Anarchism

C

Anarcho-Individualism

All anarchists emphasized the importance of the individual: the anarcho-collectivists supported individual reward and smallholder or artisanal property, and even the anarcho-communists argued that their voluntary form of communism would deepen the individual’s ethical personality. However, for anarcho-individualists the needs of the individual superseded the collective and the commune. This school of thought is associated with the German, Max Stirner (1806-1856), whose best-known book, The Ego and its Own (1845), was rediscovered by individualist anarchists in the late 19th century after decades of obscurity. Stirner was influenced by the Young Hegelians (see G. W. F. Hegel) and received trenchant criticism by fellow members Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology (1846). Stirner did not identify himself as an anarchist or the follower of any ideology. He believed that the individual should reject institutional structures and all set patterns of truth, obligation, or morals. Thus he advocated a union of egoists, of exceptional individuals prepared to question the value of all social and political orthodoxy. In the late 19th century Stirner's ideas were combined with an appreciation of Friedrich Nietzsche by a small group of anarchist activists and intellectuals. This type of anarchist individualism was attractive to certain writers (Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, for example), who decried mass civilization, common prejudice, and the “mass mind”, but it also inspired an anarcho-feminist, the Russian-American Emma Goldman, who advocated the social and sexual liberation of women (see Feminism). Later Stirner's writing had a significant effect on the philosophy of existentialism.

Another branch of individualism was found in the United States and was far less radical. The American Benjamin Tucker (1854-1939) believed that maximum individual liberty would be assured where the free market was not hindered or controlled by the State and monopolies. The affairs of society would be governed by myriad voluntary societies and cooperatives, by, as he aptly put it, “un-terrified” Jeffersonian democrats, who believed in the least government possible. Since World War II this tradition has been reborn and modified in the United States as anarcho-capitalism or libertarianism.

D

Attitudes to Religion and Organization

All these schools of anarchism shared common traits: they were for the devolution of power from the State to the smaller units of voluntary organizations and thus had great sympathy for federalism, of which Proudhon wrote extensively. They believed that the individual was the guardian of freedom, even if they disagreed regarding the form of voluntary organization with which this would be most appropriately achieved. Finally, they were anti-clerical and openly atheist, even if some, like Proudhon, expressed their beliefs with a strong religious and ethical sensibility. The idea of justice underwrites Proudhon’s political philosophy. However, other notable figures close to the anarchist tradition were openly religious. Leo Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest Russian novelist, was a Christian anarchist pacifist, who believed that mankind would outgrow the need for a State as individuals became more spiritual. He greatly influenced the Indian political figure Mohandas Gandhi, whose practice of non-resistance to violence was employed against the British colonial authorities during the struggle for Indian independence. Gandhi combined Tolstoy's ideas with Hindu traditions into the non-violence of Satyagraha. And like Tolstoy, he envisaged a future good society resting upon a union of self-governing and self-sufficient peasant villages.

Besides the various schools of anarchism, the anarchists were also divided by different attitudes towards organization. The majority of Italian anarchists advocated an anarchist party or national organization, but an important counter-current advocated small intimate affinity groups, which also found favour with some Spanish and Latin American anarchists. Anarchist philosophy did not always align with the type of organization endorsed. Thus, for example, the anarcho-communist Luigi Galleani (1861-1931), a journalist and activist in both Italy and in the United States, was an anti-organizationalist. Italian individualist anarchists might be found in the formal organizations influenced by Malatesta’s type of anarchism.

IV

Anarchism as a Social Movement (1870-1939)

A

First International

Although Proudhon pronounced on anarchism in the middle of the 19th century, anarchism did not become a separate and distinguishable movement until the foundation of the First International in 1864. It was through the First International that Bakunin and others promoted a movement of socialists, which was clearly differentiated from the followers of Karl Marx or more moderate trade unionists. At first allies against moderate reformists within the First International, Marx and Bakunin quickly fell out. In France, and particularly in Spain, Italy, and the Jura region of Switzerland, the anarchist Internationalists were more successful in gathering recruits than their Marxist competitors. The anarchist Internationalists identified with the insurgents of the Commune of Paris and radical republicans and federalists in Spain and Italy. After the demise of the First International in 1876, the repression of the Internationalists in Spain, Italy, and France, and the growing attraction of municipal and reformist parliamentary socialism, the anarchist internationalist current became a minority current within European and global socialism, albeit with the exception of Spain. Nevertheless, their influence could still be found in the culture of the left. In the late 19th century the anarchists were important participants in the campaign for the eight-hour working day. In 1886 in Chicago four anarchists were hanged after a May Day demonstration in its favour led to a riot in which police were killed. The celebration of May Day—central to the rites and rituals of Marxist and reformist socialism—was originally an anarchist event.

B

“Propaganda by the Deed”

Nevertheless, the “direct action” of the anarchists alienated popular sympathies. In the 1870s and 1880s the anarchists promoted “propaganda by the deed”. At first this meant agitating for mass popular rising through smaller acts of guerrilla warfare. And in the 1870s the disorder of republican Spain and newly unified Italy, as well as the insurgency of the Commune of Paris, seemed the perfect ground to carry out a tradition that had its roots in social and popular uprisings of 1830 or 1848. But these attempts were crushed. Propaganda by the deed now became the assassination of king, president, or empress. The assassination of the Russian tsar, Alexander II, by a “populist” in 1881 touched off a round of attempted assassinations (including the German kaiser and the Italian king) by anarchists. The assassinations of heads of state reached a crescendo at the end of the 19th century. Successful attempts on the lives of President Sadi Carnot of France in 1894, Prime Minister Canovas of Spain in 1897, Habsburg Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, King Humbert I of Italy in 1900, and President William McKinley of the United States in 1901 followed each other in rapid succession. Bombings of public places, such as cafés in Paris and the opera house in Barcelona, also occurred. Some anarchists theorized and practised criminal activities as political acts. The image of the bearded anarchist, bomb in hand, found its way not only into the popular press but also appeared in the novels of Henry James and Joseph Conrad. By the turn of the century, many anarchists denounced acts of mass terrorism and criminality, although they were decidedly less forthright about the assassination of heads of state. The anarchist movement suffered mass arrests and exile in continental Europe. The establishment of modern socialist parties, associated with the Second International in 1889, which combined the revolutionary rhetoric of Marxism with a practical parliamentary road to reform, received increasing support in the working classes of Europe before 1914. The anarchists were expelled from the Second International at its London Congress in 1896 because they opposed electoral socialism.

C

Anarchist Influence on Cultural Movements (1900-1914)

Nevertheless, between 1900 and 1914 the anarchists found a new lease of life in cultural movements and anarcho- and/or revolutionary syndicalism. Anarchism influenced the emergence of modernism, with James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Franz Kafka, for example, Post-Impressionist painters in Paris, Futurists in Milan, and later the movement of Dada in Zurich during World War I, all fascinated by its implications. Anarchism was an important cultural current in the bohemian quarters of New York, Munich, Paris, and elsewhere. Anarchists took the lead in a new form of libertarian education, which was child-centred and anti-clerical, but also against indoctrination by the secular State. The execution of Francisco Ferrer Guardia (1849-1909), the founder of the anarchist Modern School movement, witnessed mass protests against the Spanish government by anarchists, liberals, and educationalists. In France the libertarian cultural anarchists supplied popular and educational networks of the broader socialist movement with literature and teachers. This was also the case in Italy where much of the popular literature, songs, and poetry of the broader socialist movement was heavily influenced by anarchists such as Pietro Gori (1865-1911), sociologist, lawyer, vagabond, and poet.