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Title: Anarchism as non-integration
Author: Danny Evans
Date: June 2021
Language: en
Topics: anti-nationalism
Source: Retrieved on 2021-06-28 from https://abcwithdannyandjim.substack.com/p/anarchism-as-non-integration
Notes: The following piece is an attempt to write up some ideas expressed at a talk about my book hosted last week by Robert Kramm and team’s Radical History book talk series, and also in conversation with Jim about Loren Goldner’s Revolution, Defeat and Theoretical Underdevelopment: Russia, Turkey, Spain, Bolivia, the subject of our next podcast. Many thanks to both parties for these enjoyable and fruitful conversations.

Danny Evans

Anarchism as non-integration

I want to propose a way of thinking about anarchism as a historical

movement, which I haven’t seen expressed before in this way. Put simply:

anarchism was the movement and imaginary that opposed the national

integration of the working classes.

In 1988 Marcel van der Linden published an article titled ‘The National

Integration of the European Working Classes 1871–1914’, which is

foundational to this perspective. It posits some of the key factors in

the process by which working class people and their organisations came

to identify their interests with those of the nation state.

Anarchism emerged as a current within the socialist movement at the

beginning of the period covered by van der Linden’s article; its chief

characteristic was its opposition to formal political participation. At

that time, capitalism was not a completed project. By actively opposing

political participation, anarchism during 1870–1914 was able to resist

much more effectively than its Marxist opponents the process through

which capitalism extended its domination. This process has been

identified as the movement from the formal to the real subsumption of

capital, described in Marx’s ‘lost sixth chapter’ of Capital. The most

salient aspect of this process for our purposes was that described by

van der Linden: the national integration of the working classes. Loren

Goldner describes this as a shift in capitalist societies from viewing

workers as ‘a pariah class’ to ‘the community of labour’.

There were many different components to this national integration:

education, formalisation of language, communications, imperialism,

racism and the spread of ‘whiteness’ etc. Working-class representation

in parliaments and large, tolerated trade unions were only one element.

But by rejecting this element, anarchism opened up the possibility of

capitalist modernity remaining an incomplete project, defeated by an

alternative world oriented around the commune. The majority of Marxists,

meanwhile, were happy to march in lockstep with capitalist progress.

Rather than bring the working class into the fold of capitalist

modernity – the historic role of social democracy in Germany – in other

countries attempting to get on the train of industrial development,

anarchism was able to articulate a political project of the pariah

classes (workers and peasants). The requirement for socialists to do

this was grappled with by Marxists in analogous situations in places

like Italy and Russia but the ideological adherence to the progress of

history sat uneasily with the requirement to fight for a better world in

the here and now. This is what anarchists were able to do, projecting an

alternative modernity that could be brought about by a combination of

direct action and education.

The greatest achievement of that project was the Spanish revolution, an

event that was possible because the national integration of the working

class had not taken place in that country. There was no comprehensive

schooling system, pre-capitalist agricultural forms continued to

predominate in swathes of the country, there was a good deal of

differentiation across the territory in terms of economy, culture,

language, communications and so forth. To this can be added the absence

of national prestige – identified by van der Linden as a further

important factor in national integration – following the so-called

‘disaster’ of 1898 when Spain lost control of Cuba and the Philippines.

Furthermore, Spanish neutrality in World War One meant that the issue of

working-class integration was not forced by total war and conscription.

The result was that, well into the twentieth century, there was no

ambiguity about the continuing pariah status of the working class in

Spain.

This prompts an interesting chicken and egg question as to whether

anarchism thrived in or created such conditions. On the one hand, where

national integration took place very early, as in England, anarchism was

condemned from the get-go to a marginal and rearguard role, occupied

chiefly with the noble task of combatting popular jingoism. So, in that

sense, anarchism could perhaps only thrive where national integration

hadn’t occurred. On the other hand, where anarchism did thrive it was a

bulwark against integration in the sense that it opposed both the formal

political parties and large bureaucratic trade unions that led the

process of national integration in, for example, Germany. So, the

existence of large anarchist movements militated against national

integration taking place.

As such, anarchism can be added to the constellation of circumstantial

and long-term structural reasons for non-integration in Spain by the

time of the civil war. In those circumstances, the movement was able to

present a plausible alternative articulation of modernity to its

constituents. This was necessary because, in a context in which

non-integration remained pending, modernity as such was not regarded as

a completed project either by the range of left-wing, right-wing and

liberal alternatives to anarchism or by anarchists themselves. The right

wished to solve the problem of national integration through coercion and

annihilation of recalcitrant elements, the left through secular

education and the state mediation of labour disputes.

In some respects, the anarchist articulation of modernity in Spain was

compatible with a project of working-class integration, particularly if

we analyse specific individual theorists or particular ideological

defects, but taken as a whole it would be hard to make this case.

Anarchism in Spain differentiated itself from competing ideologies and

sustained itself as a movement through both a clearly articulated and

uncompromising class consciousness and the fiercely guarded independence

of autonomous union sections, affinity groups and publications. During

the civil war, however, the movement was split by the question of

collaboration with the state.

The struggle over the question of state collaboration could be usefully

framed as a struggle against the national integration of the working

class. By waging the struggle on a broad scale, and by constructing and

defending what, at least to its partisans, was a plausible alternative

outcome, anarchists in Spain fulfilled what we can retrospectively posit

as the destiny of anarchism as the movement of working-class

non-integration.

What do we gain from thinking about anarchism in this way? Firstly, we

have a plausible account of its enormous appeal and validity among

workers and peasants in the decades following 1871, while also

appreciating why that appeal was temporally and geographically

constricted. Positing anarchism as the projected alternative to a

specific and crucial period of capitalist transition also gets beyond

both transhistorical appeals to the struggle between liberty and

authority, and false dichotomies of primitive and modern social

movements. Lastly, this perspective means we can account for and take

seriously anarchism’s defeat, and start to think about what that has

meant for anarchism and the world in subsequent decades, and what can be

salvaged from a project of non-integration after integration has been

largely accomplished.