|
ANARCHISM archivo del portal de recursos para estudiantes |
Cluster of doctrines and attitudes united in the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary. Derived from a Greek root signifying "without a rule," anarchism, anarchist, and anarchy are used to express both approval and disapproval. In early contexts all these terms were used pejoratively: during the English Civil Wars of the 17th century the opponents of the radical Levellers referred to them as "Switzerising anarchists," and during the French Revolution the Girondin leader Jacques-Pierre Brissot accused his most extreme rivals, the Enragés, of being the advocates of "anarchy." Laws that are not carried into effect, authorities without force and despised, crime unpunished, property attacked, the safety of the individual violated, the morality of the people corrupted, no constitution, no government, no justice, these are the features of anarchy. These words uttered by the leader of the French Revolutionary moderates in 1793 could serve as a model for the denunciations delivered by all opponents of the anarchists. The latter, for their part, would admit many of Brissot's points. They deny man-made laws, regard property as a means of tyranny, and believe that crime is merely the product of a society based on property and authority. But they would argue that their denial of constitutions and governments leads not to "no justice" but to the real justice inherent in the free development of man's sociality, his natural inclination, when unfettered by laws, to live according to the principles and practice of mutual aid.
Anarchist thinkers
The first man who willingly called himself an anarchist was the French political writer and pioneer Socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In 1840, writing his controversial study of the economic bases of society, Qu'est ce que la propriété? (What Is Property? ), Proudhon set out to shock his readers into attention by declaring: "I am an anarchist!" He went on to explain that in his view the real laws of society have nothing to do with authority but stem from the nature of society itself; he foresaw the eventual dissolution of authority and the emergence of a natural social order. As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy. Anarchy--the absence of a sovereign--such is the form of government to which we are every day approximating. The essential elements of the philosophy to which Proudhon in 1840 gave the name of anarchism had already been developed by various earlier thinkers. There is a tradition of the rejection of political authority going back to classical antiquity, to the Stoics and the Cynics, and recurring throughout Christian history in dissenting sects such as the medieval Catharists and certain factions of Anabaptists during the Reformation. With such groups--often mistakenly claimed as ancestors by modern anarchist writers--the rejection of political government is merely one aspect of a retreat from the material world into a realm of spiritual grace; it becomes part of the search for individual salvation and as such is hardly compatible with the sociopolitical doctrine of anarchism that in all its forms consists of (1) a fundamental criticism of the existing power-based order of society, (2) a vision of an alternative libertarian society based on cooperation as opposed to coercion, and (3) a method of proceeding from one order to the other. English anarchist thought The first sketch of an anarchist commonwealth in this sense was developed in the years immediately following the English Civil Wars by Gerrard Winstanley, a dissenting Christian who identified God with reason and founded the minute Digger movement. In his pamphlet of 1649, Truth Lifting Up Its Head Above Scandals, Winstanley laid down what later became basic principles among the anarchists: that power corrupts; that property is incompatible with freedom; that authority and property are between them the begetters of crime; and that only in a society without rulers, where work and its products are shared, can men be free and happy, acting not according to laws imposed from above but according to their consciences. Winstanley was not only the pioneer of anarchist theory but also the forerunner of anarchist activism. He held that only by their own deeds can the people bring an end to social injustice, and in 1649, calling upon the people "to manure and work upon the common lands," he led a band of his followers in occupying a hillside in southern England, where they set about cultivation, established free communism among themselves, and offered passive resistance to the hostile landlords. The Digger experiment was destroyed by local opposition, and Winstanley himself vanished into such obscurity that the place and date of his death are unknown. But the principles he defended lingered on in the traditions of English Protestant sects and reached their ultimate flowering in the masterpiece of a former dissenting minister, William Godwin, who in 1793 published his Political Justice--of which Sir Alexander Gray said that in it "Godwin sums up, as no one else does, the sum and substance of anarchism, and thus embodies a whole tradition" (The Socialist Tradition, 1946, p. 134). This is essentially true, since Godwin not only presents the classic anarchist argument that authority is against nature and that social evils exist because men are not free to act according to reason, but he also sketches out a decentralized society in which the small autonomous community (the parish) is the essential unit. In his community, democratic political procedures are dispensed with as far as possible, because even the rule of the majority is a form of tyranny, and such procedures as voting dilute the responsibility of the individual. Godwin also condemns "accumulated property" as a source of power over others and envisages a loose economic system in which men will give and take according to their needs. Godwin was a prophet of technological progress; he believed that industrial development would eventually reduce the necessary working time to half an hour a day, provided men lived simply, and that this would facilitate the transition to a society without authority. Godwin enjoyed great celebrity in the 1790s and influenced such varied writers as Percy Bysshe Shelley (whose Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound are virtually anarchist poems), William Wordsworth, William Hazlitt, and Robert Owen, but he was almost forgotten by the time of his death in 1836. Though his ideas were to have, through Owen, a subterranean influence on the British labour movement, it is only recently that professed anarchists have recognized his affinities with them. His Political Justice had virtually no effect on the quasi-political movement on the continent of Europe during the mid-19th century.
French anarchist thought
It was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who laid the theoretical foundations of this movement. A brewer's son of peasant stock from the Franche-Comté, he started life (like many later anarchists) as a printer, but by the revolutionary year of 1848 he had already become a polemicist and a radical journalist with two books to his credit, Qu'est ce que la propriété? and Système des contradictions économiques (System of Economic Contradictions). These established him among the leading theoreticians of Socialism, a term that in the early 19th century embraced a wide spectrum of attitudes. In Paris during the 1840s, Proudhon associated with Karl Marx and the Russian Mikhail Bakunin, and, out of the experiences of the Revolutions of 1848 (when he served in the Constituent Assembly and voted against the constitution "because it is a constitution"), he developed the libertarian theories that he discussed in later works such as Du principe fédératif (The Federal Principle) and De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières (The Political Capability of the Working Classes). Proudhon was a complex and voluminous writer who remained obstinately independent, refusing to consider himself the founder of either a system or a party. Yet he was justly regarded by Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and other leaders of organized anarchism as their true ancestor, for he had adumbrated their philosophy. Mutualism, federalism, and direct action were the essential doctrines Proudhon taught. By mutualism he meant the organization of society on an egalitarian basis. He declared that "property is theft," but this did not mean that he advocated communism. He attacked the use of property as a means of exploiting the labour of others, but he regarded "possession"--the right of a worker or group of workers to control the land or tools necessary for production--as an essential bulwark of liberty. He therefore envisaged a society formed of independent peasants and artisans, with factories and utilities run by associations of workers, all united by a system of mutual credit founded on people's banks. In place of the centralized state--the enemy of all anarchists--Proudhon suggested a federal system of autonomous local communities and industrial associations, bound by contract and mutual interest rather than by laws, with arbitration replacing courts of justice, workers' management replacing bureaucracy, and integrated education replacing academic education. Out of such a network would emerge a natural social unity compared with which the existing order would appear as "nothing but chaos, serving as a basis for endless tyranny." Proudhon remained all his life an independent polemicist, but in his final, posthumously published work, De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières, with its insistence that the liberation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves organized in industrial associations, he laid the intellectual foundations of a movement that would reject democratic and parliamentary politics in favour of various forms of direct action. Unlike their master, Proudhon's working-class followers of the 1860s did not accept the title anarchist (though in 1850 an independent revolutionary, Anselme Bellegarrigue, had founded a short-lived magazine entitled L'Anarchie); they preferred to call themselves Mutualists, after a working-class secret society bearing the same name to which Proudhon had belonged in Lyons during the 1830s. In 1864, shortly before Proudhon's death, a group of them joined with British trade unionists and European Socialists exiled in London to found the International Workingmen's Association (the First International). The Mutualists became the first opposition within the International to Karl Marx and his followers, who advocated political action and the seizure of the state in order to create a proletarian dictatorship. Marx's most formidable opponents, however, were not the Mutualists but the followers of Mikhail Bakunin, a Russian nobleman turned revolutionary who entered the International in 1868 after a long career as a political conspirator. Russian anarchist thought Bakunin had begun as a supporter of nationalist revolutionary movements in various Slav countries. In the 1840s he had come under the influence of Proudhon, and by the 1860s, when he entered the International, he had not only founded his own proto-anarchist organization, the Social Democratic Alliance, with a considerable following in Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the Rhône Valley, but had modified the Proudhonian teachings into the doctrine that became known as collectivism. Bakunin accepted Proudhon's federalism and his insistence on the need for working-class direct action, but he argued that the modified property rights Proudhon allowed were impractical and instead suggested that the means of production should be owned collectively, though he still held that each worker should be remunerated only according to the amount of work he actually performed. The second important difference between Bakunin and Proudhon lay in their concepts of revolutionary method. Proudhon believed it was possible to create within existing society the mutualist associations that could replace it; he therefore opposed violent revolutionary action. Bakunin, declaring that "the passion for destruction is also a creative urge," refused to accept the piecemeal approach; a violent revolution, sweeping away all existing institutions, was in his view the necessary prelude to the construction of a free and peaceful society. Though the individualism and nonviolence implicit in Proudhon's vision have survived in the peripheral currents of the anarchist tradition, it was Bakunin's stress on collectivism and violent revolutionary action that dominated the mainstream from the days of the First International down to the destruction of anarchism as a mass movement at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The First International was itself destroyed by the conflict between Marx and Bakunin, a conflict rooted as much in the contradictory personalities of the two leaders as in their rival doctrines--revolution by a disciplined party versus revolution by the spontaneous insurgence of the working class. When the international finally broke apart at the Hague congress in 1872, Bakunin's followers were left in control of the working-class movements in the Latin countries--Spain, Italy, southern France, and French-speaking Switzerland--and these were to remain the principal bases of anarchism in Europe. In 1873 the Bakuninists set up their own International, which lasted as an active body until 1877; during this period its members finally accepted the title of anarchist rather than collectivist. Bakunin died in 1876. His ideas had been developed in action rather than in writing, for he was the hero of many barricades, prisons, and meetings. His successor as the ideological leader, Peter Kropotkin (who renounced the title of prince when he became a revolutionary in 1876), is more celebrated for his writing than for his actions, though in his early years he led an eventful career as a revolutionary militant, which he described in a fine autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899). Under the influence of the French geographer Elisée Reclus (a former disciple of the Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier), Kropotkin developed the variant of anarchist theory known as anarchist communism. Kropotkin and his followers went beyond Bakunin's collectivism, since they argued not only that the means of production should be owned cooperatively but also that there should be complete communism in terms of distribution; this revived the scheme Sir Thomas More had sketched out in his 16th-century Utopia of common storehouses from which everyone should be allowed to take whatever he wished on the basis of "From each according to his means, to each according to his needs." In La Conquête du pain (The Conquest of Bread, 1892) Kropotkin sketched the vision of a revolutionary society organized as a federation of free communist groups. He reinforced the vision by writing Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1902), in which he endeavoured to prove by means of biological and sociological evidence that cooperation is more natural and usual among both animals and men than competition. In his Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899) he put forward ideas on the decentralization of industry appropriate to a nongovernmental society.
Anarchism as a movement
Kropotkin's writings completed the theoretical vision of the anarchist future, and little new has been added since his time. But this work was of less immediate importance than the emergence among the Italian anarchists of the theory of "propaganda of the deed." In 1876 Errico Malatesta expressed the belief of the Italian anarchists that "the insurrectionary deed, destined to affirm socialist principles by acts, is the most efficacious means of propaganda." The first acts were rural insurrections, intended to arouse the illiterate masses of the Italian countryside. After the insurrections failed, anarchist activism tended to take the form of individual deeds of protest by terrorists, who would attempt to kill ruling figures in the hope of demonstrating the vulnerability of the structure of authority and inspiring the masses by their self-sacrifice. In this way, between 1890 and 1901, a series of symbolic murders was enacted; the victims included King Umberto I of Italy, the empress Elizabeth of Austria, President Carnot of France, President McKinley of the United States, and Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the prime minister of Spain. This brief but dramatic series of terrorist acts established the image of the anarchist as a mindless destroyer; after 1901, however, the anarchists continued to practice widespread terrorism only in such countries as Spain and Russia, where the general political atmosphere was conducive to violence. During the 1890s, especially in France, anarchism was adopted as a philosophy by avant-garde painters and writers. Gustave Courbet had already been a disciple of Proudhon; among those who in the 1890s accepted an anarchist philosophy were Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Paul Adam, Octave Mirbeau, Laurent Tailhade, and, at least as a strong sympathizer, Stéphane Mallarmé. At the same time in England, Oscar Wilde declared himself an anarchist and, under Kropotkin's inspiration, wrote his libertarian essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" (1891). The artists were attracted by the individualist spirit of anarchism. By the mid-1890s, however, the more militant anarchists in France began to realize that an excess of individualism had tended to detach them from the workers they sought to liberate. Anarchists, indeed, have always found it difficult to reconcile the claims of general human solidarity with the demands--equally insistent--of the individual who desires freedom. Some anarchist thinkers, such as the German Max Stirner, who published Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and His Own) in 1845, have refused to recognize any limitation on the individual's right to do as he will or any obligation to act socially; and even those who accepted Kropotkin's socially oriented doctrines of anarchist communism have in practice been reluctant to create forms of organization that threatened their freedom of action or seemed likely to harden into institutions. In consequence, although a number of international anarchist congresses were held (the most celebrated being those of London in 1881 and of Amsterdam in 1907), no effective worldwide organization was created, even though by the end of the century the anarchist movement had spread to all continents and was united by informal links of correspondence and friendship between the leading figures. National federations were weak even in countries where there were many anarchists, such as France and Italy, and the typical unit of organization was the small group dedicated to propaganda by deed or word. Such groups engaged in a wide variety of activities; in the 1890s many of them concentrated on setting up experimental schools and communities that attempted to live out anarchist principles. Revolutionary Syndicalism In France, where individualist trends had been most pronounced and public reaction to terrorist acts had imperiled the very existence of the movement, an effort was made to acquire a mass following. The anarchists infiltrated the trade unions. They were particularly active in the bourses du travail ("labour exchanges"), local groupings of unions, originally set up to find work for their members, that appealed to the anarchist ideal of decentralization. In 1892 a national confederation of bourses du travail was formed, and by 1895 the anarchists, led by Fernand Pelloutier, Émile Pouget, and Paul Delesalle, had gained effective control and were developing the theory and practice of working-class activism that became known as Anarcho-Syndicalism, or Revolutionary Syndicalism. The Anarcho-Syndicalists argued that the traditional function of trade unions--to struggle for better wages and working conditions--was not enough. The unions should become militant organizations dedicated to the destruction of capitalism and the state. They should aim to take over factories and utilities, which would then be operated by the workers. In this way the union or syndicate would have a double function--as an organ of struggle under the present dispensation and as an organ of administration after the revolution. To sustain militancy, an atmosphere of incessant conflict should be induced, and the culmination of this strategy should be the general strike. Many of the Syndicalists believed that such a massive act of noncooperation would bring about what they called "the revolution of folded arms," resulting in the collapse of the state and the capitalist system. But, although partial general strikes, with limited objectives, were undertaken in France and elsewhere with varying success, the millennial general strike aimed at overthrowing the social order in a single blow was never attempted. The Anarcho-Syndicalists acquired great prestige among the workers of France and, later, of Spain and Italy, because of their generally tough-minded attitude at a time when working conditions were bad and employers tended to respond brutally to union activity. After the great French trade-union organization, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), was founded in 1902, their militancy enabled the anarchists to retain control of the organization until 1908 and to wield considerable influence on its activities until after World War I. Like anarchism, Revolutionary Syndicalism proved attractive to certain intellectuals, notably Georges Sorel, whose Réflexions sur la violence (1908; Eng. trans., Reflections on Violence, 1914 and 1950) was the most important literary work to emerge from the movement. He argued the importance of the general strike as a social myth. The more purist anarchist theoreticians were disturbed by the monolithic character of Syndicalist organizations, which they feared might create powerful interest structures in a revolutionary society. At the International Anarchist Congress at Amsterdam in 1907, a crucial debate on this issue took place between the young Revolutionary Syndicalist Pierre Monatte and the veteran anarchist Errico Malatesta. It defined a division of outlook that still lingers in what remains of the historic anarchist movement, which has always included individualist attitudes too extreme to admit any kind of large-scale organization. Revolutionary Syndicalism did transform anarchism, for a time at least, from a tiny minority current into a movement with considerable mass support, even though most members of Syndicalist unions were sympathizers and fellow travellers rather than committed anarchists. In 1922 the Syndicalists set up their own International with its headquarters in Berlin, taking the historic name of the International Workingmen's Association; it still survives, with headquarters in Stockholm. When it was established the organizations that formed it could still boast considerable followings. The Unione Sindicale Italiana had 500,000 members; the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina, 200,000 members; the Portuguese Confederação General de Trabalho, 150,000 members; and the German Freie Arbeiter Union, 120,000 members. There were smaller organizations in Chile, Uruguay, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Mexico, and Sweden. In Britain the influence of Syndicalism was shown most clearly in the Guild Socialist movement that flourished briefly in the early years of the present century. In the United States, Revolutionary Syndicalist ideas were manifested in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which in the years immediately before and after World War I played a vital part in organizing American miners, loggers, and unskilled workers; but only a small minority of the IWW militants were ever avowed anarchists.
Anarchism in Spain
The reconciliation of anarchism and Syndicalism was most complete and most successful in Spain; for a long period the anarchist movement in that country remained the most numerous and the most powerful in the world. The first known Spanish anarchist, Ramón de la Sagra, a disciple of Proudhon, founded the world's first anarchist journal, El Porvenir, in La Coruña in 1845; it was quickly suppressed. Mutualist ideas were later publicized by Pi y Margall, a federalist leader and the translator of many Proudhon books; during the Spanish revolution of 1873, Pi y Margall attempted to establish a decentralist, or "cantonalist," political system on Proudhonian lines. In the end, however, the influence of Bakunin was stronger. In 1868 his Italian disciple, Giuseppe Fanelli, visited Barcelona and Madrid, where he established branches of the International. By 1870 they had 40,000 members, and in 1873 the movement numbered about 60,000, organized mainly in working men's associations. In 1874 the anarchist movement in Spain was forced underground, a phenomenon recurring often in subsequent decades. It flourished, nevertheless, and anarchism became the favoured type of radicalism among two very different groups, the factory workers of Barcelona and other Catalan towns and the impoverished peasants who toiled on the absentee-owned estates of Andalusia. As in France and Italy, the movement in Spain during the 1880s and 1890s was inclined toward insurrection (in Andalusia) and terrorism (in Catalonia). It retained its strength in working-class organizations because the courageous and even ruthless anarchist militants were often the only leaders who would stand up against the army and the employers, who hired squads of gunmen to engage in guerrilla warfare with the anarchists in the streets of Barcelona. The workers of Barcelona were finally inspired by the success of the French CGT to set up a Syndicalist organization, Solidaridad Obrera (Workers' Solidarity). Established in 1907, Solidaridad Obrera quickly spread throughout Catalonia, and in 1909, when the Spanish army tried to conscript Catalan reservists to fight against the Riffs in Morocco, it called a general strike. "La Semana Tragica," "the Tragic Week" of largely spontaneous violence that followed (with hundreds dead and 50 churches and monasteries destroyed), ended in violent repression. Tortures of anarchists in the fortress of Montjuich and the execution of the internationally celebrated advocate of free education Francisco Ferrer led to worldwide protests and the resignation of the conservative government in Madrid. These events also resulted in a congress of Spanish trade unionists at Seville in 1910, which founded the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). The CNT, which included the majority of organized Spanish workers, was dominated throughout its existence by the anarchist militants; these in 1927 founded their own activist organization, the Federación Anarquista Iberica (FAI). While there was recurrent conflict within the CNT between moderates and FAI activists, the atmosphere of violence and urgency in which radical activities were carried on in Spain ensured that the more extreme leaders, such as Garcia Oliver and Buenaventura Durutti, tended to wield the decisive influence. The CNT was a model of anarchist decentralism and antibureaucratism: its basic organizations were not national unions but sindicatos únicos, which brought together the workers of all trades and crafts in a certain locality; the national committee was elected each year from a different locality to ensure that no individual served more than one term; and all delegates were subject to immediate recall by the members. This enormous organization, which claimed 700,000 members in 1919, 1,600,000 in 1936, and more than 2,000,000 during the civil war, employed only one paid secretary. Its day-to-day work was carried on in their spare time by workers chosen by their fellows. This meant that the Spanish anarchist movement was not dominated by the déclassé intellectuals and self-taught printers and shoemakers who were so influential in other countries. One consequence was that the Spanish movement contributed nothing original to the ideological literature of anarchism; like Bakunin, whom they favoured most among the classic libertarian thinkers, the Spanish anarchists developed their attitudes in action rather than in writing. The CNT and the FAI, which remained clandestine organizations under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, emerged into the open with the abdication of King Alfonso XIII in 1931. Their antipolitical philosophy led them to reject the republic as much as the monarchy it had replaced, and between 1931 and the military rebellion led by Francisco Franco in 1936 there were several unsuccessful anarchist risings. In 1936 the anarchists, who over the decades had become expert urban guerrillas, were mainly responsible for the defeat of the rebel generals in both Barcelona and Valencia, as well as in country areas of Catalonia and Aragon; and for many early months of the Civil War they were in virtual control of eastern Spain, where they regarded the crisis as an opportunity to carry through the social revolution of which they had long dreamed. Factories and railways in Catalonia were taken over by workers' committees, and in hundreds of villages in Catalonia, Levante, and Andalusia the peasants seized the land and established libertarian communes like those described by Kropotkin in La Conquête du pain. The internal use of money was abolished, the land was tilled in common, and village products were sold or exchanged on behalf of the community in general, with each family receiving an equitable share of food and other necessities. An idealistic Spartan fervour characterized these communities, which often consisted of illiterate labourers; intoxicants, tobacco, and sometimes even coffee were renounced; and millenarian enthusiasm took the place of religion, as it has often done in Spain. The reports of critical observers suggest that at least some of these communes were efficiently run and more productive agriculturally than the villages had been previously. The Spanish anarchists failed during the Civil War largely because, expert though they were in spontaneous street fighting, they did not have the discipline necessary to carry on sustained warfare; the columns they sent to various fronts were unsuccessful in comparison with the Communist-led International Brigades. In December 1936 four leading anarchists took posts in the Cabinet of Francisco Largo Caballero, radically compromising their antigovernmental principles. They were unable to halt the trend toward left-wing totalitarianism encouraged by their enemies the Communists, who were numerically far fewer but politically more influential. In May 1937 bitter fighting broke out in Barcelona between Communists and anarchists. The CNT held its own on this occasion, but its influence quickly waned. The collectivized factories were taken over by the central government, and many agricultural communes were destroyed by Franco's advance into Andalusia and by the hostile action of General Lister's Communist army in Aragon. In January 1939 the Spanish anarchists were so demoralized by the compromises of the Civil War that they were unable to mount a resistance when Franco's forces marched into Barcelona; the CNT and FAI became phantom organizations in exile. Decline of the anarchist movement By this time the movement outside Spain had been either destroyed or greatly diminished as a result of two developments: the Russian Revolution and the rise of right-wing totalitarian regimes. Though the most famous anarchist leaders, Bakunin and Kropotkin, had been Russian, the anarchist movement had never been strong in Russia, partly because the more numerous Socialist Revolutionary Party (the Narodniki) had adopted Bakuninist ideas while remaining essentially a constitutional party. After the 1917 revolution the small anarchist groups that emerged in Petrograd (now Leningrad) and Moscow were powerless against the Bolsheviks, and Kropotkin, who returned from exile, found himself without influence. Only in the south did N.I. Makhno, a peasant anarchist, raise an insurrectionary army that by brilliant guerrilla tactics held a large part of the Ukraine from both the Red and the White armies; but the social experiments developed under Makhno's protection were rudimentary, and when he was driven into exile in 1921 the anarchist movement became extinct in Russia. In other countries, the prestige of the Russian revolution enabled the new Communist parties to win much of the support formerly given to the anarchists, particularly in France, where the CGT passed permanently into Communist control. The large Italian anarchist movement was destroyed by Benito Mussolini's Fascist government in the 1920s, and the small German anarchist movement was smashed by the Nazis in the 1930s. In Japan, anarchism had emerged during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, when the Socialist leader Shusui Kotoku became converted by reading Kropotkin in prison; Kotoku and other anarchists were executed in 1911 for their involvement in a plot against the Emperor, but, after World War I, new anarchist organizations appeared, including a Black Federation and a Syndicalist federation. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the imperial government began to suppress all left-wing groups, and the anarchist movement was finally destroyed in 1935 after a secret society, the Anarchist Communist Party, had been accused of plotting armed insurrection. Anarchism in the Americas suffered similar reverses. In the United States, a native and mainly nonviolent tradition developed during the 19th century in the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner, and Benjamin Tucker (editor of Liberty, an anarchist journal published in Boston and later in New York City, 1881-1908). Activist anarchism in the U.S. was mainly sustained by immigrants from Europe, including Johann Most (editor of Die Freiheit), Alexander Berkman (who attempted to assassinate steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in 1892), and Emma Goldman, whose Living My Life gives a picture of radical activity in the United States at the turn of the century. Anarchism appeared as a dramatic element in American life in 1886, when seven policemen were killed in the Haymarket bombing in Chicago and four anarchist leaders were executed--unjustly, as later investigations revealed. In 1901 a Polish anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, assassinated President McKinley. In 1903 the U.S. congress passed a law to bar foreign anarchists from the country and to deport alien anarchists found within it. In the repressive mood that followed World War I the anarchists, like the IWW, were suppressed; Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman, and many others were imprisoned and deported. In Latin America strong anarchist elements were involved in the Mexican Revolution. The Syndicalist teachings of Ricardo Flores Magon influenced the peasant revolutionism of Emiliano Zapata. After the deaths of Zapata in 1919 and Flores Magon in 1922, the revolutionary image in Mexico, as elsewhere, was taken over by the Communists. In Argentina and Uruguay considerable Anarcho-Syndicalist movements existed early in the 20th century, but they too were greatly reduced by the end of the 1930s through intermittent repression and the competition of Communism.
Contemporary currents
In the 1970s the theories of anarchism aroused more interest and sympathy than at any time since the Russian revolution. The same cannot be said of the anarchist movement itself. After World War II, anarchist groups and federations re-emerged in almost all countries where they had formerly flourished--the notable exceptions being Spain and the Soviet Union--but these organizations wielded little influence compared to that of the broader movement inspired by libertarian ideas. Such a development is not inappropriate, since anarchists have never stressed the need for organizational continuity, and the cluster of social and moral ideas that are identifiable as anarchism has always spread beyond any clearly definable movement. The Russian writer Count Leo Tolstoy refused to call himself an anarchist because those who used the title at that time in Russia were terrorists; nevertheless, he had developed out of his rational Christianity a form of pacifist radicalism that rejected the state and all forms of government, called for the simplification of life in the name of moral regeneration, and sought to replace property by free communism. An impressive example of the breadth of anarchist influence is Mahatma Gandhi, who based his strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience in South Africa and India on the teachings of nonviolent anarchists such as Tolstoy and Thoreau and who remembered his reading of Kropotkin when he devised for India the plan of a decentralized society based on autonomous village communes. Gandhi's village India has not come into being, but the movement known as Sardovaya, led by Vinoba Bhave and Jaya Prakash Narayan, has been working toward it through gramdan--community ownership of land. By 1969 a fifth of the villages of India had declared for gramdan, and, while this remained largely a matter of unrealized gestures, it represented perhaps the most extensive commitment to basic anarchist ideas in the contemporary world. In the West the appeal of anarchism has been strongest, at least since 1917, among the intellectuals. Kropotkin's arguments for decentralization have wielded their strongest influence among writers on social planning such as Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, and Paul Goodman--himself a declared anarchist. Anarchist treatises from Godwin onward have contributed to the progressive movement in education, and the most influential of the many books written by the libertarian critic Sir Herbert Read was his Education Through Art (1943). But in the 1960s and 1970s anarchism became popular among rebellious students and the left in general because of the values it opposed to those of the increasingly technological cultures of western Europe, North America, and Japan. Here the mediating thinker was undoubtedly Aldous Huxley, who anticipated many elements of the "counter culture" of the 1960s and 1970s. In Brave New World (1932) Huxley had presented a warning vision of the kind of mindless, materialistic existence a society dominated by technology might produce. In his "Foreword" to the 1946 edition, he stated his belief that only by radical decentralization and simplification and by a politics that was "Kropotkinesque and co-operative" could the dangers implicit in modern society be avoided. In his later writings he explicitly accepted the validity of the anarchist critique of existing society. The emergence of anarchist ideas in a wider frame of reference began in the American civil rights movements in the 1950s, with their recognition of the need to resist injustice through other than legal channels in the name of a morality different from that recognized by constituted authority. By the end of the 1950s the new radicalism in the United States, Europe, and Japan had begun to take a course separating it from the narrower issues of the civil rights movement; it shifted toward a general criticism of the elitist structure and materialist goals of modern industrial societies--Communist as well as capitalist. Within this movement there was a limited revival of traditional anarchism--exemplified in the sudden popularity of the American writer Paul Goodman and the emergence in Britain of a sophisticated monthly, Anarchy, that applied anarchist ideas to the whole spectrum of modern life. In all of this, however, anarchism was only one strand in what can be described as a climate of rebellion rather than an ideology. Anarchist ideas were mingled with strains of Leninism, early Marxism, unorthodox psychology, and often with elements of mysticism, neo-Buddhism, and Tolstoyan Christianity. None of the leaders of the student rebellions in the United States and Germany or the militants of Zengakuren in Japan could be called in any literal and complete sense an anarchist, although they had read Bakunin as well as Marx and "Che" Guevara. In Paris, the leaders of the Anarchist Federation admitted that they had no influence at all on the strikes and street fighting in 1968 that seemed to threaten the very existence of the French state. To all these movements, which rejected the old parties of the left as strongly as they did the existing political structure, the appeal of anarchism was strong and understandable. The anarchist outlook, in its insistence on spontaneity, on theoretical flexibility, on simplicity of life, on love and anger as complementary and necessary components in both social and individual action, appeals to those who reject the impersonality of institutions and the calculations of political parties. The anarchist rejection of the state, the insistence on decentralism and local autonomy, found strong echoes among those who talked of participatory democracy. The recurrence of the theme of workers' control of industry in so many manifestos of the 1960s, notably during the Paris insurrection of 1968, showed the enduring relevance of Anarcho-Syndicalist ideas. The anarchist insistence on direct action had an almost universal appeal to the radicals of the 1960s and 1970s, who advocated extraparliamentary action and confrontation. Some student groups in France, the United States, and Japan accepted Bakunin's pan-destructionism, holding that existing society was so corrupt that it had to be swept completely away. They were fond of quoting a sentence of Bakunin: There will be a qualitative transformation, a new living, life-giving revelation, a new heaven and a new earth, a young and mighty world in which all our present dissonances will be resolved into a harmonious whole. This kind of secular apocalypticism, which envisaged total violence as the paradoxical way to total reconciliation, linked many of the radicals with the anarchists who took to terrorism in the 1880s and 1890s. Now, as then, violence proceeded from theory to action, as the upsurge of terrorist bombings and urban-guerrilla activity demonstrated at the end of the 1960s. But there were others who believed with Tolstoy and Gandhi that a moral change must come first and who sought revolution by evolution. Paul Goodman, with his proposals for urban reform as a step toward a freer society, was one of them. Some turned to the creation of models of a different kind of society in the form of utopian communities. This has been a recurrent feature of radical movements, appearing in the United States during the mid-19th century, in Britain as a form of constructive pacifist protest during World War II, and in the United States in the 1970s as a way of manifesting one's rejection of normal life-styles. Experience suggests that utopian experiments and radical actions are not likely to achieve that wholly nongovernment society of which libertarians have dreamed. The true value of their vision was stated by the anarchist poet Herbert Read in his last book, The Cult of Sincerity (1968): My understanding of the history of culture has convinced me that the ideal society is a point on a receding horizon. We move steadily towards it but can never reach it. Nevertheless we must engage with passion in the immediate strife . . . It is precisely as an ideal, as a touchstone to judge the existing world, that the anarchist vision is useful. It corresponds to a recurrent and necessary strain in human thought--the revulsion against regimentation, against large organizations, against complexity and luxury. The insights of the anarchist are likely to find their maximum usefulness in urban and rural planning, in the development of community relations based on full participation, in integrated education, and perhaps most of all in encouraging what Read calls a "process of individuation, accomplished by general education and personal discipline." Anarchism is a moral and social doctrine before it is a political one; it stands as a permanent reminder of the perils of national and corporate giantism and of the virtues of local interests and loyalties. It teaches the vigilance by which man may be able to avoid such bleak utopias as those of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.