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ANARCHISM archivo del portal de recursos
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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.