I’ve commented at length on communists, socialists, and fascists. I’ve even mentioned Libertarians from time to time. Here’s a blog about the Libertarians’ fellow travelers, the anarchists.
Anarchism is the advocacy of NO government. Libertarians are not anarchists: Libertarians advocate a very limited government which only serves to protect individual rights; but the Libertarian ideal of government is so limited, that relative to everyone else – Democrats, Republicans, communists, and fascists - they might as well be considered anarchists. They certainly resent the association. For many years, anarchists have been portrayed as crazy, bomb-throwing fanatics, an image the Libertarians take pains to reject on their own behalf.
Anarchists are much more frequently associated with socialists and communists. The communist ideal of a stateless, classless society, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is basically anarchism. However, the anarchists demand this occur immediately, while the socialists and communists insist that socialism is necessary as an intermediary step between capitalism and communism, and “socialism” tends to mean “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Naturally, the socialists/communists themselves propose to be the ones running this dictatorship on behalf the working class. So the real dichotomy winds up as: anarchists as wild, crazy, dangerous, uncontrollable and unpredictable idealists, and socialists as cynical, opportunistic, manipulative, deceitful tyrants. The anarchists accuse the socialist of wanting power its own sake, while the socialists accuse the anarchists of being little better than bandits wrapping a black flag of politics around what would otherwise be simply lawless chaos.
Anarchists are still around, though in larger numbers and more active in Europe than the US. Their peak was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The primary sources of early anarchist philosophy are William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Mikhail Bakunin. At the First International, in 1868, the anarchists (led by Bakunin) broke off from Marxists, led by Marx himself. From that point, anarchists became very tied in with labor unions, often referred to as “anarcho-syndicalists”, e.g. the CNT in Spain. Even among themselves, the anarchists debated whether to work within the system (i.e. among labor unions) or to throw bombs and blow things up and kill people, aka “propaganda of the deed”. Due to the high profile acts of the latter group, anarchists held a role in contemporary society analogous to modern-day Islamic terrorists.
Haymarket Affair. On May 3, 1886, when strikebreakers attempted to cross a picket line in Haymarket Square in Chicago, a bomb was thrown, killing a police officer. A riot broke out, in which several policemen and workers were killed. Eight anarchists were charged with the murder; of these, 4 were executed and one committed suicide prior to his execution. The next year, a rally was held to commemorate these fallen comrades, and the annual version of this became what we now know as May Day.
On October 1, 1910, unionists blew up the Los Angeles Times building in L.A., in an effort to promote their campaign to unionize L.A. and oppose big business’ similar campaign (which included goons and strikebreakers) against them. And on September 16, 1920, another bomb – 100 lbs of dynamite in a horse drawn wagon, its driver long gone - blew up on Wall Street in downtown Manhattan; although the perpetrators were never caught, they are widely believed to have been anarchists.
Sacco and Vanzetti. In 1927, Italian anarchists Ferdinando Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed for their roles in a bank robbery in 1920 in Braintree, Massachusetts. The widely held consensus is that the evidence against them was scant (though by no means non-existent) and they were essentially convicted not because of their guilt but because they were undeniably anarchists; to use my Casey Anthony analysis, the jury bridged from “preponderance of the evidence” (evidence the prosecution could actually muster – indicating the defendants probably did commit the crime) to “beyond a reasonable doubt” (the standard the prosecution was obligated to meet, but fell short of) using the defendants’ political views. As a result, they became martyrs to the anarchist cause.
The three largest roles and impacts of the anarchists were (1) McKinley’s Assassination, (2) the Russian Civil War, and (3) the Spanish Civil War. On September 6, 1901, at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, NY, Leon Czolgosz shot US President William McKinley twice at point blank range in the abdomen. McKinley died on the 14th. Czolgosz was undeniably an anarchist and acted extremely difficult at his trial.
In fact, the modern day equivalent is Ted Kaszynski, the Unabomber – like the early anarchists, he pursued a lone wolf campaign of bombings targeted at authority figures based on political theories scarcely distinguishable from anarchism; the main difference is that his opponent seemed to be technology itself. Although not cited as a source of his philosophy, Philip K. Dick’s writings share similar parallels of technology as being inherently oppressive; freedom and technology are often described as being mutually antagonistic.
Russian Civil War. During the civil war, entire armies of anarchist (“black”) armies erupted, of which Nestor Makhno was the most famous leader. The anarchists acted as a wildcard to be used by the Reds to knock out their White opponents, and the Reds then turned on the blacks. Makhno fled to Paris; the anarchists disintegrated as a coherent military force, which was scarcely more than bandits at many times.
Spanish Civil War. Likewise, during the Spanish Civil War, the anarchists – strongest up near Barcelona – opposed any attempts at control and coordination and could not fit into the Republican/Loyalist strategies to defeat Franco. Here is a movement which opposes all forms of institutionalized authority as oppression, and rejects any form of discipline, even for expedience and military necessity, on principle. The Bolsheviks’ own experiment in “non-discipline” early in the Russian Civil War was immediately and obviously disastrous, and Trotsky quickly re-instituted ranks and hierarchy into the Red Army. No such reorganization occurred in Spain.
The CNT, formed in Spain in 1910 and survived through the Franco era, survived to the present day, and remains the strongest and well-known anarchist trade union in the world. The IWW, originating in the US in 1905, remains active today, although far weaker over the years than the competing communist and socialist parties.
After the turmoil of WWII, the anarchists resumed activities in the 1960s with the spread of radical left wing views. Groups such as the Weathermen espoused violence and bomb-making, not merely emulating the methods of the “propaganda by deed” faction of the early anarchist movement, but ideologically almost identical to it as well.
During the 1970s, the punk rock movement was vocal in its political support for anarchism, but so much of their noise seemed to be more a nihilistic rebellion against society in general than a principled adherence to anarchism as a coherent political theory, to the extent it is that. But it’s hard to mistake the political message intended by the name and logo of Black Flag.
More recently, the World Bank and IMF protests have been the most prominent displays of radical anarchist militancy. As noted earlier however, as militant and aggressive as the anarchists appear to be, as a hardcore nucleus of the most radical opponents of capitalism, they still remain a very small minority – too small to have any discernable impact upon the system as a whole. However, their opposite numbers in the trade union movement continue to fight a parallel, though completely independent and uncoordinated, campaign to champion workers’ rights against what they believe is capitalist oppression. It would be nice to believe that Michael Moore is an anarchist, but the Libertarians do a better job of convincing me of their quasi-anarchist views than Moore does – consistently, he comes across as a closet Bolshevik. Note that his 18 wheeler across America was painted red with a hammer and sickle, not black with a circled A.
Literature: There are 3 books I’d recommend with regard to anarchy, quite apart from any of the actual political writings on the subjects – none of which I’ve actually read.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists & Secret Agents, by Alex Butterworth. Non-fiction. Astonishingly good tale of the anarchist movement in the late 19th century, practically a story, a novel, it’s all so hard to put down. Of course, the socialists of the time are players (Marx and Engels) but there is a wide variety of intriguing characters. The book starts out with the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, taking views of each which gave me plenty of info I did not already know despite having studied both topics at length. The story leads up to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and ends very soon after.
These two are fiction, but they’re set amidst the anarchist movement of that time and are contemporary stories:
The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton. A highly amusing and entertaining book written in, and set in, turn of the century London. An undercover police agent, Gabriel Syme, infiltrates a secret cabal of anarchists, and things get very weird very quickly; we won’t learn what’s really going on until the very end, but the ride is still more than enjoyable enough to make it all worthwhile. GKC is an author I’d vaguely been aware of for some time but had never actually read.
The Secret Agent, by Joseph Conrad. Considerably more dense and verbose than Chesterton’s work, which is much more light-hearted and flippant, for reasons which become evident by the end of the book. In this case, the story revolves around the abortive bombing attempt on the Greenwich Observatory in London. It seems the anarchist who was taking the bomb to blow up the Observatory, blew up himself when the bomb went off prematurely. There are cops investigating “the usual suspects”, and foreign powers plotting to provoke extravagant terrorism to goad the complacent Brits into more repressive measures, hopefully to reign in the Continental anarchists who find an easy and convenient refuge in London from where they can plot further attempts on the Continent. A French anarchist Louise Michel (veteran of the Paris Commune and briefly exiled to New Caledonia) joked that the anarchists were amused by the police agent provocateurs within their ranks, because the PAP’s always suggested the most ambitious and imaginative plots. In this story, the foreign secret service agent operating in his own embassy complains that the London anarchist cell basically talks up a storm but does nothing, which brings to mind Reg (John Cleese) and the People’s Front of Judea. I did enjoy this one, though considerably less than the Chesterton book.
No comments:
Post a Comment