist books,

grumbling about how local actual antifascists shunned him, and working

as a paid informer to the fascist secret police during the occupation of

France.

In seeming contrast to Rocca’s individualist anarchist arc is the

socialist Torquato Nanni, one of the many, many, many state socialists

who followed Mussolini to fascism, albeit one closer in many ways to

certain anarchist circles.

Nanni started as a passionate anti-clerical activist and socialist

leader on the border of Romagna and Tuscany who had strong associations

with anarchists, particularly Arpinati. Nanni’s politics are far more

muddled and there’s a case for disputing his inclusion in a book on

individualist anarchists, after all he was a participant in the

Socialist Party and a sitting mayor, even if he wasn’t hugely into the

party. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution as a

presumed horizontal direct democracy. This was a man friendly with the

staunchly non-individualist Fabbri and Borghi in a period when Rocca and

eventually Rygier were fighting with them. Whitaker focuses on his

affinities with individualist anarchists, but I think it’s important to

clarify how muddled the situation is.

It’s true that Nanni emphasized socialism as an individual faith of a

noble elite few, was hostile to the reformism of the party and saw the

value of socialism in “critique, disintegration, and offensive,” but all

things considered he reads most strongly to me more like a modern

Bookchinite, or maybe even a council communist, than anything close to

an individualist anarchist. His fixation on direct democracy and the

Paris Commune are hardly the markers of individualist anarchism. Indeed,

as mentioned, he became the mayor of Santa Sofia with the intent of

transforming the local administrative region into a true workers

council.

Nanni, long more of a militant than a reformist despite his own

political office, was basically at odds with the Socialist Party during

the crisis about “interventionism” in the first world war, but slunk

back to the party in 1918, more inspired by the Bolsheviks than

Mussolini’s increasingly doomed pro-war crusade. Yet in the September

1919 occupation of Fiume he swapped right back into deep alliance with

Mussolini. In no small part because Nanni wanted a revolution, any

revolution. He became increasingly convinced that the Italian socialists

simply didn’t have the bloodlust necessary for a revolution as

successful as the Bolsheviks’, and the fascists did have that bloodlust.

This is a common line in all the characters here, and it had wide

currency across ideological camps in Italy of the time. The infamous

syndicalist Georges Sorel, we mustn’t forget, leapt from praising Lenin

to Mussolini, because hey at least the fascists were mobilized for

violence. The common valuing of militancy for militancy’s sake, on

violence as an immediatist or irrationalist means without ends, was

conjoined at the same time with an apocalyptic hunger for a revolution

to shatter the establishment and existing order, no matter who it took

to get it going. All of the figures Whitaker covers were influenced by

this combination. It is also, sadly, rather timeless. National

Bolsheviks and eco-fascists today continue to leverage the same sort of

argument, “I’ll ally with anyone serious about smashing The Bad System

and steeled for action, everything else is a distraction.” Whether

capitalism or civilization is held as the ur-enemy that we must narrowly

focus on defeating at any cost, fascist creep goes into overdrive. And

the same sort of somewhat paradoxical conjunction of irrationalist

immediatism with revolutionary instrumentalism. We see the same with

folks urging collaboration with boogaloos while griping that

“antifascism is just liberalism because it shies away from absolute

violence; at least these reactionaries are happy to shed blood here and

now.” The cult of militancy and rupture remains eternally attractive to

a certain set.

If the only problem, the only thing holding us back from a revolution,

is timidity and unwillingness to act, to spill blood, then even the most

reactionary scumbag is more sympathetic and has more potential than the

mewling handwringing of some – no doubt liberal – comrade wondering if

we really need to stomp this row of infants to death to prove our

militancy. And woe betide the sort of sniveling coward who asks

questions like “okay but what exactly is the causal relationship between

these means and the ends we’re seeking?”

Whitaker emphasizes the anarchist influences upon Nanni and I think

seems confident to simply point out his revolutionary focus and belief

in autonomous participatory communes, conjoined with his noises about

“the individual” but while Nanni was certainly not a classic

organizationalist or party man, it’s unclear to me how much Whitaker

thus believes or seeks to imply he should be classified with the

individualist anarchists. Every anarchist makes obligatory noises about

individual idealism or individuality – as individualist anarchists know

all too well, this often means very little in practice.

Nevertheless, one way in which Nanni is central to the story of the

individualist anarchists who went fascist is through his close

friendship with Leandro Arpinati. Indeed, Nanni would eventually write

Arpinati’s biography.

Arpinati is the most central figure in Whitaker’s book, the common

thread he traces to illustrate the other converts to fascism in passing.

Originally a young militantly anti-clerical socialist who worked for

Nanni, doing public lighting for Santa Sofia, he abandoned socialism for

anarchism in 1909.

Arpinati’s mixture of Stirner and Nietzsche, or at least the popular

interpretations going around, made him something of a wingnut in his

initial affinity group, but he was embraced by them because 1) there

were so few anarchists in his town, and 2) he repeatedly demonstrated

personal militancy and bravery, like disarming a farmer threatening to

murder his wife. I also can’t help but get the impression – reading

between the lines – that Arpinati was quite charismatic in his

streetfighter youth.

The first meeting between Mussolini and Arpinati was hostile. The

anarchist-turned-socialist Andrea Costa had died and the local

socialists of Civitella were dedicating a covered market to the traitor,

Arpinati’s crew went to paste up denunciations while Mussolini issued

the dedication and denounced them from stage, quoting Stirner at them.

Despite – or perhaps because of – these initial sparks, they grew close.

Arpinati was taken with Mussolini’s political power and Mussolini wanted

local allies, so they patched things up and Arpinati’s anarchist crew

operated as occasional local bodyguards for Mussolini. While Arpinati’s

crew had started out rather mainline-anarchist, his influence had been

significant and more and more newcomers drifted to his take on

individualism.

But, after his father died, Arpinati moved to Bologna in 1910 and worked

as a railway electrician. There he was a follower of Rygier and earned a

reputation as a scab by consistently voting against strikes, rejecting

them as deplorable collective action rather than individualist attack,

all while he bummed around the anarchist scene for food and lodging.

When war broke out Arpinati refused to support the local railway workers

in a general strike. It’s hard not to wonder if this was rooted in

anything different than his contrarian rejections of prior strikes. Yet

Nanni, recounting this, praised him for having the foresight to see war

as a fecund site of rupture: “In a flash of intuition his spirit

anticipated that revision of all human values – social, ideological,

moral – which the war had brought with it.” It’s also true that Arpinati

saw the union bosses as out of line with the rank-and-file on the issue

of war. But whatever his strongest motivation, he radicalized harder and

harder in support of the war and contrarian hostility to his comrades.

This embrace of war found immediate expression in constant brawls with

anti-war anarchists.

“He took to brush-cutting his hair when his head was not bandaged – so

that opponents could not “immobilize his head while others punched him

in the face.””

A particularly striking image amid these fights is a meeting of the

anarchist union Societa Operaia where Arpinati, Rygier, and Rocca fought

some two hundred members of their audience who assaulted the stage for

over an hour with thrown chairs and general fisticuffs.

Suffice to say, the anarchist movement as a whole had ceased to tolerate

their bullshit. And Arpinati was more than a happy pugilist in response.

Amid the fighting at home he tried to sign up for the military but was

rejected. This deeply undermined his standing in the facsist movement

for decades. Common graffiti in Bologna later under fascism would read

“Did Arpinati fight in the war? No!”

Anarchists too had a certain disgust for the pro-war non-serving

Arpinati and, after joining the first Bolognese fascio de combattimento

in 1919, he got a very harsh reception in his hometown of Civitella.

This was basically the end of his presence in the anarchist movement.

Soon enough he and Rocca were being used as bodyguards by Mussolini.

This was a period of conflict within fascist circles over right and left

alliances, with the Bolognese fascist chapter veering further left than

Mussolini and appointing a secretary “from the ranks of the

anarcho-syndicalists.” (Whitaker gives no further details than that,

being focused on the individualist currents, and my Italian isn’t good

enough to go looking for the scandalous particulars.) In any case the

Bolognese chapter was a disaster electorally and collapsed in numbers

before it was basically seized, replaced, and taken control of by

Arpinati in 1920. Militancy progressed rapidly as strikes and minor land

reform stirred up class conflict and Arpinati and the fascists

positioned themselves as defenders against socialist bullies (a similar

note to his hostility to union bosses).

“On May Day the fascists paraded through Bologna singing the movement’s

fight song, Giovinezza, and taunting the socialists. Much to Arpinati’s

surprise and delight, the socialists did not respond to “the myth of

[their] invincibility in the public squares of the city.” Arpinati wrote

to Pasella, “The local socialists showed exasperating calm; the Chamber

of Labor remained hermetically sealed all day. I am convinced they will

never make the revolution.”

It’s important to note just how critical the youth and student

population was to the fascist movement at this time (a far cry from the

relatively aging chuds and boneheads that primarily comprise their

rallies in our own era). Most members were between the ages of 16 and

26, and the absence of students over the summer collapsed the fascist

fighting forces. But when the students returned, Arpinati once again led

armed fascists through the streets and ended up in a gun battle with

socialists, successfully killing a young worker. This victory got

Arpinati appointed head of the armed squads and the ranks swelled from

20 to over 300.

Arpinati occupied a weird hybrid space during this period. The anarchist

movement hated his guts, and the goals of his pro-war organizing and

their anti-war organizing couldn’t be more different, but he still had a

certain identification with the anarchists. He evidently conceptualized

his differences primarily in terms of who was likely to actually achieve

the glorious revolution or rupture, anarchists or fascists.

“On June 26th, 1920, active troops from two of the Army’s best divisions

mutinied, refusing to board ships… The anarchists called a general

strike in support of the mutineers and within 24 hours Bologna was in

revolt… When [the socialists] refused to support the anarchists, “the

Ancona rebels greeted this message with howls of indignation… When the

revolt collapsed on Jun 30th, Arpinati took it as further proof that the

socialists would not make a revolution.”

In short, while the anarchist movement was anti-war, its revolt in that

name was far more sympathetic to Arpinati than the socialist suppression

of the revolt. At least the anarchists were in favor of revolutionary

action. (As is their wont, the socialists approved brutal state action

to put down the anarchists, tools that the fascists would promptly turn

on them.)

Bookstore burnings, gunfights and grenade throwings ensued between the

fascists and the state socialists, just as Arpinati had cut his teeth

trading live fire with anarchists, with the cops backing Arpinati’s

fascists and the landowners, Catholic orgs, and wealthy throwing money

on them. “By March, membership in the fascio rose to between five and

eight thousand.” One of the successes of Arpinati’s street terror was

that it largely avoided the socialist leadership to instead prioritize

murdering small socialist functionaries. The socialist leadership didn’t

care as much about such lower level folks and the political leaders of

other parties didn’t see this as a threat to norms protecting them, so

the fascists were largely free to terrorize the socialist base into

hiding. Beyond the examples of murders, one particularly gruesome detail

Whitaker gives is of a basement Arpinati used to personally torture

opponents.

During this period Arpinati’s personal friendships managed to win him

converts from the ranks of antifascists. (I’ll say nothing about

contemporary embarrassments of self-proclaimed antifascists maintaining

friendships and even romantic liaisons with fascists, but at least there

are stronger pressures to disassociate and draw lines today.) Similarly

he was involved in repeatedly intervening to save Nanni from his own

fascist rank-and-file who just wanted to kill a socialist of any stripe.

But within a couple years Arpinati himself was outmaneuvered in power

games by a syndicalist also climbing the fascist ranks and he briefly

declared himself done and ran off to Libya, before inevitably returning

and once again clawing his way up.

By 1924 he was once again the official leader of the Bolognese fascists

and he turned his attention to systematically building support for the

fascist regime, stealing control of nurseries and summer camps from the

socialists and pouring money into sports projects and leagues. If you

check Arpinati’s wikipedia page today practically the bulk of it is

about his ties to various sports.

In 1929 Mussolini appointed Arpinati Undersecretary to the Ministry of

the Interior, removing Arpinati from his very strong regional powerbase

to try to undermine him. But he only grew in power, becoming the “Second

Duce” of fascism by 1932. It’s easy to see how this heralded his fall,

accusation of “antifascism,” imprisonment, and internal exile in 1934,

but his stances within the fascist milieu were increasingly out of line

with the necessities of state.

Arpinati was obviously centrally attracted to the violence and the

revolutionary potential of fascism, to be valued in-themselves, happily

chucking any socialist ends. But he also saw nationalism and street

violence as “antiauthoritarian” because they broke the status quo and

allowed the suppressed natural elites like him to claw their way up. He

continued his prior fight with syndicalism from within fascism just as

he had fought it within anarchism. His focus on natural elites (he

published Evola naturally) made him hostile to attempts to build a wider

base and bring people into the party.

Arpinati kept some power and popularity and as the second world war

dragged on he refused entreaties by Mussolini to help him restructure

the government, instead trying to make a play to fund the resistance

movements and place himself on Mussolini’s throne after the Allies

ousted him. There’s a neat little anecdote about how the deluded fool

felt sure the anarchists would hear him out and, lol, of course we

didn’t. He made other plays, hoping the monarchy would rise against

Mussolini and install himself; he also personally helped evacuate

British generals trapped behind lines, in hopes of winning standing with

the Allies. Thankfully, Arpinati and Nanni were assassinated together in

April 1945 before he could regain footing in the post-war era.

In contrast to Arpinati and Nanni, and more in keeping with Rocca, was

the saga of Maria Rygier, who we already saw betrayed and attacked by

the patriarchs of the anarchist milieu.

Her break with organizationalist ranks greenlit widespread misogynist

attacks on her, with Borghi attacking her femininity, dress, figure,

sanity, etc. But even as she repeatedly went down for others and sealed

her lips behind bars, the organizationalist left spared no sympathy for

her. Syndicalist leaders even rejected prison reform while Rygier was a

quite prominent recurring prisoner, stating:

“prisons, except for extreme cases of political persecution, are not for

conscientious workers, but for the dregs of society!”

Leading Rygier to furiously rejoin:

“syndicalism, when it is not union action… is reduced to a single

passive exercise: write, write, write, with presumptuous dilettantism,

insensitive to the fervor of battle”

It’s hard not to read this onto her parallel narrative arc from staunch

anti-militarist to nationalist warmonger. The syndicalists and scene

patriarchs no doubt deserved her absolute hatred, but one can see in the

above passage this hatred mutating to focus on their lack of militancy.

Where she went to prison and proved her commitment, so many of her

abusers and detractors sat relatively comfortably at home and

pontificated in abstract sneers. Of course commitment is not the same

thing as militancy, to say nothing of making a fetish of violence, but

the slippage between those ideas sure is perennial. When a detractor has

never risked their own skin, has never applied their fists, it’s hard

not to fixate on that division between you. Of course, certain people

like Fabbri and Borghi absolutely did take personal risks, but it’s easy

to understand Rygier seeing things differently from her position.

Obviously Rygier’s plight in the scene is sympathetic, yet no amount of

persecution by your “own side” can ever excuse or justify pivoting to

evil for friends and/or revenge. What’s morally correct doesn’t become

fungible just because you face abuse and the enemy offers community and

means of retaliation. It’s actually quite easy to give one’s life for

anarchy in a single moment of bravery and pain, but the true test of

commitment is whether you’re willing to shoulder pain and isolation over

decades, to be constantly betrayed by “comrades.” A shallow violent

militancy is often the easy way out compared to saying the unpopular

thing, resisting the popular or mythologized abusers, and sticking to it

through all the backlash.

Today we regularly hear people whine that they had no choice but to

become a tankie, or proudboy, or ecofascist, or work for a liberal

organization alongside cops, because some folks were mean to them and

the monsters were nice. I can think of nothing as spineless and craven

as making your values so un-fixed as to be dependent upon whether they

get you friends.

Rygier unfortunately sought allies not just with vile scumfucks on the

edge of the anarchist milieu like Rocca, but by March 1917 she had also

joined masons and sitting politicians in forming The Committee of Public

Safety to force Italy to more deeply commit to the war. This included a

plan to “execute the king and hold the royal family hostage” to ensure a

dictatorship. They planned and advocated mass repression and

imprisonment of Germans and anti-war activists (including virtually the

entire anarchist movement).

Mid 1920 Rygier’s commitment to fascism wavered, as Mussolini declared

war on Masonry. She threw herself in the opposite direction and got

attacked and her place ransacked by fascists. Throughout all of this she

continued to loudly assert that she had proof Mussolini had been an

informant for the French secret police and that it was this evidence

that provided her with insurance and was stopping Mussolini from

imprisoning or killing her. Nevertheless, eventually she realized that

bragging about blackmail diminishes its effectiveness and she fled to

France.

Whitaker doesn’t cover much of Rygier after her departure and there’s

even less available online. But it’s important to note the opportunism

and lack of principle to her supposed “anti-fascism” and critiques of

Mussolini. Basically her argument was that Mussolini was a blackmailer

and opportunist (pot meet kettle), as well as a stooge of France to

undermine Italian national interests. Like Rocca, Nanni, and Arpinati

she was shunned by actual anti-fascists, although unlike Nanni and

Arpinati she didn’t catch a bullet for her sins. She died a monarchist.

Although Whitaker centers four figures in his history, no one should

walk away with the impression that these were the only examples of

fascist creep in anarchist ranks.

I already mentioned the individualist anarchist newspaper editor turned

fascist, Edoardo Malusardi, but there was also Mario Gioda, an

individualist-anarchist and follower of Rocca who became the leader of

the Turin fascio and slaughtered eleven workers in December 1922. Gioda

came to be seen as an urban elitist and eventually marginalized within

fascist ranks. Whitaker mentions Mammolo Zamboni, another anarchist

turned fascist seen as heretical by other fascists, because he was

protected by Arpinati.

And there was Leo Longanesi, an anti-conformist who explicitly sought to

blend anarchism with conservatism and who represented an agrarian

populist wing within fascism. Longanesi gets the best quote in

Whitaker’s book:

“[fascism was composed of] ruffians, violent people, married people,

braggarts… vaguely fanatic people who agitate for no particular reason

against all that they do not understand, more than anything else from a

natural need to exalt themselves and rail against something: unable to

clearly formulate their own ideas, they condemn those of others: in

continuous personal rivalries, yesterday anarchists, tomorrow police

informers, today individualists, tomorrow communists… readers of

pamphlets, debtors, eternal idlers and inventors of systems for winning

at roulette, living in perennial and confused fanaticism.”

I list these other individuals to push back against the inevitable

attempts to dismiss and minimize all contact between individualist

anarchism and fascism.

While liberals, syndicalists, state socialists and communists each have

a vast array of members who jumped ship for fascism – anyone thinking of

using these details as indictment of individualist anarchism should

think long and hard before throwing stones on this – and the vast

majority of individualist anarchists in Italy obviously did not become

fascists, there was undeniably a lot of crossover in the early days.

While nowhere near as much as he was tied to the socialist movement (see

the copious praise that Lenin and Trotsky heaped on him) or the liberals

and conservatives that flocked to his promises, Mussolini was

astonishingly deeply enmeshed with anarchists. His father was part of

Bakunin’s anarchist international. He was personally close with the

infamous muslim individualist anarchist Leda Rafanelli in Milan. He knew

Carlo Tresca, praised Gaetano Bresci and Malatesta, collaborated with

Luigi Bertoni and translated two of Kropotkin’s books. He praised

Stirner and Nietzsche and quoted them at his adversaries. Mussolini even

appealed to (individualist) anarchism openly as justification of

fascism: “To us, the doomed ones of individualism, there is nothing left

for the dark present and the gloomy tomorrow but the ever consoling

religion… of anarchism!” Mussolini even supported Sacco and Vanzetti and

complained privately to his friends that American fascists didn’t side

with them.

Running away from this history will get us nowhere and provide no useful

antibodies against the resurgence of fascist creep in the worst fringes

of our movement.

Yet I certainly wouldn’t recommend Whitaker’s book as a corrective.

The ideological analysis in The Individualist Anarchist Origins of

Fascism is just all kinds of shoddy and I’ve done my best to strip it

out in relaying the preceding historical accounts. It’s hard to exactly

peg where Whitaker is coming from in terms of his own ideology. At many

points he seems to be condemning individualist anarchism from a

socialist perspective, at other points from a liberal perspective, but

there are a few distinct points in the book where he even seems

sympathetic to his fascist characters. He clearly finds individualism

somewhat suspect (or at least alien), thinks the extrajudicial execution

of Nanni and Arpinati is self-evidently bad (a crime!), and bemoans that

Arpinati has been written off as a fascist rather than recognized for

his accomplishments in good government. But even that shocking and

disgusting sympathy gets nuanced with something that looks like a

critique of the ways that historical narratives have pretended that

fascism was completely wiped away and wasn’t part of contiguous

traditions through modern Italy.

Whitaker claims he wrote the book to push back against historical

accounts that flatten or homogenize fascism’s internal ideological

diversity and also cleave it from all prior and following history.

That’s certainly well and good, but the end result is a book certain to

mislead liberals and socialists, or, even worse, provide grist to actual

fascists. It’s a useful book for anarchists, but for anyone not already

fluent in anarchism there’s a serious danger of his warped accounting

doing lasting damage.

As I’ve mentioned, in (barely) trying to understand anarchism, he pulls

heavily from really unqualified liberal academics and from Woodcock’s

infamously problematic summary of anarchism. A lot has been written

critically on Woodcock’s 1962 Anarchism, its influences and resulting

influence. Woodcock was a pacifist with snobbish literary focuses, and

while he was involved in anarchist circles before the war, he was also

rather representative of the survivors that flourished in the post-war

period. He was running from the legacy of violent direct action and

concerned with social legitimacy, desperate to write off figures like

Bakunin as evil firebrands and to reframe figures like Kropotkin in

terms of his own perspective. His book was strongly slanted to reproduce

that analysis as well as to characterize anarchism in the rear-view

mirror as a failed project and historical episode. For anarchists like

my father that came up in the 50s and 60s it’s an incredibly apt summary

of their zeitgeist. But Woodcock’s Anarchism is not the place to find a

charitable or even fair reading of individualist insurrectionaries.

Woodcock was also writing to an audience of post-war liberals, whose

reference frame was very different from that of anarchism. The academic

liberals that Whitaker cites are all in this frame and to them anarchism

is not just a deludedly utopian artifact of lost history, but also a

deeply strange one that they are preoccupied with trying to fit into

their own notions of individualism and communitarianism. Since neither

they nor Whitaker really bother to read beyond some surface selections,

they do a lot of strawman inference to try and resolve how anarchism

solves the problems most pressing about it in their paradigm.

There’s also a belief that anarchism is centrally defined by the belief

that human nature is good. This – as I’ve repeatedly tried to emphasize

to contemporary anarchists – was the widespread takeaway for decades

after Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (one of the few anarchist texts to survive

in influence and circulation in the US after the Palmer raids). It

wasn’t just the warped takeaway of liberal critics, but it was also

sincerely what much of the rank-and-file movement came to believe over

these decades. Watch documentaries of old anarchists that persisted

through the 40s and 50s and you hear repeated explicit references to

this. Humans are essentially good in our core nature and we’ve lost

sight of that and been warped by social institutions. This generation of

the movement took very strongly to Wilhelm Reich (silly orgone and all)

because he was a prominent figure pushing this same simplistic

perspective. Even if Kropotkin had a more nuanced view, what was printed

in Mutual Aid and in Ethics didn’t do much of anything to counter such

beliefs and on-the-ground popular mobilizing narratives; movements don’t

do nuance. This widespread appeal to nature as good directly coursed

into the creation of green anarchism and primitivism. Even if there

remained minority currents in anarchism that objected or didn’t

formulate their perspectives in such terms, “nature = good” is indeed

reflective of the mainstream in this era.

But where Whitaker and the liberals he cites go wrong is in reading this

perspective backward into the anarchist movement in the 19th century and

early 20th. Certainly there was some presence around the milieu of the

occasional appeals to human nature (and nature more widely) as good and

the ground of anarchism’s values, but it was hardly hegemonic the way it

became during anarchism’s midcentury retreat and eclipse. Indeed much of

anarchism at this time was a fiery prometheanism, believing fanatically

in progress through science, reason, and technology, with the radical

new technologies of revolver and dynamite as unprecedented levelers that

would enable the transition to a society never before enacted. This was

not the narrative of Rousseau or Lewis Henry Morgan that liberal

discourse is familiar with. The movement was a point of intersection

between quite varying currents that all had similar conclusions about

the rejection of domination, and that mixed, hybridized, innovated, and

drew in wildly varying influences. Figures like William Godwin were

utilitarians who believed in a long struggle towards human perfection

until everyone was so individually enlightened that coercion would

become a distant memory. Such was absolutely not a perspective that

humans were naturally good but corrupted by social institutions, but

that rather humans could, with some work, recognize and come to change

ourselves towards what was good (like freedom), including in our bodies

(Godwin and the cosmist currents both endorsed radical self-alterations

to cure involuntary death). There were many other currents of course, I

emphasize the promethean ones as strenuous counterexamples to this

midcentury liberal notion of anarchism as an appeal to nature.

Because Whitaker and his liberal sources are reading things through that

lens they radically misunderstand and misrepresent the whole of

anarchism and the messy diversity of individualist anarchism, finally

characterizing Stirner in such nature-worshiping terms:

“Stirner, too, sanctioned the authority of nature, presupposing in his

Union of Egoists that each of the Unique Ones was at heart good. Like

other nineteenth-century anarchists, therefore, even Stirner fell back

on the notion that some natural authority would be “invoked

spontaneously by each person,“ despite the “massive tension between each

individual and the society in which he was ensnared.” “ (Whitaker

internally quoting from Fowler’s The Anarchist Tradition of Political

Thought)

Meanwhile, actual Stirner:

“Owner and creator of my right, I recognize no other source of right

than — me, neither God nor the State nor nature nor even man himself

with his “eternal rights of man,” neither divine nor human right.”

Whitaker’s reading of Stirner goes on to create a funhouse narrative

whereby Stirner is a moralist of The Natural and focused on Logic &

Reason, as a “disciple” of Hegel, and as a mere proto-Nietzsche he is

later surpassed by Nietzsche who embraces true moral relativism. There’s

so much askew with this account it’s staggering.

There are many ways to read an author and exegesis of Stirner is almost

as completely boring and fruitless as exegesis of Marx, many a brain has

curdled pursuing either. I have no interest in excavating or defending

The Real Stirner, but some reads are just laughably divergent from

anything close to reality.

I think the more interesting question is: did figures like Rocca happen

to misread Stirner partly in the same way that Whitaker does?

And it seems very clear from his own words that Rocca did see Stirner as

advocating a rejection of thought and return to natural instinct. Indeed

this seems to be one of the weird instances where we can actually see

some evidence that these fascists actually read Stirner rather than just

picking up “the gist” from social interactions where he at best served

as a cartoonish meme. And not just The Ego And Its Own! It’s in

Stirner’s Critics where he rambles at length about rejecting thought for

its own sake, valuing it only in terms of its capacity to to dissolve

one’s scruples. There’s a bit of a leap necessary to go from there to

worshiping natural instinct, and there is text of Stirner critiquing

being dragged along by one’s hungers, but inveighing against thought

itself is not the sort of 101 level canard most people opportunistically

pick up from Stirner at a glance. Granted, it’s quite at odds with

Whitaker’s framing of Stirner as Logic & Reason bro, but we can pick out

a kind of coherent arc where thought is the realm of spooks intervening

over and distracting from the physical base of your impulses and

instincts.

While, again, words cannot emphasize how dreary and wasteful I find

arguments over what constitutes The Real Stirner, this is not such a

rare reading. I’ve encountered it among green anarchists and even

neoreactionaries. It has a certain kind of gravitational pull because it

avoids the perpetual goalpost moving of simply declaring every single

conceivable sentence one could offer up within language as just another

specter of reified thought. The Natural thus provides a ground, a clear

goal, an explanation of what all Stirner was on about that many people

find comfortingly clear. Of course even these Stirnerites wouldn’t

capitalize it as an abstract concept “The Natural” but they would

nevertheless emphasize that the point is something like listening to

your body or more directly flowing from its desires rather than getting

lost in a tangle of cognition and social concepts.

Whether collapsing desire construction and mutation down to a direct

connection with one’s base instincts can be really extended into a

general endorsement of “the authority of nature” is less interesting

than whether folks repeatedly feel an attraction to such leaps.

Certain currents of fascists have repeatedly embraced Stirner, not as in

an attempt to claim something popular for themselves, as many egoists

have dismissively assumed, but because they clearly and explicitly find

personal resonances with Stirner. You’ll often find Stirner right beside

Evola on fascist reading lists in 8chan or the like, not because they’re

consciously trying to steal Stirner – the vast majority of their

audience has never even heard of him – but because those recommending

him have their own connection to and sincere fondness for him. These

fascists see themselves as individualists par excellence and it’s vital

that we understand fascism as not necessarily the exact opposite of

individualism but often as a perversion or specific form of

individualism. This requires going beyond the inane boomer

mis-definitions of fascism in mere terms of totalitarianism,

collectivism, or homogeneity. And it requires us to kick off from a

defensive posturing that dare not concede any rhetorical ground.

In particular we must understand that nationalism has two sides, not

just the construction of a flat and illusory solidarity with one’s

countrymen, but the stripping away of empathy and identification with

the foreigner. And of the two it is the latter that is the graver

mistake and more deadly poison. The mistake of nationalism, nativism,

etc, is most centrally about reducing one’s circle of care. When

fascists scream that an American or a White life should be worth more to

you than a Korean life, they are not demanding you elevate your

compassion for some average American, they are demanding you decrease

your compassion for every Korean. And when they justify this by

appealing to some supposed natural or inherent pull to value one’s kin

over strangers, the proper retort is not to litigate whether or not you

are truly “kin” with every other American. The fascist wants to get

around to reducing that circle of care too! Contemporary fascist

movements have embraced the micro-scale and hyper-local. Ask a fascist

today if he thinks there should be border controls between US states or

counties and he’ll often smirkingly answer in the affirmative. From

neoreactionaries to national-anarchists and countless other currents,

the evolution of the fascist movement has been to collapse the already

small number of individuals you are allowed to care about. To

characterize fascism in terms of a drive for some vast homogenous and

totalizing society is to miss that fascist movements have always

positioned themselves as defending a diverse patchwork of isolated

islands against the (supposed) homogenizing effects of global

connectivity. The Third Reich explicitly positioned itself as the

champion of local culture against the corruption of global civilization.

The fascist project is in no small part to shrink your identification

with others, to remove all sense of a common spark of creative

brilliance, emerging and situated in different contexts, different

lives, and to instead suppress this identification ultimately even in

yourself.

The creative nothing was probably meant as a non-concept, a kind of

topological defect or singularity in our language that formal

conceptualization cannot capture. The sort of beyond the horizon where

Wittgenstein thought everything important laid. I am, in my old age as a

cranky ideologue, a notorious criminal many times over convicted of

scientism, not particularly sympathetic anymore to the usage of

non-concepts of any kind. In my mind they’ve long since revealed

themselves as a cheap trick, a rug to sweep things under, a shell game

for folks running scams in the back alleys of philosophy. But even those

who embrace or accept the appeal to such non-concepts must still admit

they have a certain tendency to get immediately replaced by concepts.

What fits into the hole? A mere phenomenological experience of almost

cartesian remove and immanence? An anti-reductionist vitalism? A

collapse to bare pre-conceptual biological instinct? A self-reflective

loop of conscious integration? The array of things folks have implicitly

or explicitly stitched into the ‘creative nothing’ is vast and quite

varied.

Some provide a springboard for empathic blurring of identification, in

this sense the stripping away of arbitrary conceptual scaffoldings and

historical happenstance allows for a very humanist move from identifying

as a thing or a set of things (just more inert chains) into identifying

with all fountainheads of the ‘creative nothing.’ This replicates the

core premise of anarchism: your freedom is my freedom, because what

matters is freedom, not the arbitrary particularities of some given

context in which it is expressed. We are not our various social or

physical identities or some clotting of memetic parasites in our brains,

but the motion underneath, and that motion is itself the same motion in

my brain and yours. The same underlying characteristic or property.

This, in various languages, is a common conclusion of some different

concepts that get plugged into “the creative nothing.”

But in many other approaches the stripping away does not arrive at a

common freedom but at an even more particularized and isolated last

twitch of the mind. This is the place that Rocca went by embracing

natural preconceptual instinct as the antithesis to “thought for

thought’s sake.” It is also how fascists use Stirner to this day. In

their hands Stirner is a tool to strip away, to reject any recognition

of commonality. Why should you care about the stranger under the bombs

in another country? If they are your property to be used, they are at

best not particularly ready-to-hand, and at worst something more like a

tool abandoned to the weeds at the edge of your farm. Indeed what could

conceivably move you to care about their plight but some alien parasite,

some Humanist Brainwashing? To care about the abstraction of people far

away, laboring under the terror of the drones, is surely to fall prey to

the God that is the abstract “Man.”

Long ago, in the era before fascism was discovered by liberals (so prior

to 2017), I happened across a small brand-new blog of right-libertarians

mocking C4SS. The thrust of their critique was that mutualists clearly

hadn’t read Stirner because they still did cringey humanist shit like

care about foreigners. I laughed and rolled my eyes even further to

discover they’d registered a .biz domain – an affectation that had just

gotten popular among right-libertarians. There was no way this

“therightstuff.biz” would ever draw an audience, just another shitty

wordpress by two random dudes. …Later, of course, they would start a

podcast on that site called “The Daily Shoah.”

Now obviously their usage of Stirner was rather mercenary. I mean they

also had posts up at the same time praising tradcath shit. It should not

be contentious that if you weld Stirner to Catholicism you’re gonna have

to strip away some of Stirner. But we can recognize that while also

recognizing that what would become the most popular nazi podcast wasn’t

citing a then still quite obscure figure like Stirner to gain points,

but because they actually sincerely found value in him. And that value

was precisely in stripping away compassion for others. Mike Peinovich

and Alex McNabb had been attracted to right-libertarianism because it

provided justifications to dismiss the suffering of those without their

privilege and a narrative that let them see themselves as elite. But

they chafed at libertarianism’s strict morality and occasional concern

with the oppressed, as well as the implicit globalist cosmopolitanism of

markets. In Stirner they found an escape, a way to renounce those

fetters and embrace the callousness they actually felt. And while

Stirner does not share the inextricable essentialist elitism of

Nietzsche who despairs of a world drowning in sheeple, the reader is

still invited to an elite circle of the few brilliant souls who cast

themselves free of specters. Casting off the “fixed idea” of caring

about others from the apex of a hierarchy of enlightenment has obvious

resonances with fascistic frames, although the boys would quickly

discover they could get even stronger highs mainlining anti-semitic

conspiracies and racial pseudoscience.

Now obviously this example of neonazi usage of Stirner requires them to

scratch off more than a few things and certainly requires ignoring the

absolute nuclear bomb of his line, “I love men too — not merely

individuals, but every one.” But let’s be frank: Stirner wrote very much

in the way of snarky critique, and very little in the way of positive

argument. He emphasizes tearing down fixed concepts or memetic

complexes, and gives only the most tepid excuse or even appeal to not be

a massive prick. He’s strong on “I will not be ruled” but relatively

fleetingly and barely makes any substantive case for the other half of

anarchism: “I shall not rule.” Why should we love? Stirner’s avoidance

of positive ethics, leaves him to functionally duck the question “I love

them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to

me.” But what if loving isn’t natural to you? What if you were born

feeling no sense of solidarity, empathy, or compassion, and find

happiness in torturing animals? And wait just a minute: how is anything

“natural” to a creative nothing? Why should arguments of what is

“natural” matter to a creative nothing? Is Rocca right that the ego

boils down to a return from the compounding loop of reflective thought

to natural instinct?

In every choice of one value or identification over another there are

mechanisms of causation and reasoning that are always inherently at

play. Everyone has a morality and ethics is innate to the very process

of weighing any choice. Those who never joined us in explicitly plugging

conceptual mechanisms into the hole of the creative nothing are free to

drift loftily above any consideration of this tangle; a lack of

awareness can, of course, serve as a sense of freedom. If you’re not

aware of the actual causal mechanisms by which one choice tugs at you

more than another you can treat the happenstance flicker of feelings

across your life as a kind of fountain of randomness or even wildness.

But nothing is really left to object to the “Stirnerite” who simply

happens to feel flickers of sadism and a lust for power. And even less

is able to be objected to when the fascist argues that caring about

strangers is unnatural, because their distance from immediate stimuli

and instinctive responses, to say nothing of continual social

entanglement, makes it impossible to be tormented by their torment or

refreshed by their refreshment without requiring the adoption of the

dread conceptualization.

I do not mean to imply that answers cannot be given, and some self

professed “Stirnerites” have indeed given various answers. My point here

is that these are non-trivial issues and fascists or other reactionaries

coming down on the other side of them are not simply reading “don’t do a

collectivism” and doing a collectivism anyway. They are diverging in

ways from Stirner’s own trajectory, but they are often still sincerely

reading him and being influenced by him. Even if they end up running

with him into absolute batshit scumfuckery like Rocca and Arpinati.

For decades Sidney Parker was one of the most prominent individualist

anarchists and Stirnerite egoists in the world, certainly the

anglosphere, ruling as editor of Minus One and EGO, writing the

introduction to a popular print of The Ego and Its Own, and generally

being a thorn in the side of the British anarchist scene. In 1993,

Parker finally abandoned anarchism, writing:

“Anarchism is a creed of social transformation aiming at the ending of

all domination and exploitation of man by man. Its adherents seek the

creation of the Judeo-Christian myth of a heaven on earth. The central

anarchist tenet is: Dominating People Is Wrong. It is based on the

belief that all, or almost all, individuals are, or can be, equally

capable of taking part in decision-making.

I no longer accept these propositions.

As a conscious egoist I can see no reason why I should not dominate

others – if it is my interest to do so and within my competence.

Similarly, I am prepared to support others who dominate if that will

benefit me. “If the condition of the State does not bear hard on the

closet-philosopher, is he to occupy himself with it because it is his

‘most sacred duty?’ So long as the State does according to his wish,

what need has he to look up from his studies?” (Stirner) Sometimes,

indeed, I may behave in an “anarchist” fashion, but, by the same token,

I may also behave in an “archist” fashion. The belief in anarchism

imprisoned me in a net of conceptual imperatives. Egoism leaves any way

open to me for which I am empowered.”

And of course Parker endorsed racial hierarchy and emphatically embraced

Ragnar Redbeard, the inane “anarchist” writer constantly endorsed

alongside Stirner by fascists, whose book Might Is Right has had many

republications literally covered in swastikas. Countless other more

personal and intimate examples of such turns exist, although it’s beyond

the purview of this book review to laboriously list them all. This is

adamantly not to say that every or even most egoist anarchists become

fascists or such outright scumbags. But if being an anarchist and

respected egoist for decades like Parker still isn’t an inoculation

against such heel turns today we can’t just write off Rocca and Arpinati

as strange historical anomalies and continuing fascist and reactionary

endorsement of Stirner a completely illiterate opportunism.

While I found value in Stirner in my youth, I must admit I have never

been able to fathom the people who defensively cling to him, who

identify with him as some kind of flag. I suppose if you are too weak to

stand in the face of sneering collectivists it may help to have

something else to throw in front of you as a shield. Some external

authority to prop up your voice and draw the fire of responses away from

you personally. Some shared idol to rally a tribe of dissidents. And, of

course, if the outgroup comes for this token, the ingroup must always

circle the wagons lest they be picked off one by one by the hordes of

moralist communist bureaucrats all around. But I dunno, surely folks

understand that an actual fiery individualism wouldn’t feel the need to

remind everyone of one’s asserted individualism or to immediately form

and cling to some new tribe?

I am, to say the least, disappointed and vexed by the incessant shallow

dismissal that “Stirner opposed collectivism and nationalism is

collectivism, they’re exact opposites, fascist Stirnerites are a

complete contradiction from which nothing can be learned.” Of course,

Stirner would have laughed at the nazis. Of course, he personally had

passages at odds with some of their specific positions. But the idea

that there’s an ideological complete contradiction is simply not true.

No one spontaneously explodes upon emphasizing some parts of his texts

and ignoring others, much less in rearranging and reconstructing things,

or just using him as a loose springboard for what arguments they find

personally compelling instead.

The actual living person Johann Kaspar Schmidt who got the “big

forehead” nickname Max Stirner, was, like any other person, of such vast

complexity as to defy compression into any set of texts, much less the

few we have from him. He might have had a somewhat unified and coherent

philosophical project, where each piece depends critically upon every

other piece, he might even have had radically different intuitions,

ideas, and responses than are implied within the few scant and highly

contextually-bound texts we have, but this is not how texts work. Texts,

for better or worse, end up existing as an assortment of arguments

placed alongside one another.

I’m not suggesting that, for example, Rocca’s endorsement of a worldwide

war of all against all as the path to a union of egoists is some kind of

intelligent development on Stirner, nor anything that Johann Kaspar

Schmidt would have recognized. Rocca and Arpinati were bloodthirsty

scumfucks, Rygier a vengeful opportunist. They clearly drew at best very

loosely from Stirner’s texts and it’s not at all clear that they had any

real love for anything else that might be called anarchist theory (and

recall that Stirner never identified with the term or the movement).

But even though Whitaker whiffs completely on understanding the

ideological elements in play, his book nevertheless documents an

anarchist scene annoyingly similar to today’s. We don’t shoot each other

with pistols at bookfairs, but the scumfuckery of some noxious egoist

wingnuts and the abusive power of some red scene patriarchs will have

immediate resonances to anyone who’s been an anarchist for more than a

day and seen the worst corners of our scene.

This is the most chilling thing about The Anarchist-Individualist

Origins Of Italian Fascism: it reads like a friend at a potluck dishing

scene drama about one edgelord or another today. Even as the majority of

the Italian anarchist movement lies just out of focus, occasionally

throwing a chair or a rock at the protagonists and introducing an

interlude of hospitalization, you can’t look away from the fuckery, you

already know it so intimately.

This is the frank truth, for all our heroism and angelic exemplars, the

anarchist milieu has always had a problem with a fringe of

militancy-worshiping shits for whom the attraction of “anarchism” is a

promise of getting away with whatever they wanted. A “might is right”

sort of attitude often tied to a fetishization of criminal/warrior

aristocratic elites in the name of militarism. The spine for “action” is

substituted for the spine for values. Who cares if that dude abused his

partner, he went to a tree sit once so nothing can be done.

The recruitment of such is an inevitable byproduct of how anarchism

frames itself and the struggles it is engaged in. Failing to address

these little shits – as well as allowing much of the mainstream of

anarchism to be captured by centralized power structures – leads to a

false dichotomy between tepid manipulative gatekeeping

organizationalists and bloodthirsty scumfuck “individualists” where both

sides reinforce the other. If you’re not in favor of breaking glass in

motel pools to cut up children (because “social war”) you must therefore

be with the pacifist lib grifters and identity politicians.

I started this review with Borghi and Fabbri’s medical rape of Rygier

mostly because it’s a shocking lost fact that should damn well be at

least a footnote on every goddamn thing about either of them, but also

because I know damn well that this review will be screamed about and

relayed to people as some outrageous outsider hitpiece on Stirner,

egoism, or individualist anarchism. And at the exact same time many

opportunist communists will salivate to link it as some kind of proof

that Max Stirner secretly lived another century, grew a mustache, and

renamed himself Adolf Hitler.

But I think Rygier’s turn to fascism is fascinating because we can

appreciate that she was no doubt motivated by her extremely fucked up

adversaries in the anarchist movement. You can’t learn just how far

Borghi and Fabbri went in their struggle for popularity and influence

against her, as well as their allegiance to their bro, and not fucking

loathe them. And we can absolutely lay some of the blame for her pivot

to fascism at their feet while relieving her of not one iota of

responsibility and agency. Blame can overlap and multiply! It’s not

zero-sum!

Too often the worst sort of abuse or misbehavior is covered up by “the

other side is worse!!” Just as fascist creep is cultivated by a failure

to recognize and excise it, it is also cultivated by failing to handle

other problems. False binaries are created by inaction against or

tolerance of different flavors of fucked up shit. Green reactionaries

take root in part by pointing out how bad the bureaucratic reds are.

Nazbols take root by emphasizing just how bad the capitalist libs are.

Ranks close, political identities become mutable flags of convenient

counter-coalitions rather than anything consistent.

The Italian individualist anarchists were absolutely right to take issue

with the organizationalist currents that dominated the scene, that often

pacified and attempted to control or centralize anarchism (and thus give

space to corruption). But there wasn’t a strong base of options beyond

Fabbri and Borghi (I would kill to learn Malatesta’s complicity or

ignorance of events), so Rygier sided with Rocca. This sort of thing

could have been partially derailed if the individualists who didn’t go

fascist had the spine to stand simultaneously against both sorts of rot

early on.

It would obviously be a mistake to read Whitaker’s book in isolation;

just as there are Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Fascism, there are

also Bolshevik Origins of Fascism, Socialist Origins of Fascism, Liberal

Origins of Fascism, etc. Whitaker focuses on Nanni’s supposed

individualism, but let us never forget that the vast majority of

fascism’s initial origins were with the state socialists. And in

particular, the creeping mistake of “left unity,” the bizarre but ever

popular delusion that “we’re all on the same side,” is no small part of

how an egoist streetfighter like Arpinati could end up best friends with

a literal mayor like Nanni and then a prominent politician like

Mussolini.

The dangers of circling wagons and accepting or overlooking problematic

allies to defeat a specific enemy are eternal. In both left-unity or

individualist-unity, it was on display throughout the sordid rise of

fascism, in almost exactly the same way they’ve continued to be a

problem in the last few decades. When you’re under siege and someone

shitty offers you friendship, it takes far more spine and courage to

burn that friendship than it does to merely throw more punches against

your common enemy.

Italian anarchists took way too long to settle on deplatforming and

ostracizing the protofash egoists. Yes, streetfighting and attacks on

protofash egoist talks were common (although the Novatori started it by

starting pistol fights at conferences). But one of the most shocking

things in Whitaker’s book is that venues and conferences continued to

give them a platform basically until they were openly at war with the

entire anarchist movement as explicit fascists. Further, Arpinati was

able to recruit from anarchist ranks well into his reign of terror on

the anarchist movement because he maintained personal friendships with

specific individuals. Anarchists didn’t successfully (if at all) apply

pressure to stop those friendships and so he was able to court

“antifascists” into flipping sides. Similarly, much confusion was

clearly had before folks recognized that there can be insurgent or

revolutionary threats that must be studiously opposed simultaneous to

our opposition to the ruling establishment, never downplaying one threat

to focus on the other, much less allying with one against the other. And

of course, we can’t afford to ignore how the allure of bravery and

militancy can obscure invalidating downsides.

The absolute necessity of enforcing No Platform, pressuring

disassociation, Three Way Fight, etc. are lessons folks have obviously

learned the hard way again and again in different subcultures and scenes

as fascist creep sets in, but it’s really arresting to read the

particulars of the very first anarchists to struggle with these dynamics

at the literal dawn of the fascist movement.

Sadly, while antifascism – as a specialized project, discourse, and

milieu – has been pretty much defined by the recognition of these

lessons, this perspective isn’t a given in every circle that anarchists

operate in.

It has been frequently said that, “every anarchist is an antifascist by

definition so focusing on antifascism is a dangerous distraction.” And,

as the populist traction of the Trump era wanes, much hay has been made

once again about antifascism as implicitly liberal. Something that

focuses on minor enemies to the benefit of the status quo. Identical

things have been regularly said about “feminism.” In some real sense

anarchism is trivially feminist by definition, but while those two

concepts should ultimately converge, they clearly haven’t fully in

practice. Feminism and antifascism can be appropriated by liberals to

serve the status quo, but this is no reason to reject them. It’s long

been my contention that the anarchist movement needs a specifically

antifascist line of consideration, of focus in analysis and practice; it

cannot simply assume that antifascism follows trivially from anarchism

(or egoism or whatever).

If today – in a world of eco-fascists many of whom who sincerely want to

collapse civilization, initiate a race war and return to closed small

tribes, or national-bolsheviks sincerely committed to war on the

existing capitalist class, to say nothing of myriad other strains – it

is self-evidently absurd to cling to old marxist analyses that fascism

is merely a stage of capitalism, or that fascists are pawns of the

capitalists. We laugh in the face of boomers who still grab at claims

that fascism is literally defined by “cultural and ideological

homogenization” in contrast to virtually every fascist ranting about

preserving cultural diversity from globalism. But these absurdities were

once quite popular in no small part because studying actual fascists,

tracing the potency of their ideological appeals, or remembering

knowledge gained in struggles against them was dismissed as unimportant,

or even a threat.

It was not that many years ago that “antifa” was a widely hated word in

anarchist spaces and the most basic sorts of campaigns, to, for example,

deplatform Death In June, provoked sneering if not fervent hostility.

It’s literally impossible for that dude to be a fascist, he’s gay. My

favorite of such takes to this day remains, ‘um killing people for sport

is obviously the least fascist thing, it shows they have a liberated

libido.’

Yes, this is a collectivist sort of wagon-circling, but it also stems

from dismissively approaching fascism as purely a social or even

institutional phenomenon rather than an ideological movement. Or, even

as merely a substitute word for “the bad thing.” In this context a book

like The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism can only be

treated as an infuriating attack.

How can the good thing be in any way tied to the bad thing except

through spurious and tenuous associations, a tiny spattering of

nonsensical contradictions!

Yet, I actually do think there’s something to the instinctive

understanding that fascism is just the polar opposite of us. Even if

that doesn’t mean that everyone on the opposite side of us on any issue

is therefore a fascist.

I’ve long emphasized a two-tiered description of fascism: not just as

the macroscopic politics of palingenetic ultranationalism, but also an

underlying philosophy of power beneath it that stands as the exact

opposite of anarchism. This philosophy of power is hostile to reason and

all about shrinking one’s circle of care and identification.

Intellectual arguments for compassion and truth must be discarded as

pointless or unsustainable via moral and epistemic nihilism, but it’s

not enough to dismiss them as specters, the continuing pull of reason

and empathy requires an active resistance lest it corrupt the fascist.

Thus violence becomes a purifying loop that sheds off compassion and

reason. The self-evident lie of the nation, race, etc (virtually all

fascists admit such collective abstractions are a lie, from Anglin to

Spencer), is a useful lie not just because it provides a way to mobilize

social power, but also because it helps secure one’s own head against

the ever threatening spiral of reason and compassion.

In this sense fascism is a project defined not just as one pole in the

eternal conflict of power vs freedom, but by its evolved resistance to

the anarchist creep, that is to say the dangerous infectiousness of our

perspective. Not just through cultivating a continuous loop of violence

that burns away the weeds of higher thought and empathy, but also

through creating social pressures to vice-signal. Even when the fascist

cannot engage in daily physical violence, he can still make a combative

public show of his lack of concern for others. He can sing “nuke em till

they glow” or speechify about stomping the skulls of immigrant babies or

defend the cannibalism of raider societies or make memes treating

Assad’s gas attacks like Nickelodeon goop. As the infectious processes

of reason and empathy broadly ratchet towards certain social norms and

common values, the fascist finds a thin “freedom” in his rupture with

them, creating an opposite community with opposite values of hardness

and shallow instinct.

There is, I believe, a substantive sense in which fascism really did

emerge from (individualist) anarchism, and that’s as our antithesis.

Yes, the socialists, liberals, and conservative influences upon fascism

were vast, and counted for the overwhelming bulk of their numbers. In

comparison, the number of “individualist anarchists” who joined them was

a barely visible dust mote. But what our presence contributed was a

crystalizing clarity that catalyzed and reshaped those long-existing

reactionary elements.

In this sense, while both anarchism and fascism are modern ideologies,

we are at the same time purifications of eternal tendencies throughout

history, the modern dimension being our self-awareness.

It is frequently marveled that anarchists and fascists often agree in

our models of the world, but pick completely different values to fight

for. Where liberals, socialists, communists, libertarians,

conservatives, etc embrace delusions of some kind of compromise, some

middle path between freedom and power, anarchists and fascists both tend

to understand the actual landscape.

What matters is the values we align with.

For this reason, “I will not be ruled” on its own is not a half-step to

anarchism’s “I will not be ruled and I will not rule” but sometimes a

move in the completely opposite direction.