ANARCHISM.

Throughout the nineteenth century there was a sense of shared values that linked the anarchist, the socialist, the Marxist, the syndicalist, and even the social reformer. Itinerant figures who crossed among parties, groups, and campaigns were probably more typical of this period than were dedicated, dogmatic one-party militants. Anarchism was therefore one aspect of an eclectic and varied political milieu. For example, one could cite the political biography of Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939). She is best remembered for her campaigns for women's contraceptive rights, but the story of her changing political allegiances is revealing. While a teenager, Pelletier attended anarchist and feminist meetings. She joined a women's Masonic lodge in 1904 and enrolled in both a Republican group and a socialist organization in 1906. In the same vein, one could cite figures such as William Morris (1834–1896), Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), Georges Sorel (1847–1922), and Octave Mirbeau (1850–1917): all activists and writers whose political values defy the more precise descriptions that were to come into use during the twentieth century.

However, during the nineteenth century a number of tendencies developed that later came to be seen as distinctively anarchist. The most important of these related to the role of authority in the political process. While Marxists and Blanquists (followers of the veteran revolutionary Auguste Blanqui [1805–1881]) defended the idea of a temporary revolutionary dictatorship to guide oppressed people to a better society, anarchists stressed the need to start the construction of non-authoritarian structures immediately. From this point flowed a number of lesser, but still significant, differences. Marxists linked political processes to economic cycles; anarchists showed a more flexible or more naive faith in the imminent possibility of revolution in even the most adverse circumstances. Correspondingly, Marxists stressed the central political importance of the working class. Many nineteenth-century anarchists accepted this, but there remained skeptics who would also consider the political potential of the peasant community, or of artistic and literary circles. Marxists could defend colonialism as bringing primitive societies, based on irrational, archaic myths, into the world of modernity. Anarchists were often more skeptical about claims that a colonial state could guide such societies along a progressive path—although even they found it difficult to identify the native peoples of Africa or Asia as their equals. Another small, but telling, detail was an attitude to language. Marxists tended to demand that the workers' press should be written grammatically, with correct spelling and syntax. Anarchists were fascinated by the subversive potential of slang and some—such as the veteran French anarchosyndicalist propagandist Emile Pouget (1860–1931)—wrote columns of newspaper prose in the vivid, earthy tones of proletarian patois. Finally, some important economic issues distinguished the two strands.

EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANARCHISM

Twentieth-century anarchist history can be structured around four key dates: 1921, 1936, 1968, and 1999.

The separation and clarification of the loose strands of nineteenth-century leftist thought occurred between 1914 and 1917. The outbreak of World War I divided patriots from revolutionaries: significantly, even Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), one of the greatest late nineteenth-century anarchist political philosophers, chose to back the western allies against Germany, seeing this as an alliance of liberal societies against authoritarian states. Few anarchist militants followed him, but many found themselves as isolated antiwar critics, cut off from all mass movements. The second great political division came in 1917: the Bolshevik Revolution.

The years after 1917 were unsettled. Following the slaughter that occurred during World War I and the censorship and repression of dissident leftist voices across Europe, the Bolshevik Revolution seemed like the answer to many prayers. Anarchist responses ranged from the enthusiastic to the cautious, but very few made any immediate criticisms. Across Europe, the creation of communist parties divided and confused anarchists. Frequently, anarchists joined. In most cases, they then grew disillusioned with the ethics and practices of bolshevism. However, there was no single, stark turning point in European anarchists' analyses and attitudes regarding the communist state. The experience of Victor Serge (1890–1947), a Belgian-Russian militant with a record of anarchist activism in France and Spain, is a good example of the anarchist experience. He crossed into Soviet Russia in 1919. He was appalled by the grim, bureaucratic, authoritarian ethos of the Communist Party, but felt constrained to support it against its reactionary enemies. However, he continued to voice criticisms of the new regime. He was imprisoned in 1933 and then released and expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936 as a gesture by the Soviet government to the Popular Front coalitions in France and Spain. While Serge never returned to anarchism, his post-1936 criticisms of the Soviet Union, both in the form of pamphlets and astonishingly powerful novels, are some of the most eloquent libertarian analyses of communist society. Serge died in exile in Mexico.

The revolt in the port of Kronstadt (opposite Petrograd) in March 1921, was a key indication of the deep difference between anarchist and communist forms of organization and political philosophies. The ports' sailors and soldiers, previously militant communists, revolted against the dictatorship of the Communist Party and demanded more libertarian forms of political organization. Their revolt was put down by the Red Army under Leon Trotsky (1879–1940). A few desperate dissidents crossed the Gulf of Finland to spread the news about the crushing of the revolt, but few anarchists heard their message clearly. Instead, in each country, an awkward, emotionally charged argument continued sporadically over the 1920s. In many European countries (such as Germany and Great Britain), the new communist organizations effectively replaced the older syndicalist and anarchist groups. In Italy, the anarchosyndicalist USI (Unione Sindacale Italiana—Italian Syndicalist Union) retained some working-class presence, but was then crushed by Benito Mussolini's (1879–1940) dictatorship. In France, anarchosyndicalism only survived as a fractured tendency, maintaining a marginal existence within both the Socialist CGT (Confédération Générale de Travail) and the Communist CGTU (Confédération Générale de Travail unifiée) and—confusingly—also represented by the small CGTSR (Confédération Génerale de Travail Syndicaliste Révolutionnaire) after 1926.

Few of the pre–World War I anarchosyndicalist movements survived into the 1930s. One of the exceptions was the Swedish SAC (Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation—Central Organization of the Workers of Sweden), which, having drifted into moderate, reformist politics in the 1930s, and Cold War anti-Sovietism in the 1950s, is at the beginning of the twenty-first century experiencing a modest revival in its numbers. However, the most important of the remaining organizations was the Spanish CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo—National Confederation of Labor), created in 1911. About half a million workers were members in 1931; it seems possible that late in 1936 there were more than a million, making the CNT the largest anarchist organization in history.

The trajectory of Spanish anarchism was central to the overall development of mid-twentieth-century anarchism. The CNT attracted the support of the most advanced workers in Spain (the textile factory workers of Barcelona), but it also attracted much support from the poor landless laborers of Andalusia and from intellectuals, artists, and writers. An anarcho-feminist organization, Mujeres Libres (Free Women) developed alongside it. In July 1936 a reactionary coup was launched by conservative generals terrified by the prospect of radical social reform. Its immediate consequence was the collapse of parliamentary government, and for a few brief months the tried and tested anarchist arguments became the common sense of democratic Spain. Workers' militias beat back soldiers and the police, preserving about two-thirds of Spain from the coup. The CNT effectively ran Barcelona, which, with more than a million inhabitants, was the biggest city in Spain. They also controlled much of Catalonia, Valencia, and Aragon. Peasants seized the land, expelled landowners and priests, and ran their own communities.

By 1937 the situation had changed. Italian and German military aid to the rebel generals made them into a much more serious fighting force. The more meager Russian military aid, often sent directly to the Spanish Communist Party, transformed it from a tiny far-left sect into a serious political force, uniting moderate Republicans, liberal officers, and committed militants. The CNT, by comparison, seemed almost alone in the world. Small anarchist groups revived across Europe, desperately attempting to provide solidarity and aid. But the anarchosyndicalists were outgunned: many joined the great wave of a half a million refugees who fled from Catalonia to France in January and February 1939, when the Spanish Republic was finally extinguished.

LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANARCHISM

The next three decades were desperate times for anarchist movements. The political polarization typical of the Cold War left little room for libertarian thought. A few tiny anarchosyndicalist groups survived in France and Sweden; some libertarian magazines and papers continued. Significantly, Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), a genuinely innovative Greek French thinker who moved closer to anarchist principles in this period, and who contributed much to the later revival of anarchist thought, never used the term anarchist to describe his own thinking. There was a type of generational renewal of anarchist principles: the next generation of militants were more likely to have drawn their inspiration from radical art movements, such as the surrealists, or from ecological ideals, rather than from the labor movement.

May 1968 began the breakdown of the rigid structures of Cold War politics. Anewfar-left emerged. It was sometimes as authoritarian, as worker-oriented, as the old communism, but sometimes more eclectic and more willing to draw inspiration from heterodox sources. It was significant that, for example, the participatory ideals of the women's liberation movement often resembled the older anarchist antiauthoritarian practices. Green activists were more inspired by Kropotkin's Mutual Aid (1902) than by Karl Marx's (1818–1883) Capital. But within this tapestry of new thinking, anarchism was just one strand among many. While there was some re-foundation of anarchist organizations, none of them ever acquired the status or the mass membership of the early twentieth-century groups.

After the death of Francisco Franco (1892–1975) and the reestablishment of democratic rule in Spain there was a widespread expectation that the CNT would revive as a powerful force in Spanish politics. This never happened. Instead, the movement split, with one tendency aggressively defending a legacy of syndicalist hyper-militancy (still known as "CNT"), while another, the CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo), adopting a self-consciously "pragmatic" stance. At the end of the twentieth century this second tendency was quite successful in recruiting disillusioned militants from communist and socialist trade unions, but often its explicitly anarchosyndicalist identity seems to have been diluted. Similar processes are at work in France, with two rival CNTs, plus a somewhat larger organization, SUD (Solidaires, Unitaires, et Démocratiques—Solidarity, Unity, and Democracy), with a rather distant, indirect link to the older anarchosyndicalist tradition.

Elsewhere anarchists have contributed to a diverse range of causes: antinuclear and antiwar activism, squatters' movements, animal rights, free schools, and solidarity campaigns. In such cases, anarchism has worked best as a strand of critical, independent thought, invigorating and radicalizing other movements. The movement's intellectual center of gravity seems to have moved across the Atlantic. After the intriguing postsurrealist utopianism of the Parisian Situationists, the most significant recent anarchist thinkers are mainly based in the United States. They include Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), Ursula le Guin (b. 1929), Murray Bookchin (b. 1921), and John Zerzan (b. 1943). They have proposed a variety of ideas: Chomsky has achieved a worldwide reputation as a critic of U.S. foreign policy, Le Guin is a gifted science fiction writer and a committed Daoist, Bookchin has synthesized ecological thinking with more traditional anarchist concerns, and Zerzan proposes an anti-industrial, antitechnological utopianism. There is some tension between European anarchist political culture, within which the legacy and ethos of anarchosyndicalism still commands respect, and the "post-leftist" ideas that circulate in the United States.

Antiglobalization—or "alternative globalization"—has become a key theme in contemporary anarchist political culture. The inspiration for this turn came from the Zapatista revolt in Chiapas in 1994 and from the street protests in Seattle, Washington, during the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999. While never simply and straightforwardly anarchist in character, this new wave of protest demonstrated close affinities to both the older ideals of the anarchosyndicalists and to an eclectic range of sympathies demonstrated by the late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century anarchist thinkers.

See alsoAnarchosyndicalism; Communism; Feminism; Labor Movements; Russian Revolutions of 1917; Socialism; Spanish Civil War.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Sharif Gemie