A Short History of Anarchism

Preface

This English translation of Max Nettlau's Spanish text of 1932-34 was made by the late Ida Pilat Isca, and its publication was financed by a donation from the late Valerio Isca. The translation was first edited by David Poole and Carol Saunders, and later revised and compared with the original. Much of the production work was done by Stephanie Cloete.

Bibliographical references have been completed where appropriate and integrated into appendices following the text. Biographical and other information has also been integrated into the index.

Heiner M. Becker

Introduction

Max Nettlau 1865 – 1944

The person

Max Nettlau was an anarchist for more than sixty years, and for some fifty years he took an important part in the anarchist movement, as a writer, chronicler, historian, often argumentative critic and active supporter. And still, strange as it may sound, he is virtually unknown not only to ‘the outer world’, but also to many anarchists. This is all the more surprising, for not only was he the pioneer in the field of the historiography of anarchism (and in anarchist historiography!, if there is such thing), but even more so because fifty years after his death, in many of the fields he wrote about, he has still not been superseded by later writers.

Max Heinrich Hermann Reinhardt Nettlau was born on 30 April 1865 in Neuwaldegg, then a suburb but now a district of Vienna. His parents were both Prussians; his father Heinrich Hermann Reinhard Nettlau (29 Dec. 1830 Schlodien, Prussia — 6 March 1892 Neuwaldegg) came to Austria as Court Gardener to the Princess Schwarzenberg in January 1858. He met his wife Agnes Kast (11 May 1843 Potsdam —25 May 1898 Potsdam) during a visit in Prussia in 1862 and they married in July 1864. Max was their first child, followed by one other son, Ernst, born in December 1866, who was after a few years discovered to be mentally retarded. As may be gathered from the discretion with which Nettlau usually avoided this subject, it seems to have been the only dark cloud in an otherwise unusually happy and harmonious childhood. For Nettlau appears to have been often somewhat jealous of his brother, who soon got more attention and care than he — though Ernst was already in 1872 committed to professional care. But in many ways Nettlau remained withdrawn and rather solitary, enjoying the magnificent gardens of the Palace in Neuwaldegg, for which his father was responsible, and playing on his own, in the company of a few animals, especially birds, plants and trees. His outlook on the world always remained deeply influenced by these early experiences: comparison with the life of plants, trees and animals, to what he regarded as a truly natural environment, very often provided the standards against which he measured political phenomena. It was here also that he developed his idea of an ideal society and an ideal life, of a natural life, of Anarchy: a world which grows and regulates itself on its own and in which one should interfere as little as possible, lest the results would become some caricature like the unnatural and artificial French Palace gardens.

The first years of his life were also the time when Bismarck prepared, not least at the expense of Austria, by wars and annexations, the foundation of the German empire (which in Austria, but also by many in Germany!, was regarded as a Prussian empire). Though he was then too young to notice what was happening, Nettlau must in his first ‘conscious’ years have been constantly confronted with these political events and their consequences. It is in many ways significant that like his parents he kept his Prussian (then German) nationality all his life, and always refused to apply for Austrian citizenship — though for most of his life he would have described himself as a Viennese Internationalist.

The education he received from his parents, especially his father, seems to have been unusually liberal, generous and free-minded; as Nettlau always recalled, virtually no reproaches were ever made, and certainly no beating or other physical punishment. Thanks to his father also, he liked reading from very early on; having no religious education at home, and a liking for Greek and other mythologies, he decided, when confronted at school with Christian religion, that a world with so many competing gods couldn’t make sense, and that it was therefore probable that there were none. His father’s tales and recollections, especially about and around the revolutions of 1848/49, impressed him deeply, and this and the reading of Heine and Börne made him an adherent of “radical-revolutionary republican, always federalist opinions, yet untinged by socialism” early in life.

Digesting Heine and Borne and being confronted, in the late 1870s, with reports of the activities of Russian revolutionaries — which were received and commented on by the press outside Russia with much sympathy — he began from about 1880 to regard himself as a socialist: always “antistatist and federalist (that is, as libertarian as possible), libertarian-communist (free and unforced solidary work by all, and consuming as one liked) and, in view of the resistance by the beati possedentes [the ‘haves’], revolutionary (individually and collectively)”. He soon discovered that this coincided with anarchist communism, and from about 1881/1882 he regarded himself as a communist anarchist.

From Autumn 1882 he studied philology in Berlin. He soon became interested in comparative Indo-European philology, and concentrated on “the darkest branches of this group of languages, the Celtic languages, with a special preference for the Cymric (the Welsh)”. Working on his doctoral dissertation, he went to London for the first time in October 1885 and immediately joined the Socialist League (the only organisation he ever joined). He always regarded the League as the ‘ideal’ political organisation, with its concentration on education and the progressive development of political consciousness. Living at the time just off Tottenham Court Road, he registered at the Bloomsbury branch, then more and more the centre of Marxist intrigues against the anti-parliamentarian policy of the League; he claimed later that it was this “workshop in practical Marxism” that facilitated his understanding of the Marxist intrigues in the First International.

Early in 1887 he finished his dissertation: Studies on the Cymric grammar, and published its first part.[1] He continued to work in the field, expecting to embark eventually on an academic career, and therefore continued to spend regularly longer periods in London and other places in the United Kingdom, to use Celtic manuscripts and other pertinent materials. He continued also to take part in the Socialist League, in London, but also, during a longer visit in the Spring of 1888, in Dublin (where he met for the first time the later notorious police spy Coulon). At that time he also published his first political and historical articles, in the paper of the Socialist League, The Commonweal. The very first was on Karl Marx, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of his death (10 March 1888, signed Y Y); others were usually International Notes or historical notes for the Revolutionary Calendar.

In July 1889 he attended the Founding Congress of the so-called Second International, the International Socialist Congress in Paris, as delegate of the Norwich branch of the Socialist League (as “Netlow”, thanks to a misunderstanding of William Morris). He began also in these years more regularly to interview old militants in the English and other revolutionary movements, and to discuss political matters with them, and usually took shorthand notes either at the time or immediately afterwards. He was particularly close to Samuel Mainwaring (14 Dec. 1841 Neath (S. Wales) — 29 Sept. 1907 London), one of the founders of the Socialist League, whom he had originally met to obtain information about the Welsh language and whom he always regarded as one of his best friends, and to the Belgian anarchist Victor Dave (25 January 1847 Alost, Belgium — 31 October 1922 Paris), a member of the First International and former friend of John Most.

At the Conference of the Socialist League in May 1890 he was elected a member of its Council (he resigned in September when he had to return to Vienna); and between May and August 1890 he edited and financed The Anarchist Labour Leaf, a little four-page-sheet, of which four numbers were published and distributed gratis. It consisted entirely of articles by Nettlau and Henry Davis, who up till then had been one of the most active anarchist-communists in the Socialist League — mostly in the East End. Davis soon changed colours and declared himself an Individualist, which prompted Nettlau’s first contribution to Freedom (“Communism and Anarchy”, May 1891; signed N). He also wrote his first longer and more substantial historical articles — “Joseph Déjacque — a predecessor of communist Anarchism” (published in John Most’s Freiheit, 25 January — 25 February 1890), and “The Historical Development of Anarchism” (Freiheit, 19 April — 17 May 1890, reprinted as a pamphlet), the nucleus of his later historical works, and the first results of his studies on Bakunin, “Notes for a Biography of Bakunin” (Freiheit, January-April 1891). These already showed, as he later stressed, what subjects would be his preferences as a historian: the forgotten predecessors (Déjacque), biographies (Bakunin), and the overall view (history of an entire movement). Other long articles concerned the Austrian labour movement, German Social Democracy, “scientific socialism”, and anarchist communism.

On 6 March 1892 his father suddenly died, and Nettlau discovered to his great surprise that his father had left his family a small fortune, accumulated thanks to a number of “fortunate speculations”. He found himself unexpectedly in a position where he no longer needed to prepare himself for an academic career, and could concentrate on what had become more and more important, the study of the history of socialism in general, of anarchism and of Bakunin in particular. He saw from nearby that in a few years many of the older militants of all the radical movements of the mid- and later nineteenth century had died or were about to die, and that their sometimes magnificent collections of books, documents etc. were dispersed or disappeared (not to mention their recollections which he had already started to record from the late 1880s). He therefore decided that it was “more important” to save what could be saved in this field, instead of “using old manuscripts in libraries in Wales and Ireland”, and gave up his Celtic studies. (He had started to collect anarchist materials, but on a much more modest scale, in the late 1880s, and had bought and saved the archive of the Socialist League, which its secretary Frank Kitz had torn up and prepared for destruction).

From then on he travelled extensively to meet and interview survivors of Bakunin’s circle (and of other revolutionary movements), and he spent a considerable part of each year in London, where he not only collected what he could find and obtain around some of the Working Men’s clubs, but also for a while took an active part in the life of the anarchist movement. He was a member of the London Socialist League (which continued the Socialist League for a while), and of its successor, the Commonweal group. He wrote their declaration of principles, Why we are anarchists,[2] and a little later he wrote at the request of the remnants of the group and some other comrades An Anarchist Manifesto, approved of and occasionally corrected by Kropotkin, also published anonymously.[3]

On 28 February 1895 his brother Ernst died, and he found — as he was administering his father’s estate — that he could increase his monthly allowance and spend more on collecting. After the merging of the Commonweal and Freedom Groups in April/May 1895, like most he joined the Freedom Group, and when The Torch was closed down, he and another German and good friend of Kropotkin, Bernhard Kampffmeyer (25 June 1867 Berlin — 21 Oct. 1942 Berg.-Gladbach), provided the means to acquire the press and printing equipment of the Torch for Freedom and ‘the movement’ and guaranteed half the rent for its premises at 127 Ossulston Street (Spring 1896).

In Spring and early Summer 1896, he prepared with Joseph Presburg (‘Perry’) the anarchist participation at (and possible alternatives to) the International Socialist Congress in London, July 1896; they also organised (with Malatesta) the anarchist meetings after the expected exclusion of the anarchists. He and Presburg were also in 1897 the “Spanish Atrocity Committee”, Nettlau doing all necessary translations, duplicating the circular letters on the machine he had acquired for the publication of his biography of Bakunin, and writing nearly all articles on the subject for Freedom, the Labour Leader, and other papers.[4]

In the Spring of 1896 he wrote his Bibliographie de l’Anarchie, published in Spring 1897. Between 1896 and 1900 he wrote and “autocopied” in 50 copies his huge biography of Bakunin; he continued to work on Bakunin intensively for the next few years, and was allowed to use the Bakunin papers which his family in Naples possessed (they were destroyed at the end of the Second World War). He also received, on the initiative of Élisée Reclus, the bulk of Bakunin’s political papers and manuscripts, for his collection and for safekeeping. At about the same time, James Guillaume —who had refused to help Nettlau with his work on Bakunin — destroyed most of what he had left of Bakunin’s letters and manuscripts (including what he had received so far from Nettlau’s biography of Bakunin), partly in a fit of depression, but partly also to suppress information he did not wish to become known. This concerned in the first place everything concerning the break between Bakunin and his formerly most intimate friends around Guillaume, in particular the manuscript of Bakunin’s Mémoire de justification — of which, however, Bakunin had a copy made before turning over the manuscript to his former friends, a copy that Nettlau found and could use, and years later also published. Nettlau summarised and reproduced his discoveries in four unpublished volumes of supplements to the Biography, which James Guillaume was the only other person to use, in preparing L’Internationale, his partial recollections and history of the First International.

On 5 December 1899 he read to the Freedom Discussion Group a paper which always remained one of his pet productions — Responsibility and Solidarity in the Labour Struggle.[5] From 1900 on he regularly spent several months every year in Paris (which he had avoided until then), to collect publications in the bookstalls on the Quais, but also to collect material for his next major project, a history of Buonarroti and the secret societies of the early 19th century — a subject he had chosen after being impressed by Bakunin’s fascination with and involvement in secret societies. He continued the work for several years and wrote an unfinished manuscript, which however is no longer preserved with his papers. He finally abandoned the subject, disgusted with what he saw as inevitable in all these secret bodies, apitiless authoritarianism without any hint of understanding and tolerance.

Most of his time and energy in the years up to the First World War were dedicated to collecting and travelling; but he conducted, from 1900 until 1907, the only long-term relationship with a woman he had in his life. (His extreme need for discretion was such that he mentioned her existence only to a couple of female comrades, but with one exception to none of his male friends, who learned about her only after she died in 1907.) Otherwise he frequented prostitutes, from the early 1880s to the early 1940s, and in his later-memoirs repeatedly expressed his gratitude for all the good they did him.

In all those years Freedom was the only paper to which he contributed regularly (from 1896 to 1914, and then again from 1919/1920 onwards), and in whose production he also participated in more practical ways, when he was in London. During this period he wrote most of the International Notes, all the Reviews of the Year (usually published in the January number), historical and general articles, obituaries, and many reviews, and he wrote for Freedom some of his most controversial articles (he was repeatedly asked to produce a provocative piece, to bring a too complacent movement to life again).

From its foundation in 1911, he also contributed regularly (including some of his most important historical articles) to the Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, which remains one of the most substantial journals on the history of socialism and the labour movement in general.[6]

At the end of 1912 he threatened to resign from the Freedom Group, when Alfred Marsh, the editor, suppressed an article by Varlaam Cherkezov on the situation in the Balkans, replying to Kropotkin and attacking the imperialist policy of Russia and incidentally Kropotkin’s Russian nationalism (Cherkezov was Georgian). He was finally persuaded to remain in the group and asked to explain some of the controversial issues in an article in Freedom, “The War in the Balkans” Jan. 1913).

The outbreak of the First World War found Nettlau in Vienna, where he remained during the following years. He took the side of Austria and Germany, it seems, mostly out of a violent opposition to Kropotkin and certain other comrades, but also, as he tried to explain to the only comrade with whom he remained in correspondence during these years, out of a sense of fairness. He suffered progressively from the more and more virulent nationalism or, as he saw it, even anti-German racism, especially in radical circles and on the left, which, he thought, had lost all sense of proportion and was not just uninformed but deeply unjust. He wrote later: “N. protested and was consequently regarded as a patriot, like in that Winter of 1912/13, when he refused to join in the glorification of the Balkan Allies, the new ‘Crusaders’ (...) There was no greater Russian patriot than Kropotkin, no greater Georgian patriot than Cherkezov, no greater Dutch and French patriot than Cornelissen, no greater American patriot than Emma Goldman, and he got along with all of them; he just refused always to understand why other countries should live, while Austria-Hungary and Turkey had to be dismantled.”[7]

Some of these feelings find an expression or at least an echo in the present book:

Marx, as attested by his writings published at that time and correspondence published later, was as anti-German as Bakunin, and he did all he could to foment a British war against Russia and Germany. He was in complete agreement, at the General Council in 1871-72, with the Blanquists, who were French patriots par excellence. Those among the German socialists who were in contact with the International were all Francophiles. Conciliatory manifestos were published by both parties. Nothing in the International could cause any offence to the French. But the very fact that a race considered superior (Latin) had been beaten by a race considered inferior (barbarians) was intolerable to passionate spirits. Their racial attitudes cannot be ascribed to a later interpretation... (Chapter 10, p.129).

It was also a question of fairness and justice to take a side in a situation, where both sides were more similar to each other than either admitted, and where none had more right than the other to the claim to be “progressive”. Basically his attitude remained as balanced as before, when it came really to evaluate the situation:

But I would wish that one should speak as a historian, as a critic and not as a fanaticized continuator of the hatreds of the past, sowing new hatreds. After all — what is more international than cruelty and wickedness? The English burnt Jeanne d’Arc, the French burnt the Palatinate, the Germans bombarded Strasbourg, and so forth. The history of the past is nothing but the oppression of the weak by the strong, and the history of our time is its worthy continuation; one is used to it to such an extent, that nobody pays attention any longer to the people murdered all around us. All parties, even the most advanced ones, do just the same; if they can, they kill their adversaries, by a revolutionary tribunal or by direct assassination; and if not that, then there are still the different forms and degrees of polemic. In this situation, either one closes one’s eyes before the crimes of one’s own country and fights all ‘the others, as pure and simple nationalists; — or one admits that on the whole everything is balanced, that people and parties are all the same if not in the good they do, then certainly in the evil they do, and one fights (apart from the crime of the hour, of course) the common source of evil, authority and all its forms, the State, the thirst for power, fanaticism in all its forms.[8]

The end of the war found him destitute and starving, having lost virtually all his money in the vicissitudes of the war and being on the side of the losers. He survived in the end only thanks to food parcels that occasionally reached him from friends in Switzerland, England (T. H. Keell), and America, and from Quakers and Quaker organisations in America — which (combined with the personal contact with some of these) made him for the first time somewhat more lenient towards religious people and some religious environments.

He now had to write for a living, and first could do so only for the Christian Science Monitor (reports on the situation in Vienna), until some anarchist papers were in a position to pay for articles and books (Der Syndikalist in Berlin, La Protesta in Buenos Aires, and Freie Arbeiter Stimme in New York in particular). For the rest of his life, he did virtually nothing else but writing — as he informed one of the friends who supported him:

Until today I wrote few letters, as I finished the manuscript only yesterday (...) it’s the history of the ideas 1880-1886 and should be called: Anarchists and Socialrevolutionaries... 1880-1886. But there is no prospect of it being published. I am tired, but have always to go on writing — articles — letters — then again the next book on the years 1886 to 1894, or rather the book-manuscript, the solitary book, just for me.[9]

The conditions under which he produced all this work were at first incredibly difficult, because he was separated from most of his own collections (including many of his earlier notes and excerpts), which were kept in store in London and Paris — and which were inaccessible to him also, because they were threatened by sequestration as property of an ‘enemy’ and loser. This changed somewhat from the mid-1920s onwards, when (on the invitation of friends who also paid the expenses) he could travel to Berlin and then to Zürich and Geneva again, where he could use the libraries and collections of friends (Rocker, Jacques Gross, Fritz Brupbacher) and of public institutions (including the Social Democratic Party archives in Berlin with the papers of Marx and Engels); and then in particular from 1928 to 1936, when he was invited to Spain by the Montseny-Urales family, and spent longer and longer periods there to use the rich collections of the Biblioteca Arús in Barcelona, of Soledad Gustavo, and of other anarchist collectors. In 1935 he sold his collection to the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, and concentrated in the final years before 1940 on helping to classify and catalogue his (and other) collections. He wrote less for the movement and its papers and started to transcribe his daily notes from the 1880s and 1890s and to write his definitive memoirs (he had previously written several other, shorter versions). From 1938 he lived continuously in Amsterdam, apart from a visit in Switzerland, and witnessed not only the annexation of Austria by Germany under the leadership of an Austrian-born naturalised German, but also the invasion of the Netherlands and the seizure of the Institute including the bulk of his collection. In 1940 he began to write the last version of his memoirs, some 6,000 pages carrying the story into the 1930s, but still not complete. The last pages, written in the last weeks of his life, chronicle mostly the progressive defeats of the German army. He died rather suddenly in Amsterdam on 23 July 1944 of cancer of the stomach.

Nettlau began as an ardent and rather intolerant anarchist communist; from the second half of the 1890s this progressively changed, not least through his experiences and observations in the anarchist movement in London and then Paris (he always kept aloof from the movement in Germany and Austria), and he developed his own brand of an open-minded “anarchism without adjectives”, which should tolerate also all the different forms of economic solutions in a future society, whether communism, collectivism, or mutualism, or whatever— everyone should have his right to his own corner and from there come to terms and agreements with others. Apart from his personal experiences as a participant and observer, he saw the nefarious consequences of sectarianism more and more also as a historian. In the 1920s, when he studied more anarchist publications than ever before, with the need to understand, analyse and evaluate the development of the movement and the progress or the decay of its ideas, he realised more clearly than before the sheer practical necessity of a basic tolerance and openness for the survival of the anarchist ideas:

Everywhere, the group which believed itself more advanced fought those anarchists it considered less advanced, and isolation grew, even among these same anarchists — a phenomenon that had nothing to do with either the libertarian idea or with solidarity but was the outcome of sheer arbitrariness and egocentrism. There was no question of the revolutionary ardour of these groups; we can only point out that by their posture of rigid intolerance they succeeded in narrowing their own sphere of action and their influence. (...) One and the other, the tactic of indulgence and the tactic of carping criticism, encouraged the growth of amorphousness and the tendency toward atomization which I have just discussed above. And since these ideas were considered more libertarian, and there was a desire to impose them upon others, they turned into authoritarian concepts, tending to make anarchism into a law; the advocates of these ideas not only despised those who did not share their opinions but fought them fanatically. (Chapter 11, pp. 150-151)

As a historian, Nettlau opposed all philosophical explanations of historical developments following preconceived theories, historical, political, religious or whatever.

I find now as always [so he wrote in 1929] that the historian can do little other than to interpret the sources in the most thorough and scrupulous manner, to elucidate them in every way possible, and to try to bridge the gaps by careful hypotheses ... the one-sided hunt for motives, economical or ideal, can only falsify the result beforehand. What then seem to be results are always only what such a researcher, from his personal standpoint, puts into a matter alien to him and the true nature of which nobody can reconstruct except when the sources are very good.[10]

He saw the need to study and learn from history — and the unwillingness to do so, with consequences he regretted deeply, to the point of a resigned pessimism that anarchism, the idea dearest of all to him, had alienated itself from the mass of the people instead of approaching them, and through the fault of the well-intentioned militants themselves (though he blamed no less the natural laziness of the majority of the people):

There was an absence of tradition, or rather, what pertained to the past was considered obsolete and unworthy of attention. The dominant trend, in theory, was to go all the way to anarchism and communism; in practice, it stood for non-organization and fora free life. With it came a great fervour for propaganda, and (...) many, captivated by this atmosphere of a completely free life, flocked to the groups, which grew and became numerous. Few among them understood that these impatient spirits who were so easily drawn into the groups were, after all, few in number, and that even if a large circle of people thirsting for a free, unfettered life had been formed by the anarchists, it would have been at the cost of a great isolation from the people themselves, who watched the spectacle but took good care not to participate. Worse still, the people let themselves be beguiled by the authoritarian socialists, who demanded no intellectual or revolutionary effort from them — only their votes, that is, a surrender into the hands of new masters. Thus the hopes nourished during the International, and still entertained by the libertarians in the movements of that period, (...) came to naught (...) A fine flowering did exist in isolated groups but there was no real contact with the interests of the people.

There was certainly no lack of effort exerted to come closer to the people but anarchism probably assumed larger proportions and vitality without contact with practical questions; it had full liberty for the exercise of pure criticism and of individual expression, and, from that vantage point, it was a unique period. There was a profusion of blossoming but little concern for the fruit that should issue from the flower; a decade of idealistic and aesthetic but non-utilitarian presentation of our ideas. It left its imprint upon the spirit of the world, and its last rays still cast their light upon us. To me it made manifest the fact that anarchism is human enlightenment, the great light by which humanity seeks to find its way out of the darkness of authoritarianism; it is not merely the economic solution for the misery of the exploited people. (Chap. 11, pp. 158-159)

Bakunin had just before his death expressed the wish to write an ethics for the revolutionary movement, and Kropotkin did work on his Ethics until the very end (without finishing it); Nettlau found himself driven to the same conclusions, and shared these ironically with another old comrade, the Dutch-French revolutionary socialist and syndicalist Christiaan Cornelissen:

And you have become the author of an Ethics. Hats off? — Naughty as lam, I am saying: it is there that you should have begun 50 years ago, and so should all of us! — To argue economically without ethics has served us nothing. Economy is the art of profit, whether we are capitalist or socialist. It’s the art of cutting your neighbour’s throat — you sell 10% cheaper than he does, and he will be ruined. You promise 10% more of socialist promises, and he will be yours and will give up his old socialist prophet. That’s what the history of these 50 years of economics comes to. Profit and laziness are the great aims — and the famous modern sociocrats promise laziness, spoliation, bossocracy: if one follows our way of labour and effort, they do the opposite and the masses are for them. If one asks an ordinary individual whether he wants to study, to make some effort, or whether he wants to be a dog that does not think, is told what to do and doesn’t need to worry about anything, he will prefer to be a dog — and he will abdicate humanity like the (...) voters (...), — That’s where the preponderance of the economical without ethics has led to in socialism. Therefore if you have realised this, I am happy.[11]

1. Liberty and anarchism: its earliest manifestations and libertarian ideas up to 1789.

The history of anarchist ideas is inseparable from the history of all progressive developments and aspirations towards liberty. It therefore starts from the earliest favourable historic moment when men first evolved the concept of a free life as preached by anarchists — a goal to be attained only by a complete break from authoritarian bonds and by the simultaneous growth and wide expansion of the social feelings of solidarity, reciprocity, generosity and other expressions of human co-operation.

This concept of a life of freedom has been manifested in various ways in the personal and collective life of individuals and groups, beginning with the family. Without it a human community would no longer be possible. At the same time, ever since the humanisation of the animals who constitute the human species, authority — tradition, custom, law, arbitrary rule, and so on — placed its iron grip upon a great many human interrelationships (this probably goes back to a still more remote stage of animalism). Hence humanity’s march towards progress, which surely goes on through the ages, has been and still is a continuous struggle to shake off authoritarian chains and restraints.

This struggle takes on such diverse forms, and the conflict has been so cruel and arduous, that few people have yet attained a true understanding of the anarchist idea. Even those who fought for limited freedoms have had only a rare and inadequate grasp of its essence. In fact, they often tried to reconcile their newly-won liberties with the maintenance of old restraints, either by themselves hovering on the brink of authoritarianism or by believing that authority would be useful in holding and defending their new gains. In modern times such men have supported constitutional or democratic liberty; that is, liberty under governmental control. Moreover, on the social plane, this ambiguity generated social statism — a socialism imposed by authoritarian methods and hence lacking in the very qualities, which, according to anarchist thinking, give it its true vitality — solidarity, reciprocity, generosity, which can flourish only in a free world.

In ancient times the reign of authoritarianism was general, and the uncertain, confused efforts to fight it (aiming for liberty through the use of authority) were rare though continuous. Therefore the anarchist concept, even in its partial and incomplete aspect, made an appearance very seldom, not only because it needed favourable conditions for its growth, but also because it was cruelly persecuted and crushed by violent means, or wasted, rendered defenceless and dissipated by routine. Nevertheless if, even in the midst of tribal turmoil, an individual could achieve a private life that was relatively respected, it was not due to economic causes alone. It was rather the first step on the road from tutelage to emancipation, and the men of ancient times took this path, inspired by feelings similar to those we later find in the anti-statism of modern men. Disobedience, distrust of tyranny and rebellion led many courageous men to forge for themselves an independence which they could defend and for which they were willing to die. Other men succeeded in circumventing authority through their intelligence or through some special gifts or skills. And if, at a certain stage, men passed from non-property (general accessibility of goods) and from collective property (ownership by the tribe or by the inhabitants of a region) to private property, they must have been impelled not merely by the greed for possessions, but also by the need and the will to secure a certain independence for themselves.

Even if there were thinkers of a pure anarchist type in Antiquity, they are unknown to us. The characteristic fact remains, however, that all mythologies have preserved records of revolts, even of never-ending struggles led by rebels against the most powerful deities. There were the Titans who assailed Olympus, Prometheus who defied Zeus, the dark forces that, in Nordic mythology, brought about the ‘Twilight of the Gods’. And there was the Devil — that rebel Lucifer whom Bakunin held in such respect — who, in Christian mythology, never yields and keeps on fighting in each individual soul against the good God. If the priesthood, which manipulated these tendentious stories in its own interest, did not suppress such accounts, despite their being so dangerous to the idea of the omnipotence of their gods, it was because the episodes recounted in them were so deeply rooted in the soul of the people that they did not dare to do so. All they could do was distort the facts and vilify the rebel protagonists. Later they fabricated fantastic interpretations aimed at intimidating the believers. This is particularly true of the Christian mythology, with its story of Original Sin, the Fall of man, his redemption and the Last Judgement, which amounts to the consecration and justification of man’s enslavement, confirms the prerogative of the priest as mediator, and postpones judgement day to the very last moment imaginable, the end of the world. We may conclude that, if there had not been audacious rebels and intelligent heretics, the priesthood would not have taken all this trouble.

In those ancient times, the struggle for existence and mutual aid were no doubt inextricably bound together. What is mutual aid but a collective struggle for existence, since it protects the entire community against dangers that might overwhelm an isolated individual? What is the struggle for existence but the act of an individual who brings together a great number of forces or skills and thus prevails over another who gathers a smaller number? Progress was made by autonomous and free associations created in a social environment which was relatively secure and of an advanced character. The great Oriental despotisms did not permit of true intellectual progress. The Greek world, on the other hand, where free local autonomies existed, saw the first flowering of free thought that we have known. Greek philosophy was able, in the course of centuries, to reach out to Hindu and Chinese thought. It particularly created independent work of its own, which the Romans, with all their great desire to drink deep of the sources of Greek civilisation, were incapable of understanding and continuing. It remained equally closed to the unenlightened world of the medieval millennium.

What goes under the name of philosophy was, in those early days, a complex of considerations, independent as far as possible of religious tradition, though formulated by individuals immersed in that tradition. These were reflections drawn from more direct observation, some of them based upon experience. They included, for instance, speculations concerning the origin and essence of worlds and things (cosmogony), the conduct of the individual and his highest aspirations (morals), the collective civic and social conduct (social politics). It also dealt with the ideals of a more perfect world in the future, and the means to attain it (a philosophic ideal which is actually a utopia, bringing together these thinkers’ analyses of the past and present, and the trend of further evolution as they observed it and judged auspicious for the future).

Religions had originated earlier, in much the same manner, though under generally more primitive conditions, and the theocracy of the priesthood and the despotism of kings and chiefs were parallel with that stage. The population of the Greek territories, on the mainland and the islands, kept apart from the despotism of neighbouring countries and created a type of civic life, of autonomous groups and federations, which nourished small centres of culture. It also produced philosophers who, rising above their traditional role, sought to be of use to their small native republics and dreamed of progress and general well-being (without, be it said, daring or attempting to fight the slavery in their midst, which goes to show how difficult it is to rise above one’s own environment).

This period witnessed the development of an apparently more modern type of government and of politics, which replaced the Asiatic type of despotism and completely arbitrary rule without, however, supplanting it entirely. It was a type of progress similar to that of the French Revolution and to that of the 19th century, in relation to the absolutism of the 18th century. Just as that later period gave rise to ideas of a pure socialism and to anarchist concepts, so, alongside the great number of Greek philosophers and statesmen of a moderate and conservative tendency, there were bold thinkers, some of whom in those early days arrived at the ideas of State socialism, and some at anarchist principles. These were no doubt a small minority, but they left their mark and cannot be ignored by history, although the rivalries of the schools, the persecutions and the indifference of ages of ignorance caused their writings to disappear. In fact, where their work did survive it was preserved in extracts in the texts of better-known writers.

These small republics, exposed to constant danger, and themselves ambitious and aggressive, had a lively concern for civic life and patriotism. They were rent by factional strife, demagogy and the thirst for power, which laid the groundwork for the development of a rigid communism. This provoked in many men an aversion to democracy, which expressed itself in the desire for a government by the wisest men, the sages, the elders, such as Plato had dreamed of. And simultaneously came an aversion from the State, the desire to do away with it, as professed by Aristippus, as expressed in the libertarian ideas of Antiphones, and more strongly in the great work of Zeno of Citium (336-264 BC), founder of the Stoic school, which excluded all external compulsion and proclaimed the individual’s moral impulse as the sole and sufficient guide for individual and communal action. It was the first clear call of human liberty, conscious of its own maturity and released from authoritarian bonds.

However, just as religions transfer men’s aspirations for justice and equality to a fictitious ‘heaven’, so the philosophers and sundry jurists of those days transmuted the ideal of a truly just and equitable law, based upon promises and formulated by Zeno and the Stoics, into the so-called ‘natural law’, which, like its counterpart ideal concept of religion — ‘natural religion’ — cast a feeble glow through many centuries of cruelty and ignorance until its light rekindled man’s spirit and inspired it with the desire to bring these abstract ideals into realisation. This was the first great service rendered by the libertarian idea to man; its ideal, diametrically opposed to the ideal of the supreme and definitive reign of authority, has been gradually absorbed during the past two thousand years.

We can well understand why authority — the State, property, the Church — opposed the spread of these ideas. It is a well-known fact that the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and the Rome of the Popes, up to the 15th century, imposed an absolute intellectual fascism upon the Western world, complemented by the Oriental despotism reborn among the Byzantines and the Turks, and Russian Tsarism (now virtually continuing under Russian Bolshevism). Until the 15th century and even later (Servetus, Bruno, Vanini) free thought was forbidden under pain of death; all communication among some learned men and their disciples was carried on under cover, perhaps in the intimate circles of some secret societies. Free thought never saw the light of day except when, merged with the fanaticism and mysticism of a religious sect, it felt itself consecrated and fearlessly and joyfully accepted death. The original records of such events were carefully destroyed and we have nothing left to us but the voices of those who denounced, those who maligned, and, often, those who had executed the victims. Thus Carpocrates of the Gnostic school in Egypt, in the 2nd century AD, preached a life of free communism and also quoted from the New Testament (Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, 6:18), ‘But if ye be led by the Spirit, ye are not under the law’, a statement which seemed to lend itself to the idea of a life outside the State, without law or master.

The last six centuries of the Middle Ages were the era of the struggles of local communities (cities and small regions), anxious to federate, as well as of large territories which united to form the great modern States, as political and economic units. If the smaller units were centres of civilisation and, as such, could have prospered through their own productive labour, through federations useful to their interests and the superiority of their wealth over poor agricultural communities and less fortunate cities, their complete success would merely have enhanced their advantages at the expense of the continual poverty of less well-off units. Was it more important for some free cities, such as Florence, Venice, Genoa, Augsburg, Nuremberg, Bremen, Ghent, Bruges and others to grow rich, or for the entire regions surrounding them to gain well-being, education and other benefits? History, up to 1919 at least, decided in favour of the great economic units, and, in consequence, the small communities were reduced and decayed.

Authoritarianism and the desire for expansion and domination were present in both the small and the large units, and liberty was a word equally exploited by both. The smaller units broke the power of the cities and their alliances (leagues); the larger attacked the power of the kings and their States.

Nonetheless, in this situation, too, it was the cities that often supported independent thinking and scientific research, and granted temporary asylum to dissidents and heretics driven from other places by persecution. It was particularly the Roman municipalities situated along the highways of commercial traffic, as well as the many other prosperous cities, which became the centres of this intellectual independence. From Valencia and Barcelona to North Italy and Tuscany, to Alsace, Switzerland, South Germany and Bohemia, through Paris to the mouth of the Rhine, up to Flanders and the Netherlands and the German coast (the Hanseatic cities), was a territory studded with centres of localised liberty. And then came the wars of the Emperors in Italy, the crusade against the Albigenses and the centralisation of France by the kings (especially Louis XI), the Castilian supremacy in Spain, the struggle of the States against the cities in the South of Germany, and in North Germany the struggles of the Dukes of Burgundy, and so on, which culminated in the supremacy of the great States.

Among the Christian sects the one to be particularly remembered is the ‘Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit’, who practised unlimited communism among themselves. Their tradition, probably originating in France and destroyed by persecutions, survived chiefly in Holland and in Flanders; the ‘Klompdraggers’ of the 14th century and the followers of Eligius Praystinck, the so-called ‘libertines’ of Antwerp in the 16th century (the ‘loists’ seem to have derived their origin from that sect). In Bohemia, after the Hussites, Peter Chelčický preached a type of moral and social conduct which anticipates the teachings of Tolstoy. And here we find again sects of so-called ‘Direct Libertines’, particularly the ‘Adamites’. Some of their writings are known to have survived, especially those of Chelčický (whose moderate followers were later known as the ‘Moravian Brothers’). But so far as the more advanced sects are concerned, all we have is the horrendous libels of their zealous persecutors and it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine to what extent their defiance of the States and laws was a conscious anti-authoritarian act, since they claimed they were authorised to act by the word of God, who thus remained their supreme lord.

The Middle Ages could not produce a rational and thoroughgoing libertarianism. It was only the rediscovery of Greek and Roman paganism, the humanism of the Renaissance, which provided many scholars with the means for comparison and criticism. They viewed various mythologies as being as ‘perfect’ as the Christian mythology, and some of them, suspended between total belief and total disbelief, discarded all belief. The title of a brief treatise of unknown origin, De tribus impostoribus (The Three Imposters: Moses, Christ and Muhammad) clearly points up this tendency. Then a French monk, François Rabelais, wrote the liberating words, ‘Do what thou wilt’, while a young lawyer, Étienne de La Boëtie left us his famous Discours de la servitude volontaire (Discourse of Voluntary Servitude).

This bit of historical research will teach us to be modest in our expectations. It would be quite easy to come across glowing paeans to freedom, to the heroism of tyrannicides and other rebels, to popular revolts, and so on, but very difficult to find an understanding of the evil inherent in authoritarianism and a complete faith in liberty. The words of the thinkers we have quoted here may be considered merely the earliest intellectual and moral attempts of humanity to advance without tutelary gods and constricting chains. (It seems to be little, but it is a ‘little’ that cannot be set aside and forgotten.) Confronting the ‘three imposters’, there finally arose science, the free mind, a deepened search for truth, experimental observation and true experience. L’Abbaye de Thélème (The Abbey of Thelema — neither the first nor last happy isle of the imagination), as well as the authoritarian, statist utopias (notably those of Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella), which mirrored the great new centralised States, revealed aspirations toward an idyllic, innocent, peaceful life, full of mutual respect and affirmation of the need of liberty for the human race — all this in the centuries (the 16th, 17th and 18th) crowded with wars of conquest, religion, commerce, diplomacy and ruthless overseas colonisation carried on through the subjugation of new continents.

Even ‘voluntary servitude’ at times took steps to put an end to itself, as in the struggle of the Netherlands, and the fight against the royal power of the Stuarts in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as the revolutionary war of the North American colonies against England in the 18th century, up to the emancipation of Latin America in the early part of the 19th century. Thus rebellion made its entry into political and social life, along with the spirit of voluntary association, as manifested in the projects and attempts at industrial co-operation in Europe, already in existence in the 17th century, and in the practical development of more or less autonomous and self-governing organisations in North America, both before and after its separation from England. The later centuries of the Middle Ages had already witnessed central Switzerland successfully defying the German Empire, the great peasant rebellions and the violent declarations of local independence in various regions of the Iberian peninsula. Paris stood firm against the power of the kings on many occasions up to the 17th century, and again in 1789.

We know that this libertarian ferment was still too limited, and that the rebels of yesterday became enthralled by a new authoritarianism on the morrow. It was still possible to have people murdered in the name of this or that religion, especially if the masses were inflamed with religious zeal intensified through the Reformation or fell under the whip and the spur of the Jesuits. Besides, Europe at that time lived under bureaucracy, the police power, the permanent armies, the aristocracy and the courts of the princes, as well as under the subtle domination of the powers of commerce and finance. Few were the men who could envisage libertarian solutions and discuss them in their Utopias. Such was Gabriel Foigny, in Les Aventures de Jacques Sadeur dans la découverte et le voyage de la Terre Australe (Adventures of Jacques Sadeur in the Discovery of and the Voyage to the Austral Land) (1676). Others employed the fiction of savages who were ignorant of the refined life of police States, as for instance Nicolas Gueudeville in his Entretiens entre un sauvage et le Baron Hontan (Conversations between a Savage and the Baron of Hontan) (1704), or Diderot in his famous Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville).

There was an attempt at direct action, to recover freedom after the fall of the British monarchy in 1649, led by Gerrard Winstanley (the Digger). There were projects of voluntary socialism by means of associations, put forward by the Dutchman PC. Plockboy (1658), John Bellers (1695) and the Scot Robert Wallace (1761), also in France by Restif de la Bretonne.

There were keen thinkers who dissected statism, among them Edmund Burke, in his Vindication of Natural Society, while Diderot was familiar with thinking which led to truly anarchist conclusions. There were some isolated writers who attacked law and authority, such as William Harris in Rhode Island, United States, in the 17th century, also Mathias Knutsen, in Holstein, in the same century, and Dom Deschamps, a Benedictine monk in France, in the 18th century, who left a manuscript which has been known since its discovery in 1865. Also A. E Doni, Montesquieu (the Troglodytes), G. EF Rebmann (1794), Dulaurens (1766, in several parts of his Compére Mathieu), depict small countries and happy retreats without property and without laws. A few decades before the French Revolution Sylvain Maréchal proposed a type of anarchism which was set forth with great clarity, in the form of a fabled Arcadian era of happiness, in his L’Age d’Or recueil de contes pastoraux par le Berger Sylvain (Golden Age, Collection of Pastoral Tales by the Shepherd Sylvain), (1782) and in his Livre échappé au déluge ou Psaumes nouvellement découverts (Book which escaped the Deluge, or Psalms Recently Discovered) (1784). Maréchal also produced one of the strongest pieces of propaganda on behalf of atheism and in his Apologues Modernes a l’usage d’un Dauphin (Modern Apologues, to be used by a Dauphin) (1788) pictured the life of kings exiled to a desert island where they ended up exterminating each other, and sketched the outlines of a general strike whereby the producers, who constitute three-quarters of the population, create a free society. During the French Revolution, Maréchal was impressed and fascinated by revolutionary terrorism, yet could not help writing, in the Manifeste des Egaux (Manifesto of the Equals) of the followers of Babeuf, the following words: ‘Begone, odious differences between rulers and the ruled.’ These words were later completely repudiated by the accused authoritarian socialists and by Buonarroti himself, during their trials.

By the end of the 18th century anarchist ideas are also clearly expressed in the works of Lessing who was known as ‘the German Diderot’. The philosophers Fichte and Krause, as well as Wilhelm von Humboldt (1792 — brother of Alexander), favoured libertarianism in some of their works. Likewise, in England, the young British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his friends in the period of his ‘Pantisocracy’. An early application of these ideas is found in educational reform as interpreted in the 17th century by Jan Amos Comenius, stimulated by J. J. Rousseau, under the influence of all the humanitarian and egalitarian ideas of the 18th century, and particularly diffused in Switzerland (Pestalozzi) and in Germany, where even Goethe contributed enthusiastically. Society without authority was recognised as the ultimate goal in the most intimate circles of the German ‘Illuminati’ (Weishaupt). The Bavarian, Franz Baader, was deeply impressed by Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, which appeared in a German translation (the first part only) in Würzburg in 1803. Even the German scientist and revolutionary, Georg Forster, read Godwin’s book in Paris some months before his death in January 1794, without having been able to give public expression of his opinion of this work, which had so fascinated him (letter of 23 July 1793).

These are only short extracts from the main arguments which I have advanced in Der Vorfrühling der Anarchie (1925; pp. 5-66). I would need a few more months of research in the British Museum to complete the work by consulting Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Scandinavian texts. I have unearthed much material in French, English and German publications. It seems to me that what still remains to be studied would necessarily be abundant and interesting, but not of prime importance.

The sources here quoted are not numerous but they are quite adequate. Everybody knows Rabelais; through Montaigne one can always get at La Boëtie. Gabriel Foigny’s utopia was well known; it was reprinted and translated many times. Burke’s youthful tour de force gained great popularity, and Sylvain Maréchal was amply discussed. Diderot and Lessing were classics.

In consequence, all their concepts which were profoundly anti-authoritarian, their critique and rejection of the idea of government, their attempts to reduce and even deny the role of authority in education, in the relationship of the sexes, in religious life, in public life — all this did not pass unnoticed in the advanced circles of the 18th century. And it can be said that, as a supreme ideal, it was opposed only by the reactionaries, while moderate thinkers considered it forever unattainable. Through the ideas of natural law and natural religion, and the materialistic concepts of Holbach (Système de la Nature, 1770) and La Mettrie which were broadcast and diffused through the channels of steadily growing and highly organised secret societies, all the humanitarian cosmopolites of the century were orientated intellectually towards a minimum of government, if not its total absence. Herder, Condorcet, Mary Wollstonecraft, and even —a little later — the young Shelley, all felt that the trend of the future was toward the humanisation of humanity and that this would inevitably render government superfluous.

Such was the situation on the eve of the French Revolution, when everybody was still unaware of all the forces for good and evil that a decisive blow at the old regime would set in motion. They lived surrounded by insolent exploiters of authority and all their age-old victims, but those forward-looking people desired the greatest liberty. They were people of discernment and they had high hopes, The long night of authority was about to come to an end.

2. William Godwin; the Illuminati; Robert Owen and William Thompson; Fourier and some of his followers.

A great revolution occurs when the river of evolution suddenly changes its course and bursts its banks in violent turbulence beyond the control of its navigators, who are cast adrift or drowned. But their work is carried on, under changed conditions, by their successors. Even those who manage to survive one phase of the revolution also perish or undergo a transformation, so that, when the storm has blown over, hardly anyone can exert a vital and wholesome influence on the new stage of evolution. In other words, revolution, like war, destroys, consumes or changes those who take part in it. It transforms them into authoritarians, whatever their previous bent may have been, and leaves them ill-prepared, after their revolutionary experience, to defend the cause of freedom.

Only those who have remained faithful to the revolution, those who have learned a new lesson from the faults committed by authority, and those who possess a revolutionary spirit of exceptional force, emerge unscathed from a revolution — Elisée Reclus, Louise Michel and Bakunin had these three qualities — whereas almost all the rest are weighed down by the fatal burden of authoritarianism, which is still inseparable from great popular upheavals.

Thus, after an initial period of a few months (1789 in France, 1917 in Russia) authoritarianism took the upper hand, and those 45 or more years before 1789 — the brilliant era of the Encyclopedists with their liberal and at times libertarian critique of the ideas and institutions of the past — were as nothing. And that century of political and social struggles in Russia up to 1917, was rendered vain and fruitless by the ensuing bitter clashes among conflicting interests for the conquest of power, that is, for the dictatorship.

This phenomenon can be neither denied or minimised. It is rooted in the enormous influence which authority exerts upon the human mind, and in the vast interests which are at stake when privilege and monopoly are threatened. Then it becomes a life-and-death struggle, and such a struggle, in an authoritarian world, is fought with the deadliest weapons.

In the early months of 1789, when the States General held their meetings in France, and again after 14 July, when the Bastille was taken, there were hours and days of high exultation, of generous, warm solidarity, and the entire world shared that joy. But in those very moments the counter-revolution was already plotting, and throughout the following period it conducted its relentless defence, openly or under cover. That is why the vanguard of the revolution, with all the general good will on its behalf, all the high and generous expressions of popular support, made very few gains after 14 July. The opposition accomplished everything, in those revolutionary days, through powerful thrusts expertly led by trained militants, and by seizing control of the entire government apparatus reinforced at that time in the interior of the country by the central dictatorship of the Committees and the local dictatorship of the Sections. Having secured a firm hold on the interior regimes, it established its centre of gravity in the armies. From one of these armies issued the dictatorship of its leader, Napoléon Bonaparte; then followed his coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire, his Consulate and his Empire — his dictatorship over the European continent.

The aristocracy was promptly converted into the ‘White Army’ of the émigrés. The peasants, seeking protection against the return of feudalism, allied themselves with the most authoritarian and militarily powerful government. The bureaucracy grew rich from the hunger of the masses or from provisions destined for the wars. Workers and artisans in the cities found themselves cheated on all sides, reduced to silence by harsh governments, delivered into the hands of a flourishing bourgeoisie and snatched by armies that were always greedy for human fodder.

Unsurprisingly, in this situation, the ultra-authoritarian communism of Babeuf and Buonarroti came to the fore in 1796, while during the most advanced period of revolution, from 1792 to 1794, socialist aspirations merged with the demands of more radical popular groups, those of Jacques Roux, Leclerc, Jean Varlet, Rose Lacombe and others. The Enragés, the most determined Hébertists, Chaumette, Momoro and also Anacharsis Cloots were men filled with a spirit of self-sacrifice, convinced advocates of direct popular action, and exasperated with the new revolutionary bureaucracy. It can be said of them only that they were good revolutionaries, although we do not know whether they had libertarian ideas, and Sylvain Maréchal had nothing to say on the subject. Buonarroti, however, inspired by the genuine socialism of Morelly (Morelly, Code de la Nature, 1755), saw in Robespierre the man who could bring about social justice. Thus all the socialists either allied themselves with the Reign of Terror or demanded that it be carried to an even greater degree. And the government either accepted and even solicited their adherence or sent to the guillotine and destroyed those among them who were too undisciplined. Jacques Roux and later Darthé killed themselves before the Tribunal; Varlet, Babeuf and others were executed.

The death sentence did not spare even those who held less advanced views than the men in power. Danton and Camille Desmoulins, as well as the Girondists, were condemned to death, while Condorcet escaped the guillotine only by committing suicide in prison. To dare to doubt the absolute centralisation, to be suspected of sympathy for federalism, meant death.

It has become traditional to consider it as an act of heroism on the part of revolutionaries to decree innumerable death sentences by the guillotine for their erstwhile comrades. From what we know of events in Russia over 15 years, we no longer believe in the heroism of certain men who could maintain their supremacy only through the ferocious suppression of those who did not recognise their omnipotence. It is a mode of action inherent in all authoritarian systems; it was practised by the Napoléons and Mussolinis with the same ferocity as by the Robespierres and the Lenins.

Thus after 1789 the libertarian idea declined in France. A spark of ultra-moderate and socially conservative liberalism lingered on in a few men who, thanks to their considerable personal means, were able to remain aloof from State careers — men whom Napoléon contemptuously dubbed ‘ideologues’. They reappeared on the political scene in 1814, and, after 1830, ended up by merging into the prosperous bourgeoisie of the reign of Louis Philippe.

In other European countries, beginning in 1792, the idea of expansion through armed revolution found some enthusiastic supporters, particularly in Italy, Belgium, Holland, Germany (in Mainz), Geneva and so on. But these wars of liberation, which created short-lived republics, soon came to be considered as simple wars of conquest, and national resentment in Spain, Austria, Germany and other countries grew to such an extent that Napoléon turned, in the eyes of nearly everyone, from a hero into a tyrant, and his fall in 1814 and 1815 was greeted with general relief.

We do not propose to discuss here the beneficial results of the French Revolution. We can only point out that, as the Russian system of government of the past 15 years has brought nothing of value to the cause of anarchism in our days, so it can be said that the French Revolution accomplished very little for the libertarian cause of that period. This libertarian cause was in the ascendant during the second half of the 18th century; authority was discredited and in a state of moral decay. Nevertheless the conflicts of power and of vested interests in the Assembly of 1789 put the old and new authorities in direct confrontation with each other so that, from then on, it became necessary to be either a reactionary or an ardent advocate of Republican, Consular, Imperial authority. To continue supporting constitutional or republican authority has always meant, from 1789 to this day, to support authoritarianism, even if it assumed the form of a syndicalist dictatorship.

‘Anarchism’ had to make a fresh start around 1840, with Proudhon, and then again, 40 years later, around 1880. In 1789 liberty lost its impetus in France and in all other nations of Europe; it was a great break in a fine flowering only just begun. What followed was a jumble of liberty and authority — the system of constitutional or republican majority rule, a lifeless spectacle filled with liberals in fair weather and conservatives in foul, incapable of standing up against the assaults of the massive reaction of our time; a spectacle filled with individuals who seem to have been steadily deteriorating in quality from 1789 to our day, individuals who inspire no sympathy and create no illusions. The shaky statism of the old regime was replaced by a severe and meticulous statism, the old militarism by the militarism of popular armies and compulsory conscription. Literature, philosophy and the arts exalted the State and the fatherland, which, under the old system, had been subjected, for a span of over fifty years, to a rigorous critique. Religious disbelief in those years was no longer in fashion, since authority is always religious and, when the need arises, makes a cult of religion, using the schools, the press and the barracks for its own purposes.

That entire period, from 1789 to 1815, was poor in intellectual growth; there was, instead, a large output of works contributing to the life of the State — roadworks, buildings, all equipment essential to administrative purposes — the army, large-scale communications, standardisation of the metric system, and so on.

It was only in England that the first work of a libertarian character appeared in February 1793, under the title of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (the second edition had Morals and Happiness in place of General Virtue and Happiness).

The author of this work, William Godwin, stated in his preface, dated 7 January 1793, how he had become convinced, about 1791, through the political writings of Jonathan Swift and of the Roman historians, that the monarchy was a system of government which was fundamentally corrupt. At about that time he had read Holbach’s Système de la Nature and the writings of Rousseau and Helvétius. He had conceived some of the ideas for his book much earlier but had only arrived at the desirability of a government simple to the highest degree (as he described his anarchist ideal) thanks to ideas suggested by the French Revolution. To that event he owed his determination to proceed with this work. He wrote it between 1789 and 1792, at a time when British public opinion had not yet been aroused against the French Revolution (this happened after his book was published). It is well known that only the high cost of the two volumes prevented them from being seized and condemned, since they were obviously not books destined for popular propaganda.

On considering the moral state of individuals and the role of the government, Godwin comes to the conclusion that the influence of governments on men is, and can only be, deleterious, disastrous. ‘May it not happen’, he states in his guarded but pregnant prose (2nd edition, vol. I, p. 5), ‘that the grand moral evils that exist in the world, the calamities by which we are so grievously oppressed, are to be traced to its defects in their source, and that their removal is only to be expected from its correction? May it not be found, that the attempt to alter the morals of mankind singly and in detail is an enormous and futile undertaking; and that it will then only be effectually and decisively performed, when, by regenerating their political institutions, we shall change their motives and produce a revolution in the influences that act upon them?’

Godwin also proposes to demonstrate the extent to which government renders men unhappy, and how this affects their moral development. He seeks to set forth the conditions of ‘political justice’, that is, a state of social justice, that would be best fitted to render men sociable (moral) and happy. The results he arrives at are certain conditions regarding property, public life and so on, which grant to the individual greater liberty, accessibility to the same means of existence, as well as that degree of social life and individual life which best suits him. All this to be attained voluntarily, at once, or gradually, through education, discussion and persuasion, but definitely not through the use of authoritarian tactics from the top down. This is the road he would chart for mankind’s future revolutions. He sent his book to the National Convention of France; it was passed on to the refugee German scholar Georg Forster, who read it with enthusiasm but died a few months later without having had a chance to publicly express his opinion of it.

On reading Political Justice even at this time, one becomes aware of temperate anti-governmentalism, well argued logically, while statism is demolished to the ground. For over 50 years this book served as a textbook for serious study by radicals and by many British socialists, and British socialism owes its great independence from statism to Godwin’s work. It was the influence of Mazzini’s ideas, the bourgeois outlook of Professor Huxley, the electoral ambitions and the professionalism of trade union leaders, which led, toward the middle of the 19th century, to a weakening of Godwin’s influence. However, his teachings came to life once more in poetry; they fascinated the young Shelley and speak to us again in his verse.

As for Godwin himself, his career was shattered on publication of this book. Although the work was not confiscated or prosecuted, nationalist and anti-socialist propaganda, going under the name of Anti-Jacobin’, at that time and for many years thereafter concentrated its attacks upon him and his ideas, which were strongly anticonformist on questions of religion, marriage and so on. Although he was convinced of the justice of his ideas, Godwin, lacking strength of character and sufficient courage, adopted a more moderate tone in the second edition, and took good care not to give his further writings the strongly independent cast which characterised his Political Justice in 1793. In a word, Godwin was intimidated; he never regained a position of challenge, though he never openly repudiated his ideas. This turn of events probably contributed to the fact that his ideas, though emphatically libertarian, did not have direct popular appeal. Another reason for their scant popularity, however, may have been that the English populace, suffering under the harsh persecution of the courts, was drawn to the terrorist tactics and authoritarian socialism which came from France, from the Convention and from Babeuf. The misery of labour in the new factories, the open harassment of workers’ associations, the insolence of the ruling aristocracy, turned the people on the road to authoritarianism and away from the libertarian course which could at least have prevented the replacement of the authority of one group by that of another.

Godwin shows his familiarity with the various critiques of property from Plato to Mably, and makes special references to a book by Robert Wallace (Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence — 1761) and to An Essay on the Right of Property in Land published some 12 years before his own work ‘by an ingenious inhabitant of North Britain’ [William Ogilvie]. There also existed at that time a movement of a clearly socialist character, led by Thomas Spence, who began to expound his theories in 1775. But there had been no authoritarian socialist theory presented to the public at large, or Godwin would have examined it. He merely confined himself to saying that ‘the systems presented by Plato and others are full of imperfections’, and concluded by pointing out the value of the arguments against property, which, he said, left their mark in spite of the imperfections of the systems. He also said that ‘the real great authoritarian systems were those of Crete (Minos), Sparta (Lycurgus), Peru (the Incas) and Paraguay (the Jesuit Missions)’ (Vol. II, p. 452, note).

About 12 years before publication of Godwin’s book, Professor Adam Weishaupt wrote his Anrede an die neu aufzunehmenden Ill[uminati] dirigentes, an address to be read at the reception of new administrators before the secret society of the so-called ‘Tiluminati’, which was founded in Bavaria and had spread throughout the German-speaking countries. As a result of persecutions carried on from 1784, this text, along with many other documents, had been confiscated. It was made public by order of the Bavarian government in 1787.

In this discourse the author first returns to the life without constraints led by primitive man. He then goes on to show how, with the growth of the population, society was organised originally for useful and defensive purposes; how society later degenerated into kingdoms and States, with the resulting subjugation of humanity (‘... nationalism took the place of love for one’s neighbours’). His tightly woven argument concludes with an evolutionary phase which will bring people into mutual relationships that will be more meaningful than those of States: ‘Nature has wrested people from savagery and brought them together in States. From the States we are now entering upon a new stage, more consciously chosen. New associations are being formed, in accordance with our own wishes, whereby we shall again return to our original point of departure’ (that is, to a life of freedom, but on a higher plane than our primitive condition) (Adam Weishaupt, Anrede an die neu aufzunehmenden Ill[uminati] dirigentes, p. 61). The States, which represent a transitional stage and are the source of all evil, are thus doomed to disappear and people will regroup themselves in a more reasonable manner. This, in a nutshell, is what Godwin was later to proclaim. Even the steps for bringing about the abolition of the States are fundamentally the same: wise education and persuasion, and to those Weishaupt also adds secret action, of which, however, no mention is made in this address but which was described and sustained in other documents of the ‘Illuminati’.

On this subject Weishaupt says:

These methods are the secret schools of knowledge, which at all times have been the archives (repositories) of nature and of human rights. With the use of these means humanity will lift itself from fallen conditions and the national States will disappear from the face of the earth without violence. Humanity will some day come to be a family, and the world will become a dwelling-place for more rational people. Each father of a family will be its priest and absolute master, just as Abraham and the patriarchs had been, and reason will be the only law for humanity. (Anrede ..., p. 80-81).

Apart from his antiquated style, and the references to religious tradition — characteristics of most of the secret societies and employed as protective colouration — Weishaupt’s reasoning as regards the condemnation of statism is as clear and conclusive as Godwin’s. His methods of persuasion and action resemble those of Bakunin in his Fraternité Internationale (International Brotherhood) and the Alliance (International Alliance of Social Democracy), which were to be at the very core of the great public socialist movements.

It matters little if Weishaupt and Godwin were not men of great personal courage. What matters is that both men built their anti-State critique in the 18th century on the same basis, and that both, having probably read the same advanced books of that century, and having likewise studied Greek and Roman thought, arrived at the same conclusions. Weishaupt did not, any more than did Godwin, envision an authoritarian socialism, that is, a socialist State that would make people happy. His conclusions led him to the elimination of States which, by separating people into factions of enemy patriots have sown fratricide amongst people, which are still maintaining and intensifying it and which cannot bring forth anything that is good since their very essence is evil.

The French Revolution caused profound changes even in the secret societies. I have elsewhere attempted, with the aid of documents from archives and original writing — some very difficult to trace, others more easily recovered — to probe the depths of these societies from the times of Babeuf and Buonarroti down to Mazzini. In one of the most renowned collections, I came upon an egalitarian Credo (of the Babeuf school) in Latin. In another I discovered writings concerning a liberation which was to be achieved through the initiative and supremacy of France — practically a dress rehearsal for the wars of the French Revolution. The basis of the Young Europe movement was, in the main, the creation of nation States. Later, in 1848, the secret society thus sought to aid in the creation of Slavic national organisations and their federation. Not later than the winter of 1863-64 Bakunin himself began secretly to gather followers with the aim of the destruction of the States and the reconstruction of a free society.

Some 70 or 80 years of authoritarian turmoil were to elapse before Godwin (1792) and Weishaupt (1782) were succeeded by the federalism of Proudhon, Pi y Margall, Pisacane and Bakunin.

The authoritarian socialism of various utopias and, from the 18th century onwards, even of well-documented works (Morelly, Mably, Charles Hall and others), had always been the reflection of their particular environments or a suggestion, a recommendation, at times an expression of homage addressed to ruling power. The utopias of Thomas More, or Campanella, of Bacon and of Harrington are the outgrowth of their environments, their projects, their personalities. Certain rulers had utopias addressed to them, that would make their subjects ‘still happier’, and a king in partibus (partial royalty). The father-in-law of Louis XV himself produced a utopia entitled Royaume de Dumocala (Kingdom of Dumocala). PJ. Jaunez Sponville and N. Bugnet published in 1808 La Philosophie du Ruvarebohni (The Philosophy of True Happiness) for Napoléon. Fourier also had the desire to attract the attention of the authorities (Lettre au Grand Juge, 1804), as Robert Owen did, when he wanted to appeal to the monarchs of the Holy Alliance in 1818. The Saint-Simonists, on the other hand, actually had a secret section designed for the ‘princely apostolate’, aimed at influencing princes (they did, in fact, succeed in converting the eldest son of Louis Philippe, who died in an accident a few years later).

In theory, ideally, the authoritarian systems were adapted to suit either the territorial or commercial dimensions or the financial interrelationships of the French Empire or of the great conservative States which succeeded it. Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte actually thought in terms of worlds. And if we should hail these broadened vistas, stretching far beyond the narrow confines of a nation, we must not forget that it is authority which controls and directs these vast domains, through the industrialists and technical experts who rule them, and, in the society of that period, through the emperors and kings, the leaders of high finance and the military. From this set-up it is but a step to the simple advocacy and then to actual attempts to seize the machinery of the State, as was done by the use of the coup de main of the Blanquists and the electoral action of members of the democratic and social party, the prototypes of the Social Democrats.

The State, so to speak, is rehabilitated and will be able to organise labour (Louis Blanc). A hodge-podge of all this is Marxism, that three-faced superdoctrine, which preaches simultaneously the Blanquism of dictatorship, achieved through coup de main (violent action) or coup d’état — or the conquest of power through electoral majority (as taught by Social Democracy) — or the simple, outright participation in bourgeois governments (as evidenced in its recent forms). It even preaches automatism, that is, self-elimination of capitalism at its final apogee, followed by its fall and the succession to power of the proletariat as its heir, according to the old adage: ‘The King is dead! Long live the King!’ We are still bogged down in this obscene mating of socialism with authority, a revolting union which has already spawned Fascism and other noxious miasma.

Above all, this infiltration of authority into socialism had caused a slackening in the growth of many fine socialist initiatives, such as those of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, fostered in the better part of the 18th century, and of many other men, the most important of them being William Thompson and Victor Considérant.

Robert Owen, who was familiar with Godwin’s work, exerted at that time a great and unique influence, due to his wide experience in the fields of industry and economics, his tenacious will and dedication, a thoroughly emancipated mind and great financial means. These assured his independence and granted him possibilities for action such as had never before been at the disposal of a vanguard social group. From 1791 to 1858 (a period of activity comparable to Malatesta’s) he did everything possible to formulate and promote a type of voluntary socialism which would be all-inclusive, reciprocal and technically equipped to meet all needs. To this end he made use of individual and collective experiments, argument, organisation and every means of propaganda.

If I have rightly understood Owen’s ideas, the problem of anarchism as a subject for consideration meant no more to him than the problem of the State. He was, in fact, searching for the best conditions required for an equitable co-operative system, which called for individual competence and goodwill, technical management and the necessary organisers. It was self-evident that in such co-operative organisations, which administer their own activities and are numerous and widespread in all the fields of useful and practical interrelationships, the State had no reason for being and there would be no one willing to pay for its maintenance.

Producers’ co-operatives (poorly developed) and consumers’ cooperatives (widely diffused) derive directly from Owen and ‘his comrades. And just as in these associations employers and merchants hold no position of importance — being eliminated in the turnover of direct production and distribution — these organisations, developed in true communities, in townships (free towns) as Owen envisioned them, would have little interest in subsidising the functionaries of a State that was no use to them.

This will to engage in direct production and distribution by people personally interested in the project, also received warm support in the work of William Thompson, an Irishman and author of the second great British libertarian book, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth, most conducive to True Happiness, applied to the newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth.

The similarity of this title to that of Godwin’s work indicates their close affinity. Whatever Godwin set forth concerning statism and its pernicious efforts, Thompson applied to his analysis of property. His book, however, discloses his own evolution; having started with a demand for the full product of labour as well as the regulation of distribution, he ended up with his own conversion to communism, that is, unlimited distribution. He published three other important books, in 1825, 1827 and 1830, and devoted himself increasingly to the task of bringing his ideas into realisation. He worked among the great masses of workers associated in useful and important activities, as well as with co-operative groups and so on. His death, in March 1833, was a great loss for British socialism, which had at that time grown too individualistic, both in its ideas and the activities of other men — Owen not excepted — whose scattered experiments Thompson could have co-ordinated.

Among these independent men, one who stood out, though he was also isolated, was John Gray, mutualist. (The most important of his writings published between 1825 and 1848 is The Social system: a treatise on the principle of exchange. Edinburgh 1831). Another was Thomas Hodgskin, as also William Pare, a very moderate follower of Thompson. In practical life, numerous producers’ co-operatives were organised, which were kept apart from the State and from parties by their members and their administrators, elected directly from their own midst. But these groups, likewise, turned into mechanisms separated from the true struggle for emancipation. Direct attempts to co-ordinate their forces with those of the trade unions and to develop a fruitful co-operation were not successful, and even Guild Socialism, their most recent form, has proved to be very feeble.

Anti-statist ideas were very much alive in the co-operatives and had long existed in the trade unions for the simple reason that the workers, allied against their masters, expected little good to come from these same masters turned legislators and operating in the class which held power in its hands. Meanwhile the principle of the conquest of public power through elections was at work, subtly undermining the workers’ independence; eventually, through the struggles which culminated in the Reform Act of 1832, the influence of Chartism and the steady infiltrations of opportunism, this independence was gradually sacrificed.

Godwin’s anti-governmental logic (1793) had such an impact that, for many generations, it had been almost an intellectual testimonium paupertatis (proof of poverty) to assign to the State an innocuous political and social role; that is, the role of an inept and prejudiced intruder. It was the young Tories of the type of Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield) who promoted the legend of a social State. Radical thinkers, though they were anti-socialist, advocated the reduction of the State to a minimum, among them particularly Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill and even Charles Dickens, who satirised the governmental apparatus (Herbert Spencer, The Right to Ignore the State, a chapter from his Social Statics, 1850; John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859; Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, 1855-1857).

In France, Charles Fourier did all that was humanly possible to foster a socialism of voluntary associations and to formulate the best conditions for it. This type of socialism, which advances from one stage to another through argument and prophetic vision,’ toward sublime perfection culminating in real anarchism, was slowly shaped by Fourier from its first stumbling steps. It was he who applied to socialism a study of technical perfection and exact proportions, essential to the carrying out of any task, whether elementary or highly advanced. His voluminous Traité de l'association domestique et agricole (Treatise on Domestic and Agricultural Associations), his Sommaire, published in 1823, and his many other writings bear testimony to his work. There was the great work of Victor Considérant, Destinée sociale (Social Destiny). From the works of these two authors and of other Fourierists, such as Ferdinand Guillon and the independent Edouard de Pompéry, (Guillon in Démocratie pacifique (Paris), 8 Dec. 1850; de Pompéry in an article in L’Humanité (Paris), 25 Oct. 1845), who carry Fourierism to a concept very close to communist anarchism, one may get a splendid libertarian education which rises above all sectarian partisanship.

Fourier was in a position to know the ideas of association advocated by many men in the 18th century — among others those of the little-known L’Ange, or Lange, of Lyons, during the French Revolution. Other socialists also favoured association and federation — men such as Constantin Pecqueur, who would never have thought of handing over labour, with its hands tied behind its back, to the State, as proposed by the communist Jacobin, Louis Blanc. The ‘Social Commune’ (Commune sociétaire) was nowhere as well presented as it was in the writings of Considérant.

In short, we can say that many roads led from Fourierism to libertarian socialism, and that men like Elie Reclus felt a lifelong attraction towards these two ideas of association and Commune. That is to say, they felt that these two concepts, in a large sense, constituted one idea: the endeavour to organise harmonious life outside that useless and vicious structure, the State. (This chapter summarises pp. 67-102 of Der Vorfrühling der Anarchie, and demands, however, a much more thorough study of the old English, Italian, Spanish and other publications.)

3. Individualist anarchism in the United States, England and elsewhere. The early American libertarian intellectuals.

The great struggle of North America for its independence from central British power had unfolded from 1775 to 1783 — all the forms of constitutional protest, of insurrection, eventually converted into war (1775). From the Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776, to the final peace treaty of 1783, there were seven more years of war, carried out chiefly by the American patriots together with those who had come from Europe to help them, and the armies in the pay of England. This conflict was dominated by a strictly governmental outlook. It did not concern itself with social conditions or Negro slavery; the voices of those who advocated a minimum of government or decentralisation, who advocated real liberty, went unheard. What they finally hammered out in their constitution was a miracle compared with the European monarchies, since they formulated a system within which certain local autonomies had a chance of development and were, initially, tolerated. Nevertheless it was a formidable governmental apparatus, almost unalterable, and identical, in its subtle guarantees reserved for power, with the open absolutism of the old monarchies.

This was fully recognised by some men, including statesmen like Thomas Jefferson, and the best of them fought this new hidden tyranny. But the constitutional apparatus was so ingeniously constructed that, while it made it easy to strengthen authority, and to interpret what already existed in a more authoritarian sense, it was impossible to reduce this authority to any great extent. The people were being led, just as they are in monarchies. Their lives and their activities were limited or expanded, at the will of the masters; that is, at the will of the government under the domination of vested interests.

This state of affairs soon aroused discontent in rebellious spirits. Voltairine de Cleyre and C. L. James gave expression to these first feelings of revolt on the part of those who, while they were not anarchists in the present accepted sense of the word, were nevertheless filled with horror at the spectacle of statism and the insolent domination of monopolists over the natural riches of half a continent.

In the cities of the East along the Atlantic Coast, there was quite a lot of democratic ferment, assuming the form of working-class socialism; and precisely because it beheld politicians unctuously mouthing words like ‘liberty’ in their rhetorical outbursts, it reacted by turning authoritarian, rigid, statist. Godwin’s great work was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1796. The Irishman John Driscol (Equality; or, A History of Lithconia) and J. A. Etzler (The Paradise within the Reach of all Men) wrote a utopia and a dithyramb to human liberation by the machine, seeking in their work to express as little authoritarianism as possible. All in all, however, out of those cities which were so rapidly industrialised and transformed into arenas of politics and centres of finance, there never came a real, all-inclusive socialism, while workers organised themselves in ways parallel to the capitalists. Similarly, in the immense agricultural regions, where pioneers staked out their individual claims to the land, people were at work taming the wilderness. Not yet receptive to new ideas, they let themselves be fed or starved intellectually by the Church, the press and the politicians.

In this vast stronghold of authoritarianism and conservatism a new socialist and anarchist movement sprang up and flourished. It was active and diversified, full of the spirit of dedication and relatively numerous in membership; yet it remained practically on the fringe of society. People took notice of these men occasionally to profess admiration for them, but more often to persecute them. Quite as often, however, especially in earlier times, they were simply left alone to live in peace, much as religious groups and private individuals were. Such, as I see it, was the interplay of individual and environment for about a century after 1776. There were, above all, the wide open spaces, the distance, the opportunity to build a new life. There was land that was still comparatively free in the United States — something Europe had not known for 1,500 years, ever since the fall of the Romans. And this circumstance exerted a powerful, exhilarating influence upon the minds of people. In those of an altruistic bent it generated American individualist anarchism; in those who had religious inclinations, it took the form of libertarian spiritualism. In the following fifty years, however, with the consolidation of authoritarianism, the growth of the political machine, and man’s alienation, these two phases suffered a decline; they still remain among the finest pages in the history of anarchism.

From the end of the 18th century onwards, there was a small world which led an existence apart from the main currents of American life. It consisted of co-operative communities of immigrants joined in distinctive religious sects of a social tendency, in ways quite similar to the first monasteries in much earlier times. Later socialist experimentation was introduced in these communities by Robert Owen himself (‘New Harmony’) and by others who were influenced by the ideas of Fourier. Inevitably, the groups whose members were not made to conform or forced to submit to discipline or religious precepts led a disturbed existence, and ‘New Harmony’, a colony of 800 persons, ended, in the course of a number of years, with a good deal of disharmony. This led one of the colonists, Josiah Warren, a man of resolute and tenacious character, to the realisation that social community living, conducted in a spirit of altruism, was a practical impossibility, precisely because of the natural diversity of individuals. From there he went on to deduce that social living should be completely individualised, that is, that there should be strict reciprocity in matters of equal exchange of goods. He eventually concluded that the exchange value of a product should be set on the basis of the time required to make such a product or perform the service — founded on each person’s sense of moral responsibility.

Warren also came to repudiate any compulsion that a collective group might impose on individuals for the performance of public services. He declared that it is up to individual members, if they so desire, to make arrangements for any public services to be performed by persons hired and paid by them on the basis of the time spent in such work. These ideas, which he drew from his experiences in ‘New Harmony’ from 1825 onwards, he first applied, starting in May 1827, in his ‘Time Store’ in Cincinnati (a store in which he himself bought and sold goods on the basis of the time used in making these goods). He propagandised this system by his personal actions, his writings and in the publication The Peaceful Revolutionist, published in Cincinnati in 1833 — in all probability, the first anarchist periodical — and also carried on a correspondence with British co-operatives. In a word, he succceded in arousing interest in his experiences and his ideas. His books, Equitable Commerce (1846) and Practical Details in Equitable Commerce (1852) had a wide circulation.

In New York particularly, in 1851-52, Stephen Pearl Andrews gave these ideas wide publicity through lectures and his great book, The Science of Society (1851), in two parts, one of which was entitled The True Constitution of a Government on the Sovereignty of the Individual and the second Cost the Limit of Price: a Scientific Means for Honesty in Commerce as a Fundamental Principle for the Solution of the Social Question. Andrews participated in a discussion, originating from a ‘Free Love League’, with Henry James and Horace Greeley, in the pages of the New York Tribune in 1852; it was later published in one volume under the title Love, Marriage and Divorce. Many followers of this idea lived for some ten years, from 1851 on, in Trialville, better known as ‘Modern Times’, on Long Island, a short distance from New York. These people lived each in their own way, exchanging goods locally among themselves, with the use of labour notes. It was primarily a community for independent living, without any official authority, which attracted good elements and demonstrated that liberty unites and compulsion divides men. The American Civil War (1862-1865), with its economic consequences, resulted in the dispersal of this community.

These ideas were taken up by others — men and women — logical thinkers of a tenacious character Amongst these were: W. B. Greene, Lysander Spooner, Ezra M. Heywood, Charles T. Fowler, Benjamin R. Tucker, Moses Harman, E. C. Walker, Sidney H. Morse, Marie Louise David, Lois Waisbrooker and Lillian Harman. There were notable periodicals — The Social Revolutionist, The Word, The Radical Review, Liberty (published by Benjamin R. Tucker in Boston, later in New York, 1881-1907), Lucifer, Fair Play and many others.

These individualist anarchists fought against statism, against the intervention of collectives and their functionaries in the life of individuals, against economic powers granted to monopoly (issuance of notes, and so on), against the subjugation of individuals by marriage and the family. They were also hostile to things that were done in the name of State socialism and even anarchist socialism. Many of them concerned themselves chiefly with the financial question, others with personal liberty and sex life freed from all constraints. The only social movement that succeeded in holding the interest of some of them was the single tax organisation, started by Henry George (Progress and Poverty). On this subject there has been and there still is a certain meeting of minds. These are the anarchist single-taxers, for whom The Twentieth Century, published by Hugh O. Pentecost, was the source and the inspiration for some forty years. The members of this group, except for some defections, frequently maintained neighbourly relations with the libertarian communists and with all good causes supported by the various American labour movements. On the other hand, it should be pointed out that Tucker was ferocious in his anti-communism (against Kropotkin, Most and others); nevertheless he translated Bakunin’s God and the State in 1883, and thus helped disseminate some of Bakunin’s ideas in the United States and in England.

Throughout the more recently settled and hence still rather primitive territories of the United States, conditions were more or less similar, and if a strong voice had been raised there in affirmation of the idea of equitable exchange as against the greed and fraud of a minority, this principle of fair play might have prevailed. But it did not prevail, at least at that time. Thus monopoly kept growing ever more powerful until it took over complete control of the State, following the Civil War. During and after the War, capitalism laid its hands upon the land and its riches, and, within sixty years, founded the most powerful plutocratic empire that has ever been known.

Warren died in 1874 in possession of all his illusions, which Tucker (born in 1854) later defended against all evidence. He particularly stressed mutual aid among fair-minded men, directed against monopoly which regiments all the people in its service, destroying personal independence — the first pillar of mutualism. A second pillar is social feeling, that is, the desire for and pleasure in functioning socially, and therefore fairly and unselfishly. If we postulate the existence of such a social feeling, then these anti-socialists were in fact very sociable, in the true sense of the word. And a great deal of misunderstanding would certainly have been avoided had it been made clear their actions were not motivated by the determination not to go through authoritarian socialism. To go beyond that, to advocate one system and one only, as insistently argued from Warren to Tucker, is real sectarianism, which was hardly in accord with the amplitude of vision some of these men possessed.

In practice, the main strand of this movement, originally many-sided and diversified, was reduced to direct exchange (mutualism) or drifted away into monetary reform ideas. Its other strands concerned personal liberty and sexual liberty, which flourished in the times of Heywood and Harman. These attained a certain degree of success through the growing liberalisation of customs and, especially, because Neo-Malthusianism acquired American citizenship under the sobriquet of Birth Control.

Those old militants are dead now, some of them driven to suicide by systematic persecution. The younger generation is content with the greater social improvements in effect today; they are not bothered by the problems of liberty and personal dignity which engaged their predecessors. Now, in our times of unrestrained statism, when individualist anarchism should be proclaimed, it is no longer active or functions in feeble and ineffective ways.

These ideas very quickly reached England, through the correspondence of Josiah Warren, who sought to open a breach in Owenism. He had very little success. We may mention Ambrose Caston Cuddon, the leader of a small group in the years between 1850 and 1870 and until his death at an advanced age. Stephen Pearl Andrews’ book and the ‘Modern Times’ colony awakened a new interest in such ideas and Cuddon’s group assumed the name of ‘London Confederation of Rational Reformers’ (August 1853). In October of that year it published a pamphlet setting out its principles, probably written by Cuddon. These men came from the socialist movement of Robert Owen and Bronterre O’Brien, while William Pare, who was also interested (1855), was a close friend of William Thompson. We might also mention Colonel Henry Clinton. In England, this individualism was permeated with the socialist spirit and, from the little that is known, it may be inferred that, on the British scene, and with the exception of Cuddon, Warren’s ideas were probably reabsorbed in a socialism of direct popular action which distrusts the State.

It is a strange fact that, until about 1885, this American individualist anarchism should have passed unobserved in the European socialist world, except for its repercussions in England, which we have already noted, and which, in their turn, must have’ escaped notice on the continent. I make exception of Stephen Pearl Andrews and ‘Modern Times’; his ideas and the founding of the colony were discussed in detail in the London weekly The Leader in 1851 (it was then a democratic organ with a wide circulation). Henry Edger, who was responsible for this work, lived in ‘Modern Times’; he was a Positivist and carried on correspondence with Auguste Comte directly from the colony. If The Sovereignty of the Individual was so strongly affirmed by Andrews in 1851, is it just through pure chance that Pi y Margall wrote in his Reaction and Revolution (Madrid, 1854): “Our principle is the absolute sovereignty ‘of the individual; our ultimate aim is the absolute destruction of power and its replacement by contract; our means are the decentralisation and continuing transformation of the existing powers”?

Pi y Margall must certainly have known the two famous libertarian works of 1851, the Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siécle (General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th century) of Proudhon and the Social Statics of Herbert Spencer. Why should he not have known, as well, Stephen Pearl Andrews’ book, discussed in The Leader, a journal which gave so much information on the progressive movement in Spain? Besides, in Cadiz, in 1854, a Spanish translation, of relatively little importance, of a book by the very same Andrews (The Basic Outline of Universology ...) appeared.

There was general knowledge of ‘Modern Times’, through an article by Moncure D. Conway which appeared in The Fortnightly Review, a great British journal, in July 1865, and which was even discussed in Russia, in Chernyshevsky’s old review Sovremennik. Elie Reclus must have met some of these American anarchists when he visited the United States and he collaborated, in 1877, on The Radical Review, under the editorship of Tucker. Tucker himself made a trip to London in 1874, where he met Cuddon, then eightythree years old, and then went on to France and Italy. He began his translations of the voluminous works of Proudhon, which are the first American editions. It is also known that Elie Reclus knew Tucker and The Radical Review in 1878, just as Tucker met Elisée Reclus through Elie in Paris in 1889. But the Reclus brothers felt themselves so far removed, in their generous communism, from the tight, meticulous concept of equitable exchange as expounded by the Americans that they did not consider it necessary or important to make mention of these ideas in their European milieu.

Some of these individualists must no doubt have been present at the famous 12th Session of the International in New York, composed entirely of Americans of various shades of opinion. This session caused much vexation to Marx as it failed to submit to one of his henchmen; there was nothing left for him but to have it expelled. One of the members of this session attended the Hague Congress in 1872, but was not recognised as a delegate. It was discovered that there were also spiritualists and free-lovers who attended as members; this circumstance furnished sufficient pretext for the Marxist majority to eject the American delegate.

On the occasion of the events following the violent railroad strike of 1877 in Pittsburgh, some young individualists in Boston took a strong position and Morse wrote a vehement pamphlet (So the Railway Kings Itch for an Empire). From this youthful group came, in January 1881, the journal The An-archist, in Boston. Its first number had a tremendous circulation; the second number, while still in preparation, was stopped by the police.

In Boston, if the opinions and wishes of these young people had had their way, the American ideas would have taken their place side by side with the socialist revolutionary ideas of Most and of French communist anarchism. Their efforts were shattered, in spite of the fact that Liberty, founded by Tucker in 1881, for all its theoretical rigidity, showed at the beginning a slight degree of solidarity with international revolutionaries, Russian nihilists, et al.

This, I can truthfully say, is all contact I remember having observed between these American anarchists and those of Europe for a period of over fifty years until 1881. Neither Proudhon nor Bakunin nor Elisée Reclus nor Déjacque nor Coeurderoy spoke of these men, although three out of these five had lived or had spent some time in the United States, and Cuddon went to London on 10 January 1862, as president of a British workers’ delegation to welcome Bakunin on his return from Siberia.

On 6 August 1881, Liberty, with Tucker as editor, appeared. It was a fighting journal contesting the right of collectivists and libertarian communists, and even Kropotkin, to call themselves anarchists. In reply it was maintained that individualists could not be considered anarchists in so far as they indirectly recognised private property, and so on. It is my opinion that there was very little mutual knowledge between these men. Nothing was known in Europe of American anarchism for the previous fifty years, just as there was very little knowledge in America concerning European events in the same fifty-year period. There was ample room for both movements to function without any interference on either side, so that the one was hardly aware of the existence of the other.

Liberty had a small circulation in London where a British printer, Henry Seymour founded The Anarchist in March 1885. Honesty appeared in Melbourne, Australia, in April 1887. In England the small movement wasted its energies, a few years later, in financial undertakings such as the free issuance of paper money and other panaceas. These activities engrossed all the efforts of a great number of socialists who then never found their way back to the real ideological road. In Germany, as well, similar activities developed later (the new physiocrats, Silvio Gesell, ‘Free Money’), all of them fruitless. These undertakings cannot succeed without the possession of power, and if the power were available there would be no need for these measures, other things would have to be done.

Quite independently of these tendencies, which were conceived in good faith, the anti-socialist bourgeoisie (which is also anti-statist, being hostile to any social intervention on the part of the State to protect the victims of exploitation — in the matter of working hours, hygienic working conditions and so on), and the greed of unlimited exploitation, had stirred up in England a certain agitation in favour of a pseudo-individualism, an unrestrained exploitation. To this end, they enlisted the services of a mercenary pseudo-literature. I refer to the ‘Liberty and Property Defence League’ of the years 1880-1890, and other similar publications, which played with doctrinaire and fanatical ideas in order to project a species of ‘individualism’ that was absolutely sterile, and a species of ‘non-interventionism’ that would let a man die of hunger rather than offend his dignity.

Thence, step by step, we reach, around 1890, absolute ‘voluntaryism’; a humane and vigorously anti-statist idea proclaimed by Auberon Herbert. However, all this was only dilettantism — ineffective measures which did not prevent the enormous growth of the evil of authoritarianism during the forty years which followed.

Anarchism, as effectively formulated by Tucker in his Instead of a Book (New York, 1893; reproduces the most important parts of Tucker's articles in Liberty), is found again in the German-language journal Libertas (Boston, 1888; eight issues). Much later again, it was revived by the young German poet John Henry Mackay, who, around 1888-89, was inspired by the ideas of Max Stirner, Proudhon and Tucker. His books, Die Anarchisten (1891), Der Freiheitssucher (1920) and a third volume, revealed his responsiveness to these three concepts. His efforts were supported by certain journals and pamphlets published in Germany. Mackay died in 1933.

Outside these developments, American anarchist individualism was presented in France and Belgium, in some periodicals, and by writers who certainly did not personally accept it or embrace it in its entirety. There were also a few repercussions in Scandinavian countries. In present-day American propaganda it is called ‘mutualism’, and, as such, has found some followers in Italy. On the whole, it seems to me, there is clear justification for this state of affairs in the present world situation, which is a good deal more complex than it was when Josiah Warren set up his ‘Time Store’ in 1827. If there is a need to pass beyond the primitive forms of communism, there is as much need to pass beyond those of individualism.

I need not speak here of what is called ‘individualism’ in the libertarian socialist movements of France, Italy and other countries, since these have no relation to the American movement.

What I have called American libertarian spiritualism is summed up in the ideas and opinions of a small number of intellectuals in the United States, men and women of high integrity, who, chiefly in the years 1830-1860 and more particularly 1840-1850, dedicated themselves to freedom in their lives and actions, on a deistic religious basis. They were animated by the humanitarian spirit of the 18th century, the social spirit manifested in the writings of Fourier and Owen, a critical spirit which made them see the evil done by authority throughout history. Of this they had a living demonstration before them, in the shameful slavery of the Negroes, which they were forced to see erected before their eyes as a legal institution. We know that the defenders of slavery retorted cynically by holding up before their critics the horrors of the enslavement of the Whites in the factories. Now, one evil is certainly not lessened by counterbalancing it with another. The only way out is to fight both, and the abolitionists maintained, quite logically, that a society brutalised by Negro slavery lacked the moral fibre to do anything about the slavery of the Whites. So far as the bourgeoisie was concerned, the men it considered most dangerous at that time were those who wanted to destroy slavery immediately rather than those who spoke of a socialism to come in the distant future or those who, living in small communities, put their social convictions into practice. The men we are speaking of belonged to both categories — abolitionists of the type of William Lloyd Garrison on the one hand, and socialists of the Brook Farm on the other. These were men and women like Emerson, W. E. Channing, Margaret Fuller, Frances Wright, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others. It might be said that whatever there was of civilisation in North America at that time, was allied, closely or remotely, with that high-minded group in old Massachusetts — so different from the Massachusetts of these days, which has permitted the murder of two notable Italian anarchists whom we knew.

The most distinguished figure of this circle, from the libertarian point of view, was Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden: or Life in the Woods (1854) and of the famous essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849).

Walt Whitman, in my opinion, is quite a different type. His mind has a broad libertarian sweep, to a degree, but his enthusiastic cult of force brings him closer to the authoritarian, as I see it.

There were some other truly fine Americans, who were won for the good cause and, above all, for a free humanity; Ernest Crosby was one of the best.

(This chapter summarises pages 103-132 of my book Der Vorfrühling der Anarchie, Berlin 1925. I may refer also to my article Anarchism in England fifty years ago, in Freedom (London), Nov.-Dec. 1905, which gives information on Ambrose Caston Cuddon, otherwise completely forgotten.)

4. Proudhon and Proudhonism in different countries, in particular in France, Spain and Germany.

The early liberal aspirations of 1789 were soon followed by an intensification of authoritarianism during the French Revolution, and it took another fifty years before a powerful voice of accusation and defiance against all authority was again raised in France. This was the voice of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The libertarian critique of the 18th century, smothered by the sharp turn towards authority, was reborn with him, and, it must be said for a long time to come, in him and in his country only. He had the good sense to understand that, in those fifty years, nothing happened but a multiplication of authorities, that is, of new forms of feudalism. There was the feudalism of the bureaucracy of the centralised State, of the reorganised army and the Church, of the bourgeoisie, whose only concern was self-enrichment; the conservative spirit of the land-owning peasantry, and its hope of domination over the world of production, fed by the newly-emergent socialist hierarchies. These same producers groaned under the heavy yoke of all these oppressions. Proudhon alone in 1840 confronted this array of forces with his call for anarchism. He exposed the evil inherent in all authority, whether religious, statist, proprietary or socialist. With him was born ‘integral socialism’ — the socialism of real and complete emancipation.

Here are a few lines from his Confessions d’un Révolutionnair:

Capital, which in the political field is analogous to government, in religion has Catholicism as its synonym. The economic idea of capitalism, the politics of government or of authority, and the theological idea of the Church are three identical ideas, linked in various ways. To attack one of them is equivalent to attacking all of them, as all the philosophers now well know. What capital does to labour, and the State to liberty, the Church does to the spirit. This trinity of absolutism is as baneful in practice as it is in philosophy. The most effective means for oppressing the people would be simultaneously to enslave its body, its will and its reason. If socialism is to reveal its truly positive aspect, free from all mysticism, all it will have to do is denounce the idea of this trinity. (1849; quoted from 1868 edition, pp 232-233)

This is what Bakunin repeated in 1867, with his concrete enunciation of federalism, socialism and anti-theologism. A few years later, the Spanish and Italian Internationalists called it anarchism, collectivism and atheism. This is intellectual, political and social emancipation, which implies moral emancipation, and, upon this basis, the free development of a mature and regenerated humanity. Godwin and Proudhon were thus the first to show this road. And since their work was the expression of truly free thinkers, it matters little if their propositions and detailed suggestions were imperfect. When a great new idea is born, it takes time for its applications to assume a really practical form. Let us take electricity. Its theoretical possibilities were already known in Godwin’s time, and still better yet, fifty years later, in Proudhon’s time; however, its practical and complete applications came into general use only another fifty years later. So far as socialism was concerned, Godwin and Proudhon possessed less, in applications or tested experiments, than the chemists and technicians of their day did on the subject of electricity.

I shall not attempt here to outline all the practical activities of Proudhon. Their gradual development may be examined in his notes and correspondence. Daniel Halévy started this study in his ample but unfinished work (La Jeunesse de Proudhon, 1913). It is marvellous to see Proudhon’s awareness of the authoritarian evil which had made a massive invasion into France. At that precise historical moment he set himself, with great enthusiasm and good faith, to the task of destroying its not yet fully developed authoritarian form, that is, its old system. We follow, for twenty-five years, Proudhon’s dissection of authority and his efforts to unite men for common action that would put them outside its grip. Thus authority, deprived of the ‘voluntary servitude’ of those who feed it, would perish by itself, of sheer exhaustion and impotence. It is of little importance whether the first measures proposed were realisable or not. It is certain that all of them had as their basis man’s improvement, his conscious social action, the exercise of the primary condition for all human community living — equality and reciprocity (mutualism). The problem was formulated in these terms: what can be demanded and expected from a normally social man is this reciprocity as the minimum, while magnanimity (communism) would be the maximum. Nothing is easier to presuppose or promise than this magnanimity, which will surely come into being some day. In the mean time, however, it is only possible to introduce a little ordinary honesty into human relations. Warren’s equitable exchange and Proudhon’s mutualism aspired precisely to this practical and moderate end.

Proudhon nonetheless had faith in people’s associative and federative tendencies, which have established local and general groups among them to suit their economic needs and their true existence. These forces were being attacked by centralism and statism, in the interest of monopolies of power and property. To reestablish the free activity of associations and federations against such intervention of monopoly is the task to be achieved. This continued effort would bring about the isolation of the States and eventually their liquidation, and would result in association and federation of organisations of true social usefulness in accordance with their needs and without authoritarian interference.

Proudhon is chiefly known through a limited number of works, especially Qu’est-ce que la Propriété? ou Recherches sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement (What is Property? or an Inquiry into the principle of law and of government) of 1840, the first essay, followed by others, addressed to Professor Adolphe Blanqui (brother of revolutionary Auguste Blanqui) and the Fourierist Considérant, as well as the explanations addressed to the Public Minister (the king’s Attorney-General) in 1841 and 1842; Les Confessions d’un Révolutionnaire pour servir a l'histoire de la révolution de février (The Confessions of a Revolutionary, to serve towards a history of the February revolution), which analyse particularly the manoeuvres of the government and the mystifications and stupidities committed by the authoritarian parties during part of 1848. (Written in the same spirit is Louis Ménard’s Prologue d’une Révolution. Février-Juin 1848, Paris 1849, published at the office of Le Peuple, Proudhon’s daily paper.) There is also the Idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siécle (General Idea of the revolution in the 19th century); De la justice dans la révolution et dans l’église (Concerning justice in the revolution and in the church); Du principe fédératif et de la nécessité de reconstituer le parti de la révolution (Concerning the federative principle and the need for the reconstruction of the party of the revolution); De la capacité politique de la classe ouvriére (Concerning the political capacity of the working class); and, finally, the collection of his Correspondence, not counting a great number of writings not mentioned here. It is a monumental oeuvre. Its insight and analysis still retain its powerful impact when we consider the situations and problems which weigh crushingly upon us today and which still await a just solution.

Proudhon makes a vivid analysis of governments, politicians, finances, the bourgeoisie, nationalism, wars and the prowling hands of all these institutions in the people’s pockets on innumerable occasions; during the reigns of pure bourgeoisie (Louis Philippe), of the Jacobin revolutionaries (1848), of Caesarism during imperial and military dictatorship, and of European nationalism, the dominant factor since 1859, from which derived that series of wars in which we are constantly embroiled. For want of another Proudhon, since we do not have one in our time, we have to extract from his work useful teachings that would be of great service to our modern libertarians, who nevertheless have to find their own way from theory to practice and to the critique of our present-day conditions, as Proudhon did in his time. This does not call for a slavish imitation; it implies using his work to inspire us and enable us to profit by his experience.

Proudhon could foresee as early as 1859 what harm nationalism was to do, and showed the ways to federalism. He also foresaw the aberrations of the workers, induced by authoritarian politics, and showed the way of direct economic action. Unfortunately, his death occurred less than four months after the formation of the International Workers Association (18 January 1865).

A thinker like Proudhon could only formulate practical propositions which were of a personal and individual character; this, of course, applies as well to the theories of all the other independent socialists, who could not help projecting their own personalities into their work. It is a tactic in warfare to goad the enemy into exposing and compromising himself, and it is a lack of judgement on the part of the masses to be influenced by the outcome of such conflicts, on afield of battle arbitrarily chosen. So Proudhon, especially under provocation by his adversaries, poured forth a plethora of concrete projects which were premature and of necessity doomed to failure. These are now recognised as marginal. His great, fundamental work remains: the critique of authority; economic action and any other human action of a direct character; federation as the only way which excludes rivalry and war, and the ‘pact’, serving as a link, always to be temporary and revocable, between the parties individuals or groups — which determines the nature of their reciprocal relationships, once they have personally chosen to enter into such relationships.

These ideas, in themselves, had to be thoroughly understood, deeply felt and put into practice by individuals who themselves were courageous thinkers. As a matter of fact, it was impossible to bring together many people with the aim of making some practical application of Proudhon’s ideas; and when this did take place, the results turned out to be mediocre; hence the inevitable defeat was erroneously attributed to a defect in the Proudhonian idea. Even when such experiments were discontinued, we could not speak of the definitive disappearance of Proudhonism. His ideas still remained alive. And all our movements today would have greater vitality if our militants drew inspiration from the essential principles of Proudhon’s thought.

All individuals of intellectual stature, in Europe as well as America, were made aware of social ideas principally through the Saint-Simonist theories, and of the condition of the working class through observing its miserable state, the workers’ associations and their revolts, in England, in Lyons and elsewhere. In the same manner, a great many of them were impressed by Proudhon’s anti-authoritarian critique, directed either against the State of that period or against authoritarian socialism, which professed to represent the shape of things to come in the future. It may be said that, for many years, let us say from 1840 to 1870 at any rate, the claims of authoritarian socialism were frustrated by Proudhon alone; he was a force that touched peoples’ minds to the quick — a phenomenon not seen since the times of Voltaire, Rousseau or Diderot. Of course, this influence could not produce results equal to the full import of Proudhon’s ideas, and those who were most powerfully influenced could only carry on as his partial and imperfect successors.

In France, we could cite many people, either personal friends of Proudhon’s, such as Georges Duchêne, Charles Beslay, Gustave Chaudey and others, or youthful followers of 1860-1870, such as Robert Luzarche, Vermorel, or workers from the first syndicates and the International, among them Henri Tolain, or writers who came after 1870, like Chevalet, Perrot, Beauchery and others — aside from the Blanquists and the survivors of the followers of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Cabet, Pierre Leroux et al of 1860-1870; every socialist was influenced by Proudhon to a greater or lesser degree, since he was the only socialist who was read at that time. If the idea of the Paris Commune had authoritarian roots in the affirmation of the Commune of 1793-94 and libertarian social roots in Fourierism (Considérant), it stemmed likewise from the Proudhonian negation of the State, from federation as opposed to Statist centralisation; in a word, from anarchism. Thus, in 1868, publicly proclaimed one of the young poets of the time, Eugéne Vermersch, who wrote the Père Duchêne of the Commune, calling himself ‘atomist’ or ‘anarchist’. In sharp contrast to this authentic intellectual influence was the influential performance of Proudhon’s unworthy heirs, such as Tolain in the International, whose feeble defence of mutualism was scarcely heard amid the increasing clamour for collectivism.

In Belgium there was a certain number of individuals, in the decades between 1830 and 1870, whose thinking was more liberal because they were not distracted, as the French were, by the authoritarianism prevailing in Paris or by the incessant conflicts of interests and parties. Belgium, where Proudhon spent several years in exile, was the country where Proudhonian ideas were widely debated and propagated, and where they came into direct contact with non-authoritarian socialist concepts. I refer to that most interesting period of the Rive gauche (1864-66) and of Liberté (1867- 73) in Brussels. It is there that we find a revolutionary, socialised Proudhonism more or less-in its original modifications or applications. This independent Proudhonism is also found in the work of Émile Leverdays, author of Assemblées parlantes (1883) and of other volumes of economic and statist critique. We find it again in all the manifestations of French advanced socialism since 1860 (even in the Commune). It must also have influenced the chief editor of the daily Le Proudhon, the introductory number of which appeared on 12 April 1884; the publication of this journal was planned by a young enthusiast E. Potelle, who died soon afterwards.

From 1840 onwards, Proudhon strongly influenced the German socialists M. Hess, Marx and later Lassalle; also Max Stirner, Arnold Ruge, Carl Vogt, Karl Griin, Alfred Meissner, Ludwig Pfau among others; also the Russians, Bakunin, Alexander Herzen, N. V. Sokolov; James Guillaume, who at Bakunin’s suggestion wrote the book L’Anarchie selon Proudhon (Anarchy according to Proudhon) which exists in a Russian translation only (published in London in 1874). A few Scandinavians, scattered here and there, were followers of Proudhon. And in distant Mexico, Plotino Rhodokanaty translated L’idée génerale de la révolution au XIXe siécle (Socialist Library, Mexico, 1877). In Italy there were Giuseppe Ferrari, Saverio Friscia, Nicolò Lo Savio and some others, who were influenced by Proudhon’s thought.

It was in Spain, however, that Proudhon’s ideas found their most fervent acceptance. Pi y Margall’s fundamental work, La Reacción y la Revolución. Estudios Politicos y Sociales, whatever its originality might be, could not have been written if its author had not known the works of Proudhon. Another Spaniard, Ramón de la Sagra, was also in accord with Proudhon’s ideas. Pi y Margall later translated at least six of Proudhon’s books, among them Du principe fédératif (1868), De la capacité politique de la classe ouvriére (1869). At least eight other books of Proudhon’s were translated by others from 1860 to 1882 — among them: L’idée générale de la révolution au XIXe stécle (1868) and La Fédération et l’unité en Italie (Madrid, 1870).

In England and in the United States Proudhon’s ideas had slight repercussions, although they were not entirely unknown. Tucker, and later John Beverley Robinson, made several translations; The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century appeared in 1923 in London published by Freedom Press.

Marx showed the greatest aversion for Proudhon and sought to demolish his theories in 1847; he even tried, after Proudhon’s death, to blacken his reputation with a highly offensive article. The German physician Arthur Miilberger devoted himself to the study of Proudhon, to the point of drawing upon himself the vehement attacks of Friedrich Engels; he continued nevertheless and, in 1899, published a very accurate biography, as well as the posthumous writings of a young thinker Ernst Busch, who had arrived at economic conclusions similar to those of Proudhon (1890). Gustav Landauer, particularly in his journal Sozialist, during the years 1909-1915, was fascinated by Proudhon and published many well-chosen excerpts; he also prepared the translation of his La Guerre et la paix (War and Peace).

A new feeling of appreciation is now stirring in France for Proudhon as one of the few writers of the 19th century immune to authoritarian centralism, and occasionally anarchists rediscover the force and beauty of his critique of authority. In Bertomi’s Réveil (Reawakening) in Geneva, many extracts from Proudhon’s writings were reproduced over several years. A selection of his letters was also published in Paris a few years ago and was a well-received literary surprise.

To conclude, we see in Proudhon the constructive nature of his ideas, which we have touched upon above, and their critical application to the flood of authoritarianism which threatens to engulf us. His voice was a constant appeal to reason and to good sense. If we listen to it attentively and follow it, not to the letter but deeply to its essential meaning, it will help us to rise above routine and to fight more effectively the authoritarian environment enveloping us like a mass of foul air, which can be dispersed only by breaking the windows. This is what Proudhon did best, better than Bakunin or anyone else. It was Proudhon who aroused the fear and the deadly hatred of the bourgeoisie of the 19th century. His brief words, “Property is theft”, packed a punch for the revolution.

5. Anarchist ideas in Germany from Max Stirner to Eugen Dühring and Gustav Landauer.

It was inevitable that in other European countries the liberal thought of the 18th century should open up a path for itself through the authoritarian period which, as we have seen, started in 1789. In Germany, as in Italy, the Napoleonic victories and conquests fostered nationalism in its cultural form, with a return to the national past, and in its economic form, with territorial units and the unified nation State. From this also sprang a nationalist philosophy; philosophers of a certain logical power, such as Hegel, inspired by Napoléon’s statism, turned into advocates of a similar omnipotent statism for their own countries as well.

Upon observing the national wars of other countries, Fichte, who had earlier been a simple admirer of the State, wrote Der geschlossne Handelsstaat (The Closed Economic State) in 1800, and enunciated his Reden an die deutsche Nation (Talks to the German Nation) in 1808. Romantic writers and poets, who previously had professed no nationalist ideas but rather ideas of emancipation, became on various occasions nationalist extremists and reactionaries.

Nevertheless, international contacts were slowly increasing, through travels on the part of some members of liberal secret societies to Paris and Berlin, and personal contacts between these men and some Italian and Swiss members in Switzerland. Ten years later, a large group of young German writers was inspired by Saint-Simonism. After 1830 the early German republicans and socialists often established themselves in Paris, as did certain writers who were leaders of the vanguard, among them Borne and Heine, also refugees, and some German artisans. However, this entire movement was, on the whole, characterised by a unitarian democratic spirit since, according to the refugee Georg Kombst, federalist opinions were rarely to be found among these people.

These vacillations between the splendid cosmopolitan internationalism on the one hand, and what seemed no less splendid — a greater prosperity and a finer local and national culture — were the first manifestations of the ferocious conflicts which were still tearing Europe apart in those days. Since there were no genuine guarantees of internationalism, and its achievement appeared to be a difficult task, they turned from that great objective to seek refuge in isolation, in the armed nation; each nation, for its own protection, wanted to be the strongest and to block the development of other nations. In the sphere of independent States there is no other alternative; the only real alternative is federation, which opens wide vistas to all and an autonomous development to everyone. From that point, the next step is to the free group and to multiple interrelationships. What people do for themselves in an environment of secure peace in the many fields of social life, and the general practical activities of this free association, with the elimination of all constraining bonds — this is anarchy.

Nevertheless, an original libertarian feeling came into being from this milieu and the personalities involved in it, in the early 1840s. Centring on brothers Bruno and Edgar Bauer, in Berlin, was the ‘Free Circle’, which Marx joined; he was closely linked with Bruno Bauer, until their rupture in the latter part of 1842. Max Stirner was one of the pillars of the Circle. There the Hegelian philosophy began to undergo criticism; there was incisive critique of the sources of Christianity, day-by-day critique of statism and its crowning glory, the bourgeoisie; and the repercussions of the intellectual as well as of the social movements which were taking place everywhere. These tendencies, particularly in the Bauer brothers, in Max Stirner, Ludwig Buhl and others, grew and matured into a critical nihilism — the abolition of all established and recognised forms of authority. This finally led, between the spring and autumn of 1842, to their complete repudiation of the State.

In the summer of 1842, Engels, in a spirited radical poem, gave a good description of this circle, to which he was a frequent and’ sympathetic visitor. He summed up Max Stirner very well, saying that while the others shouted, ‘Down with the kings!’, Stirner cried instead, ‘And down with laws, too!’ Towards the end of November, Marx suddenly broke with the group, which was called ‘The Free Men of Berlin’.

Certain anarchist publications of this group remain, among them especially the writings of Edgar Bauer, for instance Der Streit der Kritik mit Kirche und Staat (The Quarrel of Criticism with Church and State) published in Charlottenburg in 1843. The projected publication of a journal (announcement dated 12 July 1843) was suspended, but its collaborators assembled their articles in book form (not subject to censorship) to issue the Berliner Monatsschrift (Berlin Monthly Review), the first anarchist collection in the German language. Max Stirner collaborated in this venture and Buhl organised its publication.

During those later years, Max Stirner was to produce his famous work, published in December 1844: Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and its Own). Other writings by Stirner were later assembled under the title of Kleinere Schriften (Lesser Writings), in a compilation by J. H. Mackay in 1898 (an enlarged edition came out in 1914), but Professor Gustav Mayer and others have found many other scattered articles; this research has not as yet been completed.

It is true, however, that the Ego contains enough to enable us to form an opinion of his ideas. I have elsewhere published some notes to support my judgement of Max Stirner (in Vorfrühling der Anarchie, pp. 169-173). His thinking, in substance, was eminently socialist. He wanted the social revolution, but, since he was sincerely anarchist, his so-called ‘egoism’ represented the protection, the defence which he considered it was necessary to adopt against authoritarian socialism and any statism that the authoritarians might infuse into socialism. His ‘egoism’ is individual initiative. His ‘Verein’ is the free association which accomplishes a purpose but which is not converted into an organisation or society. His method is eminently disobedience, the individual and collective negation of authority, and a voluntary association according to what a situation may need. It is the free life as against the life which is controlled and ordered by the usurpers of property and authority.

On reading Stirner, I maintain that he cannot be interpreted except in a socialist sense. Anyone who wants to see in him an antisocialist or non-socialist individualist, would have to ignore (for no good reason) the very numerous notes I have made on this point, and those are not the only ones. Certain interpretations of Stirner in an ‘ultra-individualist’ key are now obsolete. One need only see the publications of Dr Karl Schmidt, Das Verstandestum und das Individuum (The Understanding and the Individual) and Liebesbriefe ohne Liebe (Love Letters without Love), for which Stirner himself had the greatest contempt. I cannot think any differently about all that has been written about him later, since his supposed rediscovery. [have considered all his work, as well as his major work, which was reprinted in second edition in 1882 by the original publisher. Much information concerning his life was collected in a biography by J. H. Mackay, but, as well as the volume of Kleinere Schriften, there is a quantity of scattered material discovered later which would also be useful to know.

A popular edition of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, published in April 1892, was widely read at the time, also by many German anarchists, some of whom were deeply influenced by it. It was then translated into French, Italian, Spanish, English, Swedish, Russian and probably some other languages. There are too, a number of pamphlets etc., which deal with Stirner and his work, without, in my opinion, deepening our knowledge. One large work though, unpublished at the time, has since been edited and shows Marx and Engels in a sterile war against Max Stirner’s book.

The second, supplementary source of libertarian ideas in Germany was the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, which gave the coup de grâce to the Hegelian incubus. Even though this philosophy (which Marx also fought extensively) was not anarchist, it nevertheless reinstated man’s role of independence, whereas in Hegelianism he was submerged and trampled upon by superior and abstract forces, and very real ones too (the present State, the future State, always some god or State). It was man who created God, maintained Feuerbach, and this idea administered the final blow for the intellectual emancipation of Bakunin. Pi y Margall wrote in his La Reacción y la Revolución (Reaction and Revolution, 1854): “Homo sibi deus (Man is god unto himself), said a German philosopher; man is his own reality to himself, his own rights, his own world, his own purpose, his own god, his all. He is the eternal idea, which is incarnated and has acquired an awareness of itself; he is the being of beings, he is law and lawgiver, monarch and subject.”

In short, if people have created the gods with their imagination, it is not difficult to conclude that they have also created their own philosophies, that all the sacred institutions are works of their own creation, and that therefore, just as they were able to create them, they will also be able to discard them. They will no longer be enslaved by other people’s philosophies, or their institutions, or their authority. They can raise their heads high and control their own actions, if they have the will to do so. On this plane Ludwig Feuerbach was a liberator of the spirit. People of good will have for so long felt themselves impotent before their divinities, before nature made divine, before the affirmations of philosophers who claimed absolute value. Feuerbach showed them (in the years around 1840) that they were caught in a vicious circle of their own making. Then they began to see things more clearly and felt the need to act.

Socialists, their authoritarianism destroyed by Proudhon’s critique, and philosophers, humanised by Feuerbach, discovered a synthesis, a libertarian and humanised socialism, and these ideas come close to anarchist communism. Such ideas were set forth by Moses Hess, in two essays: ‘Socialismus und Kommunismus’ (Socialism and Communism) and ‘Philosophie der Tat’ (The Philosophy of Action) in a collection (which replaced a journal that had been planned) published in Zürich in 1843. Another thinker who arrived at similar conclusions was Karl Grün, in 1844, These ideas then (1843-45) became part of the revolutionary socialist propaganda carried on by some German workers in Switzerland, especially by Wilhelm Marr, and the Blätter der Gegenwart für Sociales Leben (Contemporary Bulletins for Social Living) of Lausanne, from December 1844 to July 1845, was the first organ of German anarchist propaganda among the workers.

Their efforts encountered crushing difficulties. These German workers were émigrés, refugees and others who, in their wanderings around Europe, stayed for a while abroad, especially in Switzerland, in Paris and in Brussels, and when they returned to their own country, carried on a clandestine propaganda through their secret societies. These men were under the influence of authoritarian communists such as Weitling, and very quickly came under the influence of intellectuals of the absolute socialist persuasion, such as Marx and Engels. Anarchist propaganda, particularly i: the French and Italian cantons, was suppressed in 1845 by the cantonal authorities through persecutions and expulsions; when it did have a slight revival, as in Paris in 1847, where Griin supported Proudhon’s ideas, Engels considered it his duty to make a direct attack upon it. Likewise, among the intellectuals, Hess was dominated by Marx, and, although he did not accept Marx’s ideas, became nothing but a cipher so far as libertarian ideas were concerned. Griin, on the other hand, under violent attack by Marx, retreated into an orthodox Proudhonism and so sacrificed his early originality, which was of very short duration. It is a known fact that Marx and his acolyte Engels, who, before he met Marx, had had a general interest in socialism and had known everything from Godwin to Robert Owen to Max Stirner, both devoted themselves from 1844 to the task of demolishing or, better still, of attempting to disqualify by political distortion, absolutely all the socialists of any standing in their time. Their continuous polemical campaign against the libertarians proved, ipso facto, that they were well aware of the intellectual ascendancy of those ideas.

That ascendancy, in fact, existed in the years before 1848, in some men who had known Max Stirner and Proudhon very well. It was sharply accentuated with the failure of all hopes for success in the German and French political revolutions of 1848-49, and particularly after the flagrant demonstration of the incapacity and impotence of liberal and democratic parliamentarism. In France, in the years 1848-1851, up to the coup d’état of 2 December 1851 which inaugurated a period of general repression, there still was a period of retrospective criticism which dealt with errors committed. And in France, as in Germany, there was no lack of libertarian voices. We hear Karl Vogt himself, scientist and politician, who had known Bakunin and Proudhon well, exclaim (December, 1849): “Come, then, O sweet, redeeming anarchy ... and liberate us from the evil which bears the name of State.” These words had a ring like those of César de Paepe: “Anarchy, the dream of those who love complete liberty, idol of the true revolutionaries: May thy reign come, anarchy.” (published in 1864.)

Richard Wagner, in his writings, Die Kunst und die Revolution (Art and Revolution) (Leipzig, 1849) and Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (The Masterpiece of the Future) (1850), shows and expresses a full understanding, a profound sympathy for the free associations of the future, and he also had the opportunity in 1849 to obtain knowledge of Bakunin’s ideas. On the local scene we find at this time: Wilhelm Marr, in Hamburg; Professor K. R. Th. Bayrhoffer in Hesse; translations from Proudhon, with whom Friedrich Mann sympathised, published in the Freie Zeitung (Free Newspaper) of Wiesbaden and in the Triersche Zeitung (The Trier Newspaper), under Grün’s influence. A Berlin daily in 1850, the Abendpost (Evening Post), was anti-State in principle (the same tendency represented by Bellegarrigue in France); it advocated the nonintervention of any collectivity, which, under the prevailing system, meant granting a carte blanche to the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the masses. In other words, it spoke up for a formal anti-statism without social content. Arnold Ruge, one of Proudhon’s translators and an old friend of Bakunin, declared himself, in an article in 1849, for the “self-government of the people”, that is, “the abolition of all government, a social order which in reality is an ordered anarchy, as it recognises no archon, but only persons entrusted with the management of affairs ... the free community and the co-operation of men who make their own decisions and who are in all respects equal comrades”. Likewise Edgar Bauer, in his small review, Die Parteien (The Parties), reveals himself as a moderate anti-authoritarian. These ideas found some expression in the United States, in the widespread German-language press of the refugees and émigrés, but I have not been able to acquaint myself with these publications by direct research.

Marx and Engels, driven again into exile in England during the second half of 1849, had little influence on militants in Germany at that time, except for Lassalle; other revolutionary communists, of the Blanquist derivation, had as little. The libertarian idea, as proved by reports obtained later, which were certainly incomplete, was alive in many centres at that time. However, the 1852 reaction crushed them all. When this forced silence was broken, seven years later, it was because the nationalist movements, with their fatal link to war — supported and stimulated by statist ambitions in Italy, France and Germany — considered it useful for the States to come to a reconciliation with the people, after the years of reaction, in order to win their support and that of the authoritarian politicians of all shades of opinion, democrats and socialists included, for the wars in preparation. Libertarian thinking was not propagated except by Proudhon, and since he was opposed to the nationalist patriotism, fanned into a blaze especially from 1859 to 1862, he was, so to speak, left on the margin of liberal public opinion.

We may note that Marx took a more sober view of these events than the very ambitious Lassalle, who took a headlong plunge into nationalism, and pursuing a steady course apart from Marx, founded the super-authoritarian Social Democracy with which, after twelve years of incredible conflicts, the Marxist Social Democrats amalgamated. By this time the International had already been founded, and it is an incontestable fact that, within that organisation, the libertarian development was now concealed, now presented with hostility and contempt to the Marxist Social Democrats by their press; Bakunin, especially, was attacked and slandered by this press. The followers of Lassalle refrained from making such slanderous attacks, but they could not swing the International to their side or even win over a majority.

Nevertheless these ideas had repercussions in Germany at that time; they formed the basis of Eugen Dühring’s ideas, as he expounded them, chiefly in 1872, in his Cursus der National-und Socialökonomie (A Course on National and Social Economy). The ideas, called ‘socialitarian’, and also ‘anticratic’, were fundamentally those of the anarchist collectivism of those years, held by the groups of producers freely federated (economic communes). He laid strong emphasis on the free accessibility of the producers to these groups, and even the collectivists of the International had no objection to this, not wishing to create closed corporations which would have led to collective monopolies. I have not been able to determine, however, to what extent Dühring’s ideas were original. In any event, his ideas of 1872, and those openly professed by the collectivists of the International from 1868 on, were virtually identical.

Such ideas did not at all displease the German socialists who had the opportunity to get to know them, and who were happy to become acquainted with a brand of liberal socialism different from the rigid doctrines of Marx and Lassalle. They were attracted by it to such an extent that they formed an opposition movement, a sort of Fronde, which included such members as Eduard Bernstein and Johann Most. This circumstance seemed very dangerous to Marx and Engels, and the latter launched a formidable attack of refutation against Dühring — another of his campaigns against the libertarian tendencies of socialism. Neither Dühring, who lacked the libertarian spirit, nor his German socialist sympathisers, who, however, remained to fight within their party, carried on any real agitation in favour of the ‘anticrat socialitarian’ system, and, since soon after 1876 a direct agitation was started by the German collectivist anarchist workers on their arrival from Switzerland, Dühring’s ideas fell into oblivion until about 1889.

They were later taken up, on the one hand, by a liberal economist, Dr Theodor Hertzka, a native of Hungary, who wrote the utopia Freiland — Ein soziales Zukunftbild (Freeland — a Social Picture of the Future), and, on the other hand, by young socialists in Berlin, best known among them being Benedict Friedlaender, author of a well-documented pamphlet Der freiheitliche Sozialismus in Gegensatz zum Staatsknechtstum der Marxisten (Libertarian Socialism versus the State Slavery of the Marxists), which contained an exposition of Dühring’s ideas of 1872.

Hertzka’s utopia was presented in the form of a present-day project for an experimental colony on a large scale. There was, at the time, general interest in socialism, stimulated for the first time outside workers’ circles in almost all countries by the appearance of Edward Bellamy’s famous utopia Looking Backward. Hence a large general public displayed a real interest in Freiland, and was actually ready to go ahead with the practical execution of the project in the territory described by Hertzka — a high and fertile region in Kenya and Kilimanjaro, in East Central Africa. With free access granted to producer groups, according to Hertzka, a balance would be maintained among the various groups attracted to the colony; thus, with the aid of various other practical and equitable arrangements, authority in the new colony would be reduced to a minimum — the indispensable, purely technical needs — to which all would submit voluntarily.

There was no lack of finance, and the flourishing state of plantations in that part of Africa, one of its most Europeanised and richest regions, gave assurance that this colonisation rested on a base that was far from chimerical. But the British government impeded the realisation of the project. Enthusiasm waned and was dispersed in other directions. It gave rise to ‘Siedlungen’ in Germany itself, proposed and founded by Dr Franz Oppenheimer. Michael Fluerscheim had tried, for a long time, to found social colonies in distant lands; Dr Wilhelm, a member of the Freiland group who had already landed in Africa, always defended his ideal of those days. It is my opinion that the gathering together of the Jews in an independent territory, advocated by Dr Theodor Herzl, which culminated, through various other stages, in the modern Zionist colonisation in Palestine, was indirectly a repercussion of Hertzka’s project to found Freiland in the region of Kenya. Likewise, the present-day Palestinian producers’ associations, some of which have a desire to live in an environment of respected personal liberty, derive whatever they possess of libertarian determination from that powerful impulse which centred on Freiland in earlier times.

Among the members of the Freiland group was young Gustav Landauer, a young student who had come to Berlin, full of curiosity and eager to learn about socialism. He saw very quickly that there was in socialism something different from the grandiloquent Social Democracy which, just because it had articles, pamphlets and books written by Marx and Engels against almost all the other socialists, maintained that any type of divergent socialism was for ever demolished or was maintained through wickedness and stupidity. Landauer was acquainted with Dühring’s ideas and very soon came to know all the anarchist ideas; yet, whether he dealt with socialism or anarchism, he was able to remain his own master. He took great interest in ‘Die neue Gemeinschaft’ (The New Community), a sort of free ethical group in the Berlin area in 1900-1902, which, however, lacked a coherent social basis. This social basis Landauer set out to give, from 1907 onwards, to a free group, the ‘Sozialistische Bund’ (Socialist League) of 1908, which established centres for freely associated living. Other anarchists and sympathisers devoted themselves to free co-operation, which Landauer also defended in 1895, and to the Garden City, from about 1902, following the initiative started by Ebenezer Howard with his book, Tomorrow; a Peaceful Way to Social Reform, in England in 1898, which was followed by the formation of the ‘Garden City Association’.

I have in my possession brief records of incipient anarchism in Germany which, as happened in all other countries of the world, had to contend with the hostility of authoritarian socialists as well as the lack of toleration on the part of anarchist workers who believed in one way only of understanding anarchy and hence felt antagonistic to their closest comrades who followed another tendency. Thus the ‘Stirnerites’ and the ‘Kropotkinists’ drew apart from each other. And Landauer, whether he brought together all these currents on one plane or affirmed his own particular viewpoint, was spurned by those who recognised the validity of only one anarchist doctrine — their own, and no other.

6. The first French communist anarchists and other libertarian forerunners. L’Humanitaire and its group; Bellegarrigue; the young Elisée Reclus; Déjacque; Coeurderoy.

The socialism of the Saint-Simonists and the Fourierists offered nothing tangible to the proletarians, who were deprived by the French Revolution of the right of association (the law of 14-27 June 1791), forced to lead the crudest type of mechanised existence, treated by successive governments as republican suspects, and massacred as social rebels whenever they rebelled in a meaningful way, as they did in 1834, in 1848 and in 1871. They could not even participate in secret societies and in republican conspiracies. It is not surprising, under these circumstances, that they were attracted by the ideas of Babeuf and Blanqui. It was really an act of independence on their part when many of them drew away from these movements to join a communism which proposed direct and voluntary action, as advocated from 1838 on by that erstwhile republican conspirator Cabet, in his great work, printed in Paris but published only in January 1840—Voyage et Aventures de Lord William Carisdall en Icarie (Voyage and Adventures of Lord William Carisdall in Icaria). It also meant progress when numerous communists devised systems which were slightly less authoritarian, such, for instance, as Theodor Dézamy (Code de la Communauté — Code of the Community, 1843), Richard Lahautière, Brige and others. Cabet promptly issued a series of pamphlets entitled Refutation of ... against the dissidents and other socialists. A similar pamphlet also appeared against the first anarchists: Refutation de l’Humanitaire (Refutation of the Humanitarian).

There were, in fact, some communists who published a periodical written in a cool, level-headed tone, resolute but without acrimony, and carefully edited: L’Humanitaire, Organe de la science sociale (The Humanitarian, Organ of Social Science), under the direction of G. Charavay. The group was prosecuted as an illegal association, and, since the periodical was published without legal formalities, the members received prison terms; the contents of the journal, however, could not be incriminated. Nevertheless, the public indictment, the press, and all the communist and socialist journals cried out against the immoral opinions of the group, which, according to a statement issued by the publishing committee on 20 July (the document was confiscated), proclaimed the following ideas as ‘egalitarian communist doctrine’: the truth, materialism, abolition of the individual family, abolition of marriage. Art was to be accepted only as recreation; luxury was to disappear; the cities, as centres of domination and corruption, were to be destroyed; each community was to specialise in one type of production only; man’s development was to advance through frequent travel. These ideas, however, were set forth with greater clarity in the periodical itself, which also featured a well-documented article on Sylvain Maréchal, recommending ‘anti-political and anarchist ideas’. The periodical also repudiated class discrimination, and showed that almost all the famous communists, and the men who were considered as ‘our masters’ were not members of the working class, citing Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Thomas More, Campanella, Mably, Morelly, Babeuf, Buonarroti.

The names of the group members are known only through their trial. Most outstanding were Jean Joseph May, considered to be the leader (he took refuge in London, was later sent, as a rebel, into military service in Africa, where he soon died); G. Charavay, a capmaker (member of a family later well known as dealers in autographs); and Page, a young goldsmith, the orator of the group.

As a result of the prosecutions launched against the extremism of L’Humanitaire, we definitely know it to be the first publication of its kind, the first organ of libertarian communism, and the only one in France for 40 years to come. The period from 1848-1851, so rich in periodicals, the years from 1860-1870 and the Commune, teeming with publications, produced no other.

It appears that, in the autumn of 1841-42 there was a group, ‘Les Amis du Peuple’ (The People’s Friends), which called itself rationalist and must have been chiefly individualist. There were illegal groups calling themselves ‘materialist communists’, which were condemned for certain acts of reprisal; Coffineau, the outstanding figure among them, had belonged to the ‘L’Humanitaire’ group. We do not know, however, the exact brand of communism proclaimed by this group of social reprisal. The years 1830 to February 1848, have been sufficiently examined with respect to the emergence of the vanguard in Paris; we have seen that there were no other anarchist expressions except those of Proudhon and of two or three other communist groups which we have mentioned here.

The individuals around Proudhon were well-known through their great periodicals in the years 1848 to 1850. In addition to these, there were also published in Paris two independent mutualist organs: La France Libre (Free France) of Maximilien Marie (from April to October 1848, six issues in all) and Le Socialiste, Journal de l’égal-échange (The Socialist, Journal of Equitable Exchange), published by C. FE Chevé (8 July to October 1849, four issues in all).

But if we are to consider anti-statist ideas of a more incisive type, we shall speak of a young man in Toulouse, born between 1820 and 1825 in the extreme Southwest of France, that is, in a section of the Pyrénées (I have heard him called a Basque but I do not know on what authority). He had attended the lyceum at Aux, and had spent 1847 in the United States. He then returned to Paris, on the occasion of the Revolution of February 1848. His name is found among those registered in the Blanqui club, the ‘Central Republican Society’; this circumstance, however, is no proof of any Blanquist convictions in those agitated weeks.

This young man was Anselme Bellegarrigue, who, a few months later, published a pamphlet entitled Au Fait! Au Fait! Interprétation de l’idée démocratique (To the Point! To the Point! Interpretation of the Democratic Idea), published in Toulouse. He was the editor of the journal La Civilisation, which appeared in Toulouse from March 1849 on. This was also the most popular daily in Toulouse in that year, with a circulation of 1,800 to 2,500 copies. While, as editor, he defended the most advanced social democracy of that period, Bellegarrigue’s writing bears the distinctive impression of his own personality.

Taking as a basis his American experience, with the minimum of central government and the autonomous local activities which he had observed in that country, his work was a complete refutation of that French governmental idea which flourished within the French republic as it had flourished under the monarchy. As a means of paralysing the governmental machine, he proposed complete abstention, later called ‘the political strike’. In an era when democracy wanted to act in a revolutionary way, Bellegarrigue himself called it on 13 June 1849 ‘the theory of calm’. On that occasion, democracy was crushed by the government without putting up a fight, because the people of Paris, crushed in June 1848, proceeded in June 1849, as well as in December 1851, to leave it to democracy and reaction to straighten things out as best they could.

Bellegarrigue persevered in his point of view. He came to Paris in 1850, and, together with some of his friends from his own region, formed the ‘Association of Free Thinkers’ of Meulan (Seineet-Oise). (One of its members, Ulysse Pic, who called himself P Dugers, and who later became a renegade, at that time wrote in a way similar to Bellegarrigue.) This group published various pamphlets, but arrests of the members stopped any further activity. Among the pamphlets which were announced, one was published independently by Bellegarrigue under the title L’Anarchie, Journal de l’ordre (Anarchism, Journal of Order). He also brought out L’Almanach de la vile multitude (The Almanac of the Vile Multitude) and prepared an Almanac of Anarchism for 1852, which, however, was not published. He also wrote a novel based on his recollections of America, parts of which appeared in 1851 and 1854, and an essay on the women of America (1851). His emigration to Honduras, and later to San Salvador, which probably took place after the coup d’état, is a confirmed fact. And I learned, as a result of investigations which I had started in 1906, that a son of his lived in El Pimental, in the vicinity of La Libertad, San Salvador, but I have not been able to obtain any further information.

He did not engage in any extended discussion of social questions, perhaps because whatever he felt against political government, he felt equally against social government. He felt quite satisfied with the anti-State activities of old Lamennais in 1850 in La Réforme (Paris). Bellegarrigue may be criticised for an exaggerated admiration of American liberties — of the type expressed in Édouard Laboulaye’s De Paris en Amérique (1862) — although his novel shows him to be a realistic observer. But he was genuinely hurt by the tremendous hankering for power felt by men and parties; this strong pull was intensified in France by the revolution of February 1848, which extinguished all hope of a free life for the people. No one, according to Bellegarrigue — not even Proudhon was a consistent defender of liberty. ‘We cannot escape’, he wrote, ‘the brutality of this inexorable dilemma: either unlimited liberty or oppression to the death, to annihilation; there is no middle ground, any more than there would be between life and death.’ (La Civilisation, 1 Nov 1849)

Young Elisée Reclus spent 1849, at least until the summer of that year, at the University of Montauban, a city not far from Toulouse. We do not know whether he had at that time seen La Civilisation, published by Bellegarrigue from early March to December of that year. This, of course, is a small matter since Reclus probably felt himself to be an anarchist even then. And surely Bellegarrigue’s cold critique could not have influenced him in any decisive way if anarchism had not already been nascent within him. No one can say just when his active, inquiring mind had its first encounter with the idea of anarchism. Reclus left a document entitled The Development of Liberty in the World, which bears the date (added much later) of Montauban, 1851; it must have been written, consequently, on the occasion of his brief stay in Montauban, when he returned from Berlin to Orthez in the autumn of 1851. We shall not dispute this date, which, in any event, is the latest possible. We quote an extract from this document, which shows young Reclus to have been a convinced anarchist at that time:

Summing up, therefore; our political aim, in each individual nation, is the abolition of aristocratic privilege; in the world at large, it is the fusion of all the peoples. Our goal is to reach that state of ideal perfection where nations shall no longer feel the need of subjecting themselves to the tutelage of a government or of another nation; it is the absence of government; it is anarchism, the highest expression of order. Those who do not believe that the earth may some day be able to dispense with authority do not believe in progress; they are the reactionaries.

In April 1851, Elisée Reclus wrote to his mother that he accepted the theory of liberty in all its extensions. He was the type of impartial man who, led by his own strong individual and social feelings, arrives naturally at the conviction that liberty and solidarity are inseparable; that is, at the fusion of these two ideas, at socialist anarchism, which, in his view, always was an economically generous anarchism, what is called ‘libertarian communism’. This idea was alive in him and he applied it in the conduct of his own life. For a long time, however, he refrained from proclaiming it directly and took on only such activities as were of a strictly technical or less advanced character, provided they did not run counter to his personal convictions. We have little information about his anarchist ideas before 1877, when Le Travailleur (The Worker) was founded. We have at hand only the lecture he delivered in Berne, in September 1868, at the Congress of the League for Peace and Freedom, on the ‘federative question’. Another lecture, which he delivered in Lausanne in 1876, when he first developed his concepts of communist anarchism, has not been preserved. It is to his credit that the best part of the old socialism, such as he had probably known in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande in the years prior to 1848, was absorbed in modem present-day anarchism as he advocated it from 1876 to 1905, enriching it from year to year with his own studies and experience.

The French Republic of February 1848 was greeted with popular enthusiasm. Bakunin openly described it from his imprisonment in the Peter and Paul fortress, throwing his story virtually in the face of Russia’s Nicholas I, the Emperor of Reaction. It had no lack of valuable human material, such as the young Reclus brothers and so many others. It was never threatened from outside its frontiers, since all Europe was inspired with revolutionary fervour in 1848. Yet from its very first moment — after the prompt constitution, by acclamation, of a provisional government — the Republic became the instrument for paralysing and destroying the revolutionary forces, and an irresistible march toward dictatorship, which this time had its eyes wide open. While the most active socialists were imprisoned after 15 May, while the people of Paris were massacred in their thousands, while jailings and deportations continued after the June days, the imperialist candidacy of the future Napoléon III was being planned. He was elected by the votes of the peasant majority and so assumed power. This event provoked the clash of 13 June 1849, which eliminated the militants of the democracy by imprisonment and exile. The military coup d'état of 2 December 1851, and the Empire declared the following year, merely served to confirm the fall of the French people under a massive authoritarianism.

What could the critical voices of Proudhon and Bellegarrigue do in the face of the authoritarian obfuscation of the democrats and the socialists? They did the bidding of the bourgeoisie and of imperialism, imprisoning and massacring the finest flower of their own comrades and placing power, through universal suffrage, in the hands of the representatives of reaction, of the deputies of the counter-revolutionary majority and of the pretender elected as Emperor.

An imperialist fascism did not fail to develop. The best method the opposition could use as a means for criticising the system — in view of incompetence of the parliamentarians — was the idea of direct legislation on the part of the people. A German socialist democrat, Rittinghausen, proposed this idea in December 1850, and Victor Considérant, already in exile in Belgium, proposed it in 1851. It found an implacable adversary in the terrible fanatic of authoritarianism, Louis Blanc.

If the criticism of the parliamentary system was pungent and useful, the remedy proposed, nonetheless, placed the decision in the hands of the very same voters who had elected the worthless and absurd delegates forming the parliament. This universal vote, in fact, elected an inferior assembly, which in its turn elected Louis Napoléon, reconfirming him again in 1852, and giving him a vote of confidence (by plebiscite) in the spring of 1870. Whether the majority, by its vote, imposes upon the people a poor deputy, a president who has perjured himself, or whether it imposes a law initiated by him which will be reactionary, it amounts to the same thing.

Nevertheless, this idea, associated in people’s minds with the old German popular assemblies still surviving in Switzerland (the peasant community of Appenzell for example) and utilised for a long time in Switzerland (referendum), was considered as a step in the direction of an anarchist society by one of the most revolutionary anarchists, Joseph Déjacque, and by the best-equipped anarchist thinker of the International, César de Paepe, in 1864. Bakunin saw through these illusions (1869) and nothing more was said about them for a long time. But councilism, which some anarcho-syndicalists are gradually coming to accept, is a sort of revival of these ideas, in spite of the Russian experience. As a matter of fact, just as a parliament composed of people of diverse types is unable to solve any problem with any degree of scientific and technical competence by a majority vote — no more than this could be done by leaving the decision to a lottery game or the casting of dice — in the same way, any plenary, local or trade union, or even a conference of experts, would find itself in the same position. Important questions cannot be settled by arbitrary decisions or the result will often turn out to be nothing but the imposition of authority, inseparable from such procedures.

In 1850 and 1851 discussions were held on various ways of moderating the governmental system, and the best-intentioned results of these were probably embodied in the programme entitled Direct Government; Communal and Central Organisation of the Republic. ... This was issued by a group of men, the most notable among them being Charles Renouvier, Charles Fauvety, Erdan, and others. But what a difference between their attempts and The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, issued by Proudhon in the same year!

In Belgium, ten years later, Paul-Émile de Puydt, a writer possessing certain social ideas, published Panarchie, an extravaganza founded on plenty of good sense. It describes the co-existence of ideas and practical social applications in an autonomy without outside control and without violence; he found his inspiration for such a co-existence in what had already been achieved, to a certain extent, in the spheres of religions, the sciences and the arts.

A vast concept of anarchism, which recognises diversity in its practical applications, in accordance with the intentions and characters of those involved in it, is found in the Philosophie de l’insoumission ou pardon & Caïn (Philosophy of Non-Submission, or Pardon for Cain), by Félix P. I was able to ascertain, through the assistance of a deportee of 2 December from the Department of Saône-et-Loire, France, that the name of the author was Félix Pignal. But it seems that the more there is of sensible reasoning in some of these pamphlets, the less chance they have of getting to be known; this one, for instance, is very hard to find.

Gradually an awareness grew that a wrong road had been taken, but the best remedies proposed were still quite feeble. Lamennais had such an awareness, when he directed La Réforme in 1849. Jeremy Bentham’s Parliamentary Sophisms, and Timon’s Légomanie, had long been known. Another work of this type, which came later, was La Représentacratie by Paul Brandat, who also wrote a number of similar critiques in the direction of ‘autarchy’ (self-rule), as he called his idea. There are also a good number of publications dealing with individualism, decentralisation, regionalism, and what Emile de Girardin, in his articles and pamphlets of 1849-1851, rather ambiguously called ‘simplifying the government’. In 1791 Billaud de Varennes had published a pamphlet entitled Acephocratie (rule without a head) which I have not been able to consult.

Some isolated voices were heard: among them that of exiled Benjamin Colin, a teacher from Brittany, whose 1856 article entitled ‘Plus de Gouvernement’ (No More Government) favoured a ‘pantocracy’ (rule of all); there were the observations of the writer-philosopher Charles Richard (1861); libertarian tendencies appeared among socialist refugees; even a schism within the International Association in London (1855), which culminated in 1859 in the unification of the French anti-authoritarians in the ‘Club of Free Discussion’, in which the followers of Déjacque’s anarchism also participated. There were also anti-authoritarian sympathisers in Geneva at that time, which allows us to make conjectures about the results of the meeting of 24 February 1861. I do not know whether the journal L’Avant-garde, Journal international, was ever published; its prospectus, printed in Brussels, announced that the publication would begin in Geneva on 1 October 1864 and would contain declarations on the emancipation of nationalities as well as on the replacement of the State, in its social and economic aspect, by a free contract. It seems to be a jumble of nationalism and Proudhonism, the origin of which is unknown to me. There was also a group, ‘The Woodcutters in the Desert’, which published clandestine leaflets between 1863 and 1867, the titles of which, Révolution-Décentralisation (the first) and Liberty or Death (the third) expressed their ideas of nihilistic, decentralising revolt.

But the clearest expression of libertarian and revolutionary antipatriotism appeared in the Belgian pamphlet Les Nationalités considerées au point de vue de la liberté et de l’autonomie individuelle, par un prolétaire (The Nationalities considered from the point of view of liberty and individual autonomy, by a proletarian), written by Hector Morel (Brussels, 1862, 52 pages).

Finally there was Claude Pelletier, an old deputy, a December exile, who took refuge in New York, where he formulated anarchist concepts which he set forth in a number of books. He gave his ideas the name of ‘atercracy’.

These publications, insofar as they remained socialist, sought to bring together the social demands of socialism with the demands for the liberty of the individual; this came to an end in the decade of 1860-1870. In the preceding decade — 1850-60 — the tradition and prestige, both of the authoritarian socialists and of Proudhon, were still in conflict, and in the period of deportations the great majority, dispersed and divided, was conservative: that is, it perpetuated schisms, created more schisms or helped bring about the gradual deterioration of men who were formerly outstanding.

Only two men, one a working painter-decorator, and the other a young physician, had the intellectual and moral energy to speak frankly, to handle ideas freely, to reveal their thinking, in spite of the isolation which reigned around them. These two men devoted all their energies to this task; both died at an early age, their nerves shattered, but not without having fulfilled their purpose. Their contemporaries and successors were silent around them, so that they actually remained unknown to the militants of just a few years later (the time of the International) who would have been glad to know of them. Their names were Joseph Déjacque and Ernest Coeurderoy.

Elisée Reclus spent those years in America, in Louisiana and Colombia, and later in France. He devoted himself to his studies and moved among humanitarian socialists, without giving public expression to his anarchist ideas. Thus these two men, together with Proudhon, were the true voice of French anarchism from 1852 to 1861.

Joseph Déjacque, whose origin is unknown, was born around 1821, and may have served in the navy of the State. He was not mentioned in the publications and the trials which took place in the decade preceding 1848 (probably because he was away from Paris). His name appears first on 25 February 1848, as member of a group of workers of moderate tendencies, ‘L’Atelier’, who signed a wall-poster manifesto; later in a women’s club (socialist), and his first poems appeared at that time. In June 1848 he was arrested and sent to the Brest prisons. He returned to Paris late in May 1849 and was again arrested on the eve of 13 June. There is no further mention of his name until 22 October 1851, when he was condemned to two years’ imprisonment for his collection of poems, Les Lazaréennes, Fables et Poésies sociales. He did not serve this sentence. On the occasion of the coup d’état of 2 December, if not earlier, he escaped to London.

There he belonged to that small minority of exiles who did not follow the great leaders, exiles like themselves, such as LedruRollin, Louis Blanc and others, and who were conspicuous for rebelling against their authority. While living in Jersey in 1852-53, he prepared La Question révelutionnaire, an exposition of anarchism, which, on emigrating to America, he read before the most advanced group of exiles in New York. These men, however, rejected his extremism. Déjacque figured among the signatories of the programme of the International Association (1855). In New Orleans (1856-58) he wrote his famous utopia, L’Humanisphére, Utopie anarchique, and planned to obtain sufficient subscriptions to cover the cost of its publication, but did not succeed. He moved to New York (1858-1861), where he was able finally to serialise this book in his periodical, Le Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement social, written and edited almost entirely by himself.

During all those years, he worked hard, lived in great poverty and devoted himself to editing and promoting Le Libertaire; this periodical had a limited, though not too small, circulation, particularly in the United States, as well as London, Brussels and Geneva. Two other French-language journals were being published in Europe, one of a very moderate socialist tendency; the other, Le Prolétaire, in Brussels, was an exponent of revolutionary authoritarian socialism. Worn out, and a victim of the labour crisis at the coming of the Civil War, he revealed, in his letter of 20 February 1861, his feelings of depression, due not to his ideas but to his awareness of being quite alone in his social aspirations in a great authoritarian desert. He returned to London in 1861, then went to live in Paris, where he could not have found a very congenial environment. We do not know when and under what circumstances he became prey to melancholy and even to a mental disturbance. He died in 1864 or maybe in June 1867, under tragic circumstances which I have not been able to verify.

I shall not undertake an analysis of the ideas held by Déjacque. He had formulated the concept of a very free anarchist communism (‘the anarchist community’). While he demanded the most intransigent actions from the militants, he was compelled, at the same time, to deal with men as they are and to devise means of transition — bridges, gangplanks — to rescue them from the sinking ship of the present and bring them over to the terra firma of the future. To this end, he accepted direct legislation (with variable majorities, based on the diversity of the questions under discussion), or parliamentarism. These are not the concessions of a moderate but the reasoning of a man who believed himself to be completely isolated-— he called Proudhon a ‘juste-milieu’ anarchist, liberal but not libertarian. This was the reasoning of a man who saw socialists as well as republicans hostile toward him, who saw the people indifferent and submissive, who saw no organised force, who felt that between the year 2858, which he foresaw as in a state of pure anarchism, and the year 1858, which he had before him, it was worth considering modes of collective action of a very rudimentary type, of which there was still so little to be seen.

Ernest Coeurderoy (1825-1862), son of a physician of republican sympathies in Burgundy, started his studies in medicine in Paris in 1842; he worked in hospitals and cared for the poor and those wounded in June 1848. From a rabid republican he turned socialist, was one of the participants in the action of the Schools of Paris on 13 June 1849, and then escaped to Lausanne, Switzerland; expelled from there, he went to London in April 1851. While he had lived previously, and also in London, among the democratic socialists of 13 June 1849, who constituted perhaps the most congenial group of exiles, he nevertheless could not, any more than Déjacque, submit to the authority of the great leaders. He launched stinging rebukes in their direction, in a short pamphlet, La Barrière du combat, signed by himself and by young Octave Vauthier (brother of a 13 June prisoner). Its provocative and challenging tone placed him on the blacklist of all authoritarian groups. The pamphlet, also, became a contribution to the discussion later started by Mazzini’s furious attacks on socialism.

He was already at that time at work on a book based on a subject conceived in 1849, De la révolution dans l'homme et dans la société (Concerning revolution in man and in society). He travelled to Spain, to Savoy, to Piedmont. He arranged for the publication, in London in 1854, ef the first part of his Jours d’Exil (Days of Exile); Trois Lettres au Journal ‘LHomme’, organe de la demagogie francaise a l’étranger (Three Letters to the journal ‘Man’, organ of the French demagogy abroad) and Hurrah! ou la Révolution par les Cosaques (Hurrah! or Revolution by the Cossacks), all in October of that year. December 1855 saw the publication of the second part of Jours d’Exil, his last published volume. He did announce that other publications would follow, particularly a second and third part of La Révolution par les Cosaques; Les Braconniers ou la révolution par l'individu (The Poachers, or the revolution by the individual) and La Reconstruction socialiste (Socialist Reconstruction). As well as his writings before 1852, we also know of a letter of his, addressed to Alexander Herzen (27 May 1854), and a declaration, issued a few years later, in which he refused to accept the amnesty of 1859.

Coeurderoy wrote with passion and painstaking care. He was in a position to have his voluminous works printed, thanks to his family’s ample means. Nevertheless he was unable to continue with his publications, though he never gave up his ideas. He succumbed to a form of nervous exhaustion and died in a suburb of Geneva in 1862. His death was a tragic one and the real circumstances (as with Déjacque’s death) are not too clear to me, though I was able to visit his home and talk with a person who had witnessed certain ~ events. What is certain now is that his mother, who worshipped his memory but felt that no one was interested in her son’s work, burned, before her death, all his correspondence and whatever she was able to collect of his publications, which was a considerable quantity of material. This fact has contributed to the great scarcity of Coeurderoy’s work. However, it has been possible to recover all that he wrote before December 1855 and I have myself published a reprint of the Jours d’Exil (Paris, 1910-1911), with an extensive biography, which is an abridgement of a more detailed manuscript. His life from 1856 to 1862 (Geneva) still remains a mystery, and there is also the question whether any other publications of his may yet turn up. He was certainly the first anarchist who was able to have his ample writings printed without any restrictions, and in the years of full reaction at that.

There are portions of Coeurderoy’s writings which deal with the crushing social misery he saw around him, others which lash out against the authoritarian system of his day, and against democratic and social ambitions; still others discuss the brotherhood of peoples and contain observations on the great diversity of their lives in various regions of the earth. Since 1849, the year when he saw the defeats of the people, Coeurderoy was obsessed by an idea which had lent itself to superficial and hostile interpretations but which must be understood and given its due place. On viewing the impotence of the people, he sought for a means to destroy society, and thought he found it in the catastrophe of a devastating War, or, more properly speaking, in an invasion by the Cossacks (a good deal was being said about it, and he did not disclaim it); he would have acclaimed such an event, much as a Roman, made desperate by the decadence of Rome, would have acclaimed a rejuvenation, a fusion of races achieved through Barbarian invasions.

In a Europe so convulsed, he saw the time had come for the destruction of authority (Les Braconniers ou la Révolution par l’individu); he probably had in mind an anti-authoritarian guerrilla warfare, and he thought that once the ground was thus cleared of all rubbish, socialist reconstruction would take place in complete solidarity, fraternity and liberty, in fulfillment of his beautiful utopian dreams. Joseph Déjacque wrote in 1859 that the barbarians of such an invasion would be the very same European workers and peasants; that the tide of destruction would start from Paris, from London, from Rome and Naples, and would sweep everything in its way. He thus foresaw the importance of those forces which the International sought to arouse from 1864, which revolutionary syndicalism organised on a much vaster scale, and which finally, in our days, has had good and sufficient reasons for arising at any moment of its own accord. We must note, however, that Coeurderoy, in discussing these three stages — the catastrophic crisis, the war against authority, and finally the reconstruction — does not make a leap toward permanent crystallisations, as is now done (witness the Social Democratic State, the Bolshevik dictatorship, the universal syndicalist regime). On the contrary, he maintains the continuity of evolution. It was his idea that the catastrophe would merely create the possibility for action — while the struggle to extirpate authority went on — and co-ordination and reconstruction would follow later.

A close examination of Kropotkin’s writings reveals that he, too, insists that there was a period of three to five years (he refers to the years 1789-1793 of the French Revolution) when, after the initial act and the ascendancy gained by the people, authoritarian institutions could have been subjected to a steady attack and the anarchist idea could have become the common heritage of all.

Neither Bakunin nor Malatesta would have opposed such an opinion. Nothing but a superficial interpretation of some of Kropotkin’s observations could lead one to conclude that anarchist communism could spring into life through an act of sweeping improvisation, with the waving of a magic wand. Clearing the ground after a catastrophe that has destroyed the old order, preparing it, sowing far and wide the seeds of the new idea in full measure, and then —at harvest time — rebuilding: these were Coeurderoy’s ideas, just as, twenty-five years later, they were the ideas of Kropotkin and others.

Proudhon, Bellegarrigue, Coeurderoy, Déjacque — these four men summed up a fruitful period of anarchist activity extending from 1840 to 1865. Then came the stillness of a wasteland. Pisacane died in 1857; Pi y Margall did not continue the work he left unfinished in 1854; Bakunin was in prison; Elisée Reclus lived in tropical lands; Max Stirner died in 1856, while the individualists of ‘Modern Times’ took no interest in other libertarians. And so many enemies, so many who were simply indifferent — all the socialists, all the workers, with few exceptions! And what did their own friends and comrades do for Coeurderoy and Déjacque, who had faced hostility on all sides for their ideas and for their libertarian criticism? The incontestable fact, which I have verified, is that the militants and the publications of the International ignored them, although these very same centres of propaganda (London, Paris, Geneva, Belgium) swarmed with comrades of these men.

Nor is it right to say that Coeurderoy and Déjacque were men of another generation — ‘the 48ers’; so were many militants of 1860-1870 and their journals, often lacking material, could have made good use of the writings of these two men. Libertarian literature was extremely scarce at the time; they knew only Proudhon, and judged communism according to the precepts of Cabet and the Bible, whereas they had all the opportunities for examining the libertarian concepts of Déjacque and Coeurderoy, It is possible, of course, to trace their ideas through quotations which appeared in the works of other writers, such as S. Engländer, Rittinghausen, G. Lefrançais, B. Malon and others. But their own writings, the web of personal recollections and traditions centring on them, various random documents — all this was discovered much later, beginning with the decade of 1880-1890, some by pure chance, some through the continuous efforts of four or five persons, among them Jacques Gross, Bernard Lazare, Pouget, Otto Karmin and myself (since 1889), with the assistance of some of the older men, Lassasie, Lefrançais, Vésinier and others. In the end, the work was done, though not with the thoroughness I would now prefer. But it is too late now. The deaths of the men and the disappearance of many old libraries, as well as of more recent collections, have destroyed these links with the past.

7. Anarchist origins in Spain, Italy and Russia; Catalonia and Pi y Margall; Psacane; Bakunin. Early signs of libertarian ideas in other countries up to 1870.

Anarchism, in the important countries which have been discussed here (France, England, United States and Germany), is a phenomenon which is part of progressive human evolution. It is the direct result of the liberal humanisation which came to an end in the 18th century or after the ice age of authoritarianism (so to speak) which started in 1789 and still continues — one of the most outstanding forms of the continuity of this idea and its resurgence, with greater experience and energy, though on a limited scale as yet, in the 19th century.

As for other countries which have gone through a different general evolution, the anarchist idea there will either develop naturally, in a different way, or will be implanted imitatively, and then its development will take on still another form.

Anarchism has at present attained its greatest development in Spain, for the reason that its historical origins have been different there from those of the other main countries, and it would be interesting to examine them. To that end, we would have to distinguish between the elements deriving from international culture since the 16th century, those contributed by imported propaganda (the French influence particularly), and those that are simply of native origin within the country itself — a study, incidentally, that should be undertaken for each individual country.

Since it is not possible for me to produce the historical details here, and because of lack of sufficient information, I shall only say that, owing to its peculiar configuration, the Iberian Peninsula does not favour that type of centralised statism which, in other countries, has been a temporarily inevitable product of economic necessity. Statism in Spain has always been of a purely hegemonic brand, designed for the defence, that is, the perpetuation, of its economic feudalism and the feudal domination over its vast lands; it also protected the operations of the gigantic Latin American Spanish domain of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. So far as the people were concerned, Spanish statism has been nothing but the administrative, judicial, military and, through the clergy, the religious regime. It has held the people in forced submission and has taken from them all it could take — in manpower (soldiers) and in taxes — for the exclusive benefit of the owners.

Yet, in spite of this towering superstructure of the State, the people of the cities and the countryside had the advantage of being able to preserve their traditions of autonomy and federation, and hence did not develop that feeling of fervent attraction to the greatness of the State which breeds authoritarianism; with the exception, of course, of the many shrewd opportunists, fanatics and other interested followers who became the executive personnel of the State, the well-known class of watchdogs found in all lands.

Another advantage was that the great national unity at least inspired in the people the feeling of social-mindedness which expressed itself in the form of federations and associations and prevented the spread of atomisation in social life which reduces the individual to a cipher.

In this environment, and under these circumstances, local development has taken many diverse forms, especially if we also keep in mind the natural differences between the north and the south, more distinct in this country than anywhere else. Elisée Reclus says that the principle of federation

... seems to be deeply graven in the very soil of Spain, where each natural division of a region has preserved its perfect geographic individuality.

(Similar conditions have fostered the growth of federalism in Switzerland.) But the hands of the ‘Crown’ of Castille and of the Catholic Church weighed heavily upon all this during the centuries of the Enlightenment in Europe, and popular feeling could reveal itself only in local revolts and an unshakable aversion toward the State and all it implied.

Spain did not have a liberal 18th century, nor did it have a French Revolution, and its socialism, as set forth by some thinkers from the 12th century to the 18th, is sober and realistic; it hardly ever went beyond ‘agrarian collectivism’ and seldom could turn, as it did with Martinez de Mata in Seville in the 18th century, into a subject for public propaganda. The agrarian revolt, nevertheless, was slowly brewing; the people knew what they wanted. Besides, the social ideas of the French Revolution brought nothing new to Spain; France’s own humanitarian ideas were soon enough set aside by a governmentalism à outrance, which could say nothing to Spain that was new to her; Spain had had enough of it. And soon the old, centuries-long war between the two countries was resumed, culminating in French victory. It faced a tenacious and ruthless resistance, which signalled the beginning of the end of the Empire of Napoléon I (1808).

With hopes blasted for a regime that could be endurable (the 1812 Constitution), absolutism was attacked by the constitutional revolution of 1820, quashed by. the French ‘l’armée de la foi’ (the army of the faith) in 1823, which restored order as the Holy Alliance of the kings understood it. From then on (virtually since the restoration of 1814), the struggle continued against the monarchy, with some intervals of moderate liberalism, and even a republic, particularly in the years 1854-1856 and from 1868 to 1874. Finally came the fall of the monarchy (14 April 1931) and the establishment of a republic which has, since that day, given very little satisfaction to the people. This struggle went on likewise against the new monopolists of central power, military and political, and thus the federalist concept was formulated and converted into the expression ‘popular union’, that is, the federal republic.

These ideas, often though not always accompanied by aspirations for social justice and social equity, were the political expression of the truly clear-sighted elements of the Spanish people. Their best-recognised exponent was Pi y Margall. His La Reacción y la Revolución (Reaction and Revolution), published during the progressive interval (1854-1856), has already been mentioned here, as well as his translations of some of Proudhon’s works (1868-70). With the return to power of reaction, he was prevented from completing this book in its section discussing society, nor was he able to complete it later. La Federación, the organ of the International, emphasised this particular fact and the matter so remained. (La Federación (Barcelona), 12 June 1870.)

As head of the federalist party, Pi y Margall probably did not wish to provoke a split by setting forth his personal ideas on society, which would probably have been rejected by the non-socialist faction of his party. He formulated, in detail, the territorial application of federalism in Las Nacionalidades, but his solutions for a purely national self-determinism are quite defective, as we know by our experience since 1918-19, since they ignore economic factors or rather distort them arbitrarily. The federal act of 1873, the ‘cantonalism’, was an initiative cast on such a vast scale — like the French Commune or the Communes of the South of France in 1870- 71 (Lyons, Marseilles, Toulouse, Narbonne, etc) — that this project, too, was crushed by the military. Even if Pi y Margall was sceptical toward anarchism and probably never went beyond the idea of the minimum State, he preserved to the end his respect for the aspirations of all-inclusive anarchism.

This was the type of socialism which harmonised with popular feeling in the country until 1868, when Bakunin’s ideas came to be known in Spain. That is why authoritarian socialist ideas, all more or less familiar through translations from the French and through some exceedingly active followers in Spain, never created any real movement there. Communism as an ideal, and the associative principle of the Fourierists, were congenial to social aspirations in Andalusia and Catalonia, while democratic ideas were encrusted with state socialism by republicans of authoritarian social action in Madrid and elsewhere, but all this was ephemeral, producing no concrete results. We can judge what the people ardently desired — at least in the advanced workers’ groups in Catalonia — by the following excerpts from El Eco de la Clase Obrera (The Echo of the Working Class):

The communes were the heaviest blow that could ever be inflicted upon feudalism. From them have issued the life-saving institutions which contained, in embryo, the liberty of the people and in them rests the origin and the living source of all political conquests. The kings have placed their reliance in them in order to combat feudal confusion, and these are the only institutions that have been able to resist the triumphant tyranny of the kings. That is why the people have always maintained and will always maintain their vigilance over their municipalities as a safeguard of their rights, as the sacred arc of their liberties.

Every social revolution, in order to become possible and successful, must start with a political revolution, just as every political revolution will crystallise and turn sterile if it is not followed by a social revolution. Hence the communes, that is, the political form through which the betterment of the poor classes was initiated, were compelled to multiply. And, in fact, this is what did happen. (G. N., ‘Pasado, presente y porvenir de trabajo’ (Past, present and future of work), in Eco ..., 26 Aug. 1855)

Let us imagine, for a moment, that in Madrid, in Barcelona, in Valencia, in Malaga, in Seville, in Valladolid, in Toulouse, in all the industrial centres, the silk weavers first started forming associations, then the cotton and linen weavers followed, then the printers’ typesetters, then the carpenters, the masons, the tailors and finally all the workers in all the arts and crafts. Once all these associations have been formed by the entire people, they elect, by universal suffrage, their executive council. The elected members of these councils hold joint meetings and deliberate upon questions of common interest. This directive centre makes contacts with other such centres. The centres of an entire province delegate a person selected from their midst for the formation of a provincial committee which would reside in the most centrally located city or the most active centre of the region. The provincial committees delegate another person for the formation of a national committee, which would direct and safeguard the interests of the entire working class. …

Thus the association within the associations, or the association organised on a vast scale. …

In the old Principality (Catalonia) the associations are exceedingly numerous. They all recognise, or at least have recognised, one centre and one only. The provincial committee has been a reality there, and, if we are not mistaken, it still is. If the organisation is not as yet as strong and as extensive as it should be, we all know why this is so. All the work there had to be done under cover. The development of social spontaneity has not been encouraged but systematically impeded. ...(PM., Influencia de las Asociaciones’ (Influence of Associations) in Eco ..., 14 October 1855.)

The same P M. (21 October) wrote:

A great association, the Church, destroyed ancient slavery. Another great association, the Crusades, demolished the walls that separated us from the Orient. Another great association, the guilds, put an end to feudalism. Cannot still another great association wipe out the new tyranny?

M. G. M., discussing association and liberty, showed that they are inseparable, neither the one nor the other alone is sufficient.

Humanity has never felt so great or so imperious a need for harmony. It has never hankered so ardently after a formula for a social synthesis. ...’ (M.G.M., ‘De la Asociacion’ (Concerning Association), in Eco ..., 11 November 1855.)

When the delegates from Barcelona, Joaquin Molar and Juan Alsina, were greeted at a banquet in Madrid by some one hundred workers, the Eco wrote:

We foresee the day when our entire class will act under the inspiration of one centre, of one great national committee formed by delegates from the committees of all the provinces. .., (11 November 1855).

Speaking of the ‘provinces’, a so-called ‘division’ established in 1833, the journal said:

... and on the day when Spain becomes a federation, as it is destined to become, and as it will be perhaps within a very few years, what will then prevail will be [the division of] the old provincial regions, which have been arbitrarily separated — as in France — by a “division” into departments.’

P M. also stated:

The organisation of the other classes, modelled after the working class, will take place within a certain time. But in this case, shall we not also have the advantage that the governmental entity will be absorbed within this new economic organisation? The government would then be the government ofthese very same classes; the apexes of these classes, when united, would form a great directive centre. The great ideal of the most illustrious thinkers of Germany will thus come into realisation; would we still have cause to complain of anything? The consequences of this reform would be incalculable. May the day soon come when things happen which some fear to see. ... (Eco..., 23 December 1855.)

This journal was published to fight an odious project of a law against associations, dated 8 October 1855. In collecting signatures of protest against the law, it reported in December a total of 33,000. Of these, 22,000 came from Catalonia, 4,540 from Seville, 958 from Malaga, 650 from Cordova, 1,028 from Antequera, 1,280 from Alcoy, 1,100 from Valladolid, 600 from Madrid and so on, as well as 800 from the Balearic Islands. (Eco..., 16 December 1855.) The delegates from Barcelona, appearing before a parliamentary commission, mentioned 80,000 workers in Catalonian associations in July 1855. (Eco..., 9 December 1855.)

We know that in Barcelona associations had their beginnings in 1840 and continued growing, openly or clandestinely, until the revolution of 1868; that they were then, in large part, affiliated to the International and to the societies which succeeded it, until the formation of the CNT (Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores). Those signatures of 1855-56, with all their fluctuations and dislocations, prove, in my opinion, that what the International, the Regional Federation and the CNT were going to proclaim was already to a certain extent alive in the souls of the men of 1855, that it kept on growing from 1840 to 1855, and on a foundation shaped by the years of struggle since the death of Ferdinand and earlier yet. This was social federalism, the association of associations (textually, it was ‘solidarity, that is, association among all the associations’). (Simó de Badía at the banquet mentioned, cf. Eco..., 18 November 1855.) It was the synthesis of association and liberty (which could be nothing but socialist anarchism), the economic society which will replace political government. It was, in short, the structure of committees from the trades — local, village and national — which was formulated with such care by the International in 1870, is still being formulated in our days; and, whether it be weaker or stronger, is now in 1935 the connecting link among workers, just as it was in 1855 — at least in the dreams of a future soon to come.

We can understand how the Spanish militants, equipped with ideas and activities, schooled in the writings of Pi y Margall as well as Proudhon, tempered by the practical experiences of associations, of strikes, of solidarity tested in clandestine work and occasionally in armed struggle — we can understand how militants of this type rejected the influence of authoritarian socialism. We can understand how the ideas of collectivist anarchism, proclaimed by Bakunin and his comrades, seemed to them the logical and harmonious complement of all that they themselves had felt and experienced for a long time.

This particular climate of opinion could not have prevailed anywhere else in 1868, for what the International had wanted to create in 1864 was already alive in the mind and life of Spain in 1855.

In 1870, in an Italy divided into independent States and regions, which were part of Austria until the recent changes of the 19th century, nothing existed of the kind we have found in Spain. In 1848 workers’ associations started forming in Piedmont and from 1853 on congresses of moderate tendencies were held. Some artisans, though not the great mass, were active in national movements, either clandestine or carrying their struggles into the open. These artisans, the youth, the intellectuals and some members of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy took an active part in, and sympathised with, attempts made toward achieving national unity. Such attempts, from their inception to their culmination, were imbued with the authoritarian spirit; their activities included diplomacy, militarism, organised guerrilla tactics; their object was the unitary State. The few federalists among them — Carlo Cattaneo, Cesare Canti, Giuseppe Ferrari and others — were not libertarians, although Ferrari knew Proudhon well and had criticised the degeneration of the Fourierists.

Only the Sicilian physician Saverio Friscia, friend of Proudhon and Bakunin, who considered himself an anarchist, would willingly have renounced the idea of a unified Italy had he been able to create a Sicily which was independent or federated with other parts of the Italian territory.

But Carlo Pisacane rejected the small States as well as the great ones. In order to eliminate the evils inherent in both, he conceived the idea of dividing the territory of Italy into communes, united by a pact formed on a provisional basis by a congress of the liberated regions of the national territory and eventually by a constituent (assembly). The means for carrying on production during the period of the struggle, and for maintaining subsistence through associations and communes, are fairly similar to the plans formulated by Bakunin in 1866, with the exception that Bakunin, like the Spaniards, always tended to interpose the provinces or regions between the communes and the territorial collective.

Pisacane, one of the foremost revolutionary fighters of 1848-49 in Italy (the Roman Republic), while in exile — when he came to know Coeurderoy and Herzen — emancipated himself, from about 1851 onwards, from the authoritarian and anti-socialist mentality of the nationalists, among them Mazzini, the anti-socialist par excellence. He had already written in 1852: “Italy has no other hope but the social revolution.”

In his famous political testament (Genoa, 24 June 1857) he declared his belief that

only socialism, not the French systems, all of them imbued with the monarchic and despotic spirit predominant in that nation, but socialism as expressed in the formula “liberty and association” shall be the only future, soon to come, for Italy and perhaps for all Europe; this idea I have developed in two volumes, the fruit of nearly six years of study... .

But for Pisacane “the propagation of an idea is a chimera and the education of the people an absurdity”, since “ideas evolve from facts, not facts from ideas, and the people will not be free when it is educated but will be educated when it is free”.

This goal can only be attained by conspiracy and attempted insurrections, and it devolves upon each individual to do his part toward the revolution, for the sum total.of these individual actions will be immense. Fired with this conviction, Pisacane and the others with him carried their active fight into the territory of the Kingdom of Naples, where their small band was annihilated in an armed confrontation with Bourbon soldiers at Sapri on 2 July 1857. Pisacane and others perished, while the survivors were incarcerated in underground dungeons, where they remained until the Kingdom of Naples was overthrown by Garibaldi’s Thousand in 1860.

Pisacane’s work, Saggi storici-politici-militari sull’Italia (Historical-political-military essays on Italy) was published in a good edition (four parts: I and II in Genoa in 1858 — 104 and 179 pages; II and IV in Milan in 1860 — 188 and 168 pages). The third volume forms his famous Third Essay, The Revolution, while the Political Testament is contained in volume IV (pages 150-162). I believe that the Essay on the Revolution was not reprinted until 1894 (Bologna, IX-274 pages), while the Testament was reproduced many times in articles or in anarchist pamphlets. (The first reprint I know was done in June 1878, in the anarchist journal L’Avvenire, Modena).

The Essays soon disappeared from circulation, through the machinations, it is said, of authoritarian and anti-socialist patriots. One of Pisacane’s friends, and a participant in the conspiracy which ended in the defeat at Sapri, was Giuseppe Fanelli. He was also a friend of Bakunin from 1865, and the man who brought Bakunin’s ideas to Spain in 1868-69. We are assured that he revered the memory of Pisacane, and through him, if through no others, Bakunin must have known of Pisacane’s work, though he never made any mention of him in any documents that we know of. This silence is even more incomprehensible than, for instance, the silence concerning Coeurderoy and Déjacque, about whom the Reclus brothers were perfectly well informed, considering that they lived in London in 1852, although they may have lost sight of them later. Pisacane was a national hero, and was well known and esteemed as such, and it is strange indeed that the Internationalists had not rescued his book from oblivion. It seems that it was impossible to find copies anywhere, and it is reported that Cafiero was overjoyed on finding a copy in Lugano around 1880. Some twenty years later I applied to an Italian bookstore for a copy of Pisacane’s book and a completely new copy was sent to me. Additional copies were sent to me later, which I presented to Kropotkin and Malatesta. Was the taboo lifted then? In any event, I have stressed these details in order to show how, beside Coeurderoy and Déjacque, another of the great libertarians of 1850-1860 had been deprived of the fruit of a labour which could have influenced the men of the following decade.

In Russia, neither the agrarian revolts, nor the plundering carried on by the people, nor the mir (the periodic redistribution of the lands of a village among the peasants), nor the aversion the peasants felt for government officials, had any particularly libertarian aspect. And the activities of the revolutionaries among the peasantry aroused very limited forces for the struggle against Tsarism. The nobility’s plots against the Tsar were chiefly court intrigues, inspired by vindictiveness or greed. It was at first only in imitation of Paris, and gradually through a true feeling of admiration on the part of some of the nobles for the humanitarian ideas of the 18th century, that these ideas came to be respected, at least in theory, by the fashionable world of the time. In the 18th century social utopias were written in Russia and translations made of utopias were internationally known; there were Freemasons. Diderot paid a visit to Empress Catherine II, just as Voltaire had visited the King of Prussia.

Bakunin’s father, educated in Italy and familiar with the France of pre-revolutionary days, came back with liberal ideas, which later decayed into conservatism. Nonetheless, his father’s thinking retained a humanitarian cast which made his oldest son Michael happy in his early youth. Later on, army officers brought back with them, from the wars in Germany and in France, their plans for anti-Tsarist secret societies, and thus was made the first contact between the centralist Russians from the north and the federalists from the south. The Ukrainians especially were the ones who advanced the idea of community of nationalities. These Ukrainians, who had no State of their own and resented the Pan-Russian and Polish supremacies, each of which wanted to absorb them, raised the rallying cry of federalism, from Kostomarov to Shevchenko to Dragomanov down to our time. Other Slavs, in their exile in Paris, dreamed of a federation of all the Slavic peoples. Even Bakunin in Paris could not come to terms with the Poles, who were statists par excellence and looked upon the Ukrainians, the White Russians and the Lithuanians as peoples historically subject to their domination. Perhaps reacting against the aristocratic and authoritarian Poles, Bakunin plunged deeply, from 1846 onwards, into a fraternisation of all Slavic peoples; in 1848, on the occasion of the Slav Congress in Prague, he proposed his ‘Statutes of the New Slav Polity’, a real federalist utopia, but devoid of any content that might stamp it as genuinely libertarian.

We cannot, in these pages, assess Bakunin’s significance or delve into the forces that moulded his personality, the multiple influences that were brought to bear upon him and his way of reacting to these influences. For good reason or not, despite the extreme diversity of his fields of action, we find in him a great continuity of thought. A great ideal, great obstacles to overcome, a close-knit group to defend, to co-operate with, to inspire if not to direct, with his intelligence, his energy and perseverance — and an environment, which he understood less, thus leading him to form illusions on which he thought he could rely (or which constituted part of his plans): these two factors, always manifested in men, in events and in diverse situations, motivated his entire life’s work, from his youth in the bosom of his family to his international period, and no adversity dismayed him.

For many years he was dominated by the image of a deity he had created in his fantasy, later he worshipped other idols — created by the philosophers — until he came to recognise, with Feuerbach, that all these wraiths were the figments of man’s own imagination. Thereafter he acted like a free man. Even when dealing with socialism, which he learned to understand better in 1842 he retained his independence and did not affiliate himself with any particular system. Nevertheless, as his letters to his brother Paul (1845) and to Georg Herwegh (1848) show, he was profoundly anarchic and profoundly revolutionary:

I do not believe in constitutions or in laws; the best constitution could not satisfy me. We have need of something else; movement and life and a world without laws, hence a free world (August 1848).

To make men free, this is the sole, legitimate, beneficient influence. Down with all the dogmas, religious and philosophical! They are nothing but lies; truth is not a theory but a fact, it is life itself — the community of free and independent human beings — the holy unity of love which emanates from the infinite and mysterious depths of personal liberty (29 March 1845).

If I were asked how Bakunin, with such anarchist ideas, could have devoted to Slav nationalist action the years 1846-1863 of his life — taking into account that he was in prison and in Siberia from May 1849 to the spring of 1861 —I would say, among other things that this was another proof of the great scarcity of libertarians with whom he could have co-operated at that time. In August 1848, he called Proudhon “the only one among men of letters in the political world who still had an understanding of some things”; but, he said, if Proudhon acquired power, “we would probably be compelled to fight him, since he, too, has a little system of his own inside him, but right now he is with us”.

Neither in Switzerland, nor among the Germans and the Slavs in 1848-49, nor on his return to London and in Sweden in 1862-63 did he meet any anarchists; while Herzen and Herwegh, the two men with whom he spoke more freely and who understood anarchism (Herzen at least) were primarily sceptics. It was only in the late months of 1863, when he left Sweden and London for a trip to Florence via Paris and Switzerland, that he started to work directly with the socialist movement to inspire them with libertarian ideas, and that by means of a secret society which he began to organise at that time.

This activity prompted him to put his ideas in writing, and I shall later deal with his early writings as they came down to us. I have to repeat here that all his Paris manuscripts of 1844-47 were lost. In 1844 he had already prepared a book on the ‘Exposition and Development of the Ideas of Feuerbach’; this book seemed ready for publication in 1845 under the title Sur le Christianisme ou la philosophie et la société actuelle (On Christianity, or philosophy and present-day society). This may have been the work — or another dealing with the French Revolution — which his friend Reichel, in whose house he lived, described as “the eternal book which he kept on writing day by day, without ever bringing it to a close”.

This work, too, was lost, and the question arises whether the great complex of ideas contained in his manuscripts and books from 1868 to 1873, or those already mapped out in the fragments preserved from 1865, were originally based on his writings of 1845- 1847, and perhaps on what he had written on Feuerbach. This question still remains unanswered.

In other European countries there was a lack of initiative in the early manifestations of socialism and particularly of anarchism. An the 18th and 19th centuries the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland were comparatively free countries. They served as places of asylum for many refugees, as did Belgium, of which I have already spoken; there socialism was very active and, for along time, even quite libertarian. As for the Netherlands, however, we could not cite any noteworthy libertarian development there before the period of the International from 1870-1872. This is also true of the Scandinavian countries, until the arrival of the writings of Quiding and Ibsen’s letters in the same years. Nor was there anything to report from Switzerland until 1868.

In Holland, Eduard Douwes Dekker (who wrote as Multatuli) and S. E. W. Roorda van Eysinga were the authors of a vast utopia and an incisive anti-statist and anti-bourgeois criticism. Henrik Ibsen entertained deeply-felt socialist ideas in his youth, in the times of Marcus Thrane, and it is reported that he had read some of the writings of Proudhon and Wilhelm Marr (who was then in Hamburg and had published Der Mensch und die Ehe vor dem Richterstuhl der Sittlichkeit (Man and Marriage before the Tribunal of Morality) in 1848 and Anarchie oder Autorität? (Anarchy or Authority?) in 1852). Did Ibsen express anti-State ideas before writing letters to Georg Brandes on 20 December 1870, 17 February and May 1871, and a letter against majority rule, dated 3 January 1882, the year when his Enemy of the People was published?

The first Swedish writer to proclaim a federalist, and perhaps a communalist, socialism, but whom J would not dare to call an anarchist, was Nils Herman Quiding (1808-1886), in his Stutlikvid med Sveriges Lag (Liquidation of the Swedish Law), in 1871-1873.

In Norway, the novelist Arne Garborg (1851-1924) described the autonomous life of Norwegian peasants and the life of free men and women with grace and precision, the early works were very realistic, in particular Kolbotnbrev, in the small volume Fri Skilmisse (Free Separation: Observations on the discussion of love), and in his journal Fedraheimen (‘The Home’, at Toennsett, founded in 1877). This periodical, in fact, became clearly anarchist communist, from 1883 to 1890, under the editorship of Ivar Mortensen, and particularly in its last phase at Skien, when it was transformed into a review which contained an anarchist pamphlet in each issue. Garborg modified his views under the influence of the ideas of Severin Christensen, when given his book Retsstaten (The Juridic State), published in Copenhagen. On this subject he wrote in 1923 the article entitled ‘Magstat-Rettsstat’ (The Power State — The Juridic State), in which the ‘Juridic State’ is, for him, the minimal State.

This minimal State, as in other systems of maximum autonomy or the most perfected type of formal federalism, is what has been proposed by many thinkers of benevolent intentions but of shortsighted outlook. We have only to consider the following works, which came from Herbert Spencer and other men we have already mentioned: The Man versus the State, one of Spencer’s most characteristic works; J. Toulmin Smith’s Local Self-government and Centralisation; the conservative federalist writings of Constantin Frantz in Germany, of L. X. de Ricard in France, of Roque Barcia in Spain, of Edmond Thiaudière, and of so many others. These abound in excellent advice against centralisation, against the State itself; but when it comes down to fundamentals, we are exhorted to put faith in the State, and this lack of confidence in liberty destroys the force of all their arguments.

Authority has also been attacked in many works of high artistic merit — those of Claude Tillier, Charles De Coster, Gustave Courbet, and in good pamphlets, in satire, in caricature, in the comedy of all the ages, in all types of writing that were by their nature ‘disrespectful’. Is there anyone to whom States, laws, functionaries, taxes, commands and prohibitions have not been odious? Everyone does his best to do without these things, yet all are inconsistent enough to deem them necessary for his fellow-men.

In conclusion, we may say that, during the period we have here considered, the anarchist idea has had many supporters who have expressed themselves in a variety of ways; and this represented the fruit of a natural evolution rather than artificial propaganda. From 1760 to 1860 Diderot and Lessing, Sylvain Maréchal, Godwin, Warren, Proudhon, Max Stirner, Elisée Reclus, Bellegarrigue, Coeurderoy, Déjacque and Pi y Margall and the united Catalonian workers, as well as Bakunin and Pisacane, all of them men of outstanding importance, hurled their clear, unmistakable challenge against authority.

8. The origins of anti-authoritarian collectivism in the International and in the groups formed by Bakunin in the years 1864-1868.

With the Crimean War (1854-56) Napoleonic political activity, crushed in the years 1814 and 1815, was revived on the European continent. In addition to Russia, both Germany and Austria placed hors de combat — Austria in particular, having affirmed her neutrality, incurred the enmity of Russia, who had relied on her but did not thereby gain the sympathy of the Western powers, Piedmont participated in the war, and the question of nationalities remained open. In 1859, Piedmont and France had fought a victorious war against Austria. Then followed a rapid growth of the power of Piedmont. In Italy — which Napoléon III had wished to see composed of principalities virtually dependent on France, with new Bonapartes and Murats at their head — the Piedmont sells was, on the contrary, transformed into the reign of the dynasty of Savoy, a great power which naturally never thought of becoming a French dependency, especially after it had shaken off the power of Austria that had weighed upon it since 1815.

This situation brought about a certain lull both in Germany and in Austria, while imperial France, alarmed by the popular awakening revealed by the Garibaldian movement, the epic of 1860, did not give its entire support to the Polish insurrection — the seas act of nationalism, which had erupted in 1862 and become widespread in 1864. The question of Schleswig-Holstein, removed from interference by the other powers and resolved by the war of 1864 was the first act of German independence. England’s enmity toward Germany was assured from that time on, while France and England drew closer together, after some disagreement concerning England's aid given to the new Italy. Garibaldi had a triumphant reception in London in 1864, but was politely warned by the British government to shorten his stay, and made a hasty departure from that city.

During those agitated years, when the rule of reaction declined everywhere (because governments held in detestation since the counter-revolution of 1848 needed the support of their peoples for the wars to come), the issue of nationalism was eagerly welcomed by the bourgeois democracy; it would serve as the means to reconcile it with its peoples. But the workers and the socialists, the men of 1848 onward, and the younger generations saw the time had come to revive their own movements and build up their own organisations. In that situation, when frequent conferences and reshufflings were taking place among the States as masters of the world, it was amazing to find the workers, too, thinking at last of establishing contacts among themselves on an international basis.

This came about slowly, between 1862 and 1864, and solely on the part of some important centres in London and in Paris, among individuals who devoted themselves completely to the task, or — to put it more exactly — individuals who overcame inertia, sluggishness, party interests, envy on the part of the more influential leaders who were already at the head of their organisations and who took good care not to join any plan of action unless its success was assured beforehand. This is the true story of the origin of the International, supported by meticulous documentation. The few large public meetings were carefully prepared; there were always good speakers on hand, and an enthusiastic and sympathetic audience, which meant nothing since the decisions were made by a small group, after months and months of frustrating work coming to terms with assorted ambitions, distrusts and so on. Then, at last, came the meeting of 28 September 1864, when many more names, prepared in advance, were accepted and acclaimed, and in this manner a great directing group was formed — the Central Council (later called the ‘General Council’), to which all the succeeding general congresses always gave their vote of confidence.

One of the men on the British committee, which received the French delegates led by Tolain at the meeting in the Freemason’s Tavern on 5 August 1862, was Ambrose Caston Cuddon, the old British individualist anarchist (see Chapter 3). He also greeted Bakunin in January, in the name of the committee from a workers’ journal, The Working Man, a nonaligned publication; there was a parallel journal in 1862, The Cosmopolitan Review, to which Cuddon also contributed. Cuddon was one of the speakers at the August meeting. Of his remarks nothing came down to us except the observation that “the social problem could easily be solved if men were to abandon hypocrisy”, an observation that did not stray far from the truth if we consider that another two years were to pass before the Council of 28 September 1864 was formed, and the first thing Tolain did after 1862 was precisely to put aside the socialists who had accepted him in order to do his utmost to ally himself with the trade unionists. In this attempt he failed. The French authoritarian socialists intervened in London and did the real work of preparation, with the assistance of the small vanguard of Masonic lodges which held together international socialists. They also had contacts in Paris which were not to Tolain’s liking. The result was that everything went badly, and when the Association was formed these same divergencies continued to plague the Central Council for a long time.

Marx had nothing to do with any of this. He was invited to the meeting of 28 September just a few days in advance. He participated in the meeting and was elected a member of the provisional Central Council by acclamation. It was only when the first documents of the Association were published that his intellectual brilliance gave him an easy ascendancy over men of good will who lacked his experience and his talents. He put into these documents whatever he judged most important of his own ideas and did it with the greatest of ease, since the other men were unfamiliar with these ideas and the conclusions he drew from them — he was very little known at the time — and took for good, straight socialism what was entirely a personal system. His erudition and literary training, as well as his energy and personal ability, gained him a certain dominance, but his brusque ways provoked a good deal of antipathy and in the long run wearied many. Yet these qualities proved useful in carrying on the work of the organisation. The other members, authoritarians all of them, took little heed of his intense authoritarianism; the ‘voluntary servitude’ of these men was what consolidated his position.

After some fifteen years devoid of public socialist activity of any appreciable degree, there was practically no social consciousness among the workers anywhere; old and young militants improvised the sections of the International on the basis of some workers’ socialist groups and skilled trades organisations, which still led a life apart. It was a labour of patience and devotion, which grew easier once a start had been made and the organisation gained in prestige. The militants, whatever their personal socialist convictions, could implant these in the sections only gradually or nominally; this led to the extreme moderation which characterised the conferences and congresses until 1867. The policy of the Central or General Council was to sacrifice the vanguard to the moderates, provided the latter had numerous organisations. The ‘impulsive’ French of the emigrant groups were eliminated, Tolain and the organised groups of Paris were brought in. As for the British trade unionists, their affiliations were purely nominal. In effect, something like what later became the Syndicalist International of Amsterdam (Legien-Jouhaux), and what was called the ‘Second International’, with the political socialist parties in a nominal association, was already the objective of the London International from its very early years, according to its real leaders.

The only solid base the libertarian cause had at that time was in Brussels, in ‘Le Peuple’, an association of the militant democracy, and its organ, La Tribune du Peuple (The People’s Tribune). The Compte-Rendu du Meeting démocratique de Patignies (Minutes of the Democratic Meeting of Patignies) (in the Ardennes, 26 December 1863) set forth this propaganda, and in particular the ideas of César de Paepe, a highly educated young socialist, who expounded anarchism with great clarity, and at the same tne and with equal clarity, recognised the impossibility of achieving it immediately; he suggested certain preliminary stages, such as direct legislation on the part of the people, with certain guarantees of liberty for the minority and so on. Such was the libertarian system which was best formulated in those years. As for the militants of ‘Le Peuple’ group (which was quickly converted into a section of the International — a local section, and a section entrusted with helping to organise other sections in Belgium), they propagated similar ideas, often more advanced than the hyper-critical, studiously moderate and circumspect ideas of de Paepe. To dex was added — though partly outside the International — a more vital anarchism, a revolutionary Proudhonism, proclaimed by the French and Belgian youth, the students and political refugees, the group of the ‘Rive Gauche’ (the Left Bank).

Those who entered the syndicates were workers called ‘French Proudhonists’, Tolain and his comrades, republicans who sought an entry into politics, who were enemies of the bourgeois republicans as well as of the Blanquist socialists and of other authoritarians, and those who accepted the weaker and more moderate parts of Proudhon’s ideas. He hailed this event in his book of 1864, De la capacité politique de la classe ouvriére (Concerning the valitical capacity of the working class), which was published in 1865 as a posthumous work by Gustave Chaudey. Proudhon was happy to see the workers beginning to awaken after 1848, but had he lived he would have given them quite a different direction. Tolain and the others rested on the laurels gathered by this book, while Marx who had so ignominiously insulted Proudhon in an obituary written after his death, was satisfied to see Parisian Proudhonism apparently incarnated in these small minds, who were useful to him for fighting other socialists whom he hated and whom he had planned to eliminate later.

Marx believed he had also won Bakunin for the International. He paid Bakunin a friendly visit on his own initiative, when Bakunin passed through London in the autumn of 1864. He thought that Bakunin would be useful to him in Italy against Mazzini. Bakunin, already absorbed in his secret society, which started in Florence during the first half of 1864, naturally did not think of mentioning it to Marx, knowing him to be opposed to it. He let Marx talk, and what he learned of the International, which had just come into being, and perhaps of Marx’s hopes, must have interested him. He promised Marx his support in Italy, but since he did not leave Italy until 1867, his already scant contacts with Marx ceased, though there was no discord between the two men, and they did not see each other again.

Towards the end of 1863, Bakunin considered that the nationalist movements had miscarried, as from that time on they were under the control of French, Prussian, Russian and Piedmontese statesmen, and placed his hopes for the future in social movements, which were reviving. Seeing as he did the disorientation of the democratic and socialist forces, he believed the best way would be to work upon these forces through secret militants who would be able to direct and co-ordinate such forces and would themselves also create and inspire more conscious groups and movements. The years 1864 (when he made his trip to Sweden and passed through London and Paris for the last time) and 1865 (when he left Florence to live in and around Naples until August 1867) were devoted to these attempts, which were inevitably little known. We know little of his work in Florence, but do know that he made an attempt to propose his ideas to the Masonry in Italy, of which he was a member, (There are some fragments of his writings on the subject in 1865, which I could publish if there were any real material possibilities for a publication of this type.) We are also, to some extent, familiar with his plans through his letter of 19 July 1866 to Herzen, through his historical summary in a Russian book of 1863, and through the programme and the statutes themselves in extenso of the ‘revolutionary international association’ (The International Brotherhood) published around March 1866, which I have made known since 1898, and of which I made an almost complete German translation in 1924.

These texts are to be found in the Werke (Works) and in my biography of Bakunin written in 1898 (pp. 209-233) — a complete exposition of his socialist and revolutionary thinking of that period — while his Masonic fragments (those he intended to propose to the Freemasons) deal chiefly with his philosophical thinking and religious critique. We also possess a more condensed version of his ideas and projects in the clandestine publications of the Italian organisation of that international society, the Programme of the Italian Social Democratic Revolution and the statutes of the ‘Society of the Legionaries of the Italian Social Revolution’ (1866), also in the secret leaflets discussing current events: The Italian Situation, of October 1866, and in another leaflet, The Situation, published in the autumn of 1868. And, finally, letters and drafts of letters dated in 1866 and 1867, and other collected material, reveal a little of the secret activities of this international organisation which was more frequently known as the ‘International Brotherhood’. I have reproduced and discussed these documents in my Italian book Bakunin e l'Internazionale in Italia; Bakunin’s ideas beginning with what we know of their beginnings up to 1867 have been succinctly treated in my book Der Anarchismus, von Proudhon zu Kropotkin (1927; pp. 21-50).

According to Bakunin, association and federation form the basis of reconstruction when the existing system has been destroyed and liquidated. What was uppermost in Bakunin’s mind was not the perfect anarchist future, which he left to the coming generations to shape as they will, but rather the foundation of a new society, a base that would best prevent a relapse and would guarantee a progressive evolution. Therefore he stressed the need of a solid beginning and put no trust in spontaneity or chance. If I may use an example, let us consider what we would do if we had to abandon an old house. We can blow it up or knock it down; we can salvage some worthwhile parts, or we can abandon it altogether and build a new house somewhere else, where we may have to contend with changes, hazards or all sorts of unforeseen circumstances. At all events, if we do not want to linger or vegetate in aprimitive state, if we desire to build a solid house, there are certain indispensable chores to be done; we have to dig a foundation, mix the cement, seek out the right proportions and obtain substantial building materials and so on; a good house cannot be improvised like a primitive hut set on top of a grassy plot. As he developed his ideas along these lines, Bakunin, while condoning all forms of destruction, became very methodical when it came to reconstruction. All the anarchists we have so far considered were also methodical on this point: Godwin, Warren, Proudhon, Déjacque, Coeurderoy, de Paepe. All, while rejecting dictatorships and distrusting improvisation, spontaneity — sudden magical transformations — all have sought to find not only the ideal objective but also the best roads that would lead to it.

In addition to Bakunin’s clandestine or private activities, there were, from February 1867 onwards, the public activities of his comrades in Naples, who worked through the ‘Liberty and Justice society. This group, having proclaimed its programme in February and in April, published in August of the same year the periodical Libertà e Giustizia (Liberty and Justice), which appeared in the early part of 1868. I have never been able to see this journal Tae, was published without Bakunin’s participation though he collaborated with it.

Bakunin went to Geneva to take part in the peace congress held in September 1867, a great demonstration of republican democracy, and there helped to found the ‘League for Peace and Freedom’. Bakunin delivered a speech there which had certain repercussions (see the Annals of the Congress of 1868, pages 187-191). He stayed on in Switzerland and was a member of the committee of this League. There he proclaimed his ideas, which inevitably failed to find acceptance. Nevertheless he prepared them for a publication which was not completed and did not appear in print at that time; it was Fédéralisme, socialisme et antithéologisme (Federalism, socialism and anti-theologism) (published by myself in Oeuvres (Works), Paris, 1895, pages 1-205).

The first text bringing Bakunin’s ideas to the attention of the public of that period — except for his Slavic Letters in the Italian periodical — was his letter in a journal-programme La Démocratie (Paris), in April 1868. Then came the programme of the Russian periodical Narodnoye Delo (The People’s Cause) in September; later still, his speeches delivered at the Berne Congress of the ‘League for Peace and Freedom’ in late September. Finally, there was the Programme of the Alliance of Social Democracy, which appeared a few weeks later. At about the same time, he published projected programmes and statutes for the new form which, in accordance with the deliberations of the members of the secret group, were to be accepted by the secret group or groups.

And, since in the summer of 1868 he had become a member of the International (central section of Geneva), he and his comrades became separated from the League (25 September), founding the International Alliance (public), which intended to become affiliated with the International, and within which the secret society was to carry on. However, since what was called the (secret) Brotherhood was already in existence, it would have been necessary to have these two secret groups, one of which was not yet in existence, come to a mutual understanding. On this subject there were exploratory writings, drafts of essays, and some of these, through a betrayal of trust or many such betrayals, eventually fell into the hands of Marx (who published them in 1873). He used this material to bring accusations against Bakunin at the Hague Congress (1872), and on the basis of such accusations Bakunin was expelled from the International. We know a number of drafts of manuscripts and of collective deliberations from the early months of 1869, which show that the 1868 documents did not correspond precisely to any actual reality, and had no existence as a complex and a totality before September 1872, except in the form of incipient fragments. In short, there was the Brotherhood transformed in September 1872 into the secret Alliance, but between 1868 and 1872 no secret Alliance existed as an international complex. Hence the charges made by Marx, Engels, Lafargue and Utin were nothing but a web of figments and fabrications without proof.

The proposal that the public Alliance enter the International as an affiliated international organisation seemed to provoke Marx. When Bakunin addressed a most friendly letter to him at practically the same time (22 December 1868), Marx wrote to Engels about him, expressing the utmost hostility (18 December, also 13 January 1869). From that time on, Marx set out to defame Bakunin in the International, just when Bakunin, in Geneva, became active in the Latin-Language Federation (Fédération romande), in the section of the Alliance and in the journal L’Égalité (Geneva), as well as in Le Progrès (Le Locle, in the Neuchâtel-Jura), with his excellently written material on the theme of internationalist propaganda.

I confine myself here to but a few indications of the original sources in order to offer my readers an evaluation of the anarchist ideas within the International, of the individuals and the groups which represented them, and of what organs and the component parts of the International - sections, councils and congresses — did when confronted with these ideas. We must necessarily be brief here, not for lack of documentation but rather because the wealth of material prevents us from giving all the available information and particularly all the necessary explanations.

As for Bakunin’s personal contacts from 1864 to 1868, we can distinguish between men who came close to him and left him without having been influenced by him; people who came under his influence but lacked any originality of their own; others who, while truly close to him, retained their own independent outlook; and those who, under his inspiration, produced interesting ideas of their own. Under the last two categories we find Elisée Reclus and James Guillaume, the latter in 1869 when the Reclus brothers had already parted from Bakunin.

Élie Reclus, profoundly libertarian, was too much of a sceptic to be able to consider himself an anarchist; in his university thesis of 1851 he had discussed the principle of authority (in theology) Fourierist and associationist by conviction, he participated in ihe co-operative enterprise ‘Le Crédit au Travail’ and in the publications L’Association and La Co-opération in Paris (1864-1868). These publications, which started as a connecting link between the vanguard elements, the socialists and libertarians, and the republicans, later revealed their own sterility and failure. Elisée Reclus took part in these efforts but, whenever necessary, he also gave expression to his own complete ideas, as he did on the federalist question at the Berne Congress. This largeness of view, characteristic of the Reclus brothers, drew them away from Bakunin in 1869; Elisée came closer to him again from 1872 on as an ‘independent brother’.

Formulation of ideas in the congresses of the International progressed at the slowest pace; there was no inclination to proclaim theories that might turn out to be unwelcome to an important part of the Association. There was the authoritarian socialist tendency of the General Council, which, however, was watered down in consideration of its British members. There was the tendency of the anti-collectivist Proudhonians from Paris and the mutualist-collectivist tendency of de Paepe, which enjoyed the sympathetic support of the Swiss vanguard (of the Jura and so on) and gradually won over a portion of the French delegates. On questions of liberty as well as of anti-nationalism, Paris and Brussels were united against London; on questions of socialism and collectivism, Brussels and London were united against Paris. Besides de Paepe held the intellectual command over the congresses; Tolain was for ever retreating, and the delegates of the General Council under the continuous guidance of Marx’s instructions, did not achieve any serious results. Marx was infuriated; his correspondence of that period, with Engels and with Dr Kugelmann, reveals his state of mind — he disliked and despised everyone.

Through the reports of the Brussels section, written by de — (1867-68), and the discussions conducted by the Congresses of Lausanne and Brussels; through de Paepe’s letter to the Alliance of 16 January 1869; Bakunin’s lengthy letter, almost a pamphlet, sent to de Paepe towards the end of 1868 (not yet recovered in its entirety, or scattered, although it had been available in the — and in copy); through the discussions carried on for example between La Liberté (1867-1873) and L’Internationale (1869-1873) of Brussels, we learn for the first time of the synthesis of mutualism with the socialisation of territorial property (on this subject de Paepe was influenced by the doctrines of Colins, of Louis de Potter, and by De Keyzer and his book Het Natuurregt). And we also earn of the synthesis with socialisation of the means of production, that is, the all-inclusive collectivism, in accordance with de Paepe’s concepts. He also recognised

... that all the political and authoritarian States now in existence should be reduced to simple administrative functions of the public services in their respective countries, and finally disappear in the universal union of free associations, agricultural as well as industrial. ... (letter of 16 January 1869, addressed to the planning group of the International Alliance, signed by the seventeen members of the Belgian general council).

This all-inclusive socialisation and this liquidation of the States form the collectivist anarchist concept which was recognised, in the form described in this letter, by the foremost militants of Brussels: de Paepe, Brismée, Eugène Hins, Verrijcken, by the French Paul Robin and by others.

De Paepe proclaimed, in a report to the Congress of Basle (1869), that scientific socialism and popular communism, in their reorganised form and under their new names of ‘mutualism’ and ‘collectivism’, abandoned their exclusive categories, henceforth united and interpenetrated each other within the International in a new concept of society, that is, in a synthesis which simultaneously seeks guarantees for the individual and for the collectivity.

If such was the continuous formulation of a synthesis of liberty and solidarity from 1867 to 1869, then, inevitably, statism and authoritarianism had nothing to do with it. There was only a great divergence of views as to the roads to follow in order to attain the non-statist, collectivist society which even Marx recognised as a higher stage of social evolution, but only to come after the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ when, after the abolition of classes, government functions would be transformed into simple ‘administrative functions’.

De Paepe was never too far away from this manner of relegating anarchism to a remote future, except that he proposed to reach it through libertarian stages rather than through dictatorship, as Marx did. He was therefore classified with the revolutionaries (Bakunin), with some Belgians such as Eugène Hins who proposed means of collective direct action but not of revolutionary action, and with the authoritarians who, in theory at least, admitted the liquidation of government when it no longer had to defend a privileged class against a disinherited class. This explains why, while he still played an outstanding role at the Basle Congress in 1869, de Paepe later went into eclipse, so to speak, until 1874 when he already advocated a moderate statism (public services). He nevertheless had to admit, in one of his 1869 reports, that the workers would not have the patience to await the results of a slow and peaceful evolution that might take centuries, since they had already suffered too long and would want to see an end to their misery. He also had to admit that the transformation of property would, in all probability, not come through a blind and necessary evolution but through man’s intelligent and rational intervention; in other words, not by evolution but by revolution.

Despite this belated acknowledgement, however, de Paepe and his comrades remained doctrinaire, with a natural, ingrained aversion toward revolution, as they distrusted its authoritarian aspects. Hence they felt alienated from Bakunin’s efforts to define, intensify and precipitate revolutionary activity, precisely by ‘man’s intelligent and rational intervention’, through the public International Alliance (his letter of 6 April 1870). The Belgians were a bit apprehensive; they harboured a certain distrust of the Alliance — they were also somewhat doctrinaire and the Alliance found no place in their doctrine. Doctrinairism did not grasp the diversity of real-life situations; consequently, the Belgian General Council said to the group of the Alliance, in January 1869, that in Belgium there was no need of the Alliance, but it could not speak for other countries. In effect, the association of the ‘Solidaires’, later of the ‘Peuple’, and later the Brussels section and the Council itself, was a solid nucleus which had its hands on the Belgian movement, alongside other nuclei in Liège, Verviers, Ghent, Antwerp; the proselytising work of the Alliance was being accomplished for a long time by these groups of militants.

The men of the Jura, under the intellectual guidance of James Guillaume, together with some clear-thinking and dedicated workers of the type of Adhémar Schwitzguébel, Auguste Spichiger and many others, were fundamentally closer to the Belgians than to Bakunin and the revolutionary Parisians such as Varlin. Despite their differences with the Genevans, which were locally inevitable, they came to an agreement through Jung, the Swiss secretary of the London General Council, that they would be let alone, just as the Belgians always had been. A harmonious relationship was established between Bakunin and the men of the Jura which lasted at least until September 1874, on a basis of mutual respect and noninterference. On this basis a friendly co-operation was maintained, which could also have been worked out between the Brussels group and Bakunin. In the Jura, Guillaume and the other militants were so intimately linked, without the Alliance, that they had no need of Alliance-made links. And Bakunin, without interfering at all, but by dint of discussions and understandings with Guillaume exerted the influence which intelligence and experience always bring to bear, just as Guillaume did. The Belgians’ refusal to take a similar action was due to a lack of intellectual solidarity, a proud rejection of assistance honourably offered.

So the new forces, on the increase even in the International from 1864 to 1868, and the action elements, united by Bakunin in the same spirit, that is in anti-authoritarian collectivism, did not have the solidarity that they could have had. Nevertheless when Bakunin started his activities among organised workers in the autumn of 1868, the anarchist idea had already assumed an outstanding position in the International. It thus overcame the decline which marked the feeble neo-Proudhonism. On the other hand, it had not yet had an open confrontation with Marx’s authoritarian ides, which, without disarming, had maintained a prudent reserve at the great public congresses.

9. Libertarian ideas in the International from 1869 to 1872. Origins of the syndicalist conception of the society of the future. The Paris Commune and communalism.

Between September 1868 and-September 1869 (the Congress of Basle), anarchist-collectivist ideas were first introduced in Spain through Fanelli’s trip to Madrid and Barcelona, which was organised by Bakunin and his comrades of the Brotherhood and of the new public International Alliance. The workers’ associations in that country were not unaware of the existence of the International; however after 1866, the year of the political insurrection, until the fall of the Bourbon monarchy in September 1868, their latest struggles were their biggest and most vital problem. It was therefore only after these events had taken place that the Associations fully rallied and were on the point of taking over the federalist republicans. The secretary for Spain in the General Council, Paul Lafargue, left no trace whatever of his activities either then or at any later time. It was Fanelli who managed, through federalist intermediaries, to seek out the vanguard of the militant workers, Morago, Lorenzo, Rafael Farga Pellicer and others acquainted with socialist and Proudhonian ideas; these ideas were alive in the hearts of the men of the vanguard workers’ group and of those who were willing to fight for their ideals rather than see the workers led by the heads of the federal party who, on the social plane, were anti-socialists or, at best, moderate reformists.

These members of the ‘nuclei’ of Madrid and Barcelona were delighted to become acquainted with anti-authoritarian collectivism and to absorb Bakunin’s all-inclusive socialism which embodied intellectual, political and social liberation — atheism, anarchism and collectivism. They also grasped the principle of the Alliance — and this was surely due to their militant predispositions. There was great diversity in their individual inclinations, their energies and their talents; some were completely dedicated to a cause, others merely joined the movement and underwent a slow development. Thence came both the International and the Alliance, whatever names may have been given to these two harmonious gradations of involvement in socialist affiliation and socialist activity.

Contacts had not yet been established at that time between the men of Madrid and Bakunin. Morago alone started a desultory correspondence with the Geneva section of the Alliance, and Celso Gomis returned in 1870 from Geneva to Madrid. When Farga Pellicer and Dr Sentiñón of Barcelona visited Bakunin and went as delegates to the Congress of Basle, Bakunin (in August-September 1869) admitted them into his intimate circle and established continuous, uninterrupted contacts with them. They became ‘allies’ or ‘international brothers’, a term indicating that between them and Bakunin and a small number of comrades of similar convictions, there was confidence and solidarity, there were consultations and meetings, and at times also common plans, actions and a common tactic.

The letters and records for the year 1870 have been lost, but in the first half of that year a convocation was called for a constituent congress of the Spanish Federation. It was called by the militants of Madrid (14 February) but was withdrawn when it had to confront the vote of the members of 153 sections from 26 localities; of these 10,930 chose Barcelona, 3,730 Madrid, 964 Saragossa, 448 Valencia and so on, to be the site of the Congress, eventually held in Barcelona in June 1870. Two months earlier (‘several months before the Congress of Barcelona’, states the Question of the Alliance, Cuestión de la Alianza; Barcelona, autumn 1872, a declaration drafted by J G Viñas), that is, in April 1870, during the weeks preceding the balloting decided upon in March and terminated by the end of May, the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy was founded. It declared itself in favour of the programme of 1868 (differently structured and slightly retouched) and adopted independent statutes. These documents were published in the Question of the Alliance, where a statement is added that the Alliance ‘had no regional committee, but that all the sections carried on inter-communication and inter-consultation among themselves’.

Through the publication of these documents in 1872 (which was rendered necessary by the public denunciation of this secret society on the part of the Madrid socialists, José Mesa, Pablo Iglesias and others, instigated by Paul Lafargue, one of Marx’s sons-in-law, in the spring-summer of 1872) it became evident that the preparation for the Congress of 1870, and particularly that vote which was a defeat for the programme of the Madrid militants, had probably inspired and determined the foundation of the Alliance, hence a purely Spanish question, which the militants of Barcelona, Farga Pellicer, Viñas, Sentiñión and others would have decided on along the same lines, with or without the advice or even the knowledge of Bakunin. This cannot be affirmed with any degree of certainty; what does matter is that this method was really utilised and found to be practicable, and that it helped the International to spread in the face of the worst persecutions.

In Switzerland in 1869, the section within the Alliance of Socialist Democracy, in which Bakunin took an active part, the journals L’Égalité (Geneva) and Le Progrès (Le Locle, published by James Guillaume) and a part of the Jura sections, propagated anarchist collectivism. After the Congress of Basle and following Bakunin’s departure (for Locarno), the political socialists gained the upper hand in Geneva and carried the split into the entire Latin-Language Federation (Easter 1870). This circumstance later led to the adoption of the name Fédération Jurassienne (Jura Federation) for the anti-authoritarian sections, and this organisation lasted for some years after 1880.

In Italy, Bakunin and his comrades sought to introduce the public and the secret Alliance, from the latter months of 1868 onward, but all their efforts brought about nothing but the creation of the Naples section of the International, in January 1869. This section brought together many workers. However, the militants of the years following 1865 paid little attention to it and it was incapable of spreading the ideas or the organisation throughout the country. Before 1871 there had been no real international awakening in Italy.

Bakunin’s Russian activities, in so far as his ideas (revolutionary theory and tactics) are concerned, are revealed in his articles in Navodnoye Delo (The People’s Cause) in September 1868, in his pamphlets and manifestos of the Nechayev period, from the spring of 1869 to the summer of 1870, as well as in the programme published in a review during the same summer, after his break with Nechayev. It would be impossible to discuss and comment upon these writings and personal matters without going into too many details. It was in his activities apart from Nechayev in 1870 and particularly in 1872, that Bakunin made contacts with young Russians who were interested in libertarian ideas and action. Nechayev was a Jacobin and a Blanquist, and tried to use Bakunin chiefly for his own purposes.

In France in 1869 collectivism predominated over Proudhonism among the more outstanding militants, particularly in Eugène Varlin. But the fall of the Empire, which seemed imminent, put practical action and the coalition of forces ahead of all other considerations. The syndicates were crowded with new members and Varlin was active on all fronts, safeguarding simultaneously the independence of the International and of the syndicates (Federal Chamber of Workers’ Societies), making sure that they did not remain isolated, and seeking to link Paris with the major cities of the provinces. Thence came the great assembly of 13 March 1870, in Lyons. On that occasion, on the fall of the Empire, Bakunin wrote in a letter addressed to his friends in France:

Are the workers going once more to play the part of victims? Abstain from all participation in bourgeois radicalism and organise the forces of the proletariat on the outside. The basis of this organisation has been stated: it consists of the factories and the associations of the workers, the creation of workers’ relief funds, the tools for the struggle against the bourgeoisie and their federations, not only national but also international, and the creation of chambers of labour, as in Belgium.

And when the hour of revolution strikes, proclaim the liquidation of the State and of bourgeois society. Proclaim juridical and political anarchism and the new economic organisation from the bottom up and from the circumference to the centre.

And in order to save the revolution, to bring it to a good end, that is, to the focal centre of this anarchism, comes the action of a collective dictatorship of all the revolutionaries, not invested with any kind of official power whatsoever, yet all the more effective — the natural, free action of all energetic and sincere socialists, scattered all over the face of the country, of all the countries, but strongly united by a common idea and a common will.

Bakunin had no influence on the Paris militants. Even Varlin, who was in limited contact with James Guillaume, and slightly more so with the Belgians, as well as the men from Lyons and Marseilles, who were allied with Bakunin, left him completely disillusioned.

As for the people — in all the countries — the ideological work of the International meant very little to them, while growth in membership depended chiefly on the prestige which the association enjoyed at any given moment. This was due to the fact that it acted, simultaneously, as the socialist party, as the syndicate in labour’s daily struggles and as the great revolutionary force; to some, it even represented the reconstructive force which was viewed as an actual part of the society of the future.

The people took little stock of subtleties or distant goals. They were satisfied and overwhelmed when they saw — from 1867 to 1870 — the first demonstrations of solidarity between countries: long-lasting strikes supported by contributions coming from other countries; strikers’ children cared for in other places; outside workers, imported as strikebreakers, persuaded by the internationalists to go home and so on. Great massacres took place in France and in Belgium, followed by a massive entry of workers from those two countries into the International.

On the other hand, situations arose where workers, under provocation by the capitalists or those who protected capital, would willingly have rebelled while the International exhorted them to wait. There were also strikes that could not be settled and at times too many strikes occurring simultaneously, which the International was not in a position to assist financially or bring to a favourable conclusion; this led to a loss of prestige and of membership. The sections, which were syndicates poor in membership or only temporarily numerous (various sections), were made up of heterogeneous aggregates; therefore some were active, some weak, depending on the quality of their militant leadership, on the efforts of their centres of propaganda, the particular situations they faced and the demands they made and were fighting for. The sections were never numerous, except in Spain, and even there only in 1872 and 1873 in Catalania and Andalusia, while in the other provinces they were few and poor in membership. They were not too numerous even in Geneva, and much less so in Belgium and the Swiss Jura, as well as in Paris, if we take into account the chambers of labour.

Their early hopes of mobilising the entire working world in millions against capital were not realised. The joint formulation of social ideas came to an end with the Congress of 1869; from that moment on, the theoretical break also signalled the beginning of the personal break between the authoritarian and the libertarian currents (1869-1872). The ideological differences had not been foreseen as the inevitable result of the progress of ideas. Uniting homogeneous groups was not worthwhile; establishing harmonious contacts between dissenting groups would have been a problem — it still remains an unsolved problem in our time, sixty years later.

The only constructive effort was promoted in Belgium by Hector Denis, Victor Arnould and other members of Liberté (Brussels) starting in 1867 and particularly in 1870, with the organisation of workers outside the State, as a ‘workers’ parliament’, that is, as an organisation linked with the economic life of the country, which would reduce the importance of the political organisation, that is, the State. It was called the ‘labour representation’, and it stirred up a lively agitation, interrupted by the war and the French Commune. Had it not been for these two interruptions, where would that agitation have carried it? It could not have imposed its objectives by revolutionary action; if it had the strength to do so, it would have been possible and desirable to make a real revolution. All it might have been able to accomplish, at the very most, would have been some legal recognition of its aims, and thus it would have created a reformism. The representation of special interests — agrarian, industrial, feudal — is nothing new, and has been nothing new, in bourgeois society, with its chambers of commerce and so many other organisations which often force the hand of parliaments and ministers.

To the socialists of that era, however, the ‘labour representation’ stood for an idea such as Eugène Hins of Brussels, for instance, expressed at the Congress of Basle when he maintained that the International “is and should be a State within the State; which leaves it to the States to continue on their way until our State becomes the strongest. Then, upon the ruins of the States, we will set up our State, already prepared and ready, as it exists in each and every section”. An article in the same spirit appeared in the Internationale of Brussels at about the same time, translated from La Federación of Barcelona of 7 November 1869:

Las actuales instituciones de la Internacional consideradas con relación al porvenir (The present institutions of the international, considered in relation to the future, reprinted in El Proletariado mulitante by Anselmo Lorenzo, Volume I, pp. 233-238). It begins as follows:

The A. I. de los T. [International Working Men’s Association] contains within itself the seeds of social regeneration ... it holds the embryo of all the future institutions. …

When it has spread everywhere,

we shall see the old social order disappearing as by magic, and the new order, which is to regenerate the world, will burst into bloom. …

(There it is: ‘as by magic’, the famous waving of the magic wand.) Thus ‘the workers’ section or association is the model of the city government’, the resistance groups ‘are destined to organise the labour of the future’, transformed into ‘co-operative shops’, while ‘the consumers’ associations’ will become

communal stores, where various products will be placed on display, with their exact cost prices specified and so on.

César de Paepe, similarly, had stated in one of his reports to the Congress of Basle (1869):

These [the resistance groups] will organise the proletariat, through their federation and their groups, and wind up by constituting a State within a State, a workers’ economic State in the midst of the bourgeois political State. The former, that is, the workers’ State, will naturally be represented by the delegates from the workers’ corporations which, while providing for the workers’ present needs, will also constitute the embryo of the administration of the future. . .. And so, given this situation, it may well happen that on some fine day the new State will decide to proceed with the dissolution of the old State.

Bakunin, likewise, stated, in an 1871 manuscript:

The organisation of the sections of skilled workers, their federation within the International Association, and their representation through the chambers of labour not only create an academy where all the workers of the International, uniting theory and practice, can and must study the science of economics. They also sow the living seed of a new social order which shall replace the bourgeois world. They create not only the ideas but also the very facts of the future.

And Eugène Hins, speaking at the Congress of Basle, stated:

Yes, the resistance groups will survive after the abolition of the wage system, not in name but in action. They will then be the labour organisation. They will then become the organisation of free exchange, operating through a vast section of labour from one end of the world to another. They will replace the old political systems; in the place of a confused and heterogeneous representation, there will come into being the representation of labour.

On the eve of the Congress of Barcelona June 19-26, 1870) Federación published The Representation of Labour (from 15-29 May), concluding that it was necessary ‘to create, in a word, the bases for the economic-workers’ State in the midst of the present bourgeois-political State’. It was in this spirit that the statutes of the Spanish Federation were drawn up at that Congress; they were formulated within the Alliance and, as Lorenzo (ibid., Volume II, page 89) reports, ‘were chiefly the work of young bourgeois students together with the associated workers of Barcelona and the active members of the Alliance of Socialist Democracy’. The report for the organisation was made by Antonio González García Meneses, a future professor, and, amongst those mentioned by Lorenzo, the most active man was probably the future physician, José García Viñas, and another could have been Trinidad Soriano.

These young comrades — Meneses chief among them — convinced that today’s organisation had to be built in such a way that it could, on the morrow, be an organisation of which each part was capable of filling a new, important and wider function, accomplished a work of meticulous precision, a real code, which was put together in the Reglamento tipico aprobado por el primer Congreso obrero de la Regién espanola de la Asociacién Internacional de Trabajadores, celebrado en Barcelona, el 19 de junio de 1870 (Typical Regulations approved by the first Workers’ Congress of the Spanish Section of the International Working Men’s Association, held in Barcelona on 19 June 1870; 48 pages in -16°). The conference of Valencia (September 1871), added more material to these texts to form 88 pages: Organización social de las secciones obreras de la Federación Regional Española; the last revision, dating from the congress of Córdoba, December 1872, was published in 1873 (96 pages). Later, the clandestine character of the organisation — from 1874 to 1881 — simplified these statutes, or rather reduced them to a dead letter. Nevertheless the Regional Federation of 1881, in so far as it was able to function freely (in 1881, and particularly in 1882) readopted them until about 1887-1888, when this mode of organisation and its underlying idea (of the embryo of the future society within the present) came under criticism.

As for the rest of the International, this idea, the offspring of its Belgian background which Bakunin did not care to discourage, had no real vital meaning in view of the conditions that had developed since 1870, which were unfavourable to theoretical activity and to progress within the organisation. The authoritarians, infuriated by their failure to make any impact at the Congress of Basle against the anti-authoritarians (Bakunin, the Belgians, those of the Jura and some of the Spaniards and the French) started their offensive in favour of political action, that is towards the conquest of the State (not its liquidation). This led, according as opportunity permitted, to electoral action or to Blanquist dictatorship. Those of Geneva (opposed to Bakunin and those of the Jura), the German Social Democrats, Marx and his faction of the General Council, started this war against the anti-authoritarians in the organisation, at times openly, at times under cover, using an odious type of polemic and resorting to tactics which were nothing short of an abuse of the powers conferred upon them by the statutes.

In France, the general persecutions of May 1870, crushed the life of the International until September, in the midst of the war, when the general situation put an end to this internecine strife. In Belgium, the events in France were watched passively. Not only was it impossible for the International to expand, but an economic crisis destroyed the progress already achieved. Spain as well as the Jura were also in a state of crisis during the winter of 1870-71, and in 1871 the Spanish Federation was particularly harassed by persecutions, while in 1872 Lafargue’s intrigues caused trouble in that country. It was only in 1873 that the Spanish Federation rose to vast proportions, to become again the victim of new persecutions after the summer, that is, after Alcoy and San Lucar de Barrameda; from January 1874 it was reduced to a clandestine existence. The basis for the expectations of 1869 — for a general growth of the organisation, so weak still in that year and, except for Spain, growing ever weaker and departing from its ideas since 1870 — never really existed during those twenty years of the International’s life, from 1864 to about 1884, and in Spain in reality to 1888.

The idea was revived by French syndicalism, particularly in the years of its greatest glow of revolutionary fervour, 1904-1908, and there it was incorporated in the utopia Comment nous ferons la révolution (How we shall make the revolution) by E. Pataud and E. Pouget (Paris, November 1909; VIII-298 pages). It is always reaffirmed when a syndicalist organisation is filled with great hopes. So it happened with the German syndicalists in their reconstruction years which followed 1918, and with the Spanish syndicalists when they saw the possibilities which seemed to open up in April 1931. The idea is also reaffirmed as pure theory, as in Pierre Besnard’s Les Syndicats ouvriers et la révolution sociale (Workers’ Syndicates and the Social Revolution) (Paris, 1930; 349 pages).

Just as Bakunin in 1870 did not refuse his help for what seemed to him to be a living force, so Kropotkin, when the French CGT appeared to him to be a real force, recognised the possibility of similar developments. However, in my opinion, neither the one nor the other can be included among the real advocates of this idea; these were the individuals who saw it as the only, the inevitable, sure road, who believed it useful and necessary to abandon all other roads in favour of this one. Such as these were the Spanish Internationalists, the French syndicalists and those who are now called ‘pure syndicalists’. This idea is on a par with any other anticipated social form, for example that of the free municipality or of the communities called soviets or of the anarchist group or the experimental community (the Phalanx), which were to be the elementary stage, within which and through which the free social community and the needs and realities of future social living would best achieve their initial development. None of these or other suggested forms excludes or reinforces the others, and these five or six activities (there is also the organisation of the co-operatives) would do well to get used to working together, since there will be need of all of them, and of another force besides, which no organisation can create alone but which is indispensable: good will, enthusiasm, good sense, mutual tolerance and united effort.

So far as the International was concerned, this syndicalist utopia was just an episode. In Spain it was subjected to strong criticism in the end even by its formerly steadfast advocates; criticism chiefly formulated by Antonio Pellicer Paraire in the review Acracia (P, ‘Acratismo societario’, Acracía, January-July 1887) and in El Productor. This utopia left a deplorable aftermath in all the countries where syndicalism is now to be found: in any locality, district or town there would be one single recognised organisation. This exclusivism led to internecine conflicts and endless excommunications. It was, in sum, an anticipated dictatorship not only over future humanity but present-day humanity as well, which would hold sway over the development of its propaganda and its actually existing adjustments. This idea, for all its good intentions, has been weighed down with this ‘burden’ which will always create opposition to it, now and in the future, if it should ever be imposed again.

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 put an end to the joint formulation of ideas within the International for discussion at the congresses. After September 1869 (Basle), authoritarians and libertarians met as absolute enemies only, each shackled by his own doctrine. Bakunin, in his desire for a social revolution, felt his old nationalist passions reviving in August 1870. His plans, which were projected theoretically in his writings and which for the most part remained unpublished for a long time, proved weak and inadequate when they were confronted with reality (in Lyons and Marseilles). He took refuge in critical work, where he quickly rose from the passions of the day to his finest philosophical heights, as in his unfinished writings on the ‘Divine Phantasm’ and his work entitled Dieu et l’état (God and the State). The Paris Commune interrupted this labour and, since it was impossible for Bakunin to help (in May 1871 he was in the Jura), he made a profound analysis of it and took up the defence of the Commune and of all socialism against Mazzini, who had slandered it. His defence of the Commune brought him many Italian contacts and the International was substantially implanted in Italy, which was completely won over to the ideas of anarchist collectivism and the tactics recommended by Bakunin. Thus the Italian Federation was founded in August 1872. In the same year Bakunin entered into closer contact with Spain. In November 1871 (the Sonvillier Circular), the Jura started its struggle against the authoritarians, in defiance of their closed meeting held in London in September. In France, the International came to an end, and, after the fall of the Commune, its authoritarian faction was soon reduced to some refugees and a handful of Communalists. In Belgium, the intellectual impulse was, so to speak, paralysed, overcome by scepticism concerning the efficacy of revolutionary methods, when the intellectuals were confronted with the massacres in Paris.

The Paris Commune was the product of the convergence of multiple factors which gave rise to a great variety of interpretations, not all of them of a liberal or libertarian nature. There was the old antagonism between cities and States; the pride of the capital as against a State and a government devoid of prestige, disgraced before the court of public opinion in those days (September to March); the reshuffling of labour and socialist forces during the state of siege, which ended in a sort of military dictatorship of the armed proletariat in opposition to the ferocious dictatorship of the generals. There was much more of this than of a federalist sentiment; there was less still of a clearly anti-State sentiment that would want to replace the French State with the Federation of 40,000 communes which Elisée Reclus, in his speech in Berne (1868), had described as satrapies made up of those who obeyed and those who paid taxes, since each of these had a judge, municipal councillors, priests and other functionaries — all of them, down to the rural guards, eager to rule over someone. There were certainly also some good people, who were simply in favour of progress and who welcomed the new attempt as a social protest against the impotence and century-old cruelty of the State.

Considered in itself, the Commune, fighting obstacles and driven toward authoritarianism in its desperate self-defence against ferocious enemies who drowned it in blood, was an authoritarian microcosm, beset with party passions, bureaucracy and militarism. These facts, in view of the Commune’s heroic end in death, were often brushed aside by the libertarian critics; there is no doubt, however, that they were acquainted with the real facts, which they could not help learning in their contacts with the numerous refugees, as in Geneva, for instance. Its best representatives, such as Gustave Lefrançais, an old communist of 1848, were thorough anti-statists, but within the Commune which was so eulogised there were indelible remnants of municipal and local governmentalism and a distrust of anarchism. In short, just as there was the theory of the ‘minimal State’, they upheld the idea of the ‘minimal Commune’, governed as little as possible, but still governed. The libertarians who encountered these Communalists were both attracted and repelled. The idea of the Commune was their holy of holies, its governmentalism appeared to them to be oppressive; nonetheless some took the plunge and, like Paul Brousse, were absorbed and thus lost to our ideas. Others, like Elisée Reclus (a fighter and strong supporter of the Commune, who remained a friend of its defenders), refused to be seduced by communalism and became more and more aclear-sighted anarchist. Louise Michel, the most enthusiastic fighter for the Commune, confronted with these mistakes and the authoritarianism she had seen developing in its best supporters, became an anarchist when she had the opportunity, on the boat which carried her to a deportation lasting until 1880, to reflect upon what she had seen.

Another fighter, Victorine Rouchy, also became one of the first communist anarchists in Geneva. Bakunin was neither absorbed nor completely captivated by the Paris Commune, as were so many others whose field of vision was constricted by the great event. As for Italy and Spain there was, for the most part, no such narrowness of outlook. Elsewhere it did exist, and this, in my opinion, brought about a certain disintegration of the anarchist idea.

10. The anti-authoritarian International until 1877. The origins of anarcho-communism in 1876-1880.

It is sad indeed to see the rapidity and indifference with which the principle of workers’ international solidarity was shattered in 1870, 1871 and thereafter, just when that principle should have stood its first test. The war of 1870-1871 was born of an agitation which made loud demands for a world war against Russia; it was indifferent to the war of 1866, and considered itself above the efforts for peace made in 1867-1868. The war of 1870-71 as such was of no interest to the International, but its particular amplitude and its expansion as it went on, reawakened all the old patriotic passions.

Marx, as attested by his writings published at that time and correspondence published later, was as anti-German as Bakunin, and did all he could to foment a British war against Russia and Germany. He was in complete agreement, at the General Council in 1871-72, with the Blanquists, who were French patriots par excellence. Those among the German socialists in contact with the International were all Francophiles. Conciliatory manifestos were published by both parties. Nothing in the International could cause any offence to the French. But the very fact that a race considered superior (Latin) had been beaten by a race considered inferior (Barbarians) was intolerable to passionate spirits. Their racial attitudes cannot be ascribed to a later interpretation; one need only turn to Bakunin’s great work Statism and Anarchy, and the first two volumes of the Spanish series of his Obras, with his writings from 1870, to note the vehemence of these racial feelings. (Vols. 3 and 4 include his more philosophical writings from 1870-1871.)

Bakunin was really stirred by racial questions. In Marx a pathological egocentrism was at work — from which no people was exempt — and this egocentrism led him to reflect that “its [that is, the German working class’s] supremacy upon the world scene over that of the French would at the same time be the supremacy of our theory over Proudhon’s” — an ignoble expression of a coldly calculating mind. Nevertheless, as all his other statements of that period show, he did all he could against the Germans and nothing on their behalf. On the other hand, the two camps were so poorly informed about each other — as witnessed by the correspondence which has been preserved and the press of that period — that Marx was dubbed a ‘Pan-Germanist’, with the same lack of factual information and same disregard for truth as Bakunin was called a ‘Pan-Slavist’.

On the subject of these events within the International, let us listen to the retrospective voice of Malatesta as he sums up his experiences starting with 1871. Malatesta wrote in 1914 in Volontà concerning his own actions and those of his comrades:

... that we want, by conscious action, to guide the workers’ movement in the direction which seems best, contrary to those who believe in the miracles of automatism and in the virtues of the working classes.

Bakunin expected a great deal from the International; yet, at the same time, he created the Alliance, a secret organisation with a well-determined programme — atheist, socialist, anarchist, revolutionary — which was truly the soul of the International in all the Latin countries and gave the anarchist impulse to the one branch of the International just as the Marxists, on the other hand, gave the Social Democratic impulsion to its other branch.

He also wrote that, although the congresses were called

... the democratic universities of the proletariat ... it is a well-known fact that the spontaneous impulse of the working masses entered very little or hardly at all into any of our work; that, on the contrary, it was a small group of thinkers and fighters which proposed, discussed and accepted certain solutions for the social problem; that they then propagated these solutions and had them accepted by the masses of the Internationalists. And what brought about the doom of the International, above all else, was the fact that the executive and directive minority had been too critical of the masses and was not able to separate the functions of the party from its own functions within the labour movement.

Why try to conceal certain truths now that they are in the domain of history and can serve as a lesson for the present and the future? ... We, who were known in the International as Bakuninists and who were members of the Alliance, made loud outcries against the Marxists because they tried to make their own particular programme prevail in the International. Yet, setting aside the question of the legality of their methods, which it is fruitless to dwell upon now, we did just what they did; we sought to make use of the International for our own party aims. The difference lay in the fact that we, as anarchists, relied chiefly on propaganda, and, since we wanted to gain converts for the anarchist cause, emphasised decentralisation, the autonomy of groups, free initiative, both individual and collective, while the Marxists, being authoritarians as they were, wanted to impose their ideas by majority strength — which was more or less fictitious — by centralisation and by discipline. But all of us, Bakuninists and Marxists alike, tried to force events rather than relying upon the force of events.

Until 1870, Marx displayed a certain amount of caution. He knew he had to consider the English; he kept aloof from the activities of the Belgians, of the Italians (except for the fighting of the Mazzinists), and the Spaniards in the International. The Swiss received gentle treatment from their compatriot Jung, who had no love for Marx. As for Marx, he busied himself chiefly with the Parisians, while holding Proudhonians at bay, discarding the rhetorical revolutionaries (of the type of Félix Pyat), and searching for elements of a labour party, which he failed to find. He saw the rise of independent collectivists like Varlin, whom he did not like, but he took good care not to antagonise them. He showed great interest in the United States, in the hope of forming a party on the American continent, and paid a good deal of attention to the Irish, who could give plenty of trouble to the English. Bakunin’s unexpected appearance, and his intense activity from 1868 onwards, infuriated Marx, who opposed the affiliation of the public Alliance; he distributed his odious Confidential Communication against Bakunin in Germany and a similar one in Belgium (January 1870).

From autumn 1870, Marx’s hatred joined forces with the brutal aggressiveness of Engels, who tried to undermine Bakunin’s work in Italy through Cafiero and in Spain through Lafargue. In his hands, every question was tainted with controversy. Through Utin, a Russian, he got hold of whatever documents Utin managed to collect on projects dealing with the secret Alliance, and the doings of Nechayev, and launched a campaign of denunciation against Bakunin, which started at the London conference, went on with a pamphlet-circular — the Prétendues Scissions (Fictitious Split) in May 1872 (by Engels) — and culminated in a secret investigation at the Hague Congress in September. The pamphlet on the Alliance, published in August 1873, their legacy to posterity, is a monument of ignominy.

Throughout this entire affair, Marx and Engels — as can now be confirmed in all its details — acted with that shocking lack of honesty which was characteristic of all their polemics. They worked with inadequate documentation, which, according to their custom, they supplemented with arbitrary declarations and conclusions — accepted as truth by their followers although they were exposed as deplorable misrepresentations, errors and unscrupulous perversions of the truth.

On the anti-authoritarian side, with special reference to this controversy, we have direct documentation collected by James Guillaume in the Bulletin of the Jura Federation (1872-1873), in the Mémoire of this Federation, and all of it, together with a mass of explanatory material, in the four volumes of L’Internationale: Documents et souvenirs (1864-1878). Bakunin wrote a good deal at that time but published little, in the expectation, to the very last, of reconciling all these differences amongst the comrades.

It would be particularly important to read of his writings from this period: his letter to the Réveil (Paris) of October 1868; the three conferences given in the Jura (May 1871); The Principle of the State, a fragment; the writings of 1871 concerning the Geneva section of the Alliance (1869-1870); the Reply of an Internationalist to Mazzini (in Italian) and his Théologie politique de Mazzini ... (in French), also of 1871; the long letter to Ceretti of March 1872, after the death of Mazzini, and many other texts and fragments concerning Italy (1871-1872); the long letter to the Jurassians of the first months of 1872, unpublished, which would form in itself a small book; the letter to Anselmo Lorenzo (March 1872), and the letters concerning the Alliance in Spain (manuscript fragments from 1872); still concerning the Alliance, his letters to Albert Richard and a chapter of the Russian book The historical development of the International (1873). There are also other manuscripts of the autumn of 1872, which deal with the International after the Hague congress (in Oeuvres, vols III and IV), and the great book Statism and Anarchy (1873, in Russian). Finally the two letters published in autumn 1873, on the occasion of his withdrawal from the International. In addition to all this, his correspondence with Herzen and Ogarey, published in 1895 in German translation and then 1896 in Russian, is very instructive.

As for Bakunin’s personal activities in 1871, these were chiefly his meetings with friends and comrades in Florence (April) and in the Jura (May), and his fight against Mazzini and in his numerous new Italian connections. In 1872 we find his contacts with Cafiero, with the Russians and other Slavs in Zürich, his visits to the Jura, organisation of the ‘Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists’ in Ziirich, and the international Congress of Saint-Imier (Jura) in September. In 1873 we have his Russian books, contacts with delegates to the Congress of Geneva (Berne). Then starts the year of the ‘Baronata’; from December 1873 came preparation for the Italian insurrection (August 1874). In September 1874, some of his closest comrades committed the deplorable act of splitting with him. Thereafter, until his death on 1 July 1876, he refrained from all militant action.

It is obviously not an easy task to obtain other documentary information on Bakunin from 1871 to 1874, particularly since a certain number of his writings (which were supposed to have been included in his Oeuvres, Paris — that is, if Volume VII and the following volumes had really been published) are available only in the numerous extracts I have made of them in my Biography (1898- 1900). From 1914 to 1935, however, no one has tried to make any arrangements for continuing the publication of the Oeuvres in the original French; very few people I know were even curious enough to try and find out just what was to be included in those additional volumes. Concerning the events of the ‘Baronata’, one can easily find Guillaume’s report and his interpretation, in his work on the International. I must point out, however, that his viewpoint has always seemed to me to show partiality, and that one would have to become acquainted with the entire material which had been preserved before hazarding an independent opinion. I have published the entire text of the Memoir of Justification of the summer 1874, in the Supplement of La Protesta, with some notes. One should naturally be cautious about accepting the fantastic report dealing with this matter and with Bakunin, which appeared in Bologna in August 1874.

One of the most notable expositions of Bakunin’s ideas was his resolution entitled Nature of the Political Action of the Proletariat, offered at the Saint-Imier Congress (6 September 1872), which concluded with the following words:

... that the destruction of all political power is the first duty of the proletariat; that any organisation whatsoever of a political power, called provisional and revolutionary [the Marxist-Bolshevik theory], can be nothing but another fraud, and would be as dangerous to the proletariat as any government now in existence; that the proletarians of the entire world, by rejecting any compromise in the attainment of the social revolution, should establish the solidarity of revolutionary action outside any bourgeois political form.

The full import of these ideas is summed up in the eighth resolution most certainly drawn up by himself —at the Congress of the Italian Federation held in Bologna in March 1873; it is too extensive for inclusion in this work.

Concerning Bakunin’s anarchist ideas and actions, it may be said in general and objectively that, after the autumn of 1874, all but a few men in Italy and in Spain, and a few Russians, thought these could all be and should be set aside. Their real significance had been almost forgotten, but after twenty years of oblivion the true worth of his work has been revealed and is gaining increasing recognition. During that period of obscurity, God and the State had been extracted from his manuscripts; this I well knew. But then it was felt there was nothing more to be done. I have already noted the impression made on Kropotkin in 1895 by a reading of some of Bakunin’s Russian letters (to Herzen). Those years marked the turn of the tide.

Without the stimulus of discussion among the different groups of socialists, the congresses of the anti-authoritarian International (1873-77) declined in interest. In accordance with the wishes of James Guillaume, who insisted at the Hague Congress on this point, a rapprochement was made with Marx’s adversaries, some of whom, especially the English, were authoritarian socialists themselves. They were allies who had little to offer that could be of interest in ideas, in action and in trade union power. There were other deficiencies. There was, for instance, the excellent ‘L’Avenir’ (the Future) section from Geneva at the 1873 Congress, the more advanced anarchists — the first communist anarchists, but labour men par excellence, who insisted on the exclusion of the intellectuals from the International; this proposal, however, was rejected by the Congress. They had taken this stand because they distrusted men like Marx and the leaders of the Commune. The Congress remedied this evil by the new organisation of the association, which abolished the General Council, instituted a federal ‘Bureau’ without any power and put in effect the complete autonomy of the federations. Questions of principle were no longer to be decided by vote.

In practice the International, for lack of any initiative that would come from a central organ, disappeared from public view. The fact is, however, that for quite some time all the work had been done locally. London’s initiative had been exhausted since 1864-1866. From then on the Council was nothing but a group which sought to impose its own point of view (that is, Marx’s, who thought he would be able to rule in this manner); to this end, it used increasingly the administrative powers with which it was endowed. The federal commissions, alternating between Switzerland and Belgium, lost all influence because of their inactivity. Eventually the Belgian group which was to form a federal commission after the 1877 Congress was so apathetic that there was no longer any sign of life from any commission. Thus the slight bond that had existed between the federations gradually disappeared, although the federations continued to exist, and no one even took note of the absence of this formal bond.

Persecution soon made the public existence of these sections impossible in France (1871) and in Spain (1874), and made their continuance precarious and sporadic in Italy (from 1873 onwards). In Belgium, in the meantime, a series of sections (particularly the Flemish ones) turned toward a moderate socialism. In Spain, at the Congress of Cérdoba (December 1872), the councils were re- 136 Cuapter 10 placed by commissions; in 1874-75 as a result of persecution, and after the clandestine Congress of Madrid (June 1874), the regional assemblies held their deliberations every year and there were no more congresses. Nevertheless the federal commissions continued to survive and their secretary became virtually the connecting link for the entire organisation. Thus real life, compounded, as it always is, of many sore trials, had within a few years, changed this international organisation which, in 1869, believed itself to be the very image of the society of the future. Such notions lack, primarily, all historical perspective and any sense of proportion. A thousand factors stand between the inevitably fleeting and inconstant present and a future of unknown shape and time. To wish to span this distance with an affirmation, a hope, a disbelief, or to leap over it by sheer willpower, is a simplistic device or pure fantasy.

The real situation determined tactics as well. The Italians favoured insurrection (1874-1877); the Spaniards chose perseverance, envisioning a great general movement in the country which did not materialise in the year it was expected to come (1877). The people of the Jura and the Belgians carried on a quiet propaganda, with the formation of small local syndicates.

What united them all was their joint defence at the Brussels Congress (1874) against the authoritarian infiltrations proposed by César de Paepe. Influenced by Social Democracy (the Workers’ State), as well as by Communalism (communalised public seryices), he advocated such a free commune in a free State (in De l'organisation des services publics dans la société future). Belgians, Swiss and Spaniards (Farga Pellicer) rejected these ideas.

1875 was a dull year, and the plans for a Congress to be held in Barcelona did not materialise. In 1876 there was a reawakening of spirits; in that year, when Bakunin died, there were fine, new manifestations of anarchist thinking.

James Guillaume, who had already written Une Commune sociale (1870), in which he described a free commune in its initial stage, had assembled in the autumn of 1874 and published in 1876, his Idées sur l’organisation sociale. In this volume he portrayed a future collectivist society; it is a well-argued work, which takes into account progressive evolution. Between collectivism (distribution according to work performed) and communism (free consumption), Guillaume emphasises the principle of the availability of goods — limited or abundant — which would permit society to proceed from limitation of consumption to the widest freedom of consumption. Hence he did not promise immediate communism but rather a communism to be reached by creating abundance in the first place.

A pamphlet entitled Aux travailleurs manuels partisans de l’action politique (To Manual Workers Partisans of Political Action), written by Francois Dumartheray, appeared in Geneva in February 1876; it voiced the ideas of the ‘UAvenir’ section, an independent group of refugees, most of them from Lyons, as well as some others. Dumartheray, a native of Savoy, was a member of this group.

This publication was the first to mention anarchist communism in print. It also announced the coming publication of another ‘special’ pamphlet that was to explain the meaning of this term; but for lack of funds, this special leaflet never appeared. These men, either because their roots lay in the old Icarian communism of Lyons or because they wanted to move forward on all problems — as their group did on many occasions when they had to face the men of Jura and the Communalists — not only rejected the limitations of collectivism but proposed anarchist communism. And it was exactly through his contact with this milieu, and especially with Dumartheray, whose friend he became, that Kropotkin, a few years later in Geneva, came closer to communism, to the point of accepting it openly.

At the gatherings of the Internationalists and the Communalists in Lausanne on 18 and 19 March 1876, Elisée Reclus delivered a talk in recognition of communist anarchism, and this must have represented so novel an event that it was still remembered many years later although the text of the speech itself had not been preserved. On the other hand, he had not had the opportunity, or had not sought one, to specify his opinions earlier, but he did so later in Le Travailleur (1877-78; Geneva) and in Le Révolté, from 1879 on, he did so more often.

It was after reading Guillaume’s Idées (which appeared in August 1876, and which some Italians, such as Cafiero, had been familiar with since 1874), or perhaps on the occasion of a discussion in the Bulletin of the Jura, that militant Italians in Naples, in the summer or autumn of 1876, came to accept anarchist communism. Malatesta wrote in Volontà:

In Italy there were a few of us (Cafiero, Covelli, Costa, the writer and one or two more whose names I do not recall) who decided to give up collectivism, which was at that time professed by the entire International, and made the delegates at the Congress of Florence (1876) and hence the entire Italian Federation of the International, accept communism.

The Congress of the Romagna and Emilia sections in July was orientated toward collectivism, and Costa presided, while before the Congress of Florence he was in prison. Later, between July and October, an understanding was reached with the abovementioned Naples comrades, by mail or by personal contact. Then, perhaps in September, they agreed to propose this change of orientation at the Congress of Florence, Cafiero and Malatesta went directly to Switzerland, to the Berne Congress of the International.

The records of this congress make no mention of such a change and this omission shows, at least, that if this new fact was discussed, it attracted no attention. But the Arbeiter-Zeitung of Berne (under the editorship of Paul Brousse) reported on 28 October: “... an important fact is the adoption, by Italian socialism, of common ownership of the products of labour. …”

And a letter from Cafiero and Malatesta in the Bulletin of the Jura states: “The Italian Federation considers the collective ownership of the products of labour to be the necessary complement to the collectivist programme.”

Paul Brousse (at a conference at Saint-Imier on 17 February 1877) and Andrea Costa (in his propagandist activity as a refugee in Switzerland in spring/summer of 1877) gave recognition to these new ideas. And a small leaflet printed in German, issued either in April or May 1877 by some German workers in Berne who were connected with Brousse and Kropotkin, is entitled Statuten der deutschredenden anarchisch-kommunistischen Partei (Statutes of the German-speaking Anarchist-Communist Party), while Kropotkin proposed another version for the title: ‘ ... deutsche anarchische kommunistische Partei’ (German Anarchist Communist Party; quoted in a letter from Emil Werner to Kropotkin, 4 May 1877). At the Congress of the International held at Verviers in September 1877, there was likewise a discussion at which Costa and Brousse spoke in support of communism, Morago and Viñas held for collectivism, while Guillaume, Jules Montels, Emil Werner and a Belgian delegate wanted to shelve the question. This discussion is known to us through the minutes taken by Kropotkin. It was Guillaume’s argument that

the only thing to be said at this time is that the products [of labour] will be distributed in one way or another, and that different solutions for the distribution will be arrived at within the groups themselves.

All this goes to show that, in its early beginnings, the new theory was proposed in a calm, deliberate manner, without fanaticism or exaggeration.

“We were communist anarchists and we still are”, wrote Malatesta in Pensiero e Volontà on 25 August 1926;

but this does not mean that we are going to make communism into a crowbar, a dogma, or that we fail to understand that before we can achieve it we require certain moral and material conditions which it is necessary to create.

He had written in 1884:

But, in order that it may become attainable, communism has need of a great moral development on the part of the members of society, of a lofty and profound sense of solidarity, which the revolutionary impulse itself may not be capable of creating.

That is to say, since the nature of various localities and concrete situations will not make it possible to have an abundance of goods immediately available everywhere, it will be necessary to accept a temporary collectivism.

And Kropotkin, although not seeming to be concerned with these problems in 1877 and 1878, and even in 1879 (from what we know of his thinking through his articles), nevertheless concludes his great exposition of The Anarchist Idea from the Viewpoint of its Practical Realisation with the collectivist commune, without any mention of communism. And in his address at the Congress of the Jura (according to Le Révolté of 18 October) he advocates communist anarchism as the objective, with collectivism as the provisional form of property in the interim.

We must not overlook the fact that advocates of anarchist collectivism, while guaranteeing to each the full product of his or her labour, did not have in mind a literal, rigid distribution according to each person’s performance. The total product was construed as the product without deduction of capitalist profits and State expenditures. The association, the group or other such unit would make the decision as to how this totality would be distributed — either on the basis of hours of labour or of equal wages (advocated by Bakunin) or according to each person’s needs. To identify collectivism with a new wage class was a mistake. Such was the opinion of Guillaume, who, as shown in his Idées (1874-1876), had the good sense to make unlimited distribution depend on the availability of a product. It is to be noted that even the communists conceded that goods in short supply would have to be rationed. It was understood, however, that such goods would be exceptions; for instance, early fruits and vegetables would be allotted to the sick and the children, while all the other products of real importance were assumed to be available or easily obtainable in abundance. Collectivists and practically-minded communists like Malatesta did not take it for granted that there would be an abundance of any particular item, although they wished to create it promptly, by well-planned labour. On this point, too, the question arose whether it might not be worth producing new goods, of which there was a lack, rather than creating a superabundance of items already available for an unlimited distribution. They did not have the audacity to set up standards and regulations — that would have been authoritarianism, even if none of them believed that things could be regulated automatically. Collectivism, as understood by Guillaume, and Malatesta’s communism, offered the greatest amplitude of these concepts: progress toward communism or its complete realisation wherever abundance should permit it, and collectivist arrangements of various types wherever abundance did not as yet exist, and for the purpose of creating it.

The Berne Congress (October 1876) was inspired, according to Guillaume and other delegates, with the idea - supported also by some authoritarian socialists in Switzerland after Bakunin’s death — that ‘reciprocal respect’ and a parallel peaceful progress could and should exist between libertarian and authoritarian socialists. The Congress accepted a manifesto of a strongly international character, drawn up by Charles Perron, Guillaume, Cafiero and Zhukovsky, dealing with the Balkan War (Slavs versus Turks). On that occasion de Paepe revealed himself to be entirely statist, but Guillaume, Reinsdorf, Malatesta and Zhukovsky rejected his ideas.

As regards the type of action to be used, Perron, Brousse, Zhukovsky, the Spaniards (Viñas and Soriano) and the Italians proposed reciprocal respect for any type of action used in any country. The Italian Federation at that time believed that the ‘insurrectional deed’ was the most efficacious means of propaganda, as a prelude to the action planned for the month of May in Italy (see the declaration signed by Cafiero and Malatesta in the Jura-Bulletin, 3 December 1876); what was called the insurrection of the band of Matese or of Benevento in April, was but a fragment of such action, precipitated by adverse circumstances. This event and the one of 18 March 1877 in Berne (in defence of the red flag attacked by the authorities) were influential in promoting the idea of the ‘propaganda by deed’. This specific term was then adopted by Costa (in June) and Brousse (in August). It had already been used in 1873, in a Russian manuscript by Kropotkin, which contained the expression ‘fakticheskaya propaganda’ where the adjective ‘fakticheskaia’ signified ‘by deed’. Bakunin, likewise, wrote in 1870: “To propagate our principles by deeds” (manuscript unpublished at the time). These words, so terrifying to anti-socialists, hold no greater menace than, say, ‘setting an example’ or any similar turn of phrase in various languages, used to convey the idea that actions speak louder than words. The Congress of Verviers (September 1877) was nothing but a meeting held in advance of the so-called World Congress of Ghent, where authoritarians and anti-authoritarians met once more, but coldly as enemies, without being able to arrive at any mutual modus vivendi. Viñas and Morago attended the Congress on behalf of the Spanish Federation.

Before going to Belgium,.the members of the International Alliance and Kropotkin met at La Chaux-de-Fonds (Jura) and made an agreement to reorganise their ‘revolutionary community’; in other words, the old fraternity of 1864. Kropotkin was named its corresponding secretary and it was agreed that each country would maintain its autonomy in the matter of tactics. The members were to carry on correspondence among themselves, and the secretary was to transmit such letters between the members, adding his own comment to each. There is reason to believe that these men were Guillaume, Schwitzguébel, Pindy, Paul Brousse, Costa, Viñas, Morago, Kropotkin, as well as two men in prison at the time, Cafiero and Malatesta, who, having been allied since 1872, also belonged to this group. Its activities may be followed in some correspondence preserved from 1879, 1880 and 1881; however, the major part of their work remains unknown and may be considered lost. With the departure of Malatesta from London in the summer of 1882, or the imprisonment of Kropotkin until 1886, close contacts between the militants probably came to an end in December of that year. But whenever Malatesta or Kropotkin and Guillaume met, they must have keenly felt the closeness of the ties that had united them in the past. Malatesta’s death on 22 July 1932, marked the passing of the last member of that intimate group founded by Bakunin in 1864.

Le Révolté was considered the international organ of the group, to which it owed a good deal of its prestige. The rest was due to Kropotkin’s talents. In 1880 he drew very close to Elisée Reclus and for the first time declared himself strongly in favour of direct, immediate communist anarchism at the moment of social revolution, in his La Commune de Paris. There is reason to believe that this declaration was prompted by Brousse, who at the time had left the ‘revolutionary community’ and set forth his new viewpoint almost at the same time in Le Travail. (Issue of April 1880.)

Kropotkin then agreed with Dumartheray and with Herzig, of the Geneva group, and later also with Reclus and Cafiero — probably between July and September 1880 — to propose the acceptance of anarchist communism to the Federation of the Jura at its congress of 9-10 October; this was done. Schwitzguébel had made a summary of collectivist ideas in his Socialist Programme. Cafiero delivered his speech ‘Anarchism and Communism’; Kropotkin and Reclus supported the communist-anarchist idea with their powerful defence, and the Congress adopted it. Schwitzguébel and Pindy also declared themselves communists, but advised against the use of this particular term, of which Swiss and French workers had a poor understanding. The same objection could have been made to the word ‘anarchist’, and this led to the adoption of the term ‘libertarian communism’ at the French regional Congress at Le Havre (16-22 November 1880). The term ‘anarchist communism’ soon came into general use in France; a manifesto of January 1881 used the term ‘Libertarian or Anarchist Communism’.

This concept, which originated in 1876, was first taken over by the Italians, and then came into general use in Switzerland, in France and in Belgium from 1880.

11. Anarchists and social revolutionaries. Kropotkin; Elisée Reclus. Anarchist communism in France 1877-1894.

By 1880 there existed three vital concepts of anarchism:

Collectivist anarchism, in Spain, which was proclaimed as the social creed of some 30,000-40,000 organised workers in 1881-1882 by the International (when it resumed its public existence as the Workers’ Federation of the Spanish Region), with organs such as Revista Social (1881), Acracía (1886), El Productor (1887) and many others.

Communist anarchism, which spread in France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, England and other countries, with organs like Le Révolté, Freedom (1886) and so on.

Mutualist-individualist anarchism, in the United States, with organs such as Liberty (1881) and others.

At about the same time there was a good deal of peasant agitation (Ireland, Andalusia); there were acts of political terrorism (Russian nihilism, assassination of the Tsar), violent labour agitations (Montceau-les-Mines in France in 1882 and so on), and some acts of reprisal. At about the same time the Communards returned after the 1880 amnesty (among them Louise Michel, who had now become an anarchist orator). There were savage persecutions of socialists in Italy and anarchists in Germany and in Italy. There was also a social and political awakening in the Middle East and in Egypt (1882). In short, this growing accumulation of acts of violence, following upon a decade of comparative calm, created the feeling that a general revolutionary upheaval of a socially destructive type was imminent.

Blanqui, who appeared to represent at the time a great revolutionary authoritarian socialist force, died in the latter part of 1880. Thus, while the Communards who came back from their deportation and the French workers who returned to socialism let themselves be absorbed by political and municipal socialism, both on the electoral level, the Blanquists, deprived by their leader’s death, proved incapable of taking any decisive stand. German Social Democracy, excluded from public life and persecuted since the autumn of 1878, organised a series of revolutionary socialist protests in 1879, 1880 and 1881. But the great majority of their party opposed a stronger tactic; only those who became anarchists in 1881 and 1882 (as well as those who had joined the anarchists in the period from 1876 and 1878) stood out as intransigent individuals and groups, the rest remained faithful to electoral reformism.

Since the great masses of the workers tended to do as little as possible on their own behalf, and concentrated in parties where the active work was done by the militants and the leaders, a widespread inertia set in. Its impact was stronger than the revolutionary awakening, which at a closer view was the product, first of an oppressive situation in a specific locality, and second of the emergence of a few individuals with a resolute spirit to fight the oppression. Where these two factors met and clashed, there was action, but such encounters were unpredictable and sporadic, while the inertia, the tendency to make the minimum effort, and easy compliance with the leaders, were everywhere. Be that as it may, the revolutionary socialists and the anarchists of those years very soon found themselves more isolated than they had believed they could be. This situation led them either to an exacerbated and even ferocious social struggle (particularly in Germany and Austria) or to a certain contempt for the stupidity of the masses, and a series of aggressive individual acts; some reached the heights of heroism, while others came close to a sort of debasement, in a life of compromise — neither labour nor bourgeois — which stripped their declarations of all moral value. This was particularly in evidence in Paris, as well as among expatriate Italians.

Now, fifty years later, one may admit that it was an era of heroic exaltation which, however, brought about the isolation of the anarchist idea from the mainstream of modern thinking, an isolation that still persists. The idea that loomed large at the great congresses of the International, the idea that was admired (and acclaimed) in the men who were accused at the great Italian trials in Florence, Trani, Bologna (1875-1876), the idea that had brought forth the triple flowering of intelligently differentiated concepts which we have cited at the beginning of this chapter — this idea had no need of a demonstration by acts whose social and ideological significance called for very subtle interpretations. Acts, especially, that should not have been allowed to claim the most important place, almost the only place, in anarchist activities for so long a time. We may grant that these acts were very often justified as a reaction against cruelty, and, as such, represented inexorable vengeance. But what is most painful is that many believed that such acts were the only thing that could be done and that this was the only way to awaken and provoke a general social revolt. And public opinion was induced, and accustomed, to believe that this was the only thing anarchists could do. Thus, just at the moment when the three concepts came to flower, the anarchist ideology was banished from public debate and relegated to a state of mind to be found in a few individuals, under the impression that it could not manifest itself except in an absolute violence of words and action.

This temporary phase of anarchism was determined by various factors. There was the reaction against the turncoats who went over to parliamentarism (Andrea Costa and Paul Brousse among others); indignation against the authoritarian socialists who were busy scrambling for seats in parliament; the example of fortitude and sacrifice set by Russian nihilists. This period was also marked by the influx into anarchist ranks of many revolutionary socialists, of old French Blanquists and German Social Democrats, who were chiefly attracted by the spirit of thorough-going revolt which characterised the anarchists; these newcomers brought with them a narrow and rigid outlook, typical of the authoritarians, which caused libertarian thinking to grow torpid, immobile, stationary and dogmatic.

Johann Most’s propaganda in his Freiheit, the Parisians’ viewpoint set forth in La Révolution Sociale (The Social Revolution; 1880-1881), the International Socialist Congress in London (July 1881), the public meetings held in Paris in those years, the terrorist activities in Germany and Austria and so on, all revealed what I have defined as evidence of unilateralism. The London Congress wanted to produce an organisation; at the same time, nearly all of them would have felt branded with authoritarianism if they had achieved a real organisation. One such organisation was created, but it was rather ill-adapted for liaison work or for purposes of co-operation, and it promptly showed itself worthless in practice as well. All this ran counter to the ideas of Malatesta or Kropotkin, but they were powerless before the rising tide in favour of amorphousness (‘amorfia’), a movement that demanded an absolutely unlimited communism, converting it thereby into arbitrary individualism and reducing it to zero so far as organisation was concerned.

There were various great movements in the very same years, the greatest that had ever existed (except for Spain), greater even than those which followed later. In France there was the Southwestern movement in the Lyons region, which had Kropotkin’s strong support (1881-1882); in England there was the incipient anti-parliamentary socialism — which soon became, in part, purely anarchist — in 1879-84, in alliance with the strongly libertarian socialism of William Morris (Socialist League, 1884-1890). In Austria, the socialism that was growing increasingly revolutionary and partly anarchist of 1880-1884, was accepted by nearly the entire old Social Democratic Party. In the United States there was the collectivist anarchism of 1881-1886 (represented by Johann Most, Albert Parsons, the Chicago anarchists executed on 11 November 1887). These four great movements showed that a good many of the socialists in all these regions could become interested in the propagation of our ideas and that they could organise effectively, for present-day struggles as well as for collective action which it was hoped might soon come. This was also true of the regional Federation in Spain, whose congresses in Barcelona (1881) and in Seville (September 1882) revealed quite a considerable public development — delegates coming from some 495 sections in Seville. And we might also mention the good work of international reorganisation accomplished by Malatesta in Italy in 1883-1884, when he published La Questione Sociale (The Social Question) in Florence.

All these efforts failed to give true satisfaction to many comrades and groups who already saw too much cohesion, too much contact with labour’s practical problems, excessive collectivism or moderate communism, and too many people in prominent places who could easily turn into leaders. Hence, when all these coordinated movements were broken up or paralysed by persecutions — often enough as the result of some irresponsible action — there was not much lamentation and no one tried to resuscitate them. Many felt far more comfortable in a group of their own choice, each with a little publication written up by themselves, than in the wider arena provided by these six movements. The Spanish anarchist communists carried on a bitter fight against the regional Federation and collectivism; Malatesta and Merlino were hounded as arch-enemies by the Italian ‘intransigents’; Most and his collectivist Freiheit (Freedom) felt the concentrated odium of the communists of Die Autonomie. Everywhere, the group which believed itself more advanced fought those anarchists it considered less advanced, and isolation grew, even among these same anarchists — a phenomenon that had nothing to do with either the libertarian idea or with solidarity but was the outcome of sheer arbitrariness and egocentrism. There was no question of the revolutionary ardour of these groups; we may only point out that by their posture of rigid intolerance they succeeded in narrowing their own sphere of action and their influence.

The most active militant anarchist thinkers of those years were Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, Malatesta and Merlino, Johann Most, Antonio Pellicer Paraire and, in England, the lesser known Joseph Lane; we should also add William Morris of the era of 1884-1890 who, while not an anarchist, nevertheless represented a true libertarian socialist force. I have tried to describe this period in my German book Anarchisten und Sozialrevolutionäre, that covers the years from 1880 to 1886. Kropotkin’s three years in prison (1883- 1885) and Malatesta’s four-and-a-half year stay in Argentina (1885- 1889) interrupted their activities, while Elisée Reclus and Merlino, in a way, took their places. Reclus was more tolerant than Kropotkin; Merlino less so than Malatesta. In one way and another the tactic of indulgence and that of carping criticism encouraged the growing disposition towards amorphousness and tendency to atomisation I have just discussed above. Since these ideas were considered more libertarian, and there was a desire to impose them upon others, they turned into authoritarian concepts, tending to make anarchism into a law; the advocates of these ideas not only despised those who did not share their opinions but fought them fanatically.

Kropotkin’s critical work, extracted from Le Révolté (1879-1882) was assembled in Paroles d’un Révolté (Words of a Rebel) (1885). Afterwards, while in prison, he did a good deal of thinking and writing. He summed up his ideas in a lecture in Paris, Anarchism in Socialist Evolution, then elaborated the theme in a series of articles in Le Révolté and La Révolte (The Rebel and Revolt). This series was started 14 February 1886, and the articles were later assembled in a volume entitled The Conquest of Bread and in another series of writings dealing with the situation in England, in Freedom (London). He prepared quite an elaborate summary of all these, published in the great review, The Nineteenth Century as ‘The Scientific Bases of Anarchy’ and ‘The Coming Anarchy’, in February and August 1887.

He went on to the series: ‘The Breakdown of Our Industrial System’; ‘The Coming Reign of Plenty’; ‘The Industrial Village of the Future’; ‘Brain Work and Manual Work’; ‘The Small Industries of Britain’ (from April 1888 to March 1890 and August 1890). These later formed a book which had wide circulation, particularly in England, under the title of Fields, Factories and Workshops (1899).

Then began the ‘Mutual Aid’ series, from September 1890 to June 1896 and his book Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution, which was intended to contain his Ethics as its last part. But at the lecture he gave either in 1888 or 1889, he was able to include only the early drafts of his ‘Ethics: Origin and Development’, which was not published until 1922, and of ‘Anarchist Morality’. He started the Ethics with an essay on ‘The Ethical Need of the Present Day’, and with ‘The Morality of Nature’, but did not complete the historical section until 1920. For the part which was to set out his own personal ideas, he left nothing but numerous rough drafts and notes.

In addition to these great works, the most important source for the study of his ideas seems to me to be Les Temps Nouveaux (New Times) and L’Etat: son rôle historique (The State, Its historic role), assembled with some other of his writings in La Science moderne et l‘anarchie (Modern Science and Anarchism). But it might also be right to follow his collaborations with various publications chronologically, especially his contributions to La Révolte up to Les Temps Nouveaux, to Freedom and to some Russian anarchist periodicals, in order to understand which contemporary events influenced his thinking, as well as the stand he took on all the events he had so often discussed from 1877 to 1921.

Then we come to his historical and retrospective works, his study of the French revolution, begun in 1878, which culminated in La Grande révolution (1789-1793) (The great French revolution), and his autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionist. But his correspondence, largely unpublished, preserves for us, far more than his ‘memoirs’, his intimate thoughts, his impressions and his plans for further work. Russian Literature reveals his aesthetic judgement, while In Russian and French Prisons helps us to a better understanding of his memoirs. The lengthy series, ‘Recent Science’, with its controversies with some scientists and so on, gives us a better insight into his Mutual Aid.

If his work still remained incomplete, especially since Ethics was never finished, this was due, in the first place, to the serious illness which attacked him in the autumn of 1901 and gradually reduced his capacity for work in later years, and, in the second place, to other urgent work made necessary by the general situation — Russian events following the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and so on. Finally, his great controversy with some Darwinists on the issue of Lamarckism, involved both Mutual Aid and Ethics, since this polemic became necessary before he could go on with Ethics, which was started with his articles of 1904 and 1905. All this is brought out clearly in his unpublished correspondence and the records of his conversations which have been preserved. I have used a great deal of this material in the still unpublished volumes of my History of Anarchism.

Kropotkin’s work is extensive and varied; it shows an astonishing continuity and, at the same time, some variations, which can be discerned on close observation. Vivid impressions of his seventy years of life crowded in upon him, and his vigorous intellect and nervous system responded with intense and ceaseless activity such as few men could match.

As I see it, Kropotkin’s anarchist ideas — starting with his independent activities (Geneva, 1879) and particularly his years of imprisonment and his period of study at Harrow (1883-1892) — are an extraordinarily personal product which reflect, in the highest degree, the essence of his own being and the innumerable, powerful sensations which he had absorbed. His communism is just what he himself would have practised — taking little and giving much. The siege of Paris, the Commune, the agrarian situation in England, the wars which he foresaw as continually recurring, the rich and varied physical nature which he observed in his travels between Eastern Siberia and China, all this and many other impressions are mirrored in his anarchist ideas, just as the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution gain in mutual clarification as he interprets these two strongly divergent epochs. He could not do otherwise, just as a true poet must express what is within him, and I do not question the value of his work as an individual creation. It is only that, precisely for this reason, his work lacks that character of wide-ranging, enduring theory which had so often been attributed to it, particularly in the twenty-five years preceding 1914, when many believed that here at last was a definitive and incontrovertible statement of the anarchist system. What we have, in fact, is no more than a candid, generous offering, from the depths of his being, by a highly intelligent and completely dedicated man, who was also exceptionally sensitive and subjective in his reactions.

Elisée Reclus was a geographer. He did not devote himself exclusively to anarchist propaganda as many others did, particularly workers who were not too absorbed in their daily work, for whom propaganda was a happy release for their leisure hours and a sanctum of ideas pursued even during their hours of monotonous toil. He was fortunate in other ways; his professional intellectual labour was not only interesting in itself but he could also use it as a vehicle for his own libertarian ideas. He thus produced work which was valid in its own right, and at the same time bore the personal impress of a literary artist and a libertarian and humanitarian thinker. La Nouvelle géographie universelle; la terre et les hommes (New universal geography; the earth and man; 19 volumes, Paris 1876-1894), followed La Terre, description des phénomènes de la vie du globe (The Earth, description of phenomena in the life of the globe; 2 volumes, Paris 1868-1869), and was followed in turn by L’Homme et la terre (Man and the earth; 6 volumes, Paris 1905-1906), a powerful body of work, the third part of which — dealing with man, his history, the institutions he has created and his further development, with glimpses into his future — was gradually transformed, in his hands, into an application of anarchist critique, observations and anticipations to man’s social life.

These works, and many others, accustomed their author to the serenity of outlook inherent in scientific labour, to large perspectives, to amplitude of vision. Reclus’s anarchism reflects these qualities. It is limitless in expectations and possibilities, and voices his confidence and his faith in the progress of science. He can distinguish between the small and the great and can put aside the minutiae and the deviations without thereby neglecting details but putting things in their right places. He is inspired by a great goodness and personal rectitude, solid but modest.

The finest expression of his ideas is found in L’Evolution, la révolution et l’idéal anarchique, the last version of Evolution et révolution, a lecture first published in Le Révolté and then as a little pamphlet in 1880 and in a revised form as a pamphlet in 1890. After his lecture in Lausanne in March 1876, Reclus, absorbed in his geographical studies, whose annual volumes demanded methodical labour, study and travel, devoted a little more time to propaganda (lectures) and took particular interest in the review Le Travailleur (published in Geneva from 1877-1878); in his contributions he dealt with the anarchist idea (which in the Programme was written ‘an-archist’, April 1877) and soon found himself compelled to defend it against communalist and other objections. This he did in his articles, L’Evolution légale et l'anarchie and A propos d’anarchie. These polemics led him, at the Jura Congress, held in Fribourg in August, to propose an examination of the following questions: ‘Why are we revolutionaries? Why are we anarchists? Why collectivists?’ He sent his own answers, which were published in L’Avant-Garde (Chaux-de-Fonds), on 12 August 1878.

It is now known, through Kropotkin’s letters to Paul Robin, that there was no contact in 1877 and 1878 between Kropotkin and Reclus on the question of propaganda, to the extent that they even knew little of each other’s ideas. Kropotkin, friend of Guillaume and of the austere Brousse, considered Reclus a moderate. It was only in the early months of 1880 that they came to know each other well, and thereafter there was real mutual understanding between them. I cite the following passages from Reclus’ preface to Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread (1892):

But the recovery of humanity’s possessions — in a word, expropriation — can be accomplished only by way of anarchist communism. Government must be destroyed, its laws torn to shreds, its morality overthrown, its officials ignored; and men must approach this task through self-initiative, grouping themselves according to their affinities, interests, ideals, and the nature of their work. …

After the overthrow of the State, groups of emancipated workers, toiling no longer in the service of monopolists and parasites, can apply themselves to attractive and freely chosen occupations and can approach scientifically the cultivation of the soil and industrial production, interspersed with periods of leisure for study or entertainment. The pages of this book which deal with agricultural labour are of major interest because they describe methods already proven in practice and which may be easily applied on a wide scale for the profit of all and not merely to enrich the few. …

We profess a new faith, and as soon as this faith, which is also a science, becomes the faith of all those who seek the truth, it will take its place in the world of reality, for the first law of history is that society models itself after its ideals. …

The impending revolution, to be sure, however important it may be in the development of humanity, will not differ from previous revolutions by making a sudden leap, for nature does not act in this way. But one can “ay that, judging by a thousand indications, a thousand profound changes, the anarchist society is already rapidly emerging. It shows itself wherever free thought breaks loose from the fetters of dogma, wherever the genius of research ignores old formulas, wherever the human will manifests itself in independent action, wherever sincere men, rebels against all imposed discipline, unite of their own accord for the purpose of mutual improvement and to reconquer jointly, without any master, their share of life and the full satisfaction of their needs. This is anarchy, even when it is unconsciously so, and it will come to be recognised as such more and more. How can it fail to triumph when it has its ideals and the courage of its will. …

I shall not go into the details concerning Reclus’ life; these can be studied in depth in the recollections he wrote of his brother, Elie Reclus, and his Correspondence. Ihave given an account of his life in Elisée Reclus, Anarchist und Gelehrter (1928), published also in a revised and enlarged Spanish translation. A beautiful collection of testimonies and recollections of many friends of the Reclus brothers was published in 1927 by Joseph Ishill, Elisée and Elie Reclus — in memoriam.

In France, those ideas, either Proudhonian or collectivist, which had existed in the world of labour up to 1870, were confused by the socialists with ideas stemming from memories of the Commune. However, a limited secret propaganda started up — it never died down, thanks to the contacts kept up by the men of the Jura, the people from Lyons in Geneva, Brousse in Berne, and others. It was conducted through the journal L’Avant-Garde and the review Le Travailleur (The Worker), starting in 1876, especially in 1877 and in 1878, when Costa and Kropotkin were active in a small circle of sympathisers, in Paris itself. If those who carried on this propaganda called themselves collectivists, they were none the less already and unmistakably communists. And after the breaking up of these groups, caused by the arrest of Costa and the absence of Kropotkin and so on, when they again joined together in 1879, this time it was not in sections of an International that existed in name only but in autonomous groups. These groups, which read Le Révolté, and which contained Italian communists like Cafiero and Malatesta, and others such as Cherkezoy, did not — so far as we know — resume the discussion of collectivism.

This idea had no outstanding interpreter and was mistakenly considered to be superseded, refuted, finished — in a word, retrograde. Its past history and its solid existence in Spain were unknown to those who formed the French groups since 1880. These were socialists of all kinds, who had witnessed or participated as militants in France’s social awakening since 1876, who rejected statism, the traditional electoral policy of the guilds, and the moderate tendency of the syndicates of their period. Some were ready to accept federalism and communism; others, coming directly from the ultra-authoritarian Blanquism, saw revolutionary salvation, after Blanqui’s death, in anarchism only.

There is no doubt that even the collectivist anarchists of 1868, 1869, and so on, were not the lily-white, born-anarchist type (there always are some of these). But the fact is that there was little homogeneity among the French anarchists of 1879-1885 — as little, for instance, as among the revolutionary syndicalists who came fifteen years later. There was an absence of tradition, or rather, what pertained to the past was considered obsolete and unworthy of attention. The dominant trend, in theory, was to go all the way to anarchism and communism; in practice, it stood for non-organisation and for a free life. With it came a great fervour for propaganda, and in Paris and the provincial centres many, captivated by this atmosphere of a completely free life, flocked to the groups, which grew and became numerous.

Few among them understood that these impatient spirits who were so easily drawn into the groups were, after all, few in number, and that even if a large circle of people thirsting for a free, unfettered life had been formed by the anarchists, it would have been at the cost of a great isolation from the people themselves, who watched the spectacle but took good care not to participate. Worse still, the people let themselves be beguiled by the authoritarian socialists, who demanded no intellectual or revolutionary effort from them — only their votes, that is, a surrender into the hands of new masters.

Thus the hopes nourished during the International, and still entertained by the libertarians in the movements of that period, which we have just described (in Italy, Spain, Austria, England, the United States and in the Southwest of France as well) came to nothing in Paris, and in France generally. A fine flowering did exist in isolated groups but there was no real contact with the interests of the people.

There was certainly no lack of effort exerted to come closer to the people, but anarchism probably assumed larger proportions and vitality without contact with practical questions; it had full liberty for the exercise of pure criticism and of individual expression and, from that vantage point, it was a unique period. There was a profusion of blossoming, but little concern for the fruit that should issue from the flower; a decade of idealistic and aesthetic but non-utilitarian presentation of our ideas. It left its imprint upon the spirit of the world, and its last rays still cast their light upon us. To me it made manifest the fact that anarchism is human enlightenment, the great light by which humanity seeks to find its way out of the darkness of authoritarianism; it is not merely the economic solution for the misery of the exploited people.

Kropotkin devoted himself to this propaganda from 1879 to 1882, and from 1886 onwards. Reclus took his place from 1882 to 1885, when Kropotkin was expelled from Switzerland (Reclus lived in Clarens until 1890). After Kropotkin, Le Révolté was managed by Herzig, and from 1884 on by Jean Grave; it appeared in Paris from April 1885 to March 1894. From November 1887 its name was La Révolte.

Grave, who belonged to the Pascal Street group from 1879, had tried immediately to establish contacts between the groups. The journal eventually became such a link, which many accepted voluntarily while others did not recognise it. Grave himself, in numerous articles, supported a communist anarchism, which he set forth in simple and plausible terms, but perhaps his brisk way of overriding difficulties and obstacles was too superficial to be completely convincing. His writings, however, served as elementary material for French and international propaganda. Among them we mention the most notable: La Société au lendemain de la révolution (Society on the morrow of the revolution), amplified in 1889 and changed in 1893 to La Société mourante et l’anarchie (The moribund Society and anarchism); La Société future (The future Society); L’Individu et la société (The Individual and Society); L’Anarchie —son but, ses moyens (Anarchism — its aims, its means); Réformes, Révolution; a short utopia, Terre libre [Les Pionniers] (The free earth [The Pioneers]); a novel inspired by the anarchist environment in Paris, Malfaiteurs (Evil-doers); and a volume of recollections entitled Le Mouvement libertaire sous la troisième république (The libertarian movement under the Third Republic). In addition to this there would have been a new collection of articles on the deformations and deviations from the anarchist idea if Temps Nouveaux (New Times) had not discontinued publication on the occasion of the war. Grave’s later thinking can be followed in a certain number of articles published in La Revista Blanca and its Supplement in Buenos Aires, and in the small pamphlets which he continued to publish.

The programme of the moment, which stressed that anarchism was not to be discussed among anarchists but was to be directed to the people, was advocated with enthusiasm and devotion by Louise Michel (1833-1905); her return from deportation to France in 1880 conferred great prestige upon anarchist gatherings. Another seasoned militant of the communalist movement of 1871, Emile Digeon, placed his practical intelligence and his exceptionally clear anarchist ideas at the disposal of the cause. Louise Michel was a frequent visitor in 1880-1882 to the circles of the journal La Révolution sociale (1880-1881) and of the young orators, such as Emile Gautier. Young Emile Pouget owed his solid foundation of social criticism to the older Digeon and was ever mindful of the direct demands of the workers and the great, direct, popular social revolution; he did all in his power, even then, to create a vigorous syndicalism of direct action. He also wrote the first revolutionary anti-militarist pamphlet, A l’armée (To the army) in 1883. Various cabinet-makers, particularly, belonged to these early syndicates, among them Tortelier, Guérineau, Théophile Meunier and others. On the occasion of a demonstration of the unemployed, on 9 March 1883, Pouget, Louise Michel and others were arrested, and both remained in prison until January 1886. Then Pouget, with his paper Ça Ira (It Will Come) of 1888 and especially with his Père Peinard (Father Peinard), succeeded in forming an anarchist periodical that was closer to popular feeling; this journal, always keeping up with the movement of ideas and voicing intelligent criticism on political and social questions, reminded one of the great organs of the French Revolution. In fact, Pouget might have become the Marat of anarchism. I consider him, alongside Marat, Blanqui, Proudhon and Varlin, one of the best minds of French socialism, one of the rare men who really wanted the popular revolution, the breaking of the chains that keep the people shackled and the destruction of its torturers. But I do not regard him as one of the leading libertarians; if it is true that he viewed anarchism as the greatest destructive force that there was between 1880 and 1894, it is likewise true that he believed he saw a mightier, destructive, and perhaps also a constructive force, in the syndicalism of 1895 to 1908. Obviously, one cannot very well accuse Pouget of any lack of effort in this direction when the anarchists themselves were unable to create such a force in 1880-1894, a period which offered them an opportunity for extensive action, such as they never had again.

French anarchism had one of its most brilliant orators and most intelligent propagandists in Sébastien Faure, whose general ideas are embodied in La Douleur universelle — philosophie libertaire (Universal suffering — libertarian philosophy), in his utopia, Mon communisme (My communism), and in a great many pamphlets and articles, particularly in Le Libertaire, which made its appearance in November 1895, In earlier times, his very persuasive anarchism did not seem to me to go beyond the general lines of the past, but after the tribulations of the war and in his later years, he became more critical and original, as may be observed in La Synthèse anarchiste (The anarchist synthesis), and in the spirit which informs his great Anarchist Encyclopedia, the theoretical part of which, started in 1926, was almost completed in 1935.

It seems to me that the romantic element was represented by Charles Malato; educated in a socialist republican and communalist environment, he embraced anarchism starting in 1885 and quickly became an active militant. La Philosophie de l’anarchie (The philosophy of anarchism) and Révolution chrétienne et révolution sociale (Christian revolution and social revolution) are his most important works. Some of his other works, such as Prison fin-de-siécle; souvenirs de la Pélagie (Prison at the end of an era; recollections of the prison of Pélagie), De la Commune à l’anarchie (From the commune to anarchism), 1894, and Les Joyeusetés de l’exil (The pleasures of exile), 1896, have a lighter tone. Malato defended anarchism frequently and openly, like a good controversialist, but he lacked the right field of action for his capacities, such as a great independent journal could have offered him. He laid stress chiefly on the racial element, as Bakunin had done before him, under the sway of an idea which the entire French movement of that period had fortunately relinquished.

In the second, revised edition of his Philosophie de l’anarchie, published in 1897, Malato wrote:

The ‘taking from the big pile’, advocated by Kropotkin, that is, the indiscriminate levy of products, may be viewed as a revolutionary expedient resorted to during the initial struggle, lasting a few days, and, later, only as a consequence of the superabundance of production...,

which corresponds to the ideas of Malatesta, Merlino and others.

In this environment, direct social revolt was also growing, but it took the form of individual struggle, since collective revolt was slow in coming and did not arrive for another fifty years. There were earnest men to whom the ‘débrouillage’ (getting out of a muddle) and ‘petty acts of illegalism’ gave no satisfaction. It was Clément Duval and Vittorio Pini particularly who attracted general attention and earned a good deal of respect by their firm stand before the tribunals and their personal stoicism. Acts of protest took place, the first by Charles Gallo at the Stock Exchange (1886); acts against property owners (who dispossessed their tenants); acts against employment offices; a League of Anti-patriots was organised. In brief, there were numerous acts of affirmation against authority and property which apparently were not strong enough and large enough to win the support of the people, and which, under those conditions, rather produced the result of separating the anarchists from the people, who would not and could not follow them in this direction.

Then came a certain dogmatism of authoritarian origin, which constructed a theory out of these individual methods, and disowned such anarchists as did not hold the same opinion. There was wholehearted approval even of ‘robbery among comrades’. Kropotkin, in his Anarchist Morality, and Merlino, however, reacted violently against these ideas, while Reclus, who was personally so remote from them, refrained from criticising them.

The man who first signed his articles N’Importe Qui (No Matter Who), Antoine, was for many years the most persuasive libertarian defender of illegalism. Merlino, in his Nécessité et bases d’une entente (The need and the bases for an agreement), advocated a clear separation from the illegalists. At the same moment, a different version of illegalism was offered by Ravachol, who, hurt perhaps by very harsh criticism, turned from an illegalist into an executioner, in order to avenge his comrades who were put to death in 1891. He was the first of the French anarchists to be condemned to death (in Spain the condemned men of the ‘Black Hand’ were hanged in 1884, and earlier Moncasi and Otero, who had made an attempt to assassinate the king, were executed).

All the acts of violence, from Ravachol to Santo Caserio during 1892-1894, were either the direct repercussion of acts cruelly committed by the government or acts of direct social war, and they were so interpreted by public opinion. These acts led to persecutions, in accordance with the principle of ‘collective responsibility’, which so quickly takes the place of ‘legality’, a principle extolled as though it were a thing deep-rooted, irrevocable and eternal.

Other illegalists, even Ravachol, were imbued, in carrying out such acts, with an eminently social spirit; to them, it was less a question of their taking the risk of becoming separated from the movements, than to place themselves on the fringes of present-day society, that each of them abandoned as soon as he could. Malatesta expressed his opinion on this at the time in Un peu de théorie (A little theory), to which Emile Henry wrote a reply. Kropotkin seems to me to be the author of the Declaration in La Révolte of 18 June 1892; see also his Encore la morale.

Anarchist ideas were also propagated widely in those days by Elisée Reclus, both in his writings and in his personal actions (he lived in the environs of Paris between 1890 and 1894). He was in contact with young writers and artists, some of whom professed very libertarian ideas. The philosophy of Jean Marie Guyau had a libertarian undertone and was acclaimed not only by the young anarchists but also by Reclus and Kropotkin, whose ethical ideal was that of Guyau. We shall mention only his Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction (Sketch of a morality without obligation or sanction; 1885) and L’Irréligion de l’avenir; étude sociologique (The irreligion of the future; a sociological study; 1887). We shall also mention the books of Emile Leverdays (1835 to 1890), chief among them Assemblées parlantes (Speaking gatherings), 1883, and those by Léon Mechnikov. We will also recall the sympathy often expressed for these ideas by Madame Sévérine, by Steinlen, by Octave Mirbeau and by Laurent Tailhade. Some of these young writers, such as Paul Adam, Adolphe Retté and many others, who had openly professed anarchism for a certain length of time, abandoned these ideas; the rest, among them Bernard Lazare, Pierre Quillard, Maximilien Luce (the painter), even though they modified their convictions, still retained their anarchism. There were many ‘youth journals’; one of the best of these was the Revue blanche (White Review, 1891-1903). There also appeared a quite extraordinary sheet of libertarian struggle, which had unforgettable verve; it was L’Endehors (On the Outside) — published by Zo d’Axa whose La Feuille (The Leaflet), 1897-1899, and Le Grand trimard, a book published in 1895, still hold the afterglow of the same brilliance.

Anarchist propaganda burst forth in an inexhaustible stream of books, leaflets, journals, posters, songs and drawings. Among the songwriters we will mention Paul Paillette, author of Tablettes d’un lézard (Notebooks of a lizard) and Gabriel Randon, as Jehan Rictus author of Les Soltloques du pauvre (The Soliloquies of a poor man) in 1897. The ‘anarchist commune’ of Montreuil was a first attempt to set up a voluntary exchange of services. The cruelties of the law (deportations to Cayenne) and the exceptional ferocity of the prosecuting attorneys, the judges and the police provoked reprisals from 1892 to 1894. These led to mass persecutions, to the emergency laws known as ‘lois scélérates’ (criminal laws) of 1893 and 1894. Hence a great many militants were compelled in 1894 to take the road of exile to London, and Elisée Reclus, too, at that time left France for ever, to settle in Brussels.

Throughout this period, anarchist communism was discussed and debated in all its aspects, on numerous occasions; yet so far as I know, no critique of this theory appeared in France. A mutualist voice was heard — through the pamphlet L’Anarchie et la révolution (Anarchy and revolution), written by Jacques Roux (Eugéne Rousseau, 1889), and in November 1893 there was Merlino’s critique, of which more will be said later. Tarrida del Marmol’s opinions were also known. One, short-lived publication in Belgium, in 1890, La Réforme sociale, later known as La Question sociale, defended individualist anarchism of the American type. Individualism, in French journals, stood for anti-organisation and a communism stripped of the sense of duty — or the moral spirit of reciprocity.

The above chapter is a brief summary of several parts of the unpublished volumes of my History of Anarchy, the first of which (volume four of the series) will have the title: The first flowering of Anarchy: the years 1886-1894.

12. Italy: Anarchist communism, and its interpretation by Malatesta and Merlino.

There was little discussion of anarchist communism in Italy during the years of the persecutions, which started in the spring of 1877. Although proclaimed by Covelli as well as the accused men who were brought to trial in Benevento, it was only in 1879 that a more extensive discussion began in La Plebe, Milan. Cafiero proclaimed an exuberant communism at the Jura Congress of 1880 — and in articles in Le Révolté, 1880 and La Révolution sociale,1881.

As for Malatesta, we have his article in the second Bulletin of the Congress of London (22 June 1881), and the long letter written by the ‘confidential’ international group (Cafiero’s conception is quite different). His later writings, such as those in L’Ilota, of Pistoia, and the Risveglio (Awakening) of Ancona, are unknown to me. Il Popolo (The People) of Florence, could not be published; the Questione sociale, which was published, I am not in a position to consult at this moment. What did appear, in 1884, was his Fra contadini (A talk among peasants) and his Programma e organizazione della Associazione Internazionale dei Lavoratori (Programme and organisation of the Working Men’s Association), where he sets forth for the first time his views of communist anarchism.

Malatesta must have suffered greatly from 1879 to 1882, as he saw Andrea Costa and many other old comrades abandoning the ideas they had fought for, and as he watched the gradual mental deterioration of Cafiero (who finally became hopelessly insane). He rallied, and went back to active work in 1883-1884, the consequences of which led him to leave Europe for a long time to come.

In his Programma of June 1884, Malatesta weighs the pros and cons of collectivism. In his judgement, communism offers a broader and more consistent solution, the only one which is in accord with the concrete development of the principle of solidarity, but which also presupposes a great moral development in man (as already mentioned in earlier pages). He concludes in favour of communism wherever feasible, and for an interim state of collectivism where abundance (of products) is not as yet available. He maintains that collectivism in the early post-revolutionary period, in the fervour and enthusiasm of the revolution, would not bring harmful results but that it would be necessary to bring about its prompt evolution in the direction of communism. Even in his Fra contadini he foresees that, in some localities, there will be communism; in others, collectivism or another form, and that, with experience, one and the same system will gradually come to be accepted. Malatesta, as Luigi Fabbri pointed out in 1925, conceives communism

... as a directive line of conduct, followed voluntarily, with all the adjustments and reservations that the conditions and the will of the members themselves may demand and which may be necessary.

In all of Malatesta’s work we find this understanding, very libertarian and at the same time very realistic, of the probable differentiation in the degrees of communism, and also of an interim state of collectivism, based on the real situations to be faced, the dispositions of individuals and the abundance of certain products. This sober, realistic approach distinguishes Malatesta, and Merlino as well, from the majority of communist anarchists, who believe in the existence of abundance (see the widely distributed pamphlet Les produits de la terre, The products of the earth, etc.) or in the rapid production, almost the improvisation of such abundance (e.g. Cafiero, 1880); in a word, who believed in taking from the big pile, an inexhaustible pile, we might say, and in the absence of any initial difficulties in a free society.

Francesco Saverio Merlino was won over to anarchist ideas after the winter of 1876-1877. He translated into Italian Dr S. Engländer’s The Abolition of the State, which was an extract from a German work published in 1864 dealing with social experiments made by Proudhon and others in 1848-1851; this book also made mention of Bellegarrigue.

Merlino, like Malatesta, became a refugee after the Rome trial of 1883-1885. During Malatesta’s stay in Argentina, he was the most outstanding Italian comrade in ideological discussions. He set forth his ideas with great clarity, particularly in Profili d’un possibile organamento socialistico (Outlines of a possible socialistic organisation), a chapter of his book Socialismo ó monopolismo (pages 198-212), and in Dell’anarchia o donde veniamo e dove andiamo (Concerning anarchism, or whence we come and whither we are going) published in Florence in 1887.

In this last work he rejects collectivism as a standard for the distribution of goods, and denies the existence of the conditions necessary for communism, that is, abundance, for the reason that a rational economic system would promptly produce a variety of useful articles rather than an abundance of some particular items. Nevertheless he accepts communism, on the basis of solidarity, which, being spontaneous as its essence demands, will take the form of a social contract, of the organisation of labour by means of free agreements freely arrived at. These agreements, assuming different forms in accordance with the type of locality and the degree of development of socialism in each of them, will be based on the liberty of the individual, the liberty of labour, the liberty of association, and on the direct use of the tools of production and the equivalent value of the labour performed.

I cannot enter here upon a full exposition of Merlino’s propositions, which would be necessary in order to bring out their real essence. It seems to me they are particularly in accord with what is now meant in Spain by the ‘free municipality’; an awareness of the fact that the basic organisation of a free social life demands mutual goodwill, reciprocal agreements imbued with the spirit of solidarity; and that all of this, together with labour performed, will produce security, the assurance of the absence of misery. On the other hand, freedom from deprivation, the satisfaction of all wants, the general ‘taking from the big pile’ will not be attained immediately; these exist today, for the rich, but at the cost of deprivation of a hundred poor people per one rich man. The hundred poor men would therefore have to increase their efforts a hundredfold if they were to produce the full measure of satisfaction now enjoyed by the rich, which is an absurdity.

Merlino expresses the essence of his thinking in the words: “We are anarchists.’ But anarchism is not an amorphous condition; it is the association of free and equal men. To him, ‘appropriation’ (his favourite word for ‘expropriation’), free agreements, and federation of a more or less extensive kind to suit actual conditions, are a series of successive acts of revolution. “Communism, collectivism, and other systems, too, will be experimented with, and perhaps combined ...”, and, in the course of such experiments, men will become habituated to co-operating in solidarity. The difficulties will be great, there will be no overnight transformation but, rather, explorations, improvements, even conflicts before an agreement is reached. All this is explained in his Nécessité et bases d’une entente, the pamphlet published in Spring 1892.

It would have been unnecessary to go into these details were it not that what Merlino calls ‘an amorphous condition’ (amorfia) was deeply implanted in the Italian and French movements, and even among the early Spanish communist anarchists, who advocated what Mella termed an ‘extravagant communism’. The proponents of this idea claimed it was supported by the writings of Kropotkin, who, however, held different views. To Kropotkin communism stood for generosity, for giving forth more than was demanded, rather than for the perfect satisfaction of all one’s wants and a state of almost absolute repose, as though the proletarians, on achieving their victory, lapsed into an infinite quiescence due them as compensation for the exhaustion which previous generations had suffered. Merlino, in the end, criticised Kropotkin’s own work, and I believe he was the first among leading communist anarchists to do so. L’Individualisme dans l’anarchisme (Individualism in anarchism), published in Société Nouvelle, is as critical of Tucker’s ideas as it is of those expressed by Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread. Briefly, as he wrote in La Révolte of 30 December 1893, he does not believe that after the revolution production can be organised on the principle of ‘do what you like’, nor that consumption can follow the theory of ‘taking from the big pile’; there will have to be a plan, there will have to be free agreements involving obligations, and permanent arrangements based upon equality. Kropotkin turned down a direct discussion, expecting to deal with these objections in the course of replying to a series of refutations. But the arrest of Merlino in January 1894, and the discontinuance of La Révolte in March of the same year, put an end to this debate.

During his years in prison, and afterwards, Merlino modified his ideas to a considerable extent; he set them forth in his book, Pro e contro il socialismo (For and against socialism) and in other writings. He viewed ‘amorphous’ anarchism as a dead-end and sought to link up his own brand of realistic anarchism with the less statist forms of authoritarian socialism. He states: ‘The future of humanity does not lie in amorphism or atomism.’ He makes a clean break with Malatesta, the advocate of socialist anarchism, and with Kropotkin and Grave, the advocates of communist anarchism. He is familiar with the ideas of Hertzka (Freiland), which he also criticises, and concludes in favour of a ‘unionist system’, some general ideas of which he outlines. I believe Edward Carpenter had taken a similar position.

It is not enough to reject Merlino as an apostate. His case, it seems to me, demonstrates the extent to which the supporters of amorphism, who had dominated the anarchism movement until 1894 at least, had, by their intolerance, their doctrinaire attitude and their personal behaviour, made anarchism seem to have stumbled into a cul-de-sac. Merlino, who was in prison from 1894 to May 1896, was unable to participate in the serious discussions between Pouget and Malatesta, or between Kropotkin and others in 1894, which, at that very time, determined their approach toward syndicalism. Nor did he have the opportunity to observe that, starting from about 1895, the halcyon days of ‘amorphism’, too, were gone. His objective, and that of others as well, was to put an end to their isolation. He believed he could create a centre that would be comparatively libertarian, composed of people who were serious-minded anarchists and the less authoritarian socialists; the others believed they could instill the libertarian spirit in workers of various socialist tendencies, organised in trade unions. It was, in substance, practically one and the same hope — an activity that could prove to be useful — and it ended in disillusionment both for Merlino with the socialists, and for those who had fervently desired and believed in syndicalism (such as it was in those days!).

Malatesta, unperturbed in the midst of these events, saw Merlino battered by the socialists; he saw the devotees of syndicalism either swallowed up by syndicalism (rather than the other way round) or sorely disheartened when self-sufficient syndicalism would have none of them. And he saw the decay of amorphism and atomism. What he failed to see was the new swing toward a study of the problems, and the difficulties of a reconstruction. At that point it was felt that they could find support in the writings of Kropotkin, and the resulting routine was probably more fatal still than the earlier extravagances which, in part at least, came from exuberance and gave evidence of strength. Uniformity, on the other hand, is always a mark of weakness.

On his return from Argentina, Malatesta issued an Appello, published in Nice in September 1889, which was a declaration of his new journal, L’Associazione. His objective was a revival of the International as a

revolutionary anarchist socialist party ... with a general programme which, without prejudice to anyone’s ideas, and without shutting out any new ideas that may emerge, would unite us all under one banner, bringing unity of action to what we may do now and during the revolution…

From these two works, which summarise the principles and the modes of action with a precision and amplitude seldom encountered, I have extracted declarations such as follow. Having set forth the fundamental principles, he states:

With the exception of these extremes, we shall have no reason for splitting up into small schools, in our eagerness to overemphasise certain features, subject to variation in time and place, of the society of the future, which is too remote from us to permit us to envision all its adjustments and possible combinations. There will be no motive for creating division among us, to take an example, on such questions as: whether production will reach a lower or higher level; whether agriculture will be everywhere linked with industry; whether products scattered at great distances from each other could be exchanged on the basis of reciprocity; whether all things could be utilised in common or according to standards that may be established, or if the use of any such things could be carried on, on a more or less private basis. To sum up, the methods and the individual forms of association and agreements, or the organisation of labour and of social life, will not be uniform and we cannot, at this moment, make any forecasts or determinations concerning them.

We can but dimly foresee the transformations that may take place in industries, in customs, in the mechanisms of production, in the physical aspect of cities, in occupations, in men’s feelings and in social contacts and inter-relationships. It is not right for us, to say the least, to fall into strife over more hypotheses. Even the question as between anarchistcollectivism and anarchist-communism is a matter of qualification, of method and agreement.

It is quite certain that ‘remuneration according to labour performed’, advocated by the collectivists, may lead to an unequal accumulation of products and result (when the process of such accumulation proves to be excessive) in the return to profiteering, unless the accumulation of goods and the profiteering are stopped short by prohibitions and confiscations, which could only be despotic and odious. On the other hand, ‘taking freely’ from the big pile of things available in abundance, and storing the products in short supply, may also lead to arbitrary acts and the imposition of humiliating conditions. Thus, the communist system is not entirely free from difficulties, either.

But the difficulties of both systems will disappear. The restrictions, the accumulation of goods and the profiteering will become impossible and fruitless through the mere fact that all men will find means for producing goods and for living in freedom within society itself; that the advantages of production in common will become manifest, and that a new moral conscience will come into being, which will make the wage system repugnant to men just as legal slavery and compulsion are now repugnant to them. Thus, whatever the specific forms of society may turn out to be, the basis of social organisation will be communist. Let us be contented with moral and fundamental communism, which, viewed aright, is worth more than material and formal communism. Rather than binding ourselves to formulas which are often veiled in obscurity, almost always ambiguous and of uncertain application, we prefer to hold to fundamental principles and will do our utmost to instil them in the masses so that, when the right time comes, they will not quarrel over mere words or trifles but will give postrevolutionary society a direction toward justice, equality and liberty. …

In his Programma, he says:

We are decidedly communists. ... But, in being so, we have to distinguish between that which has been scientifically demonstrated and that which is still in a state of hypothesis and anticipation. It is needful to make a clear distinction between the things that will have to be done in a revolutionary way, immediately and by the use of force, and the things that will result from future evolution; in other words, where we can give full scope to the free energies of all men, in their spontaneous and harmonious expression.

There are anarchists who foresee and propose other solutions, other future forms of social organisation, but who desire, just as we do, to destroy political power and private property; who wish, as we do, to have a spontaneous organisation of social functions, without delegation of power and without government; who want, as we do, to carry on an uncompromising struggle until complete victory is achieved. These are our comrades and brothers. Let us do away with all exclusivism of schools of thinking. Let us come to an understanding on ways and means, and go forward. …

Reading these observations attentively, we find that Malatesta had a keen awareness of the situation. He pointed soberly to certain beliefs, calling them by their true name, hypotheses, and rejected all forms of exclusivism. On viewing the failure of the socialist congresses of July 1889, he wrote:

The last Workers’ Socialist Congress in Paris has marked its decline [that of the authoritarian socialist party] and almost its disappearance. We should become socialists anew — it has declared correctly; and the mission of raising the banner of socialism should be accomplished by the anarchists, who are and will be, in accordance with their principles, anti-parliamentarian and revolutionaries to the very end. ...

In the same month of September when the Appello appeared, however, two anarchist meetings took place in Paris, at which many questions came under discussion, among them, especially, the edifying question of ‘robbery among comrades’, which held a peculiar fascination for some members. It suffices to read the published reports and the article in El Productor (The Producer) of 2 October 1889, based upon the impressions of Tarrida del Mármol, who attended the meeting. I too was present and I know how far they were from Malatesta’s desire to let the differences lie and find a common ground for action. Only El Productor of Barcelona recognised the value of his initiative; as for the rest, his invitation to organise came to them as a call for slavery.

In Italy Malatesta tried to form a party of action, composed of anarchists and revolutionary socialists — the latter still considered revolutionary though they voted for Cipriani and Costa, in Romagna. The Congress of Capolago responded favourably; see its Manifesto ai socialisti ed al popolo d’Italia. On 1 May 1891, however, this attempt was frustrated. His trip through central Italy in the winter of 1893-4, the efforts he made in 1895 — which even involved abandoning the project of publishing Federazione internazionale fra socialisti-anarchici rivoluzionari (International Federation of revolutionary socialist-anarchists) — his call to all of them in 1899 in Contro la Monarchia, Appello a tutti gli uomini di progresso (Against the Monarchy, Appeal to all men of progress), as well perhaps as other attempts, were all in line with his plan to unite the Italian militant anti-monarchist forces for the purpose of overthrowing the monarchy, in the first place, after which each of the groups was to pursue its own course. On the international plane, although he wanted to unite the anarchist forces of all tendencies, he was compelled to recognise at the ‘Anarchist International’, founded by the Congress of Amsterdam in 1907 (24-31 August) that anarchist groups of that period (and until 1914) did not favour any joint activity and had let the International fall into decline; it was never again revived.

Only Malatesta, working together with some local Italian comrades, was always able to put new spirit into the groups, inspire the people, found the best publications. In 1883-84 there was La Questione Sociale, in Florence; in 1885, a periodical by the same name, in Buenos Aires; in 1889-1890, the Associazione in Nice and London; the series of pamphlets in London in 1890-91 and another series started in 1892. There was the great output of propaganda in Spain in the winter of 1891-1892; L’Agitazione of Ancona in 1897- 98; almost a year of La Questione Sociale in Paterson, N.J., 1899-1900; some small publications in London; Volontà (Will) in Ancona 1913-14 and the red week in Romagna; Umanità Nova (New Humanity) from 1920 to 1922 in Milan and in Rome; the review Pensiero e Volontà (Thought and Will) from January 1924 to October 1926 in Rome. In these publications and in many articles which appeared in others, we find Malatesta’s precise and meticulous thinking, both theory and practice applied to the thousand problems of the day. Down to the last line he wrote — in 1932 — one can discern the rational, realistic interpretation of anarchism which was peculiarly his own.

The great majority of the comrades had preference for the other concept, the so-called ‘optimistic’ idea, which borders on a state of passive insensibility, on a faith in spontaneity, where all things will take care of themselves almost automatically, on a passionate, longed-for amorphism, a desire to live at the highest level provided that there was absolute isolation, on a contempt for any sort of precarious solidarity as a backward step. Thus routine and exuberance both won the upper hand over conscious will, which was the essence of life to Malatesta. He could not understand how so many anarchists, who had seemed to recognise the value of will and of reason, failed to make use of them in order to give their anarchism that appropriate expression, closely reasoned and well articulated, which is characteristic of all work that is well done. Anarchism is life itself, which, among human beings, becomes the act of living together; it is the maximum of benefits derived from autonomy and solidarity, with the minimum of friction and wasted force. It is the movement of the stars — if we want an example — rather than the seemingly endless frolic of comets and meteors. The celestial systems are composed, essentially, of stars, while shooting-stars are the exception. And if the stars are good enough for those great systems, the tiny human society, clinging to the crust of the little Earth, would surely do better to be satisfied, for the present, with living together in the greatest harmony possible rather than choosing an amorphous, atomised existence similar to the erratic course of shooting-stars, which are nothing but fleeting sparks.

I am not discussing here the other Italian comrades, great as their activities and devotion are and have been, since they appear to offer merely reproductions and re-combinations of the two currents I have already described — the ideas of Kropotkin and of Malatesta — at times, also, Stirnerite and other influences which played upon their personalities and characters. Cafiero, Covelli, Fanelli, Friscia, Converti, Giovanni Rossi, Sergio di Cosmo, Paolo Schicchi, Roberto d’Angiò, Ciancabilla, Fabbri, Pietro Gori, Luigi Galleani, Bertoni, Edoardo Milano, Ettore and Luigi Molinari, Samaja, Vezzani, Damiani, Borghi are some of these outstanding individuals. Nor do I exclude those who have written little or not at all, but who have fought and made sacrifices for the cause. There may possibly be a certain critical spirit in Gigi Damiani, more so than in others, but all of them seem to me to differ from Malatesta in this: none had the absolute faith that he had in the possibility of an Italian social revolution.

Malatesta, perhaps affected by the changes he had himself observed in 1860-1870, and perhaps under the influence of Bakunin, had that direct faith and the will to unite the elements that would launch this struggle. The others, who had seen the State strengthened since 1870, had no such faith, and either gave him half-hearted help or no co-operation whatsoever. Thus, respected or rejected — and in opposing him they thought they were fighting a tyrant — his continued efforts met with little support. On the international scene, they preferred to follow the more brilliant figure of Kropotkin. Let us hope that, after his death, there will finally come a better understanding of Malatesta!

13. Spain: Anarchist collectivism. Anarchism without adjectives. Anarchist communism. Overview of the years 1870-1936.

The story of the Spanish Federation of the International until the spring of 1874 has been recorded in numerous documents, pamphlets and journals. Following a slow development in 1870-1871, a perilous situation leading to the temporary transfer of its Federal Council to Lisbon, its revival at the Conference of Valencia, as well as its repudiation of Paul Lafargue’s attempt to introduce Marxist tactics, it steadily grew in sections and in membership from 1872 to 1873.

At the Hague, in Zürich and in Saint-Imier, the militants found themselves in accord with Bakunin, the Italians and the Jurassians (September 1872), while the secretary of the Federal Commission, Francisco Tomás, a young mason from Palma, Majorca, took a genuine interest in the fate of the Association. His efforts were directed toward enlarging the Association in terms of the number of sections and, chiefly, in increasing its membership; by the spring of 1873 he was already thinking that, if this progress continued at the same rate as in 1872-1873, it would create, within two years, the conditions for real, effective action. With this in mind, he did not want a series of strikes to weaken the forces and possibly bring disillusion and local disorganisation in their train. For the same reason he wanted the International to stay out of the violent struggles provoked by an exacerbated federalism, so-called ‘cantonalism’, around the summer of 1873. But this policy was impossible in certain localities (particularly Alcoy, where the Federal Commission had its headquarters, and in San Lucar de Barrameda, where Morago had gone) where social revolt carried the Internationalists along with it, with resulting persecutions and numerous arrests. When seventy-four arrested workers described the maltreatment they had been subjected to (letter of 29 October 1873), a circular of the Federal Commission, dated 10 November (Nr. 34), written by Tomás, was the first actively revolutionary declaration of the Federation; it spoke of the threat of reprisals, with a reminder of the ‘Sheffield outrages’ — acts of industrial sabotage carried out by the trade unionists of Sheffield.

The International was declared dissolved by the government, in a decree which appeared on 11 January 1874. Forthwith, Circular Nr. 38 (Madrid, 12 January 1874), privately distributed among the comrades, gave suggestions about how to provide for the secret continuation of the organisation, whose publications disappeared or became insignificant. In March of that year, the Maniftesto de la Comisión federal a todos los trabajadores de la Region española was circulated throughout the country — we know that 11,720 copies were distributed. It was the manifesto of the Federal Commission, addressed to all workers of the Spanish region, in which parts of Bakunin’s plan for the organisation of the International Brotherhood were freely inserted. There was a clandestine journal, Las Represalias (The Reprisals) and a Manifiesto of the Regional Congress, the last one, held in Madrid in June 1874, which appeared in 12,000 copies, and also threatened reprisals. As a result of persecutions, the organisation was disrupted but the Alliance succeeded in holding the ranks and from 1875 onwards, regional conferences, held every summer, took the place of congresses. The Federal Commission was stationed henceforth in Barcelona, and this fact produced a somewhat different development in Madrid. After the restoration of the monarchy, some clandestine leaflets appeared there; they were addressed to the workers (A los Obreros) and they expressed the determination not to regard the possibility of a political change with absolute indifference, as they had done till then, but to wrest all the power they could from a new regime. I am not acquainted with any of the 63 numbers of El Orden, the clandestine journal (1875-1878) which described itself as a ‘socialist sheet of propaganda and revolutionary action’ (hoja socialista de propaganda y de acción revolucionaria). Morago and Juan Serrano y Oteiza collaborated in this publication.

It was probably Francisco Tomás, the secretary, who wrote Medidas prácticas que han de tomarse después destruido el estado actual (Practical measures to be taken when the present state has been destroyed) in 1876; it was quite close in content to Bakunin’s document which has already been mentioned. In 1877 a republican agitation appeared to be imminent, in which the International would have participated, but, perhaps for this very reason, the revolt did not take place, and the Republicans have remained on parliamentary ground ever since. From 1878 the International had to contend with the agrarian problem in Andalusia, where incendiary fires were frequent in the fields in 1878 and 1879. The name of ‘The Black Hand’, it seems, was put in circulation at least by one judge who was said to have shown to a prisoner, ‘a publication entitled The Black Hand’ (I am unable to verify the reference at this time).

A clandestine sheet signed by the Federal Commission in May 1879 was addressed A los trabajadores del campo de Andalucía, en particular y a los obreros en general (To the workers in the fields of Andalusia, in particular, and to workers in general). The regional conferences in 1879 accepted the Programa de realización pràctica inmediata (The programme for immediate practical realisation) which consisted of seventeen articles indicating the revolutionary measures to be taken during and after the revolution; a revised version was published after the 1880 congresses and dated 8 April 1881). This project is similar to the programme of the clandestine journal El Municipio Libre (The Free Commune) published in Barcelona from November 1879 to May 1880, and I believe that both were written by J. C. Viñas, who was editor of the journal Revista Social until the end of 1880. It was necessarily ‘colourless’ but took on a little ‘colour’ when the fall of the conservative ministry of Cánovas del Castillo drew near (February 1881).

From these publications and various leaflets, particularly from the translations made from the works of James Guillaume, one may gather that their ideas of organisation bore the imprint of a rigid collectivist anarchism that would have brought about a revolution to be carried out by methods which may be described as dogmatic and severe. Francisco Tomas and Dr Viñas, although they had developed a mutual antagonism in the course of years, seem to have drawn closer together in austerity of method. In the end there were serious disagreements about the return of the International to public life with a new name, Federación de Trabajadores de la Región Española (Workers’ Federation of the Spanish Region) in place of the old. Vifias and others would have preferred to continue revolutionary secrecy; Farga Pellicer, Llunas and others in Barcelona, and Serrano and Oteiza in Madrid, must have supported the foundation of the public organisation above all. Viñas withdrew, but the germs of discontent over the discontinuance of the secret organisation seem to have entered the Regional Federation from its very beginning. Another factor for dissension in the Federation was the Andalusian problem.

An impressive list of activities marks the spirit in which preparations were made for the Workers’ Congress of 23-25 September. These were — a public conference on 20 March 1881; the founding of the Revista Social (Social Review) in Madrid (11 June); the Congress of the Building Trades Union around the end of June; the convocation to the Regional Workers Congress (11 July), issued by Farga Pellicer; the project of the Estatutos de la Federación de Trabajadores de la Región Española (Statutes of the Workers’ Federation of the Spanish Region) published in the Revista Social (of 18 August); the explanatory articles which appeared in that periodical — ‘Autonomia’, ‘Pacto y Federación’, ‘Municipio del Porvenir’, ‘Nuestra Politica (la politica demoledora)’, ‘Nuestra Actitud’, ‘Nuestra Linea de Conducta’, ‘Politica Demoledora: Sus Consecuencias y la Revolucion’ [‘Autonomy’, ‘Pact and Federation’, ‘The Community of the Future’, ‘Our Policy (the policy of destruction)’, ‘Our Position’, ‘Our Line of Conduct’, ‘The Policy of Destruction: Its Consequences and the Revolution’], published from 11 June 1881 to 23 February 1882). The Workers’ Congress of 23-25 September consisted of 140 delegates from 162 associations. Its reports were published in four editions, with a total of 28,500 copies. We should also make mention of its Manifiesto a los trabajadores de la región española, dated 24 September.

The building trades declared themselves, at the end of June, in favour of a

Free and autonomous community composed of all the sections of Producers of every locality, who, as masters of the earth, of capital and of the tools of production, will administer themselves in the way they judge to be best suitable for their own interests, so that each may receive the full product of his labour ..., in favour of a Federation of the Communes of every region for all regional interests and services ..., and in favour of a Pact or fraternal alliance among all the regions for all general interests and services, so that human brotherhood and the practice of justice on the earth may become a reality …

The Conference declared itself

in favour of calling a Regional Congress composed of delegates from all the sections which sympathise with the collectivist ideas and the free federation of Free Communities ...

In the Manifiesto of 24 September we find this statement:

What we have set forth, makes it clear that the Workers’ Congress declares itself collectivist as to property, anarchist or autonomist in its interpretation of social organisation …

The word ‘autonomy’ was used frequently, at that time and for a year or two, as a synonym for anarchism. Serrano y Oteiza wrote in ‘Nuestro Programa’, in the first number of Revista Social (11 June), without using the word ‘anarchism’:

We want the autonomy of the individual, of the group or managing section that individuals may form, and of the community. As a means of achieving the ultimate autonomous ends, we want the legislative function to rest in the individual, in the group or section, in the community itself, for dealing with all our problems, and more particularly those in the field of economics, always excepting individual rights which we would call primary, or essential, and which are based on the equality of economic means of individuals as well as of society. In this context we are autonomists, in the widest meaning of this term. The harmonious organisation of all the autonomies rests in the pact, which, while being a means for bringing about the organisation, is, as such, an essential part of it as well. We must stress the fact that, in the field of sociological science, we profess ideas which are the very opposite of communism, Fourierism and ‘co-operativism’ (if we may use the term); therefore, we are collectivists.

On 10 January 1882, Serrano, writing in ‘Nuestra Politica’, stated:

The material means which will enable that society [the society of the future, “Universal Harmony”) to rule itself are: Autonomy, the Pact and Federation based upon collective property, which is the equitable principle of property. This is the society where order is permanent. This — and not the absurdities that are circulated about it — this is the anarchism which is so hated,’

Juan Serrano y Oteiza (1837-1886) of Madrid, militant republican and Internationalist from the very start, as well as a jurist and man of letters, modelled his ideas on Proudhon’s and, in those years, appeared to be the militant least influenced by ideas which originated with Bakunin. His writings, while clear and precise in their thinking, seem cold and unfeeling. Ricardo Mella, Serrano’s son-in-law, who was a contributor to libertarian publications from 1880, seems to have followed his lead, at least if we may judge by his output during the following decade.

In Barcelona, on the other hand, the anarchism of that period was greatly influenced by Bakunin’s ideas on association and by general revolutionary feeling. It hada solid nucleus in ‘La Academía’, the large printing shop managed by Farga Pellicer. Thanks to his professional competence, his choice of contributors and the integrity of its owner, Evaristo Ullastres, a federal republican, it was possible to print a considerable number of good anarchist publications there, such as the great book, Garibaldi — Historia Liberal del Siglo XIX (Garibaldi — a Liberal History of the Nineteenth Century), La Tramontana, Acracía, La Asociación (The North Wind, Acracy [No Government], The Association [of the Society of the Typographical Workers of Barcelona]), and so on. If it is true that the Federal Commission (the names of whose members were often omitted in the documents I have been able to consult) consisted in 1882-1883 of Francisco Tomás (secretary), Antonio Pellicer Paraire, José Llunas, Eudaldo Canibell and a fifth man (the first three belonged to ‘La Academía’ printing shop), it is also true that Farga Pellicer — whom I would not presume to consider the fifth member, because I would have no basis for such a supposition — was anyway constantly at their side.

José Llunas Pujols of Reus, an old militant of the International (he died in 1905), was very well known at that time, particularly in 1882-1883, as the exponent of the Federation, and his writings are the most cogent presentation of the theory of 1869-1870, which considered trade union organisation capable of transformation into the society of the future; see in particular his two essays, Qué es la Anarquía? (What is Anarchy?) and Colectivismo (Collectivism) in 1882; and also Organización y Aspiraciones de la Federación de Trabajadores de la Región Espanola (30 December 1883; also in the Primer Certamen Socialista [The First Socialist Debate] of 1885), where he came to closer grips with communism. His speech against communism, delivered at the Congress of Seville (1882), may 186 — be considered similar to his essay on collectivism. (Published in Almanaque para 1883, a volume of the Biblioteca del Proletario printed in an edition of 40,000 copies.)

Llunas recognised the need of delegation, and from his viewpoint a hierarchy composed of successive delegations makes a perfectly anarchist organisation. Likewise, the election of persons for definite purposes does not imply an abdication of freedom.

Since a collectivity as such cannot write a letter or add up a list of figures or do hundreds of chores which only an individual can perform, it follows that delegating these tasks to qualified individuals, who are instructed in advance on how to proceed, not only does not mean an abdication of that collectivity’s own liberty but fulfills the most sacred obligation of anarchism, which is to organise the administration.

Let us suppose that a workers’ corporation is being organised without any directive council or any hierarchical offices; that it meets in general assembly once a week or more often, when it settles all matters needful for its progress; that it nominates a commission with strictly administrative functions, to handle the collection of dues, the custody of its funds, its financial records, its files, correspondence, and so on; that it prescribes a definite line of conduct to this commission or gives it an imperative mandate. The organisation of these activities would be perfectly anarchist.

He goes on to consider, ‘the free community of the future, organised in an anarchist way’. In that case, ‘the unit of the organisation would always be the section of occupation or craft in each locality’, that is, just one trade union of each craft or industry that there may be in one locality — one only, not several.

Thus, to organise an anarchist community, each unit [section of craft or industry] would delegate one or more individuals, with purely administrative functions or an imperative mandate, in order that the community or local administrative commission may be created. These delegates, subject at any time to replacement or recall by the permanent suffrage of those who had given them their mandate, can never establish themselves as dictators. …

In accordance with their geographical or topographical conditions, and their ethnological circumstances, such as their habits and customs, affinities of language and climate, geographical position and size of population, they could become trade federations as well as federations of communities of greater or lesser territorial extension. …

All the commissions or delegations nominated in an anarchist society must be subject to replacement and recall at any time by the permanent suffrage of the section or sections that have elected them, in order to make it thereby impossible for anyone to arrogate to himself a scintilla of authority. …

Llunas further elaborates the same ideas in his ‘Questions socials’, a series of 19 articles in Catalan, published in La Tramontana. (From 25 June 1890 to 10 April 1891; in April 1891 also published as a book of 128 pages.) In his ‘Los Partits socialistas espanyols’ (published in La Tramontana from 9 October to 27 November 1891; also as a pamphlet in Castilian, 1892) he proposed, after a critique of contemporary socialist and anarchist currents, that alongside the anarchist movement there should be set up an extra-anarchist party, composed of authoritarian socialists of goodwill and kindred spirit who would struggle and extirpate obstacles to social progress by authoritarian but unselfish means, without any intention of establishing their own domination. This suggestion was not followed; it was similar to Merlino’s efforts in 1897. It originated in the notion that all the socialists who are now busy setting up their leaders as deputies and ministers (or making them direct lords over life and death as in Bolshevism) can still be led toward more useful activity than their present actions which only serve to waste their lives. A few years later, Llunas was still in determined opposition to isolated individual acts of violence involving the use of dynamite, which had led to harsh persecutions. The satirical journal, La Tramontana, in Catalan, was edited and largely written by him, with verve and audacity.

The Revista Social of Madrid, published until at least May 1884, reappeared as an organ of dissent from the decisions made by the Congress of Barcelona (September 1884) from 26 December 1884 to 8 October 1885 in Sans (Barcelona). Then there were the Crónica de los Trabajadores de la Región Española (Chronicle of the Workers of the Spanish Region), founded after the Congress of Seville (1882), the various articles in the Primer Certamen (First Debate) of Reus in 1885, and the discussions concerning the extension of the organisation, during its finest period of growth, reported at the Congress of Seville (September 1882). All these tell us enough about those years of the Regional Federation, whose existence, nevertheless, was at the same time being undermined and threatened by separatist currents.

The main organisation, nominally composed of 663 sections with a membership of 57,934 in September 1882 (some 30,000 at any rate), could not continue long without disputes and disagreements just because it was, at a certain juncture, the strongest and was supposed to represent the image and the seedbed of the society of the future. This tranquillity was soon rudely disturbed by ominous reports of the agrarian situation in Andalusia, where poverty was rampant, and where the sections could not very well remain indifferent or urge their own members to stay aloof without losing prestige. The dissidents, who originated at Arcos de la Frontera, and were irritated by the Federal Commission and the Congress of Seville, converged at a small secret Congress in Seville in January 1883 forming a society, ‘Los Desheredados — Organización revolucionaria anarquista’ (The Disinherited — Anarchist revolutionary organisation), which was apparently in existence until 1886, particularly in Andalusia, where it had its Congress at Cadiz in December 1884. It was collectivist and its revolutionary programme of terrorist action had nothing libertarian about it. During the second half of 1882 there were hunger revolts, with acts of agrarian terror and of violence, even murders of traitors, real or suspected. The Federal Commission repudiated all such acts by declarations and manifestos, and struck at the dissidents, expelling them as ‘disturbers’ (late in 1882, and in the early part of 1883).

Worse still was the government’s massive persecution, with arrests of the members of all shades of opinion within the organisation and even of the Regional Commission of West Andalusia, and a numerous series of harsh trials. All this was carried on under the pretext, for the public and the press, of the discovery of a terrorist organisation, ‘La Mano Negra’ (The Black Hand). Seven men were immediately condemned to death and much later, on 14 June 1884, six executions took place at Jerez. Outside Andalusia, the Regional Federation was not persecuted but it did not even express any solidarity with the Andalusian victims. As the prisoners were awaiting execution, the Congress of Valencia declared, in October 1883:

The Federation disclaims any solidarity with those who have organised or are organising the perpetration of common crimes; we declare that criminals will never find a place in our ranks.

And it protested against confusing

our public, legal and revolutionary organisation with other organisations, or rather with cliques whose aims are reprehensible.

On 30 September, T. G. Morago, one of the oldest militants, was for this reason expelled from his section in Madrid, and eventually died in the penitentiary of Granada in 1885.

This position on the part of the Federation was motivated by a desire to save, at whatever cost, the full, public existence of the organisation, but it must have aroused bitter animosity and hatred between the dissident elements and the hard-line authoritarians. At the same time, sections were thinning out or disappearing, either as a result of persecutions or of indignation at the stand taken by the Federal Commission. It was then that Serrano proposed ‘submitting the Statutes for approval to the responsible ministry’ (of the government), and if such approval was not granted, to dissolve the organisation as a protest. The Congress did not accept this proposal of legalisation but decided that “if the abuses, persecutions and threats should continue” it would dissolve itself and “the proletarians would then retire to the Mount of Aventine and wait for better times”.

A year later, this decision was taken by an extraordinary Congress held in September 1884 in Barcelona; however, the sections were urged not to dissolve and to continue keeping up their contacts. The public organisation was reaffirmed at the Congress held in Barcelona in July 1885, and its Manifiesto declared that it favoured

the union of all the schools of socialism through an alliance of all the trade unions, in the struggle against capital and the authoritarian principle, without intending thereby to surrender an iota of our principles.

The libertarian communist idea was supported for the first time at the Congress of Seville by a local worker, Miguel Rubio, an old member of the Alliance, who had arrived at this concept by his own reflection. He was alone and even the dissidents did not share his views. But there was ‘a little group in Seville, led by the communist Rubio’, as reported in the Crónica, and the local Council of Seville expelled them in March 1883. The trial in Lyons January 1883) and perhaps an Italian anarchist circle in Barcelona (autumn 1883), as well as Georges Herzig’s stay in Barcelona in 1884, helped toward a better understanding of these ideas, which were proclaimed in 1885 in a manifesto signed by ‘Los grupos comunistas anarquistas de Barcelona’. Their nucleus of agitation was in Gracia, centred on Martin Borrás and Emilio Hugas. Their first pamphlets were entitled La Justicia humana (Human Justice) and Tierra y Libertad (Land and Liberty), issued in 1888-1889, but some pamphlets had been translated since 1885.

Those early communists, as evidenced in their publications and their correspondence in French periodicals, strongly disapproved of collectivism and organisation, and proclaimed more or less what Merlino later called ‘amorphism’. Collectivists were not impressed by such ideas and such methods; nevertheless, they had experienced a change, a reaction from the inflexible stand of their organisation in 1883 and its disappointing tactics during the Andalusian revolt. Tomás not only ceased to be secretary from September 1883, but he, and Serrano as well, were not treated too well in 1884. The new secretary, Indalecio Cuadrado, a printer from Valladolid, seems to have sought a reconciliation, or perhaps he may have followed those who had a greater inclination toward the revolutionary way, even though it might be secret and limited, rather than the great, public method of organisation favoured by Tomás, who had lived through all phases of the International, both public (1870-1874) and clandestine (1874-1881).

Cuadrado must have been the inspiration for a cosmopolitan congress in 1884 (he always liked to use the word ‘cosmopolitan’). This Congress was held in Barcelona, in 1885, following the session of the Regional Congress. The federated, the Disinherited and the communists held a joint meeting there, but the vehement debates which showed the impossibility of a mutual understanding among these elements were cut short by the Congress. Some of the Disinherited deplored this schism in 1886, and set forth their position in a manifesto published in June — A los trabajadores de Jerez de la Frontera (To the Workers of Jerez de la Frontera). Perhaps the influence of Fermín Salvochea, who reproduced articles in El Socialismo on all the schools of socialism and who was a communist at that time, might have contributed to such a reconciliation.

In any event, the death of Alphonso XII, a fusion government, the agitation for the eight-hour day and May Day, as well as the events in Chicago on 4 May gave a new impetus to the movement, particularly in Catalonia. In January of that year a new review was founded, with the name Acracía, a word often used at that time instead of ‘anarchism’, and reminiscent of a workers’ review, Atercracia, the publication of which was announced in 1884, to take place in Barcelona; it was, however, never published. The title was taken from the French book Atercratie by Claude Pelletier in New York, which was discussed in a letter by the Federal Commission in 1873. Canibell wrote that Farga Pellicer discovered the word Acracia, and though he might have found it directly, it is also plausible that the title Atercratie suggested it to him. In other countries the word uticraty (government by one person), ukarchy (no government), anticraty (against a government), Herrschaftslosigkeit (free of government), bezvlastie (in Russian), and so forth have been created.

The great manifesto addressed A todos los trabajadores de la región española (To all the workers of the Spanish region), which was signed by the Federation of Barcelona (23 February 1886) and drawn up by Anselmo Lorenzo when he rejoined the movement, states:

We proclaim acracía [non-government]. The primary social collectivity is the local group of producers of an identical industry [or trade]. The fundamental pact takes place between the producer and the respective or similar group of producers. The producers’ groups of a locality conclude a pact whereby they form an entity which facilitates credit, exchange, education, sanitation and local police, and this entity concludes pacts with other localities, for the functions of credit and exchange on a larger scale, as well as for communications, transportation and public services, both general and mutual. Other entities, designed to meet certain special geographic conditions, such as the quality of the soil, its configuration, the climate and so on, may be created through special pacts, based on economic principles and the possibilities for production, exchange and transportation. The land, the mines, the factories, the railroads, the ships and, in general, all the means of production, transportation, exchange and communication, declared to be property of society, shall pass as usufruct to the workers’ collectives.

This manifesto, published many times, had a great many supporters; it was also inserted, in part, in the manifesto of the Regional Congress of Madrid in May 1887. It likewise contains the following passage, which is identical with the texts of 1886 and 1887:

Organisation of society on the basis of labour to be performed by those who are fit to produce; rational distribution of the products of labour; assistance for those who are as yet incapable of performing such labour, as well as for those who are no longer capable of labour; full physical and scientific education for future producers.

Lorenzo, the delegate from the Federation of Barcelona in Madrid, who analysed the manifesto in El Productor of 27 May 1887, recalls an animated discussion concerning one sentence of the manifesto, which stated, ‘the worker will receive the product of his labour’, but which omitted the adjective ‘full’ (that is, ‘the full product of his labour’). This omission had special reference to the children, the aged and the infirm, and was based on the premise that the individual's relation to society is a reciprocal link of rights and obligations and that ‘therefore, in order to have the right to be a consumer, one must fulfill the obligation of being a producer’. ‘Society is founded on the principle of solidarity, the natural consequence of reciprocity.’ And if society guarantees the enjoyment of his rights to the individual, through his fulfilment of his obligations, everyone should contribute to the preservation of society by helping in the nurture of children and supporting the aged. For this reason Lorenzo omitted the word ‘full’ and inserted the words ‘rational distribution of the products of labour’. Nevertheless, Ricardo Mella, writing in La Solidaridad of Seville on 9 December 1888, maintained that, ‘speaking from the anarchist point of view’, society had no obligation to educate the children or to support mental defectives or the sick or the old; let their families take care of them and the spontaneous solidarity of human associations!

On reading the journals published in Madrid from 1885 on, La Bandera social (The Social Banner), La Bandera roja (The Red Banner), La Anarquía, this latter edited by Ernesto Alvarez, one can hardly distinguish whether they were collectivist or communist; they display neither enthusiasm for one nor animosity against the other doctrine. Intellectual life at that time revolved entirely around the review Acracía, El Productor and La Solidaridad of Seville from 1888 to 1889, so long as Ricardo Mella was its editor. Antonio Pellicer Paraire was the vital force behind these publications in Barcelona before Farga Pellicer, and, together with Anselmo Lorenzo, there were the younger people such as Pedro Esteve, Fernando Tárrida del Mármol and Palmiro de Lidia (Adrian del Valle). There were Teresa Claramunt, Teresa Mañé (Soledad Gustavo), Juan Montseny of Reus (Federico Urales) and others. There were also Rafael Farga Pellicer and José Llunas, and the group that gathered around La Tramontana. Outside Catalonia, the most outstanding personalities were Fermín Salvochea of Cadiz and Ricardo Mella.

In this summary, it is impossible for me to support my statements with quotations from original sources or enlarge on the significance of the self-critical material, and attempts of these comrades to go beyond the ideas which had prevailed until then. This information can only be found in Acracía and El Productor (1886-1893); the reader will have to be content with my condensed report.

We shall first examine La Asociación, formed by a group of printers (1883-1888), where we find the men of ‘La Academía’ and others, who had established intelligent co-operation among themselves. In ‘La Organización Obrera’ (Workers’ Organisation) (28 February 1886) Lorenzo formulated his first critique. This was followed by Antonio Pellicer’s intensive critique in the ‘Acratismo Societario’ (January to July 1887). Cuadrado joined him in his ‘Mandato Imperativo’ (Imperative Mandate) (April 1887). The Congress of Madrid of May 1887 was subjected to a critical examination by Lorenzo. The hypothesis of the ‘embryo’ (of the future society within presently existing organisations), the full product of labour, and the organisation of 1870, were at last closely scrutinised, with the result that they were no longer held to be incontrovertible facts which only the ‘disturbers’ could question.

Some writings of William Morris and Kropotkin’s English articles, in Salvochea’s translations, appeared in Acracía and El Socialismo, while Mella, in Seville, became acquainted with Tucker’s ideas on reading Liberty (Boston). The simplistic approach of the manifesto issued by the anarchist-communist groups of Madrid in May 1887, made a poor impression on El Productor (3 June), but it received serious attention in Le Révolté (10 June; see also Acracia, August 1887; ‘Colectivistas y comunistas’ in El Productor, 16 September; and Acracia, October). Mella’s ‘La Reacción en la Revolución’ (Reaction in the Revolution, published in Acracía from June 1887 — April 1888) maintained that deciding right now whether, after the victory of anarchism, the people should organise for the communist or the collectivist mode of distribution, would be blind dogmatism — worse still, it would mean the destruction of the anarchist principle, the negation of the revolution. As Mella put it, reaction is a standstill; hence it is death, which is the result of dogmatism, while revolution-evolution is life.

Antonio Pellicer proposed a convergence of the different schools, in which the communists would abandon their exaggerated notions of equality and the acrato-collectivists would abandon their authoritarian errors and prejudices. Even Kropotkin (in an unsigned article, in La Révolte of 7 October 1888), called attention to the friendship without compromise of ideas which reigned in Seville between the two schools, and declared that this was the only way for honourable intercourse between persons who respected each other. He could not refrain, however, from adding that no doubt should be entertained about the fact that communism would be victorious.

The Spanish communists attacked the collectivists in Portuguese and French journals; Pellicer’s ‘Declaraciones e Aclaraciones sobre Declaraciones’ (Declarations and Explanations of Declarations), which appeared in El Productor (3 August, 7 September 1888), and the response made by Tierra y Libertad (Gracia) on 14 September were splendid refutations of exclusivist fanaticism, but in ‘Tiempo Perdido’ (12 July 1889) it was stated that it was a ‘waste of time’ to argue with the Gracía journal. Esteve — making allusions to Mella — pointed out, on 5 October 1888, that in certain localities there was no such fanaticism but rather an understanding that each individual and each collective group would organise, after the revolution, in any way that best suited them.

The restoration of the organisation was. discussed at the Conferences for Social Studies and at meetings held in Barcelona (see El Productor from 4 October 1887 to 11 May 1888). As a result of these discussions, the ‘Federación Española de Resistencia al Capital’ (Spanish Federation for Resistance to Capital) was founded at the great Congress of Barcelona in May 1888. And after many discussions — Mella, particularly, raised objections and argued with Esteve — the Regional Federation (that is, the International) was replaced in Valencia in September by the ‘Organización Anarquista de la Region Española’, in the field of revolutionary ideas and actions, as it had already been replaced in the field of economics in May. This new entity included persons, groups, and so on, ‘without distinction of revolutionary methods or schools of economics’. It established a Centre of Reports and Statistics, that is a co-ordinating body, known as the Benevento Group of Barcelona, which continued until the great persecutions came, for a period which I am unable to determine.

At the same time voices were raised protesting against the divisions among anarchists due to differing ideas of economics (see El Productor, 11, 18 January; 8 March; 14 June 1889). The Benevento Group declared on 31 May that no particular economic regime should be imposed upon the new society; that any work dealing with this field of economics should be considered, solely and simply, to be a study designed to further the science of economics.

Fernando Tárrida del Marmol, designated by this group, was appointed a delegate to the anarchist meetings held in Paris in September. For the Segundo certamen socialista (Second Socialist Debate) the group proposed a theme on which Tarrida wrote his essay, Revolutionary Theory, dated 26 October 1889, concluding in favour of ‘anarchism without adjectives’. This idea, however, was already current in Barcelona in the second half of 1888; Mella had discussed it in Seville’s La Solidaridad on 27 September 1888 and 12 January 1889 (‘Anarchism ... does not admit of adjectives’). This same question was later brought up in La Révolte on 6 and 13 September 1890 by a comrade from Barcelona (apparently Tárrida) in a very important article which revealed the difference between the Spanish and French interpretations. Tárrida, speaking to me in French, used the expressions ‘anarchism sans phrase’ and ‘anarchism pure and simple’. In 1908, when his essay was being reprinted, he proposed, following Ferrer’s idea of 1906 and 1907, that the word ‘anarchism’ be dropped, since it had an unfavourable connotation for the public, and that the term ‘libertarian socialism’ be used instead. He later reported that his conclusions of 1889 had been accepted by the immense majority of Spanish anarchists ‘who repudiate all sectarian prejudice’.

We may recall that precisely at the time when Tárrida was writing (26 October 1889), Malatesta’s Appello had already appeared in a Spanish leaflet and was being read. (‘It is not right for us, to say 198 Cnapter 13 the least, to fall into strife over mere hypotheses’; Circular; also El Productor, 2 October, etc.). Tarrida was frankly critical of Kropotkin’s ‘industrial village’, which would reduce his concept to an aggregate of small communities, while Malatesta recommended the creation of great organisations that would exchange their products. He added that every powerful mind creates new paths toward the society of the future and, by its hypnotic force, so to speak, would always find followers to spread his ideas among other people. He concluded by saying that each of us usually has a special plan of his own.

Writing in La Anarquía, Juan Montseny (Federico Urales) declared that anarchism knows no exclusivisms, calling himself ‘anàrquico a secas’ (anarchist plain and simple). The same viewpoint is the basis for his ‘Las Preocupaciones de los Despreocupados’ (The Prejudices of the Unprejudiced) in El Corsario, and he remained faithful to this idea.

Some communist anarchists in 1893 lined up in favour of anarchism without adjectives in La Controversia (Valencia), Octave Jahn’s journal. So did Vicente Garcia in La Tribuna Libre (Seville), on 23 January 1893, in his article, ‘No Hay que Temer!’ (No Need to Fear!). (He had just accompanied Malatesta and Esteve on part of their speaking tour. At a triple Conference in Barcelona, Malatesta, Esteve and Tárrida each expounded his own point of view.)

It is impossible to follow here the evolution of Ricardo Mella’s ideas from his writings for The First Debate (1885) until a report for the International Conference of Paris in 1900, titled ‘La Cooperación Libre y Los Sistemas de Comunidad’ (Free Co-operation and Systems of Community Organisation), and so on. Mella fought harder than anyone else against the feeling of distrust which communism — authoritarian and libertarian alike — aroused in him. La Solidaridad (Seville) of 1888-1889 showed it, on one occasion when he shared the views of federalists, of Proudhon and, later, of Serrano y Oteiza; then he was reassured by Tucker (Liberty), and a little later by Dyer D. Lum (The Economics of Anarchy) in 1890 and G. C. Clemens (A Primer of Anarchy). He had a horror of communism in its extravagant expression à outrance (its extreme form). In his article ‘El Socialismo Anarquista’ he states that socialist anarchism views all hypotheses with toleration; that it recognises ‘free cooperation’, within which all methods and all applications may be practised. Following his report for the Paris Conference, which was published in Les Temps Nouveaux — one of the most characteristic statements of a genuinely libertarian concept of anarchism — this argument was presented to a public which was truly international. Yet it was seldom discussed, except by Voltairine de Cleyre at a conference held in Philadelphia a little later.

Anarchism had lived through moments of great enthusiasm, of high energy, of moving expressions of goodness and of beauty, but I do not think it has ever experienced a period of greater intellectual vigour than in the years 1886-1893, in the stimulating atmosphere we are now describing, when it succeeded in freeing itself from deep-rooted beliefs and customs and rose above sectarianism, fanaticism and intolerance. Those years marked its passing from religious faith to scientific criticism; it is indeed unfortunate that the anarchists of other countries did not follow this evolution, which led from the defence of a single idea to the free examination of all ideas.

But there were backsliders, even in Spain. We were so blind as to believe that only one among the outstanding thinkers, and only one among the doctrines, had gained supremacy over all preceding ones, and, since no one came out in opposition to Kropotkin and Tucker, we were convinced that these two alone had the last word on anarchist communism and anarchist individualism. We believed that if one side was right, the other side was all wrong, when everything I have just related so briefly was plainly obvious to us through the Spanish publications, and some repercussions were also accessible to us in French journals.

I myself, narrow-minded and limited as I was then, wrote in 1890 an apologia for communist anarchism, with a complete refutation of collectivism and individualism. My article was translated by Mella and published in El Productor just to expose its limitations and its lack of merit. It was entitled ‘Discusión: Comunismo, Individualismo y Colectivismo’. I did not see these articles until 1929. I personally came to the conclusion, around 1900, that it was necessary to rise above exclusivisms, but I was seldom heeded and, when I brought up the matter for the last time, in Freedom (London) in early 1914, everyone was opposed to me. When this latter article was, without my knowledge, reprinted after the war it met with less criticism and was reproduced a number of times.

Sébastien Faure fought exclusivism in his La Synthèse anarchiste (1928), but not entirely in the same manner, as I have tried to show in several articles on coexistence published in the Suplemento de la Protesta. Tárrida professed the same idea from the agnostic point of view, maintaining that we cannot foresee the economic developments of the future. Mella came to the same conclusion, through his conviction that every idea had an equal right to manifest itself. Juan Montseny viewed liberty and anarchism in their unified aspect as a complex of ideas, and did not want to belittle this concept with suggestions of predetermination or exclusivism. And Malatesta said it was not right for us to split ranks over hypotheses whose choice was to decide the future.

If it were claimed that this problem had no practical relevance and that it could have been solved by an almost unanimous acceptance of anarchist communism, we would be committing a grave error. Discussion and dissension continued on so many other points in addition to the question of exclusivisms. Simple coexistence has never existed; everyone believes himself superior to his opponents on ideological grounds. That is why we are so disunited and fragmented, and can no longer join for a common activity should there be a need to do so. Thus passion and fanaticism always prevail. But the idea of coexistence in solidarity has been launched and it will become a reality in the future, when intellectual dictatorships as well as material dictatorships have been abolished.

Those who had thus revitalised the ideas and the form of interrelationships (organisation), by the same token from 1886 onwards also revitalised collective popular action. Up to that time the growth of the sections and of the federated groups constituted the main objective, which was constantly being frustrated by strikes and other unforeseen agitations, to the despair of a faithful secretary like Francisco Tomas. But now, once the burden of working chiefly for increased organisation was lifted, there was greater freedom of action and the Catalonian General Strikes of May 1890 and 1891 brought splendid results. Further progress, anticipated for 1892, which was to be achieved through Malatesta’s and Esteve’s trip, was limited because of the agrarian revolt in Jerez de la Frontera (on the night of 8-9 January 1892), followed by the executions of 10 February and the tortures and imprisonment of many victims. This put an end to the May First strikes, and while it undoubtedly caused a weakening in the collective effort, it brought to the fore the advocates of individual action — not the isolated men but rather those communists, imbued with the spirit of solidarity, who had been left outside the great current here described, together with their personal opponents. Mella pointed out, on that occasion, that an excessive feeling of distrust created precisely the strong prejudice against any organic action that was pernicious to our cause. Free initiative, on the other hand, was interpreted as a direct negation of the principle of association and practically its opposite; see El Corsario of 26 July 1893, and also Juan Montseny’s description of the mentality of those days in Entre anarquistas in an anarchist periodical of 1895. But the main document on that state of tension is the long series Puritanismo o exageraciones in El Productor (27 April to 15 June 1893), whose author was undoubtedly Antonio Pellicer.

For fear of the authoritarian principle, even the organisation of the society of the future was thus negated. An incomprehensible and antisocial individualism was preached, without any realisation of the fact that the complex nature of the social organism required administration, association and organisation. This is what Pellicer meant when he criticised all the simplistic and primitivist solutions in vogue at the time. Such ideas were not merely the products of exuberance and of inconsistent reasoning based ona superficial interpretation of reality; they were also the expressions of a real hatred for the so-called ‘moderates’, the ‘respectable people’, the ‘organisers’ and the like; that is, the friends of El Productor, Freiheit, Freedom, of Malatesta and of Merlino.

There were fierce antagonisms. The Workers’ Circle for Social Studies — that great anarchist centre shut down by the authorities on 3 May 1891 — was going to be re-inaugurated on 24 September 1893, which would indicate that there was a normal and progressive movement; on that very day, Paulino Pallás made the attempt to assassinate General Martinez Campos, and, as a result, El Productor’s printers refused to return to work. The journal made no effort to deal with this situation (the journals in other cities continued to publish) but simply closed its doors (see El Corsario, 5 November 1893). It offered explanations which are painful to read; they demonstrated the unpopularity of this organ, which, it was said, weighed like a lead upon free initiative. One may understand the bitterness aroused against the men of El Productor on reading the angry reports sent by Martin Borrás of Gracía, one of the opposition leaders, to El Perseguido (The Persecuted Man), Buenos Aires, in 1893 and until his arrest.

Bombs were thrown in the Liceo Theatre, followed by arrests, torture, executions and the horrors of the courts Juan Montseny, EI Proceso de un gran crimen). True, there were worthwhile journals, like El Corsario, the publications of Alvarez and some communist-anarchist sheets of brief duration, but the great current of anarchist thinking seemed to have ended when Antonio Pellicer threw away his pen, so to speak, and Lorenzo had to devote his energies to an almost insignificant journal, the only one that could be published in Barcelona, El Porvenir Social (The Social Future) and a review, Ciencia Social (Social Science) in 1895 to May 1896.

There was still great weakness. The movement was beginning to recover its forces somewhat when the bomb exploded in the Cambios Nuevos Street on 7 June 1896, and again came the massive persecution, the executions in Montjuich, long-term penitentiary sentences, and in 1896-7 many were exiled by deportation to England. An international effort was called for. Great campaigns were mounted by Tárrida del Mármol and Federico Urales (Juan Montseny), abroad and in Madrid, to obtain the liberation of those who had survived the terror, and with the press campaigns of La Revista Blanca and its Suplemento (which became Tierra y Libertad (1899-1905)), it was possible also to obtain the release of the prisoners of Jerez (1892) and of the ‘Mano Negra’ (Black Hand) in 1893.

It was only then that trade-union reorganisation was undertaken, through various efforts, at Haro (December 1899), at Manlleu January 1900), and at Jerez. It started with the Congress of Madrid, held in October 1900, which founded the ‘Federación de Trabajadores de la Región Española’, thus continuing the work of the ‘Pacto de Unión y Solidaridad’. It was an organisation which continued to exist, weak and dislocated though it was, under this new impetus, with a membership of some 52,000 at its start, and it published a manifesto with an anarchist content.

This organisation of 1900 ceased to exist as a federated unit in 1905 or 1906, but the disappearance of the federal machinery did not mean that its component parts — sections or syndicates — had disintegrated in Spain. In one particular case, a committee located in Barcelona, in Seville and La Corufia simply lost contact with the syndicates. As a matter of fact, a fresh start was made by these forty or fifty sections or syndicates from Barcelona and its environs. They had always existed and now, under the name of ‘Solidaridad Obrera’, their federation acquired new vigour and united the syndicates of Catalonia, moving in the direction of a national federation.

The insurrection and the repression of 1909 slowed down this development which culminated, in 1910 and 1911, in the 204 Cuapter 13 organisation of the ‘Confederación Nacional del Trabajo’ (CNT) in September 1911. Its public activities were almost immediately interrupted by arrests which came a few days later. Another, local attempt was made by the Catalonian region (1913-1914) to organise on a national basis, nominally in the beginning, in Ferrol, early in 1915. Once again a great development took place in the regions, as evidenced, for instance, by the Catalonian Regional Congress in Sans (Barcelona) in August 1918, perhaps with only slight interregional activity continuing until December 1919, when the great Constituent Congress was held in Madrid. The syndicates there assembled represented 90,750 members in Andalusia; 15,172 in Aragon; 1,081 in the Balearic and Canary Islands; 699,369 in Catalonia. When another congress became possible in Madrid in 1931, after a great many events had taken place, the number of those represented remained the same, and the number of members of the CNT had grown, by 1931, to a total of almost a million. The totals fluctuated, reflecting the agitated life of the syndicates; nevertheless there was this great united mass, about ten or twenty times greater than the forces the International had been able to muster.

The International had its highly complex, cumbersome administrative machinery, but it also had its vivifying, energising spirit, which came from the Alliance. And similarly, the organisations closer to us in time, which had grown to great numbers, had their administrative machinery, but if this great complex were to function alone, it would inevitably have degenerated into dictatorship or a stagnant bureaucracy. In all good reason, an organised body has need of such a life-giving breath of air, that the Alliance gave to the International, and it was the anarchists who gave it to that vast conglomeration of syndicates. Without it, inertia, indifference, impotence and corporatism would have set in very quickly, dictators and ambitious men would have moved in, bent on converting this mass of people into electoral capital for their own profit and advancement. In Spain, anarchist groups, united since 1888 (‘Organización Anarquista’), were constantly renewing their mutual contacts and, finally, at a Conference in Valencia in 1927, they organised the ‘Federación Anarquista Ibérica’ (FAI). It is this organisation which drew the concentrated hatred of dictators and would-be dictators of all species who would have liked to dominate that million of organised men and more millions of sympathisers, while the anarchists of the CNT were doing their utmost to prevent it.

The history of the Spanish movement is full of great struggles and great martyrs. We recall the victims of Alcalá del Valle and of Cullera. One of the bitterest struggles was the strike of the metalworkers of Barcelona in 1902; the journal published by Ferrer and Lorenzo, La Huelga General (The General Strike), was then in the forefront proclaiming the idea of the revolutionary strike. There was the Red Week of 1909, in Barcelona, when reactionaries retaliated by assassinating Ferrer on 13 October. The period of 1917- 1923 witnessed an enormous growth of the organisation and, along with it, a ferocious repression and the murder of many militants. There were always violent strikes, accompanied by massacres, in Andalusia. Finally, came the dictatorship of September 1923, which lasted until the fall of the dictator in January 1930; this period imposed a clandestine existence on the organisation from which it did not emerge for fifteen months, or until April 1931. The anarchists, finally united in the ‘Federación Anarquista Ibérica’ (FAI), participated vigorously in the CNT; at times taking a leading part in its conferences or by their own actions, at other times clashing with the forces and elements of the type I have just described, whose importance or at least whose personal power was strengthened in times of persecution, of clandestine or semi-clandestine life, and who gave a free hand to a small number of militants (as had happened earlier in 1874-81, 1883-1888 and in other later periods).

Anarchist ideas — well represented in the Revista Blanca and the publications that belonged to it (Suplemento and Tierra y Libertad) from 1899 to 1905, and for many years in the series of Tierra y Libertad of Barcelona — were, shall I say, compelled to act in an increasingly limited way upon the great workers’ organisation, which had a progressive value only to the extent it was able to overcome the obstacles I have described. In these circumstances, anarchist thought itself had little new life, I believe. Communist anarchism was accepted as a system permanently agreed on, without discussion, through sheer force of habit. Amorphous’ communism of 1885-1896 died away during the terrible persecutions of 1893-1897, while the advocates of open, definite struggle, no longer meeting the resistance so provoking to them in the past, when they fought against collectivism and organisation, proved their solidarity in actions aligned with the general objectives of all the groups — in collective struggles (of which there was no lack) and in the wide-ranging war against the dictatorship, the monarchy and the State.

There were congenial applications of a practical nature, such as the ‘Modern School’ of Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, the entire movement of free and rational education and the naturalist movement which in Spain generated a great libertarian spirit. To sum up, so many years of constant, hopeful struggle and the great joy they felt at not having been involved in the terrible world war, maintained Spanish libertarians in a state of vigour, alertness and confidence which anarchists of other countries had seldom been able to achieve. The effort, begun in 1840, continuing to grow since 1868, contending with persecutions from 1893 to 1931 and to the present day, has borne fruits which I shall not analyse here. The three libertarian affirmative actions of January 1932, January and December 1933 are in themselves living and vibrating testimonies.

From among Spanish and Catalonian writers of those thirty years, I shall mention only the following: Anselmo Lorenzo, active until his death in the autumn of 1914; Tárrida del Mármol; Ricardo Mella; Petro Esteve, in the United States; José López Montenegro, a veteran of the International; Federico Urales and his daughter, the youthful Federica Montseny. I shall not speak of the militants of syndicalism, whose positions continue to provoke controversy, since they have resurrected the idea, prevalent from 1870 to 1888, that the present organisation will constitute the framework of the society of the future which they believe to be imminent. It is a concept which reappears whenever organisations are expanding, and fades away when there is better understanding of the complexity of social life, and particularly when the libertarian spirit acquires vigour and will not permit the present to mortgage or lay its hands upon the future. In this spirit, the hypothesis and the hope for a free community have come to the fore — a nucleus of constructive action in solidarity, as important as the syndicate, the group, the co-operative and other organised forces of the present; all these forces alike have no real knowledge of the nature of the society of the future, which, like life itself, will have to remain ‘without adjectives’.

14. Anarchist ideas in England, the United States, Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium since about 1880.

I shall be brief on the subject of England, where libertarian influences already described in earlier pages — from Godwin to Cuddon — had left their traces, from 1870 to 1880, only in the minds of a few socialist workers. Around 1880, these men revived popular agitation and gave their socialism an anti-parliamentarian, generally anti-authoritarian, communist and libertarian cast. Through their mutual contacts in their clubs and meetings, they were not unaware of the anarchist ideas which were then current among _ the Germans, the French and the Italians, and they also knew American publications which reflected Tucker’s ideas. Since they were also familiar with Robert Owen, the Owenites and other older surviving socialists, they developed a communist anarchism imbued with the spirit of solidarity and reasonableness which was perhaps closer to the ideas of Malatesta. They were not attracted to ‘exuberance’ or ‘amorphism’, not even to Kropotkin’s particular hypotheses. Joseph Lane, author of An Anti-Statist, Communist Manifesto, Samuel Mainwaring and others represented that brand of indigenous British communist anarchism which calls for the maximum of liberty, along with the greatest solidarity.

These men encountered William Morris in the Socialist League, and they both co-operated in instilling a forward-looking spirit in the group; in this they succeeded to a certain extent. At that time — or at least from 1884 to 1890 — Morris was a sincere socialist who repudiated all the statist and economic institutions, as well as the concepts of fatherland and nation. These he replaced with an order based on townships and local guilds, joined in federations which could organise and dissolve voluntarily, communicated through delegates, and would be joined in a sort of central organisation whose almost exclusive function would be ‘the guardianship’ of the fundamental principles of that society. It would evolve in the direction of ‘the abolition of all government’ and all standards not sanctioned by usage. Thus ‘the voluntary association’ would become ‘the only bond of society’. (See one of his letters of 1888, reproduced in Letters on Socialism..., London 1894.)

This concept is quite in accordance, though on a much more libertarian level, with the ideas proclaimed by Serrano y Oteiza and Llunas from 1880 to 1890 in the name of the Spanish anarchists, with the difference that Morris clearly intended to proceed to a progressive and total elimination of authority while the Spanish collectivists, at least in all their public declarations, imposed a character of rigid immutability upon their system.

William Morris has given us a vivid picture of his further concepts and conjectures about the form that the British social revolution would take, in his utopia News From Nowhere (first serialised in Commonweal from January to October 1890), his form of protest against Bellamy’s authoritarian utopia. In this book, as in his talks and in earlier writings, Morris proposed the application of art to life, with beauty and practical production all combined; intellectual and manual labour was to be aesthetically beautiful and well done, replacing mechanisation and the official, vulgar, venal and utilitarian ugliness. His socialism, like every original socialism, expressed the essence of his own being. Loving harmony, loving things substantial and well executed, intelligent co-operation among producers, practical agreement on goals decided upon and voluntarily accepted. He hated officialdom, servility, incompetence and indifference. In consequence, even when it came to social ideas and personal conduct, he hated ‘amorphism’, any sort of sharp practice, any exaggeration and even high-flown, pretentious revolu- - tionary terms where simple reasoning would serve much better.

Nor did he share the opinions of those who favoured instantaneous transformations of society. All this explains why he did not declare himself in favour of an improvised ‘quick-as-lightning’ anarchism, so to speak, which the French anarchists advocated at the time. He was repelled by the behaviour of certain anarchists and took no interest in the contemporary revolutionary socialist movement. When some of these elements invaded the Socialist League — though in a limited form — he withdrew from the League, in the autumn of 1890, and thereafter turned toward a form of egalitarian socialism, in the belief that the anarchists were incapable of serious co-operation. On many points, his views coincided with those of the Spanish collectivists, who could not co-operate with the early communists. In fact, the collectivists were a little more in harmony with Kropotkin’s ideas as expressed in his English essays of 1887 and 1888 (in The Nineteenth Century). However, Morris, who had known Kropotkin since 1886, at meetings and through his articles in Freedom, maintained that Kropotkin had imported to England a system formed on the Paris model, without any knowledge of the British background. Thus Morris and Kropotkin, though they found no common ground to agree on, nevertheless felt no antagonism toward each other.

As a matter of fact, Kropotkin had already had a brief stay in England (1881-1882). On his return to London in March 1886 after his long prison term, he did not bother to co-operate with the Socialist League, in whose ranks parliamentarians and even Marxists still militated until spring 1888; however, thanks to the autonomy of the sections, the-diverse currents were able to live each its own life. The Freedom Group was founded in the spring, and the monthly review Freedom appeared in October 1886 (continuing, in various forms, to the present day). In this monthly Kropotkin amplified his views until autumn 1914, seeking to interpret and to resolve British problems on the basis of actual conditions in that country, as he had done for France in the Le Révolté (and its successors) (1879-1914), and for Russia in the Listki ‘Khleb i Volia’ (Pamphlets of ‘Bread and Liberty’) in London, 1906-1907.

Following a period of anarchist revolutionism (1890-1894), the British anarchists of the old Socialist League united in 1895 around Freedom, which was being written by Kropotkin and his comrades, but which also accepted dissident opinions provided they were courteously expressed. There was a prolonged period of wellargued propaganda, which also sought to propagate an anarchist syndicalism (The Voice of Labour). As almost all British socialists were converted to an electoral socialism, which was growing more and more colourless, the radius of action of the Freedom Group became more restricted and with the absorption of elements of a slightly less legalistic shade, such as communists of the Russian type and socialists of the left, the situation of the libertarians did not improve.

In my more detailed chapters dealing with libertarian efforts in England — which still remain unpublished — I have described the era of the International Socialist Congress held in London in 1896, when some anarchists, some anti-parliamentarians, some antiMarxist socialists and some non-sectarian socialists, were united in their common indignation against the Marxist leaders who were then displaying the height of their sneering arrogance. I also described the period after Kropotkin’s return from the United States and the efforts made from then on — from the end of 1897 to 1902 — to attract the trade unionists. One of the ablest men among them, Tom Mann, showed interest in the position taken by libertarian syndicalists, as interpreted chiefly by Cherkezov and Tarrida del Marmol. Again in 1910 to 1914, the ‘syndicalism’ of Tom Mann, on his return from Australia, captivated his British comrades and Cherkezov’s, not so much for the ideas it stood for as because these ideas stimulated their hope that a force for direct economic workers’ action would at last come into being, which would relegate the labour policy of the British Labour Party to a back seat. Statism being greatly strengthened by the war, the dictatorial mentality carried by the winds from the East and blowing in from Russia, and the weakening of the workers’ economic power, caused by mass unemployment — were all contributing factors in the destruction of hopes nurtured before the outbreak of the First World War. That is how British libertarians became isolated in the face of a purely electoral socialism, a trade unionism to a defensive position, and the imitators of Moscow’s Bolshevism and Rome’s Fascism.

We should also remember that there had been a truly libertarian socialist who did not take a backward step, like William Morris, but who nevertheless found himself growing ever more isolated. This was Edward Carpenter, author of Towards Democracy, and a pamphlet entitled Non-Governmental Society (a reprint of a chapter from Prisons, Police and Punishment). His concept was more libertarian than that of William Morris; it is interesting as a study both in aesthetics and in ethics.

Oscar Wilde, though he stayed out of all propaganda, published an essay which was clearly socialist libertarian, under the title The Soul of Man Under Socialism. And in a French poll, published in L’Ermitage in July 1893, he wrote that while he had formerly been a poet and a tyrant, he was ‘now’ an artist and an anarchist. (This was an international poll, conducted among writers and artists; 23 of them declared themselves authoritarians, 24 were undetermined, and 52 were in favour of liberty, 11 of whom proclaimed themselves conscious libertarians.)

I have already made mention of the British individualist anarchists, inspired by Liberty of Boston, among them the voluntaryist individualist Auberon Herbert and others. But authoritarianism regained its ground in England and Scotland, while in Ireland nationalism never permitted anarchism to prosper, and yielded but slightly to socialism. A sad evolution, after almost a century which, between 1793 and 1890, had produced Godwin’s Political Justice and William Morris’s News from Nowhere — two of the brightest gems of libertarian art and thinking.

In the United States, the great, turbulent strike of 1877 in Pittsburgh had stirred the revolutionaries; one result of this reawakening had been a review produced in Boston, The An-archist. Socialistic-Revolutionary Review. Most’s Freiheit attracted many German-speaking workers. The personal agitation of Johann Most, which he conducted from December 1882, drew those revolutionary socialists to anarchism and they later organised in Pittsburgh, in the autumn of 1883, accepting the principles formulated by Most, which were those of anarchist collectivism. Most elaborated these principles in the pamphlet entitled Die Freie Gesellschaft (Free Society), which bore the subtitle: ‘A Study of the Principles and Tactics of Communist Anarchists’. Most used the term ‘communist’, as he had used it in Berlin in 1877, for the reason that the term ‘collectivist’ was unfamiliar to his German readers. He was sharply criticised by the German anarchist communists in London, who knew the difference between the two expressions. However, since they were his personal enemies, he did not admit his error and propagated true anarchist communist ideas (which were in harmony with Kropotkin’s views) only from 1888 onwards.

The Chicago martyrs were collectivists, with the possible exception of Lingg. The Americans Albert R. Parsons and William T: Holmes followed the same ideas. Dyer D. Lum (1839-1893) reconciled collectivism with mutualism and also proclaimed a revolutionary syndicalism. Victor Drury, G. C. Clemens, C. L. James, Joseph Labadie represented other trends which, generally speaking, showed the influence of individualist anarchism on collectivists, while the individualists, who were close to the ideas of Henry George — among them Hugh O. Pentecost — brought a wider socialist vision to their individualism.

The finest flower that had sprung from the soil of this libertarian evolution among Americans — who, without concerning herself with European schools of socialism and anarchism, strove to bring together the highest degree of liberty, of solidarity, of revolutionary fervour and the spirit of dedication on behalf of disinherited workers, of women enslaved by the traditional family, of all humanity held in subjection by its rulers — was Voltairine de Cleyre. First inspired by freethinkers, the martyrdom of the Chicago men, and by the ideas and the influence of Dyer D. Lum, during the twenty-five years of her active work she arrived at a concept of anarchism which in its breadth of outlook and tolerance, in its high seriousness, close reasoning and clear definition, had its equal, so far as we know, only in Elisée Reclus. In her lecture on anarchism in Philadelphia in 1902, she made an objective analysis of the various concepts, from the individualist to the mutualist (Lum), from the collectivist to the communist, and clarified the differences between them, which she considered to be due only to the diversity of environments — and of personalities — that had produced these concepts. We may well think of the many petty and fruitless animosities that could have been averted if we had maintained this clear outlook.

The Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, which was published by Alexander Berkman, is a treasure of American anarchist literature. Unfortunately, the career of this gifted woman was cut short by a tragic incident; she was felled by a madman’s bullet and badly wounded, then lingered on as a hopeless invalid for some eight years, until her death in 1912.

The anarchist communist publications in the English language were: Solidarity, The Firebrand, Discontent, The Demonstrator, The Agitator, all these issued by libertarian groups in Washington State, on the Pacific Coast. Mother Earth was published in New York by Emma Goldman, who was soon assisted by Alexander Berkman. These publications, and others besides, contained popularised versions of ideas derived more or less from Kropotkin, as well as a good quantity of articles, letters and discussions representing independent anarchist criticism that would call for a separate analysis which I am not in a position to submit. Among these we find, for instance, Some Misconceptions of Anarchism, a lecture delivered in New York in January 1904, by ‘Dr. M-n’ (Dr J. A. Maryson), later translated into French and into Spanish, which has been erroneously attributed to myself.

Alexander Berkman, who had almost sacrificed his life and had suffered fourteen years of imprisonment for his attempt on the life of Frick in Pittsburgh in 1892, returned to anarchist activity in 1906 and proclaimed a vigorous workers’ anarchism in New York and in San Francisco. His ideas are revealed in his pamphlets on the Russian Revolution, in his book, The Bolshevik Myth, and particularly in Now and After — The ABC of Communist Anarchism.

Emma Goldman has recorded her activities as propagandist and lecturer, her ideas and her struggles, in Living My Life, a book which also reports the important events in anarchist and libertarian life and the great labour struggles in the United States from 1887 to 1919. Also noteworthy are her two volumes on Russia, published in 1923 and 1924; the final chapter of the second volume (My Further Disillusionment in Russia — a title which was not her own choice) sets forth her concept of anarchism, which rises well above the ordinary.

In some parts of her autobiography we meet figures, both old and young, of the so-called radical and liberal American element. These men and women proclaimed humanitarian as well as, in varying degrees, libertarian ideas, derived as much from individualist anarchists who defended the human person and human autonomy, as from the New England Transcendentalists (old Boston), from Fourierists and other socialist currents of 1830 to 1860. These are now dispersed and disappearing, to such an extent that they were unable to prevent the shameful murder of Sacco and Vanzetti in their ancient cradle, Boston, in 1927. They nevertheless represented the element which strove to humanise that great country. On reading Theodore Schroeder’s Free Speech Bibliography, we can realise, to some extent, how persistent were their attempts to resist evil.

Robert Reitzel was a German libertarian who possessed great literary talent; he revealed an often extraordinary power of reflection and criticism in his weekly, Der Arme Teufel (The Poor Devil), from 1884 until his death. The Chicago tragedy aroused in him a feeling of solidarity with anarchists and he spoke at the funeral of the victims in the Waldheim Cemetary, accusing the religion which preaches submission to authority; the religion and the capitalist system which turned the workers of Chicago into cowards who permitted the murder of their comrades (as happened again in 1927, when the entire world stood by and allowed Sacco and Vanzetti to be assassinated).

A great number of anarchist communist publications in the Italian language were also issued in the United States. Among them were La Questione Sociale (The Social Question), which started in 1895 (later called L’Era Nuova (New Era)); La Cronaca Sovversiva (Subversive Chronicle) published by Luigi Galleani, beginning in 1903, and others. El Despertar (The Awakening) and other Spanish-language reviews were also published, by Pedro Esteve and others, from 1891. Galleani’s writings reveal a revolutionary ‘Kropotkinism’ expressed with great vigour, and the parts of his work which have been reprinted still retain their original freshness. Pedro Esteve, who carried on a tremendous amount of activity, expressed his wideranging ideas in articles published in Cultura Obrera, in New York, in 1922, in the booklet Reformismo. Dictadura. Federalismo and in various other essays.

Capitalism in the United States was ferocious, and resistance to it compelled workers of all social and political tendencies to make use of any and all means of action, from cunning to guerrilla warfare, all the way to open battle. This intensified state of war, latent or open, produces neither revolutionaries nor libertarians among the fighters, since preparations for the struggle and its consequences engage all their minds and their energies. A libertarian syndicalism was unthinkable in a situation where force and cunning prevailed, often supported by solidarity, enthusiasm and a tenacious will. For this reason, the authoritarian mentality found itself on solid ground and grew strong, while the libertarian idea found little opportunity for expansion in the great land of unrestrained monopoly, where authoritarianism had run amuck for centuries, from driving out the Indians, to warring with neighbouring countries, enslaving the Negroes, the control of its natural riches by the strong, down to the forcible subjection of the workers to economic dictatorship.

In such circumstances, the influence of libertarian ideas upon American workers has always been weak; after ten years of struggle (1877-1886) animated by a revolutionary socialist fervour, these men made themselves felt in local situations only, in violent strikes which were harshly repressed. The organisations of determined men of action, such as a part of the I.W.W. (the Industrial Workers of the World) of the American West, did not appear receptive to libertarian ideas, although some anarchists had fought in their ranks and some anarchists had come from them, such as Kurt Wilckens, who was able to do valiant work in Argentina, and others. In recent years, the tremendous labour crisis did provoke a revolutionary turmoil, which, however, sought to combat existing authority with other, newer forms of authority. Libertarian propaganda has as yet been unable to strike deep roots in this vast land.

The first German-language anarchist nucleus was a workers’ association in Berne, Switzerland in 1875-1877, under the inspiration of Paul Brousse, also aided by Kropotkin in 1877. It published its first organ, Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers’ Newspaper) at that time. Some very active workers soon spread these ideas in Germany, in 1877 and 1878 — not without some success — but they were hampered by Social Democratic opposition as well as by lack of means for carrying on their activities on a larger scale and publicising them. The outstanding men among them were Reinsdorf, Emil Werner and Rinke. The anti-socialist law of October 1878 obstructed their work considerably, and the few militants were soon imprisoned or compelled to hide or leave the country.

In 1879 and 1880, the vehement revolutionary socialist protest, thunderously proclaimed by Johann Most in Freiheit in London, aroused their sympathies and they followed Most, who, though he was familiar with anarchist ideas, was almost as strongly attracted by Blanquism in those years, the last of Blanqui’s residence in Paris. For this reason, the anarchist initiation of the readers of Freiheit was quite incomplete and fragmentary (following the meagre explanations furnished by Reinsdorf). And the propaganda of libertarian ideas turned almost chaotic in 1881-1882, when Most spent a long time in prison. The journal was published under gradually worsening conditions; finally, when he was released from prison and had gone to America toward the end of 1882, it took on his exclusive orientation. What happened in America has been recorded in earlier pages; this was Most’s affirmation in favour of collectivism (1883-1884), which was fought by his German opponents and rivals in London, who supported anarchist communism as they saw it propagated in Switzerland and in France. This rivalry was still further embittered by deplorable events which need not be mentioned here. Some years later, Most recognised anarchist communism, but by that time the influence of his journal had been superseded in Germany by a rival publication — Die Autonomie. Hence German readers who again became interested in anarchist ideas around 1890 came to know them chiefly as they were presented in this publication, in a form at once rigid and vague, an ‘obligatory amorphism’, we might say. Nevertheless the numerous translations of Kropotkin’s works published in and by that paper created the impression that Kropotkin’s ideas and those put forward by Die Autonomie were more or less identical.

There existed a socialist opposition which was against Social Democratic reformism, and many men of good will took an interest in revolutionary ideas. Some believed in a socialism of the left, anti-parliamentarian and revolutionary; others adhered to the line laid down by Die Autonomie and Freiheit, in the belief that these two journals expressed the entire anarchist ideology. Others still, as I have already stated, obtained their information through Dühring and Hertzka and anarchist collectivism. Finally as they followed the chapter-by-chapter translation of The Conquest of Bread, they came to know the ideas of Kropotkin. The journal Der Sozialist (1891-1899) shows this diversity of currents. This journal was published from the early months of 1893 by the young Gustav Landauer, who declared himself, personally, an anarchist collectivist and was in open opposition to ‘the free right of consumption’ proclaimed by the communists. He was soon imprisoned in 1893-94 and the journal, too, was under heavy persecution. When he was able, at last, to revive it, the discussions had come to an end, communism had general acceptance and Landauer and his friends found themselves so isolated that there was a break among them in 1897. Anarchist workers were issuing at that time two publications of their own, Neues Leben (New Life) and Der Freie Arbeiter (The Free Worker), which, in my opinion, defended a doctrinaire anarchism.

Landauer was attracted by the principle of co-operation in 1895. Later he became interested in an intellectual and ethical community of free men (see his Durch Absonderung zur Gemeinschaft, (1901)), was then drawn to the ideas of collective passive resistance, as advocated by Etienne de La Boëtie (see his little book Die Revolution, 1907), and, having made a thorough study of Proudhon, came to the conclusion that it was possible to resolve the impasse in which present society finds itself by the creation of numerous free socialist centres, organised in the best way possible for mutual production and exchange, without, however, a cultural separation from the general progressive contemporary world. He published his Dreissig Sozialistische Thesen (Thirty Socialist Theses) on 12 January 1907 (in Die Zukunft, Berlin), the Flugblätter (Leaflets) of the Socialist Bund in 1908-09, the journal Der Sozialist in 1909- 1915, Aufruf zum Sozialismus (Call to Socialism) and so on. The war of 1914 interrupted these activities.

Landauer’s proposals were not carried out in practice, though many groups were formed for that purpose; the reason was that almost all the anarchists and syndicalists, all the Social Democrats and organised workers either took no interest in his plans or completely opposed them. It is easy enough to gather the masses around a programme by asking for no more than their votes or contributions, but difficult, if not impossible, to induce — even one man ina 220 Cuapter 14 thousand — to perform a truly independent act as an individual. Still Landauer believed that all our socialism and all our anarchism were mere words if we did not perform such acts of true separation (in so far as it was possible) from the existing system. His journal, during 1909-1915, was a continuous appeal, with arguments and examples drawn from the past and the present, for such acts performed by ourselves; it was one of the rare publications that urged specific, concrete personal initiative and the creation of a socialist will within ourselves. Anarchistische Gedanken tiber den Anarchismus (Anarchist Thinking on Anarchism), published in October 1901, already contained the essence of his future work. A large number of his most important articles were collected in Rechenschaft (1919) and Beginnen (1924). I have dealt extensively with Landauer, the man and his ideas, after the publication of a collection of Landauer’s letters: Gustav Landauer. Sein Lebensgang in Briefen (1929), in the Suplemento de La Protesta, 31 July 1929. He wrote then that he ‘had not said anything that had not first been expressed in lectures and other writings’. And that was true, for there was a great continuity in his thinking during the twentyfive years preceding 1914. In 1901-1902, when he lived in Bromley, he met Kropotkin, but they came to no mutual understanding.

While Landauer believed in this individual and collective effort, which was to develop on the fringe of the present society, he also believed that, whenever a favourable opportunity presented itself, it was necessary to participate in the life of the existing society and mobilise latent energies for passive resistance and for autonomous destructive and reconstructive action. He was always watchful for such opportunities, in various contingencies, even during the war or immediately after, and he became absorbed, body and soul, in action and propaganda, especially from November 1918, when the external and internal upheaval in Germany seemed to offer possibilities for action to him. He also did all he could in Munich, in the following months, working himself to exhaustion, until he drew such hatred upon himself from the reactionaries (the Social Democrats, who were in control even then in Bavaria) that he was brutally assassinated by the soldiery in Munich on 2 May 1919, right in the courtyard of the prison to which he was escorted as a prisoner.

In Germany, there was a brief return to Stirnerism during the twenty-five years preceding 1914, due to the activities of John Henry Mackay, who was influenced equally by B. R. Tucker and the mutualism of Proudhon, and was also author of poems entitled Sturm (Storm) in 1888, and of the novel Die Anarchisten in 1891; this latter book contains the discussion between communists and individualists. The complete text of the discussion appeared in Der Freiheitssucher (The Seeker for Freedom), in 1920 and in a third volume, Abrechnung (The Settlement of Accounts), in 1932.

Propaganda in favour of these ideas through journals and reviews was begun in 1898 and continued until the advent of Hitlerism. Proudhon’s ideas were also propagated, particularly in the writings of Dr Arthur Miilberger and the numerous translations of extracts from Proudhon made by Landauer. I shall not linger here over Nietzsche and Tolstoy, who, together with Max Stirner, Ibsen, Multatuli, and whatever there was of libertarian and of true social ethics in all the philosophies and literatures, interested and fascinated both old and young. Of course, these ideas were wrongly interpreted by many and truly understood by some few minds, who strove to achieve an individualist and socialist synthesis — the goal of libertarians of all the ages. Among these were, for instance, Dr Bruno Wille and the Hungarian Dr Eugen Heinrich Schmitt, with his numerous writings, as well as Moritz von Egidy. We may mention some poets who were sincere idealists, such as Peter Hille (who died of consumption induced by hunger); Benedict Friedlaender, a libertarian and a follower of Dühring; Bernhard Kampffmeyer, who was very close to Kropotkin in his ideas; the Austrians Arthur Kahane and Carl Morburger; Fritz Karmin and his son Otto, and others. A book written by a jurist opposed to these ideas but who wrote with meticulous accuracy also appeared then; this work, Dr Paul Eltzbacher’s Der Anarchismus, presented a comparative study of the principal ideas of Godwin, Proudhon, Max Stirner, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Tucker, and Tolstoy. It was a very incomplete examination of these writers, and it did not report on other concepts of anarchism, but it achieved its direct aim, which was to offer an accurate presentation of the social criticism and the main propositions of these seven libertarians to the general public. (Though it may seem inappropriate to mention it here, I may say that I have also contributed to showing the great richness of the international anarchist literature, with my Bibliographie de l’Anarchie (1897), and to presenting Bakunin, maligned to such an extent by his authoritarian enemies, far more completely than had been done until then, with the volume of Bakunin’s Oeuvres (Paris 1895), and with my biography of Bakunin (1896-1900).)

There was no lack of libertarian aspirations in that period, from 1890 onwards, although this impetus in Germany, as in almost all the parts of Europe, was gradually declining a few years before the catastrophe of the World War of 1914.

One section of the Social Democrats had not abandoned the party on the occasion of the opposition and the break-up of the others, which took place in 1890, but the spirit of opposition was stirring in them for a long time. There was a certain number of local organisations (‘Fachvereine’) who preferred their own autonomy and their own federation to the great centralised syndicates. These were the so-called ‘Lokalisten’ (Localists); the leading men among them were Gustav Kessler and Fritz Kater. They organised themselves in a ‘Freie Vereinigung deutscher Gewerkschaften’ (Free Association of German Trade Unions) in 1897 and published Die Einigkeit (Unity).

In the meantime, French syndicalism attracted the attention of anarchists; the pamphlet entitled Der Generalstreik und die Soziale Revolution (The General Strike and the Social Revolution), written by Siegfried Nacht and often translated, particularly held their interest. It was followed, in 1906 or 1907, by Die Direkte Aktion als revolutionäre Gewerkschaftstaktik (Direct Action as the revolutionary tactic of the Trade Union).

A prominent Social Democrat, Dr Raphael Friedeberg, came to consider Marxism, from 1896 on, as without foundation, and the Social Democratic tactic as still less applicable to contemporary society. He became an anarchist; his activities, however, were not directed towards ideological anarchist propaganda nor towards French revolutionary syndicalism but rather to what was called anarcho-socialism; that is, the concept of organised masses inspired with the anarchist idea and working in solidarity in the economic field and along revolutionary lines toward that objective.

He did some intensive work with this goal in view from 1904 to 1907 or 1908, in Germany, but found no anarchist sympathies among the old localists, and no understanding among German anarchists of his activities outside the regular propaganda routine. Besides, while there was no real discord between him and Landauer, the two men could not come to an understanding. I believe that Malatesta, whom he met at the Congress of Amsterdam, was ideologically closer to him. Illness, however, soon compelled him to give up his active militant work. (It was Friedeberg who quickly diagnosed Kropotkin’s respiratory ailment as very serious, and not only induced him to spend his winters in the South but actually cured him.)

Inspired by this propaganda, the Localists broke with the Social Democratic Party in 1908 and gradually drew closer to the French syndicalism of that period (in ideas only, not in actual contact); they did so in the belief that syndicalist theory represented a final solution. It was only at the Congress held in Berlin on 27-30 December 1919, following the great address delivered by Rudolf Rocker, that the Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism was adopted; it rejected the State and all statism, and thus constituted a reaffirmation of what the Spanish Federation wanted syndicalism to be, from the time of its foundation in 1870 — that is, the practicability of converting syndicalist institutions, once the revolution has been achieved, into social organisations:

Thus each local Federation shall become a species of local statistical office and will take charge of buildings, food supplies, the garment industry and so on. …

The industrial federation, for their part, shall have the task of placing under their administration, through their own local organisations and with the assistance of factory councils, all the available means of production, raw materials and so on, and of providing all necessary equipment to producers’ groups and the factories…

Thus, in the same manner as the earlier theory of ‘taking from the big pile’, this new ‘extreme’ — the domination of all social wealth and of the entire life of human society by one group — expressed the glowing enthusiasm of a period of exuberance, in a situation where people failed to come face to face with reality. For surely the 3,577 enrolled International members of September 1870; the few thousand unemployed and militants who were willing and ready to make more powerful demonstrations in the streets of Paris from 1880 to 1890; the few tens of thousands who perhaps had the same willingness in 1906 on the occasion of the Congress of Amiens (which declared that the existing trade union, representing groups of resistance, was to become in the future a group for production and distribution, the base for social reconstruction); the over 100,000 German workers in syndicates, whom Rocker addressed at the Congress of December 1919; and the 500,000 or 600,000 members of the CNT at that time and in 1931 — surely all these, taken together, were far from constituting the whole of human society. And if we were to assume even that these opinions were held by the majority of society, which would have the power to impose its will, it would still be an imposition of control over the future, hence authoritarian and dictatorial, but not libertarian.

Among the men who had led in propagandising anarchist ideas in the German language, I shall also mention: Max Baginski, Rudolf Lange, Rudolf Rocker, Siegfried Nacht, Fritz Oerter, Erich Mühsam; in Austria, there were Josef Peukert, Rudolf Grossmann. There were militants who wrote little or nothing but who should be remembered for their personal activities, among them Johann Neve, S. Trunk, Wilhelm Werner, and others.

Experimental socialism was recorded in the book Utopie und Experiment, by Alfred Sanftleben, and in the translation he made of the writings of Dr Giovanni Rossi (Cardias) before and after the ‘Colonia Cecilia’ was founded in Brazil, as well as his [Rossi’s] later, unpublished utopia which caused him to abandon libertarian communism and to accept a mutualist regime.

In German Switzerland, Dr Fritz Brupbacher, socialist thinker and ‘frondeur’ attracted by syndicalism in 1904, who had known James Guillaume and also Kropotkin since 1905, did active work for several years on behalf of syndicalism and anti-militarism. He was the first to present to his German readers Marx and Bakunin as a study in contrasts — to the great chagrin of the Marxists — in his book entitled Marx und Bakunin. We know that the Russian Revolution later thrilled him as a great aspiration which became a reality, at least in its early years. But he always remained a critical observer, and in 1911 he expressed his ideas with great clarity, in his Aufgaben des Anarchismus in dem demokratischen Staate (Tasks for Anarchism in the Democratic State). He observed men, things and ideas as would a physician who has no right to conceal the weaknesses of an organism. Hence his criticism was very useful, as it sought to teach men to do better. If we had to choose between opportunistic apologists (or flatterers, I might say) and earnest critics, who would not prefer the latter? His autobiography, 60 Jahre Ketzer (Sixty Years of a Heretic’s Life) appeared in Zürich in 1935.

It is curious to note that a certain number of countries were lacking in originality in their anarchist thinking, or were hesitant and slow. Outside the countries we have already mentioned, and Switzerland and Belgium — those old havens of asylum for political refugees, at one time more hospitable than they now are — and outside Russia, which has given us thinkers like Bakunin and Kropotkin, as well as Tolstoy, other European countries have shown little originality in our field.

As a result of a number of expulsions during 1880 to 1890, many contacts between the movements which had existed in Switzerland in the days of Bakunin and Kropotkin were interrupted, although many links still stayed alive: Dumartheray, Herzig, Jacques Gross, Pindy, Alcide Dubois and others in Geneva and in the Jura. In the mean time a new generation emerged with a new youth and new students, among them Stoyanoy, Galleani, Atabekian, Samaja, Bertoni, Ettore Molinari. This environment brought forth a young libertarian who became one of the most anti-authoritarian and nonconformist writers in his country and an expert in libertarian education, Henri Roorda van Eysinga.

Jacques Gross, of Mulhouse, friend to the older group and to all the young people and himself a man who had a wide ideological background, was one of those to whom we must be grateful for the preservation of anarchist printed material and rare bibliographical items. He alone managed to rediscover Déjacque and Coeurderoy (his favourite author), and I am greatly indebted to him for his assistance in all my historical research during the decades of our friendship, which lasted from late 1892 until his death.

Following the many persecutions (chiefly directed against the Italians) from 1890 to 1900, and the famous trial of the Almanacco Socialista-anarchico per l’Anno 1900 on account of an article which we now know had been written by Malatesta, the bilingual Réveil-Risveglio (Awakening) was banned on 7 July 1900. It nevertheless continued publication, composed and written in its entirety by Luigi Bertoni in Italian and in French, and for a long period in collaboration with Georges Herzig, a native of Geneva and a libertarian writer whose mordant satire struck at social hypocrisies. The two men joined in a memorable attack on the functionaries within the Swiss syndicate and Bertoni extended his criticism also to the CGT of Paris, where he delivered some unforgettable lectures.

From 1903 onwards, James Guillaume resumed his activities in Switzerland and devoted himself body and soul to the CGT, together with the old Jurassians (particularly with Spichiger), gaining some young people for the movement, such as Dr Brupbacher and Dr Max Tobler and also Margarete Faas-Hardegger, who came from Berne. They published La Voix du Peuple (The People’s Voice), a syndicalist organ, in Lausanne, and there were lively discussions in its pages on syndicalism versus anarchism, between Guillaume, Dr Wintsch of Lausanne, Herzig, Bertoni and others. Kropotkin, who was spending his winters in Canton Tessino, renewed his contacts with his old friends and came to know Bertoni well. All this contributed to enhancing the importance of La Voix and of the Weckruf (Reveille) of Zürich in the development and critique of ideas.

In Belgium, following a brilliant era which saw Buonarroti, Considérant, Proudhon, Blanqui and so many other socialists, and after the glorious period of the International, there came a backsliding into the electoral system, with its emphasis on votes, and along with it a sort of intellectual ‘depression’. Even anarchist publications were dull repetitions of things well known, at least until the appearance of La Société nouvelle (The New Society), which started as a journal of limited outlook but later became receptive to anarchist and libertarian ideas. This review was founded by young Fernand Brouez, who succeeded in imparting to it an attitude of tolerance, especially with the stimulating collaboration of Merlino and of Elisée and Elie Reclus above all (from 1894 until their deaths — in 1904 and 1905); there was also Paul Reclus, Elie’s son, until 1914. There were fine reviews in the Flemish language, Van Nu en Straks and Ontwaking, published in Antwerp (from 1896 to 1910). There also came a literary renaissance, partly initiated by writers of libertarian tendencies, such as Georges Eekhoud. Among the students, Jacques Mesnil, who lived many years in Italy, soon became one of the most stimulating young anarchist writers; he was influenced by the Flemish and Italian art movements, by his life among the people of Italy, his friendship with Elisée Reclus, his great interest in Edward Carpenter and the entire progressive intellectual output of that period. Le Mouvement Anarchiste (The Anarchist Movement) and Le Mariage Libre (Free Marriage) remain his best-known works.

The vicissitudes undergone by Elisée Reclus, whose course of lectures, to be given at the ‘Université Libre’, had been continually postponed, due to the anti-anarchist panic of 1894, led to the establishment of the ‘Université Nouvelle’, where the Reclus brothers gave free lectures and became the leading spirits of an intellectual centre in Belgium. It was at that time that Elisée wrote L’Homme et la Terre (Man and the Earth), which Francisco Ferrer got translated into Spanish by Lorenzo. Ferrer himself also founded L’Ecole Renovée (The Regenerated School), a review started in Brussels and continued in Paris (1908-1909).

Toward the end of Reclus’ life, even in Belgium, a tendency made its appearance which Landauer, writing to me in 1910, described as ‘the epigonal anarchist movement’, which he stated he found in all the countries. This is what I meant in referring in these pages to ‘the habitual’, ‘routine’, ‘uniformity’ or ‘dull repetition’. It is based on the erroneous supposition that all our intellectual labour has already been accomplished, and that one may as well now devote himself to such pleasant pursuits as the study of Esperanto, Neo-Malthusianism, primitive colonies, and sometimes even to illegal acts and expropriation — in other words, we do not move forward, we hang back, we scatter our energies. There was a good deal of this stagnation in Brussels. In Liége, on the other hand, there was more earnest continuous activity, from 1900 to 1908, when Le Réveil des Travailleurs (The Awakening of the Workers), L’insurgé (The Insurgent) and L’Action Directe (Direct Action) were published; Dr Lucien Henault was very active. Other active militants of those days were the Houtstond brothers, George Thonar, Raphael Fraigneux; another comrade engaged in multiple activities was Emile Chapelier of the ‘L’Expérience Colony’ of Boitsfort. Among old militants there were Jules Moineaux, who was condemned at the Liége trial in 1892, Paul Gille, author of studies published in 1920, later reprinted in a collection under the title of Esquisse d’une Philosophie de la Dignité Humaine (Outline of a Philosophy of Human Dignity) and others.

Professor Guillaume De Greef, Judge Ernest Nys, Mrs Florence De Brouckère, the painter Van Rysselberghe and others belonged to Elisée Reclus’ circle.

15. Anarchist and syndicalist movements in the Netherlands and in the Scandinavian countries.

In my books, and particularly in some of my unpublished manuscripts, I have tried to identify the origins of anarchism in a great many countries and nations; here, however, I can only summarise the individual achievements of these countries in the light of their contributions to the ideas and activities of the international movement. Of course, wherever anarchism became purely reflective and imitative, it also thereby influenced the international movement, adding force and stability to ideas so received when these ideas seemed to be equally accepted in other places without contradiction or important modifications. Only a critical examination would enable us to realise that the fact that an idea which has developed naturally in a certain locality is accepted elsewhere without question and in its entirety by force of its mere prestige, is no proof that it fully satisfies the needs of its new locale. Mechanical systems or machines can be thus standardised, and even hothouse plants, but not so the living organism — the plant, the animal, man and his most sensitive creation, thought — all of which undergo changes and adaptations to their particular environments.

We have frequently criticised the fictitious importation of Marxism into all countries. And I believe we have an equal right to doubt whether, by the mere act of translating some pamphlets by Kropotkin or Grave and other comrades at some haphazard moment in circumstances that may appeal to a few dedicated men, or even by starting a review modelled on La Révolte and some other publications received in exchange, we could have ‘imported’ anarchist ideas into a certain country, in the specific form that would best suit the dispositions of the inhabitants of that country.

It is precisely this spirit of localisation that has been badly missing, either for lack of means of action, which could have facilitated study and brought some experience, or because of the zeal of the initiators, who would not change one iota in the message of good tidings, the new Gospel they were bringing to their countrymen.

There is a good deal still to be done in this field. And we need not be misled by the standardisations achieved in modern industry, commerce and finance into thinking that the human mind can be equally reduced to a level of uniformity — except when minds are levelled and constricted under capitalist or Bolshevik authoritarianism.

Nor is it the nationalism of our days or the nationalities locked within prison-States that will save men. What we desire is an international libertarian socialism, with all its manifold variations, alive and responsive to the needs of every local community.

This is the anarchism of all lands, and the rigidities of anarchist and syndicalist programmes are just as repugnant to it as the rigidities of Marxism. Anarchist differentiation will have to avoid the levelling process of the Bolshevik type in order to assure a true, all-inclusive anarchism for the future.

In The Netherlands socialist ideas rarely found expression in past centuries — although social conscience was a living force within its religious sects (see B. de Ligt’s book La Paix créatrice, Paris 1934). Likewise, French and English socialism and German radical philosophical criticism of the first half of the 19th century received a hearing only among some intellectuals and freethinkers. It was the total loss of its national independence, during the wars of the French Revolution, the loss of Belgium in 1830, caused by the policies and the armies of France and the consensus of the great powers, that brought about the isolation of the Netherlands. Was it not also the influence of economic conditions, the rich commerce and the peasants satisfied with their lot, that retarded the clash of social interests?

The International was slow in coming to the Netherlands, and even then anarchist ideas formulated in Belgium were propagated mostly in 1870-72 but soon began to languish. A few months later, nothing remained but reformism and a pallid social democracy. Finally in 1878-79, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, a Protestant pastor, left his church and for the following forty years devoted himself entirely to socialist activity and later to anarchism. It was a good field and soon a great movement was created which still endures in its ramifications. It is fruitless to inquire why this had not happened earlier and why Domela, who had witnessed the Paris Commune when he was twenty-four years old and who had read Most’s Freiheit attentively and with full approval from 1879, did not reach his ideological maturity earlier.

Yes, I have to declare that during my Social Democratic period it was Freiheit that impelled me to keep Holland’s labour movement from turning into a herd of well-disciplined and organised masses that would follow their shepherd blindly wherever he might lead them. (3 December 1903; see Freiheit, 26 December 1903).

Thus, after ten years of Social Democratic activity in a party of which he was the principal founder, propagandist, orator, writer and journalist, he was inspired by the international socialist congresses in 1889 finally to criticise German Social Democracy. This criticism he expressed in various studies of extraordinary vigour, such as: Les Divers courants de la démocratie socialiste allemande (The various currents of German Social Democracy), in March 1892; Le Socialisme en danger (Socialism in danger), in May 1894 and Socialisme libertaire et socialisme autoritaire (Libertarian socialism and authoritarian socialism), in September-November 1895, Le Débacle du Marxisme (The Failure of Marxism) appeared in June 1900, concluding this series. Nieuwenhuis thus came to the conclusion that what he had criticised in German Social Democracy applied equally to all Marxism and all authoritarian socialism, to which he opposed his own concept of libertarian socialism.

As Nieuwenhuis felt the growing need to awaken the libertarian awareness in men’s minds, his interest in organising workers tended to diminish. On this point he differed from Christiaan Cornelissen, who had been publishing the journal Recht voor Allen (Justice for All) with him since 1892, and who participated in his critical campaign against parliamentary socialism. Cornelissen immediately went to work organising syndicates and federating them (National Arbeids-Secretariaat, 1893). In 1892 he recommended that anarchists join him in criticising Merlino’s Nécessité et bases d’une entente (The need and the bases for an agreement), and in 1893 he also criticised The Conquest of Bread a good deal. His own ideas were formulated in 1893 in Les diverses tendances du Parti Ouvrier International (The various tendencies of the International Labour Party), in Le Communisme révolutionnaire: Projet pour une entente et pour l’action commune de socialistes révolutionnaires et communistes anarchistes (Revolutionary communism: Project for an agreement and common action for revolutionary socialists and anarchist communists) in 1896; also, in Dutch, Het revolutionaire Kommunisme: zijn Beginselen en zijn Taktiek (Revolutionary Communism: Its Beginnings and its Tactics) in 1897. His beliefs and opinions have been collected and published in En marche vers la société nouvelle (Toward the new society).

Cornelissen was one of the outstanding proponents and organisers of the plan to oppose the Marxists at the International Congress in London by means of a syndicalist and anarchist anti-parliamentarian front. In this project he co-operated with Fernand Pelloutier, Hamon, Pouget, Malatesta, Landauer and others, with the result that the London Congress presented this minority front, which also had the support of the British, with whom Kropotkin collaborated, and with others, except for the ‘amorphists’. But they were far from reaching an agreement on ideas or organisational contacts with the anarchists. This step was not taken — not even started — except by Merlino, who proposed it in his new concept (starting in 1896), with the support of Bernard Lazare in France and hardly anyone else. Cornelissen grasped the meaning of this situation, but he saw no organised libertarian force with which he could co-operate except for the syndicalists, whom he took the trouble to get to know quite well in Paris during his stay there in 1898 or 1899, precisely because they differed in ideas, assumptions and personally with Domela, and in order to avoid an open break in Holland. Nieuwenhuis wrote in 1907:

I am primarily an anarchist, and then a syndicalist; I believe that many others are syndicalists first, and then anarchists. There is a great difference. …

The cult of the syndicate is as pernicious as the cult of the State, but it does exist and threatens to grow stronger still. It seems that men cannot live without gods, and no sooner have they overthrown one divinity than another arises. If the divinity worshipped by the Social Democrats is the State, then the divinity of the libertarian socialists seems to be the syndicate.

He also wrote:

Syndicalism alone would not satisfy me, for, when it is not inspired by the ideal, it becomes a struggle for higher wages and less work, which for practical reasons, I do not disdain, but it does not seem to me to be worthy of so much effort.

These words sum up the point of view which Nieuwenhuis maintained for a great many years and until his death. His aim, above all, was to liberate men intellectually and morally; hence he was deeply interested in the free education of children, in the primary moral education of adults which would teach them to give up hating and killing each other (anti-militarism), and in their intellectual emancipation (freethinking). Cornelissen, on the other hand, who knew the shortcomings and the lack of experience of the workers in real social co-operation, intended to educate them in their own environment — in the syndicate, in the factory, on the job — since compulsory labour, performed for the benefit of his master, fails to interest the worker and prevents him from learning the meaning of true social labour.

I shall pass on from these two conflicting concepts and the many other variations of ideas and doctrines at work in the Dutch movement, which was subject to frequent sharp schisms. While the proponents of these ideas had little respect for each other, and wasted precious energy in internal polemics, they nevertheless never displayed the bitterness and ferocity which we occasionally observe in other countries. Cornelissen had discussed economic doctrines to a greater extent than anyone else in our movement, and thus arrived at some vital ideas in the field of economics; he also made a special study of labour practices, but these studies are beyond my small competence in the subject. As well as this he examined the syndicalist movements of the time, in his contributions to journals and chiefly in his Bulletin International du Mouvement Syndicaliste, multigraphed, started in 1907. (See also his article on the evolution of anarchism in the Dutch workers’ movement, in Mouvement socialiste (Paris), 15 July 1905, pp. 392-400.)

Among other Dutch militants, I shall mention here only the early anarchist communists, who propagated the idea a long time before Domela became an anarchist; these, however, did nothing more than repeat what they found in German publications (Die Autonomie), in French publications (La Révolte) and so on.Among the best known of these were: J. Methéfer and B. P van der Voo. Alexander Cohen was for a short period influenced by the French anarchist ideas of Félix Fénéon and Emile Henry. Maurits Wagenvoort published his novel De Droomers (The Dreamers) — he drew closer to individualism and naturism in his Licht en Waarheid (Light and Truth) and An-archie in Amsterdam (1894- 1895; 1896-1902). Pamphlets of direct anarchist propaganda were less numerous than those proclaiming revolutionary socialism and other similar ideas, all of them libertarian but more interested in contemporary labour events than ideals. Nieuwenhuis published De Vrije Socialist from 1898 onwards. He would have preferred it if these ideas were called ‘Sociaal-Anarchie’, which brings to mind Malatesta’s ‘anarchist socialism’.

Tolstoy’s ideas, the individual’s refusal to do military duty, agrarian collectivism and life in a community, inspired groups of propagandists and men who believed in free action but who at the same time accepted religious belief. These were the ‘Christen-Anarchisten’, among whom I shall mention Felix Ortt; the colony of the ‘Internationale Broederschap’ at Blaricum, destroyed by Catholic peasants at Easter 1903 (the Reclus brothers had visited it); also the writings of T: Luitjes. Frederik van Eeden, was somewhat detached from this group, and not entirely libertarian in his writings; he later abandoned their social ideas. In the Netherlands, as earlier in England, in the United States and elsewhere, religious socialists managed to steer clear of clerical tendencies. Thus, as early as 1920, a publication appeared in Utrecht, under the name of De Vrije Communist, Orgaan van religieuse anarcho-communisten; this organ was administered in much the same way as other libertarian publications in the Netherlands. Likewise, B. de Ligt was a minister who became an independent and anti-militarist anarchist.

The war of 1870 had already impelled Domela Nieuwenhuis to issue a call for a peace organisation; he then tried to induce the International Congress of Brussels in 1891 to accept the idea of a general strike in case of war, as the Congress of the International, held in that city in 1868, had already done.

Social Democracy, which lived on votes and did not want to lose the votes of voting patriots, treated him like a man out of his mind. Later, during the Dreyfus Affair, a great agitation arose against the military mentality and five Frenchmen — Laurent Tailhade, Malato, Gaston Lhermitte, Janvion and Charles Vallier —issued a call, toward the end of 1902, for an international anti-militarist congress. This eventually resulted in the Congress held in Amsterdam in June 1904, and in an organisation called ‘Association Internationale Anti-militariste’. Both the Congress and the Association were rendered ineffectual by dissension between the moderates, who wanted to unify all the anti-war factions which rejected the use of force (that, of course, would include the Tolstoyans, the Christen-Anarchisten and others) and their opponents, who were eager to put anarchist and syndicalist revolutionary anti-militarism in the forefront, and send all other anti-war groups packing. The effect of this exclusivist tactic was to isolate the movement. Anti-militarism in France soon became shrill, due to the stand taken by Almereyda, the ill-timed and extravagant sallies of Hervé, and the persistence of the syndicalists who were hammering away in their famous special annual editions of La Voix du Peuple (The People’s Voice) by Pouget, the New Soldier’s Manual by Yvetot, which appeared in 1902 (The Soldier’s Penny), and other such pamphlets. This anti-militarist movement, which also had certain repercussions in Italy, had no concrete ‘substratum’ and vanished like straw scattered to the winds ~ in some people, like Hervé, a few years before the war of 1914; in others, like Yvetot himself, under the brain-washing which went on during the war, or at the first bugle call to arms.

By ‘substratum’ I mean either a foundation of morality, or rather a feeling of human solidarity — that the Tolstoyans and some others possessed — which implied an absolute repugnance to committing murder on orders from above — or an intellectual basis, a real understanding of the causes of war and a condemnation of those who preach war and profit by it, which respects the right of all peoples to live their lives in their own way and in peace (except for the greedy and the ferocious). That is the only way we can become immune to the brain-washing, just as, on moral grounds, we can be immune to any incitement to murder our fellow-men. The moral effort of the Tolstoyans was somewhat underestimated by all those who, as we shall see later, had no real understanding of Tolstoyism. So far as the intellectual effort was concerned, it was rare, and when we did make it, it was stifled in ourselves by animosities and nationalistic prejudices; even the mentality of the revolutionaries — in the years of general preparation for the war which flared up in 1914 — was insensibly attuning itself to the mentality of each nation, while the anarchist campaign against Marx, and the syndicalist campaign against German centralisation, based their arguments increasingly on racial feelings, Latin or German, just as any other polemic of those years did. There was certainly no lack of effort to overcome this impasse, but such efforts were too isolated. The two volumes of collected contributions to Les Temps Nouveaux, Guerre-Militarisme (War-Militarism) and Patriotisme-Colonisation (Fatherland and Colonisation), are a worthy attempt to operate on the moral and intellectual level, but a great deal more should have been done. The propaganda was chiefly directed against the poor conditions in the barracks and the military infernos of Africa, all of which could have provoked resistance or desertion, or a desire to reform conditions, but said nothing about the factors which were busy at work making the war inevitable and soon confronted the peoples with a fait accompli.

Nieuwenhuis must have had a deeper grasp of the problem (see his Projet de propagande antimilitariste, 1907), but even he did not go far enough, as did in some respects Francis Delaisi, Marcel Sembat and some others. Nieuwenhuis, disillusioned by many men and events, nevertheless maintained to the very end an uncompromising anarchism, without extenuation or adaptation. He remains a pathetic, passionate, unique figure who was less and less understood or followed in the work he did during his last twenty years, though he had met with praise and recognition. He recounted the early steps in his ideological development in his Van Christen tot Anarchist (From Christian to Anarchist), published in Amsterdam in 1911. He was familiar with the writings of Eduard Douwes Dekker (Multatuli, 1820-1887) and of S. E. W. Roorda van Eysinga (who died in 1887; the father of Henri Roorda). He met Elisée Reclus in Clarens, Switzerland, when he himself was a figure in the Social Democratic Party. He probably also met Kropotkin in London before 1896.

His work practically died with him. His numerous writings were never collected in a single volume; all that remains of him is his example and his moral courage, which led him to sustain the anarchist principle, once he had made it his own, at all times and against all odds. Some of this spirit he passed on to many Dutch comrades, who united or separated in various ideological tendencies, according to their individual convictions. But Nieuwenhuis was gifted in other ways, too; he had tremendous drive, vigour and tenacity, and he made his voice heard when other men, though very active, were rarely heard outside Holland.

In the Scandinavian countries —in Denmark — there was a revolutionary socialist movement in 1881, to which Harold Brix, who died in the same year, gave expression; there was also the weekly Nye Tid in Chicago, which in those years followed the revolutionary line of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, under the editorship of Spies; its ideas were inspired chiefly by Most’s Freiheit. Starting in 1889, a less reformist but nevertheless Marxist socialism was propagated by the Arbejderen, in Copenhagen, as well as by the Volkstribüne of ‘Berlin, from 1887 on. It was in 1896 that the first anarchist communist sheet appeared, under the name of Proletaren, and was soon suppressed under persecution. Later, beginning in 1904, another sheet, Ny Tid, was close to the Swedish ‘Young Socialists’, Finally, the Norwegian writer Hans Jaeger, a well-known novelist of the realistic school, published the volume Anarkiets Bibel (The Bible of Anarchism) in 1906 and a journal of struggle, Korsaren (1907); after a period of suspension, it was continued by Revolten (1907-1908).

The best known comrades were J. J. Ipsen, who collaborated with Hans Jaeger, and Dr Rolf Hammer, who died several years before 1914. A few other journals (Anarkisten, Frihet) were published, also some periodicals which were strongly individualist — such as Individet of 1808 — some individualist and syndicalist, and one which advocated ‘the minimum State and the maximum autonomy’. This was Samstyre (Self-Government), which started in 1908 and existed for a long time.

For over fifty years, Denmark felt the intellectual influence of Georg Brandes, a man who recognised human, social and libertarian aspirations. He was in contact with Ibsen, with Nietzsche, with Kropotkin and Clemenceau; it always seemed to me, however, that he had a cold nature, a lack of social feeling, and that he was essentially bourgeois. The review Socialdemokraten, which even became a daily, was published in that country for over sixty years; but it was always reformist. In that environment it appeared that the only libertarians were Hans Jaeger, J. J. Ipsen, Dr Rolf Hammer and a few militant workers.

In Norway there was Henrik Ibsen, to whom I have already referred in an earlier chapter, where I stated that he was not an anti-social individualist but one who, observing the prevailing authoritarianism and ‘voluntary servitude’, in other words, the collective stupidity, found that he no longer believed in collective revolutionary action, which he had supported in his youth, during the time of Marcus Thrane, who spent the years 1851 to 1858 in prison for his agitation in previous years. Moreover, Ibsen advocated the self-development of the individual, but later probably abandoned this ideal too and gradually merged with the masses like everyone else.

Arne Garborg, also mentioned earlier, idealised the autonomy of peasant life in Norway, while the journal Fedraheimen, written in the language of the locality, edited by Ivar Mortensen from 1888 to 1891, fought for anarchist communism. The outstanding militants were Arne Dybfest, who became acquainted with anarchist ideas in the United States and in Paris and carried on correspondence with Kropotkin, and Rasmus Steinsvik. But by 1892 the movement seemed to be dispersing. A few moderate publications issued by Ivar Mortensen appeared in 1897-1898. Arne Garborg ended up by giving his support to the idea of the minimum State, as advocated in Denmark.

There was just one excellent comrade, Kristofer Hansteen who persevered from 1898 to 1904 in publishing in Christiania (now Oslo) the journal Anarkisten; it was later continued under the name of Til Frihet and carried the translation of Kropotkin’s Words of a Rebel. (Voltairine de Cleyre, on her trip to Norway in 1903, recorded her meeting with Hansteen — whom I have also met — in a fine memoir). Since then, A. Hazeland has published translations of some of Kropotkin’s other works. Following Sweden’s example, Norway also had a ‘Young Socialist’ movement (‘Ung-Socialism’) from 1906 on, a syndicalist movement (Direkte Aktion from 1912- 1918; Alarm from 1919 on). And one of these publications of the ‘Young Socialists’, Revolt, published from 1914 to 1927, was, in its later years at least, openly anarchist. In June 1927, it changed its name to Fritt Samfund, organ of the Social Anarchist Federation, and, so far as I know, ceased publication in 1928.

In Sweden Nils Herman Quiding, who has also been mentioned earlier, declared himself federalist and autonomist, in his book published in 1871-1873. The question remains, however, whether he had actually renounced the idea of the minimum State, an idea which marked precisely his lack of faith in liberty and, consequently, an absence of anarchist conviction.

A Scandinavian group residing in London published some manifestos in 1886 and 1887, also Kropotkin’s Law and Authority (1888), and until 1891 some anarchists collaborated in Sweden with socialists, until they were ousted. Hinke Bergegren then published Under roett Flagg (Under the Red Flag), which was the first anarchist organ in Stockholm. This movement was under the influence of the ‘independents’ of Berlin so far as the critique of the Social Democracy was concerned; it was also influenced by the ‘propaganda by deed’ — violent acts and illegalism — which manifested itself within the French movement. One of its strongest militants, Gustaf Henriksson-Holmberg (1865-1929), was in contact with Friedlaender, the follower of Dühring in Berlin, as well as Reclus and Kropotkin. In 1890 to 1891 Kropotkin saw Gustav F. Steffen, a young Swedish chemist, in Harrow almost daily; while Steffen never shared Kropotkin’s ideas, he nevertheless acted as a connecting link in his contacts with the Swedes, at a time when authoritarians and libertarians were not yet as separated as they soon came to be in every country.

Bergegren’s followers were primarily socialists who were opposed to reformism. In November 1892 they founded the ‘Club of Social Democratic Youth of Stockholm’. They published the journal Anarkus and in 1896 sent greetings to Liebknecht on his seventieth birthday. They created youth clubs in provinces which federated, while the journal Brand appeared in 1898 and still continues publication. In 1898-1900 they published The Conquest of Bread, and in 1901 an anarchist took over the publication of Brand. Anti-militarist propaganda was started in 1901 and anti-religious propaganda in 1903. Even at that time, groups were separating and others federating. In 1908, following an attempt at violent action on a boat where strike-breakers were employed, three men were condemned to death; the condemned men remained in prison until 1917.

In 1908, the Young Socialist Party of Sweden was founded, for the conquest of economic power through the general strike and by effective co-operation as the most efficacious means to that end. From that moment, the bases were laid for a revolutionary syndicalist organisation, which was formed in June 1910 — the Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation (SAC). There were thus the Young Socialist Party, with its journal Brand, and the syndicalist central organisation, which published Syndikalisten, followed by the daily Arbetaren, which still continues publishing. Albert Jensen was the mainspring behind all these movements.

The Party’s programme, as it was accepted by the Congress of 1918, was that of a ‘party of propaganda and socialist revolutionary action’, which recognised the anarchist point of view and, at the same time, also took into consideration more immediate goals. It also stated: “The means that the working class possesses for achieving its final objective, the free society founded by all men, as well as its means for attack and defence in its daily struggle, consist of its economic organisations, based on syndicalist principles, with the intention that these may become, in the future, its organisations for production.” It also maintained that co-operative organisations should be created on a socialist basis: ‘envisioning not only the present but also the future.’

It rejects the parliamentary tactic but accepts, in certain situations, collaboration with the socialist parties. The Party published a great quantity of translations of communist anarchist literature, and a small number of original works which were above elementary propaganda, with the exception of an essay by C. J. Björklund on Quiding and the Henriksson-Holmsberg publications such as Anarkismen — Dess Grundtext. This essay reports no more remarkable anarchist activities in Sweden than what I have also tried to review here.

The ‘Young Socialism’ is singularly eclectic in its nature and sets no limits to its critical research. Judging by the publications which I happen to know, however, it seems to me very superficial in its treatment of problems facing anarchists in other countries. I am, of course, referring to the literature issued by the ‘Young Socialists’, not to the output of the syndicalist organisation, which is ponderous, technical and so narrow and constricted it is hard to discern its libertarian character, although its federalist affirmations and its support of direct action and anti-parliamentarianism distinguish it clearly from the Social Democratic and Communist organisations. It would be difficult to say just where its libertarianism lies — for if such a system were adopted by the society of the future, there would be very little change, except for the abolition of capitalist exploitation. The material structures would be perfect, yet an outspoken Ibsen would still be considered an ‘enemy of the people’ — ‘en Folkefiende’.

16. Other countries: Russia and the East; Africa; Australia; Latin America.

The last phase of Bakunin’s activities relating to Russia, his contacts with Russian youth in Zürich in 1872 and his book Statism and Anarchism, with its appendix on propaganda and methods of action in Russia (advice to revolutionaries on promoting agitation and revolts among the peasants — such as an Alliance in an International) — all this was a great inspiration to the young Russian revolutionaries who were going ‘to the people’ with a fervour and devotion which became legendary. But the ferocity of the persecutions drove them toward terrorism, at first against the landowners and government functionaries, and later directly, and increasingly — from 1879 to 1881 against Tsar Alexander II, who was assassinated.

The libertarian and anarchist propaganda carried on by Bakunin’s old comrades in Geneva from 1873 to 1879, and by the review Obshchina (The Commune) in 1878-1879, gave way to concentrated terrorist action. Not even Kropotkin — who found himself almost isolated in Russia in 1872-1873, where he was surrounded chiefly by moderates (in fact he was not accepted by the Chaikovsky circle) — not even Kropotkin made any attempt to stimulate Russian anarchist propaganda on his arrival in the West. He suspended all such activities in favour of action against the Tsar (1878-1881) and later in favour of defending Russia's prisoners and Russian revolutionary activity in general before the public opinion of the world, and of England particularly. To this mission he devoted his talents and his personal prestige, just as did Stepniak, formerly a member of the ‘Matese band’ of Italian anarchists and protagonist in one of the boldest terrorist acts, the assassination of General Mezentsey, the Tsar’s chief of police.

Thus, from 1878 to 1891, Russian anarchism gave no sign of life. It was only from 1891 that some Russian students in Geneva began to plan the publication of a journal, but this was never achieved; they contacted Kropotkin, Malatesta, Cherkezov and published a few pamphlets. The prime mover behind this movement was Alexander Atabekian, an Armenian medical student, who personally did the printing of the early anarchist publications in the Armenian language. In their ideology, these young comrades were close followers of Kropotkin, Reclus and La Révolte; in their actions, they drew inspiration from Malatesta. A few years later, however, with the departure of the more active students, this agitation died down; it was soon revived by Gogeliia, an energetic young Georgian, who gave himself entirely to this work.

Varlaam Cherkezov (1846-1925), a Georgian, lived in the times of Chernyshevsky among the nihilists, linked to the most advanced groups — the co-workers of Karakozov (1866) and Nechayev (1868- 1870) — among the Swiss and French anarchists from 1877 to 1883, and particularly in London, in the autumn of 1891. He became the inseparable friend of Kropotkin and of Malatesta until the war came. He began to fight Marxism, which, particularly through the machinations of Plekhanov, had gradually invaded Russian socialism and was harassing the entire liberation idea with malicious attacks. Cherkezov wrote Pages d’histoire socialiste: I. Doctrines et actes de la socialdémocratie; Précurseurs de I’Internationale, and other essays retracing the ideas of the old socialism and of liberal and humanitarian movements in general, which the Marxists sought to vilify and to consign to oblivion, under the pretext that Marx, as a cultured man of his time, had fed on all those sources and already discovered all that was worthwhile in social economy and in socialism itself. If this examination of the origins of socialism was a very useful work, then Cherkezov’s other thesis, which he developed from spring 1900 onwards, has for much the same reason to be refuted, namely the thesis that the Manifesto of the Communist Party published in February 1848 was probably a plagiarism of Victor Considérant’s Principes du socialisme: Manifeste de l’Ecole sociétaire fondée par Fourier (1841). For Considérant was impregnated with a general culture similar to that of Marx and other men of advanced ideas, and was himself quite an exceptional observer of economic developments. Neither one nor the other needed to plagiarise and of the general facts known to both sides, one gave a strictly Fourierist interpreation (Considérant), and the other — that is Marx and Engels — a necessarily ‘Marxist’ interpretation.

Cherkezov also criticised other theories formulated by Marx, such as that of the concentration of capital, and he was highly interested in French syndicalism. On these two points he not only reconfirmed the opinions already enunciated by Kropotkin but also aroused the interest of some militant British trade unionists in syndicalism and strengthened their mistrust of Marxism. His idea that syndicalism is the socialism of the people was welcomed in 1912 by James Guillaume, who maintained since he had rejoined the movement (1903), that the CGT was the old International, in a form which was more precisely defined, perfected and truly the embryo of the new society.

The aspirations of the Georgians of the Caucasus for national autonomy were strongly supported by Cherkezov, who for many years had been their spokesman for such hopes, which were tabooed by public opinion, especially by the British. Their aspirations and sympathy for the Armenians, the Boers, the Finns and particularly the Persians, contributed to awakening support, even among libertarians, for small States, which were held preferable and culturally superior to large States, just as Communes were considered more desirable than States. This was a fatal error, since the Communes, whether federated or even isolated within a large State, necessarily find themselves in contact with their peers — the Communes — or they live within a State but without a policy of war or conquest. Independent small States, on the other hand, live in an environment of rivalry and struggle which is characteristic of the State and are as ambitious and war-minded as any other State. The commune, the city, the village, stand precisely for peace; the State, large or small, sooner or later foments wart.

As Russian protests against despotism grew, starting with ‘disorders in the universities’ and proceeding steadily until 1905, the young Russian anarchists, particularly in Paris and in Geneva, started the publication of a journal Khleb i Volya (Bread and Freedom) in Geneva (1903-1905). It represented the Russian comrades’ interpretations of Kropotkin as well as Kropotkin’s own ideas. But then a number of other Russian publications cropped up speaking in the name of various anarchist tendencies which were chiefly at work in the French movements; the expropriationists, the amorphists and mixed points of view, all spoke out freely and, often in Russia, acted out their convictions. The journal Listki ‘Khleb i Volya’ (pamphlets of ‘Bread and Freedom’), was edited and in large part written by Kropotkin, who also collaborated on Khleb i Volya in Paris in 1909, and on Rabochy Mir (Workers’ World), also published in Paris, with the assistance of A. Schapiro, Gogeliia, Maria Goldsmith and a few others.

Kropotkin’s ideas, which advocated the organisation of workers as a practical activity in Russia, seemed, however, to be on the extreme ‘right’ to the majority of Russia anarchist youth of 1903- 1914. The young comrades were bent on a strongly direct line of action, involving a constant risk of their lives, in the effort to assault or weaken the Russian State with continuous individual or collective acts. They were the young people who acted in accordance with the ideas set forth by Kropotkin in 1881, in his Spirit of Revolt. And if, in these recent years [1931] I have recalled what he wrote at that time in the Russian language in favour of syndicalism, we must realise that such propaganda and such advice from Kropotkin remained isolated; they carried no weight and soon vanished from sight. He saw, in spite of himself, his opinions supplanted by the more active projects of the young comrades. He also saw the lack of response to these collective acts on the part of the people, who, if they did anything at all, simply preferred being mus- 248 Cuapter 16 tered and dominated by the authoritarian socialists, when these seemed to represent real power. Before 1914, Kropotkin nourished greater hopes for what seemed to be a general liberal awakening (already saturated with nationalism and a warlike spirit; but this agreed with his own opinions and apprehensions). We hoped that these liberal forces would array themselves against the domination of the authoritarian socialists, which in fact did happen for a very short span in 1917. But he soon realised, on his return to Russia, that it was no longer possible to fight this supremacy, and sadly resigned himself, disheartened, all his hopes defeated. He tried, without success, to come to the aid of federalist ideas and cooperation; he watched all independent associationist efforts with sympathy; to the very last moment he expressed his hopes for a Workers’ International (which he never envisioned without an Alliance of militants at its core). Having devoted the last months of his life to his Ethics, he died on 9 February 1921.

Frankly speaking, it would be rather naive, even partisan, to seek or create an image of Kropotkin as a syndicalist. The man who at all times recognised the need of a revolutionary period of three to five years could not have wanted the revolutionary victory, at its earliest start, to fall into the hands of a syndicalist organisation that would later constitute ‘society’ — a stable organisation which, like all constituted organisations, would oppose any evolution beyond its own limits. He did not defend the cause of anarchism for almost fifty years of his life in order to want a syndicalist dictatorship to take over on the very day of popular victory. I have collected what he really thought on the matter, in his own words, in several articles published in La Revista Blanca (Barcelona) in winter 1933-34 and also in other writings.

A great quantity of anarchist literature was published in Russia between 1905 and 1906, and from 1917 to 1922; pamphlets and books were translated with great speed and new journals appeared, representing all shades of opinion. Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own was published twice in 1907. A mutualist system was formulated in 1906 by P D. Turchaninov (Lev Cherny, later assassinated by the Bolsheviks) in his book entitled Assotsiatsionny Anarkhism, while A. A. Kavelin represented another, separate trend. German Askarov (Yakobson) founded the group of ‘Universalist Anarchists’ (where the term ‘universal’ stood for the ‘international’ idea), Nestor Makhno (27 October 1889 — 25 July 1934), Voline (Eikhenbaum), Maximoy, Grigori Gorelik, Aleksei Borovoi, Rogdayev and many other men represented a variety of trends, none of which could be said to be definitive or superior to the others. There were also deplorable attempts to make an adaptation to Bolshevism and others, no less deplorable, to import authoritarianism into the anarchist movement, with the apparent aim of enabling authoritarian anarchism to fight a rival Bolshevik authoritarianism. There were returns to an absolute syndicalism and even attempts to achieve a synthesis (ideas proposed by Voline in the Anarkhicheskiy Vestnik (Berlin), 1923-24). In brief, there was a great deal of discussion, influenced and embittered by a long exile, by the seeming success of authoritarian methods achieved by Bolshevism (which, at the time of writing, has ruled so large a country for some eighteen years), by the general world crisis and by the lack of communication with the Russian people itself, who throughout all those years had not uttered a word that did not pass through Bolshevik censorship, and whose true, authentic thinking remains, more than ever, a mystery to us.

After Belinsky, Herzen, Bakunin, Chernyshevsky, few original voices of socialists and libertarians arose in Russian socialism. Kropotkin, in his profound solidarity with the Russian Revolution as a whole, made very little effort to impose his personal ideas upon the great struggle. The only, the great exception, in the period following Bakunin, was Leo Tolstoy. I shall not attempt here to discuss Tolstoy; his towering work and his life itself are too vast and too complex for a summary statement. My impression is that we are indebted to Tolstoy for his insistence upon two great verities indispensable to all libertarian realisations, great or small, present and future. One of these is an understanding of the explosive power of passive resistance, which is disobedience, the abandonment of ‘voluntary servitude’.

Tolstoy is poorly understood and his thinking deprived of its effectiveness, if this principle is viewed as resignation, as a submission to evil, which is endured with a so-called ‘Christian’ patience and with the obedience said to be due to all authority. Tolstoy asserted precisely the opposite — resistance to evil; and to one of the ways of resistance — by active force — he added another way: resistance through disobedience, the passive force. He did not say: ‘Submit to the evil which is inflicted upon you, or turn the other cheek’. He said: ‘Do not do what you are commanded to do; do not take the gun which is given you for enslaving your brothers’. His own words may enable us to trace the principle of basing human relations on peaceful persuasion instead of brute force to William Lloyd Garrison, and eventually to Emerson, to Thoreau and other thinkers; and if he had read William Godwin’s work he would have found it there, too. He had also corresponded with Gandhi. Neither resistance to Negro slavery as advocated by Garrison, nor the disobedience preached and practised by Gandhi, are acts of obedience; these are acts of defiance launched against authority. If the Tolstoyans compelled to do military service had been resigned, passive, obedient men who did not oppose evil they would have been the first to take up arms when they received their orders; yet while everyone else obeyed, the Tolstoyans refused. I maintain that the Emerson-Tolstoy-Gandhi line is as significant a line of combat as the line of revolutionary force. In brief, is not the strike, and the general strike above all, to be aligned with the Garrison-Tolstoy-Gandhi action? Whether we strike or rebel by use of force, the two means of action have an equal right of citizenship in the social struggle; exclusivism on principle is pernicious and proves nothing.

The other great truth stressed by Tolstoy is that the recognition of the power of the good, of goodness, of solidarity — and of all that is called love — lies within ourselves, and that it can and must be awakened, developed and exercised in our behaviour. This powerful force works against moral passivity, against the so-called non-responsibility for what is being done, against the expectation that we shall be all improved collectively, when, in reality, each one of us, no matter how oppressed, possesses the power of improving and perfecting himself individually. Tolstoy has written:

The organisation, any organisation, exempts itself from all human, personal, moral obligation. All the evil of the world lies at its roots. Men are tortured to death, brutalised, stupefied, and no one is to blame. (13 January 1898, Journal)

Just as there is the strike and the revolution, there is the individual effort and the collective effort. The two alternatives do not exclude each other, they complement each other In Tolstoy we find precisely the intimate, personal part of libertarian preparation, and it seems to me that men prepared as he was are the only men capable of employing both individual and collective force in a rational manner. The soldier can do nothing but kill, just as the revolutionary can do nothing but destroy. But even as the surgeon can apply force in order to cure, so the revolutionary who has already achieved his own revolution within his conscience is the only one who will be able to devote himself, with intelligence and awareness, to the serious task of reconstruction.

In all that has just been said, we are in no way in disagreement with Tolstoy, who put his finger on many of our great shortcomings. It is only to be regretted that, in doing so, he often made use of religious terminology. (Bakunin, at a certain period of his life, used similar terminology.) At the age of twenty-seven, that is, in about 1855, Tolstoy wrote: ‘The wish to bring about the union of all mankind through religion, this is the fundamental thought that I trust will dominate me.’ And by religion he meant — as is manifest in his writings — love and goodness among men — the kind of behaviour which men of good will would practise right now, without concern for what its consequences might hold for them; if they did not, who would be there to make the start? Certainly not illintentioned men, or an abstract collectivity, or the State. As he observed, from 1878 to 1881, Russian rulers and revolutionaries battering each other, Tolstoy intervened with his ceaseless propaganda for a period of nearly thirty years, using a religious terminology which was all his own.

It was a fatal error; he should have known that humanity is emancipating itself from superstition and that it expects nothing but evil from organised religion. In his propaganda, he harked back to the glorious promises held out in the early stages of Christian proselytism, but failed to see that they were no more valid than the pre-election promises of political candidates. He miscalculated; people no longer held these beliefs, and religions have always been an instrument of reaction, which persecutes those who fight them. The fact is that Tolstoy’s good intentions are presented to us in a language we scarcely understand, just as we seldom understand a writer whose ideas are obscured in a fog of philosophical, economic, or medieval language. Those who, on reading Tolstoy, are unable to penetrate this fog and discover his simple, clear ideas would do well to suspend judgement. His entire work, examined and translated into our own language, acquires a different aspect and is rich in libertarian insights we can find nowhere else.

Such ideas are seldom if ever-found in the writings of Tolstoyan writers who, like all those who parrot the thinking of one man, risk descending to the level of Marx’s imitators. Apart from that, there were many men of good will who did the best they could.

Let us recall of all this propaganda and example lives by so many who suffered persecution for having refused to obey: the martyrised J. N. Ivan Tregubov, Droshin (1868-1894), V. Chertkov, Paul Biryukovy; John C. Kenworthy, Arthur St. John, William L. Hare, J. Morrison Davidson, the Croydon Brotherhood of Purleigh and the colony in Whiteway (Gloucestershire); the journal The New Age (London); many publications of the publishers A. C. Fifeld and C. W. Daniel (London); Marie Kugel from the circle around L’Eve nouvelle (begun in 1901 in France); the world of the Christian anarchists in Holland, and a large movement in Bulgaria, particularly in Burgas (the journal Vrashdane, i.e. Resurrection). And the sympathisers in the United States who were also to a large part libertarian followers of the ideas of Walt Whitman, people like Edward Carpenter, and Ernest Howard Cosby, Leonard D. Abbott, Bolton Hall and others who were also followers of Henry George and sympathetic to an altruistic individualism.

In short, a substantial number of these men, to whom one must add the members of Tolstoyan colonies and men who have refused to do military service, were then, and still are, worthy of esteem. Among the numerous Dukhobors in the Caucasus and in Canada there were men who, before Tolstoy’s time, insisted on living their lives apart from the State: writers, artists, thinkers of high moral stature, religious libertarians who were not fanatical on religious matters, who stood side by side with other anarchists like comrades. It was a great reservoir of men and ideas which merited a good deal more sympathy on the part of anarchists than it received. With the conscientious objectors during the war and the truly humanitarian actions of many members of the Society of Friends (Quakers) after the war, there came an appreciation of the humane elements at work within this world of warfare and cruelty. And if the Tolstoyans had been better understood and better supported they would have been able, and still are, to attract minds whom revolutionary propaganda could not reach. The reason is that Tolstoy’s ideas did not die with him, and cannot be gleaned from his over-dogmatic followers; they can be found only in the spirit and the essence of his own work in its entirety.

Among anarchist movements of the peoples of Europe beyond the Russians, the most intensive and widespread was that of the Jews of old Russia and Austrian Galicia who speak Yiddish, a German interspersed with many Hebrew and Slav words. Jewish emigrants, particularly those who settled in London and in the United States, created powerful workers’ movements, which were of a socialist character from about 1885, and anarchist in great part from about 1890. They had journals which appeared for many years, as well as pamphlets and translations. Their anarchist movements always followed communist ideas; they accepted Kropotkin’s ideas in their entirety. Although they were at times influenced by their own writers in matters concerning events in Russia and Palestine, they were on the whole more faithful to Kropotkin’s anarchist communism.

I do not know their language and cannot say to what extent the ideas discussed in their publications have led to new orientations.

Their most active militants were, or still are, David Edelstadt, S. Yanovsky, J. Bovschover (Basil Dahl), Dr J. Maryson, Dr Michael A. Cohn, Joseph J. Cohen and others. Their London journal, the Arbeiter Freund, founded in 1885, was published for some twenty years until 1914; the review Germinal was published by Rudolf Rocker (1873-1958), an anarchist of German nationality; attracted by the zeal and energy of this movement in the East End of London, he quickly learned the Yiddish language, using it as a writer and speaker. Kropotkin was in those days the man greatly loved by these comrades; he was a frequent speaker at their gatherings.

The Modern School of Stelton, N. J. (which represented the most enduring effort to continue the work of Francisco Ferrer), a fine libertarian colony — the ‘Sunrise Colony’ — and other experiments in free co-operation were founded by these Jewish libertarians in the United States.

In the Ukraine, there was no written propaganda in the native language of that locality; however, a certain number of the more militant revolutionaries in the decade of 1870-1880 up to Nestor Makhno, were anarchists, and the groups formed in this southern region were always more advanced and had more fighting spirit than the northern groups.

There had existed for a long time in the Ukraine a political and national federalism which Professor Mikhail Dragomanov combined with a popular socialism (in the review Gromada and so on) around 1880, but he soon abandoned it himself. Thence came the purely nationalistic parties; at another time there was a popular cultural, anti-religious party (M. Pavlik, Ivan Franko and others), but it soon disappeared.

So far as the Finnish language is concerned, The Conquest of Bread appeared in translation in the 1900s (date unknown), in Tammerfors; Law and Authority in New York in 1910; nothing more than a few publications since 1926.

There was a greater number of publications in the Latvian language: journals, pamphlets, translations, from 1905. Latvian anarchists dispersed in the West by the harsh repression to which they were subjected in their own country in 1906, were exterminated when they committed acts of violence in London (Sidney Street), chiefly in the winter of 1910-11.

There was little literature published in Lithuanian at that time; an incipient literature appeared in recent years.

There was little more in the Polish language. The Socialism of the State, written by L. A. Czajkowszki (Eduard Abramowski, who died in 1917), may be considered an original expression of a very social-minded and libertarian co-operativism. He also wrote Cooperativism as a Means of Emancipation of the Working Class. Some extracts from Gustav Landauer were also translated in 1907. But all the centres of propaganda were soon liquidated and the publications suppressed. Dr Josef Zielinski, in Paris, was very close to the Temps Nouveaux.

Bakunin, who sympathised strongly with the Polish nationalist cause, could never come to terms with them on the question of the Poles abandoning their historic claims for incorporation of the Ukrainians, the Belorussians (White Russians) and Lithuanians into their own nation. The only Polish comrade with whom he could collaborate for a certain length of time was Waleryan Mroszkowski.

Romania was the country where, before the Turkish-Russian war erupted in 1877, Bulgarian refugees from Turkey conspired for many years; Nechayev passed through that country when he returned secretly to Russia in 1869. The first socialist and anarchist impetus was given to Romania by Russian refugees, in groups formed by students and young professors. Around 1890 the propaganda was revived this time it was communist-anarchist — by students attracted by La Révolte of Paris and the ideas of Kropotkin and Grave. From time to time, though quite seldom, sporadic attempts were made to approach the peasants, but the propaganda, on the whole, found response in a restricted milieu of intellectual sympathisers. RP Mushoiu was for a long time their main support. At other times, there were N. K. Sudzilovski (Dr Russell, who died in China about 1930), Zubka-Kodreanu, Zamfiri Arbore (Ralli, active in Bakunin’s time), Levezan, ZoSin and others.

The two Bulgarian revolutionaries, Christo Botiov and Liuben Karavelov, were in contact with Bakunin and Nechayev; Botiov also with Romanian Sudzilovski, but the nationalist conspiracy absorbed them and Botiov was killed as an insurrectionist. Fifteen years later, from about 1890, anarchist communist ideas were propagated by students who read La Révolte, particularly Stoyanoy, a medical student in Paris, Geneva and Bucharest; he was very close to Merlino and knew Reclus, Galleani, Kropotkin and Malatesta quite well. A continuous, expanding activity was built up, which was revived after the long period of the wars; it included workers and peasants, did not lose its influence on a minority of intellectuals (some of them suffered cruel persecution and martyrdom), and had solid roots such as no other Eastern European country.

In Serbia, on the other hand, libertarian efforts were poor, although in 1872 some Serbian students were closely allied with Bakunin in Zürich. They voiced their ideas in some journals and pamphlets which appeared from 1905 to the war years (1912), while in Yugoslavia there was not a spark of life after 1918. Only one Croat libertarian, a worker, Stepan Fabijanovic, who was compelled to leave his native country for many years and who died in 1933, left the imprint of an independent and vigorous spirit in several publications printed in the United States.

Anarchist communist publications in the Armenian language, which appeared in Geneva from 1891 to 1894, were due to the assiduous labours of Alexander Atabekian, a medical student, already mentioned earlier, who published a small journal (Hamaink — The Commune, 1894). After their nationalist struggles and misadventures, it seems the Armenians abandoned all propaganda, except for the little they could accomplish in Tiflis in the rare intervals when public life became somewhat freer.

Georgian anarchists within the Russian movement were numerous and dedicated. The majority of their more militant members were implicated in the great trial of the ‘Fifty’ in Moscow in 1877, while Cherkezov had already been convicted in the trial of Nechayev in 1871. Later these men and Cherkezoy, who escaped from Siberia in 1876, started to agitate for the autonomy of Georgia; even their socialism, in the Georgian publications which appeared in Paris, was imbued with national autonomism. Young Gogeliia, rather than Cherkezoy, preached anarchist syndicalism in Tiflis in 1905-1906, and continued to do all he could from 1917 until his death. Cherkezov developed cultural cooperation, based on solidarity and autonomy, among the hostile nationalities, the Georgians, the Tatars and the Armenians, in Tiflis in 1905-1906, but if the Georgians, the Tatars, the Turks came to an agreement, it still did not seem that the Armenians were on really good terms with them.

In Palestine, there were probably some pamphlets published, as well as translations in Turkish, Tatar, Persian, Arabic, perhaps even in Hebrew, but all this is unknown to me. I believe I can declare, however, that the Indians were not reached by a direct libertarian propaganda; the boycott, the tactic of disobedience, the terror practised in nationalist struggles, are aimed at replacing the old power with a new one. Let us pay our respects to the victims fallen before a nationalist power has been achieved; among them Dr José Rizal in the Philippines, the Multatuli of his race (he was a Tagal), author of Noli Me Tangere (Do Not Touch Me), of Philibusterism and of a magnificent poem he wrote before his execution. Let us likewise pay our respects to the Korean victims (the Korean exiles in China issued anarchist publications), also to those on the Isle of Formosa (there, too, refugees from China circulated anarchist publications). Elsewhere, in the Far East and in Indonesia, it seems that communist propaganda alone was available.

As for China, I refuse to be the exponent of the teachings of Lao Tse (he lived some 550 years before the Christian era), who, in the text of some of his translators, assumes quite a libertarian aspect. A discovery has also been made of Yang-chu, who was considered a ‘Chinese Stirner’. In 1907-1908 young Chinese intellectuals in Paris published the journal Simsiki (New Times) and a number of anarchist communist translations. Later this group, on their return to China, participated in general liberal activities; they influenced education along progressive lines, and hence it was claimed that they had abandoned anarchism. A movement started in China itself by Shih Fu, seems to have made attempts to influence the people more directly. Libertarian ideas, to the extent that they were not submerged by communism and by national liberalism, have followers in southern China,-and chiefly in the United States.

As regards Japan, we are familiar mainly with the life and martyrdom of Denjiro Kotoku and Sakae Osugi. In 1905, Kotoku, while in prison, passed from Marxism to anarchism. He accepted the theories of Kropotkin, was particularly impressed by Fields, Factories and Workshops, but was driven by persecution toward anti-militarist acts, the general strike and probably to terrorist plans. At any rate, he, as well as his wife, Suga Kanno, and ten other comrades, were hanged on 24 January 1911. Osugi and his wife, Ito Noe, were also executed, on 16 September 1923. The two of them, it seems, were held in some way responsible for the great Tokyo earthquake.

There have been, in China and in Japan, numerous syndicalist and anarchist organisations and publications; some of them were quite considerable. They were very often persecuted and suppressed. In recent years the surge of nationalism and communism, catastrophes and war must have obstructed this activity. But in China itself at least, libertarian feeling is alive and growing; there is a desire to find a way towards liberty away from authority which has been enthroned in a horrifying shape. Japan, however, seems to be steadily sinking back into authoritarian darkness, in spite of all the efforts of dedicated propagandists.

As we pass on to the remaining European countries, we may recall that, in the old Austria-Hungary of 1881, Social Democracy was firmly relegated to a secondary place, and, in the end, reduced to a small minority of revolutionary socialists who started an anarchist educational propaganda in 1883. This early ideological education was interrupted by terrorist acts and repressions reduced them all to an underground existence. After 1885, Social Democrats started their recovery, and set out to establish their long-lasting, exclusive control over the workers.

The period of 1881-1884 had an influence on German-speaking and Czech-speaking socialists, some of the Poles and even the Magyars in Hungary. There was no time to elaborate ideas but the spirit and the will were awakened.

It was only much later, from 1892 and again from 1907, that it was possible to start a new public propaganda, which, however, had to confront the steadily-growing regimentation of the workers within Social Democracy. Among the German-speaking groups this propaganda did not reach the trade unions. In Bohemia it did, particularly the miners in some regions, and up to 1914 there was an abundance of anarcho-syndicalist printed matter, as well as anarchist publications, in Czech. Among the latter, those published chiefly by St. K. Neumann were more or less similar in character to the young libertarian literature of France; the rest were, for the most part, organs of defence in labour struggles. Both types were subjected to continuous nationalist infiltrations. The First World War snuffed out all these activities, and after the war, all of them, socialists and anarchists in Czechoslovakia, beat the drum for national patriotism. All that remained of anarchist literature was a little journal, Bezvlastie (Anarchy), which is no longer in existence, and whatever was not absorbed by the nationalism of the Nation State passed over to Moscow’s Communism.

In German-speaking Austria, many publications were issued from 1907 by Rudolph Grossmann, who summed up his ideas chiefly in Die Neuschöpfung der Gesellschaft durch den kommunistischen Anarchismus (The Re-Creation of Society through communist anarchism). His annuals, Jahrbuch der Freien Generation. (Yearbook of the Free Generation) which followed a review by the same name (1906-1908), brought a great many international anarchist works to his Austrian readers.

In Hungary, the intensely active period of revolutionary socialism during 1881-1884 was followed by a standstill. Dr Eugen Heinrich Schmitt’s ideas then exerted great influence; he proclaimed a very explicit and informed libertarian socialism which was rather close to Tolstoyism in its moral outlook. These ideas did not give complete satisfaction to some men who advocated greater organised collective activities that would call forth a truly libertarian popular movement. Among the former there was young Ervin Szabó (1877-1918); among the latter, who favoured a more popular movement, was Count Ervin Batthyany (born about 1877), who published Térsadalmi Forradalom (The Social Revolution; 1907-1911). He proclaimed communist anarchism and at the same time devoted himself to popular education, particularly in the rural regions. Batthyany spent many years in England, where he was in touch with Kropotkin.

There were other Hungarians who continued Eugen Heinrich Schmitt’s work, especially Krauss, but the war, the Bolshevik regime of 1919, the cruel repressions which followed and which are still going on, have absorbed, destroyed or dispersed these men, and there is no sign of any revival of libertarian ideas in that unhappy land.

In Greece during the decade of 1870-1880, in addition to Italian anarchist refugees and their contacts with their comrades in Egypt and Turkey, there were also some contacts with the Jura Federation. Some of Kropotkin’s pamphlets were circulated in Greek translations after 1886; the socialism of Platon N. Drakuli, who published them, was of an eclectic type. The few existing anarchist groups soon became isolated but still retained their prominence; Stavros G, Kallergis was one of the most active militants. There were terrorist acts and numerous prosecutions.

In Egypt and in Tunis, Italian anarchist émigrés and refugees were for many years the life and the spirit of libertarian activity. We will mention particularly Icilio Ugo Parrini of Leghorn (1851- 1906), who was active in Egypt.

Malatesta, Galleani and Gori spent some time in Egypt. In Tunis, particularly, Dr Niccolò Converti was the author of a series of publications. These Italian centres of activity, which supported the most advanced sectors of the Italian movement, were unable to create local activities of any duration in these countries since every effort made in this direction was followed by repression. The same situation existed among the French in Algeria, where anarchist publications did appear but had no influence upon the local populations. This must also have happened in Tangier, Morocco, which, in other times, occasionally sheltered anarchist refugees from Spain.

In English-speaking and Dutch-speaking (Boer) Africa, it seems to me, there has been no libertarian activity worth mentioning. The one exception was Henry Glasse, an Englishman who emigrated to Natal and maintained contacts with comrades in London. In Australia, from 1887, various communist anarchist publications were issued by comrades whose ideas were formed by reading Liberty (Boston), William Morris’s Commonweal (London) and Freedom (London). These were: Honesty, the Australian Radical, Anarchy, The Revolt, Reason and so on, issued by militants such as WR. Winspear, David A. Andrade, J. A. Andrews, J. W. Fleming. Almost all of these were individual efforts, not altogether wasted but impotent against social statism, which held the entire continent in its grasp and frustrated the few direct attempts to create an independent syndicalism in Australia and New Zealand. There must surely have also been isolated English-speaking libertarians in Canada, but nothing is known of any propaganda that might have produced publications in the English language.

I have written many long chapters on the remaining great number of Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking countries. I shall confine myself now to brief remarks which deal with the outstanding writings published in those countries and their significance.

We shall mention the well-documented and critical book of Neno Vasco (Nazianzeno de Vasconcelos, died in 1920), titled Concepçáo Anarquista do Syndicalismo; O Sindicalismo em Portugal. Esbôço historico (Syndicalism in Portugal. Historical Sketch), by M. J. de Souza; Kropotkin. Su Vida y Obras (Kropotkin: His Life and Works) by Adrian del Valle (Palmiro de Lidia). We shall also mention Paul Berthelot’s L’Evangile de l'heure (The Gospel of the Times); E. López Arango’s and D. A. de Santillén’s El Anarquismo en el Movimiento Obrero (Anarchism in the Labour Movement);La FORA Trayectoria e ideología del Movimiento obrero revolucionario en la Argentina (The Course and the ideology of the revolutionary labour movement in the Argentine) by D. A. de Santillan, and the history of La Protesta by the same author. (D. A. de Santillan, ‘La Protesta’. Su historia, sus diversas fases y su significación en el movimiento anarquista de América del Sur, in Certamen internacional de ‘La Protesta’, Buenos Aires 1927, pp. 34-71.)

In Mexico, there were fabulous, epic tales of agrarian insurrections, struggles aimed at the overthrow of the entire despotic age-old system, by Ricardo Flores Magón, Praxedis G. Guerrero and Librado Rivera. The investigations of J. C. Valades in the socialist and libertarian history of the country, and his historical and bibliographical essays, in a volume commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of La Protesta, Certamen Internacional [International Debate], contain an abundance of historical material.

The countries still to be considered are: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Chile; also Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba, Brazil; and, finally, the Latin workers in the United States.

The simultaneous presence in America of Creoles, Spaniards, Catalonians, Italians and some Frenchmen, the continuous immigrations, the presence of native American Indians in varying proportions in these countries, the influence of European writings and militant propagandists, the special economic problems facing different localities, the great distance which removed the influence of European political and economic questions — all these factors inevitably worked to produce libertarian concepts of a different character on this continent.

In these pages I have endeavoured merely to sketch a brief outline of this vast theme, which has occupied many chapters in my still unpublished volumes. Many interesting personalities and movements have figured in those times and in those vast territories; from the early socialists to the International, from territorial groups and organisations to individual and collective acts of rebellion. There were propagandists who came from Spain, from Italy, from France (B. Victor y Suárez, who published a translation of Cabet’s Le Communisme in Buenos Aires in 1864, came from the Balearic Islands). There were men like Rhodokanaty, Zolacosta Sanz, Ettore Mattei, Malatesta, Dr John Creaghe, José Prat, Gori, Esteve, López Arango, Santillan, Damiani, Fabbri, Neno Vasco and a thousand others. There were men of outstanding talent, like Rafael Barret, Paul Berthelot and others. There were natives of America, of the stature of Alberto Ghiraldo, González Prada, Gonzalez Pacheco and the unforgettable Ricardo Flores Magón, a victim of American cruelty, Librado Rivera, Dr Fabio Luz and others.

17. Revolutionary syndicalism in France. Fernand Pelloutier. Emile Pouget. Kropotkin, Malatesta and syndicalism (1895-1914).

While I would wish to shorten this work, which has already grown much too long, I find that I must still report on the contacts and interrelationships our movements have had with syndicalism.

In France from 1880 the group — with its absolute autonomy, its voluntary activities, the absence of opposing forces, obstacles or adversaries (provided there was no desire for conflict) — the group as such no doubt constituted the ideal form of organisation for anarchists. However, when the group lacked a strongly motivated, direct objective to achieve, it also meant isolation and a paralysis of energies. At the same time, the group was easy to disperse, since there was no larger collectivity available that could defend it. Then, when the days of persecution came, no one remembered that the syndicates had already been, at various times, linked to the revolutionaries — as in the final years of the reign of Napoléon III; that they had also provided a refuge — as in the years of reaction following the Commune. Pouget had recommended that the anarchists in Paris enter the syndicates as early as the beginning of 1894, when all other means of action were closed to them.

Emile Pouget was by 1879 the moving force behind the Syndicat des Employés de Commerce Parisiens (Syndicate of Commercial Employees of Paris). In 1880 he turned from socialism to anarchism. At that time, the cabinet-makers, the shoemakers, and the tailors joined for mutual aid in their demonstrations and their collective acts of direct action of all kinds — boycotts and sabotage — and they also made contact with the unemployed. In the mean time, Pouget, who had written and distributed a secret pamphlet entitled A l’Armée (To the Army), was imprisoned on the occasion of the great demonstration of the unemployed in March 1883, and remained in jail until January 1886. His absence no doubt contributed to a still greater isolation of the groups. When he was released, he could no longer remedy the situation and had to create a forum for himself, in the shape of publications, and especially through Le Père Peinard (Father Peinard) which was issued from 1889 to 1894. Pouget did more than anyone else to stimulate acts of anarchist and popular revolt, but he also realised the weakness, the isolation of the groups. He determined, while he was in exile in London, to put an end to this state of affairs.

He was familiar with the activities of Fernand Pelloutier, who had proposed, at the Congress in Tours in 1892 of the ‘Fédération des Travailleurs Socialistes de l’Ouest’ (The Socialist Federation of Workers of the West — who were followers of Paul Brousse, or ‘Broussists’), that a study be made of the general strike, and that the conclusions arrived at be reported by a specially appointed committee to the International Socialist Congress in Zürich in 1893. Pelloutier established himself in Paris in February 1893; there he met Hamon and Gabriel de La Salle (of the Art Social). As Hamon related, through his own influence and the literature he provided, Pelloutier soon became an anarchist. He represented ‘La Bourse du Travail’ (The Labour Exchange) of Saint-Nazaire at the Federation of these ‘Bourses’ in Paris from 1894 and in June 1895 became the secretary of the Federation, which was founded in February 1892.

Pelloutier had already proposed, at the national congress of the syndical chambers and co-operative groups, held in Paris in July 1893, that the Federation of Syndicates should organise itself into industrial federations according to trades, and their local federation into the ‘Bourse de Travail’ (also the national federation of such ‘Bourses’ and the international federation of the industrial federations). This was analogous to the project elaborated in Valencia in 1871, which Lorenzo was to propose at that time to the International Conference in London.

At Nantes in September 1894, the Guesdists suffered a serious defeat on the question of the general strike. The Confédération Générale du Travail was founded in Limoges in September 1895; its statutes stipulated that the members of the Confederation were to keep out of all political schools. It only marked time until 1900 with the support of reformists, in opposition to the Federation of the Bourses, which was autonomous and held within its ranks all the vital revolutionary activity of the syndicates (as Pouget declared in 1905; naturally life in local federations had a different momentum and life from that in sections of federated trades, dispersed throughout the country and hardly aware of each other’s existence).

It was in this setting of interacting forces that Pelloutier developed his theoretical-practical propaganda and his organising coordinating efforts, from 1893 until his premature death in 1901, or as long as his declining health permitted him to work. We must examine particularly his practical ideas concerning the general strike and his fundamental social ideas which formed the ideological basis for his efforts to organise the Bourses de Travail on a new base. In his L’Organisation corporative et l’Anarchie, Pelloutier envisaged the free and voluntary association of producers as the prototype of the first new form — though a transitory one (since progress never stops) — of the society of the future; and, as he outlined the structure of this life of men in association, he pointed out that the embryo of these new forms was already present in the (then) existing Bourses de Travail (Labour Exchanges), which he preferred to call ‘Chambers of Labour’. Their functions — according to Pelloutier — were identical. He concluded that the corporative union, which is in the process of evolving, and the communist and libertarian society in its ‘initial period’, are in perfect harmony; the one and the other want to reduce all the functions of society to satisfying our needs. And while the corporative union was steadily emancipating itself from its faith in the necessity of having governments, both desired a free understanding among human beings; authority and coercion would be abolished, and emancipation would be achieved by the people themselves. Workers would have to broaden the field of their studies, in order to comprehend that the entire life of society is in their hands; they would assume no duties except those which they themselves desired. This was to be their self-assumed task, and here also lay the goal of anarchism.

In this way, Pelloutier himself contrived to link the present and the future through the one organisation which he believed capable of a great development, but he did it with the utmost discretion and in a deeply libertarian spirit. He was chiefly concerned with the free commune, which in its initial stages would be buttressed by the institutions, the relationships, the experience and the habits of solidarity which local organisations would be able to form and acquire through their ceaseless activities toward that end. He, more than anyone else, knew how little of all that was already in existence; he also realised that the ‘Bourses’, supported as they were by municipal subsidies, lacked real independence. What could be done to counteract these local influences? And the industrial federations were weaker still; when they were revolutionary, they remained poor in membership and incapable of pressing strong economic demands, except by a surprise action or by concentrating all their forces for months on one local strike. The federations with large memberships, on the other hand, followed reformist tactics and took good care not to get involved in strikes that might turn out to be too long or too frequent.

L’Histoire des Bourses de Travail and his reviews Ouvrier des Deux Mondes (Worker of the Two Worlds) and Monde Ouvrier (Labour World) of 1897-1899, present but a pale picture of Pelloutier’s efforts. He had everything against him: the State, the employers, the radical municipalities, and the political socialists from whom he ‘snatched’ many working people as voters. And also the anarchists who were won over to syndicalism — with the exception of some, like Georges Yvetot and Paul Delesalle — were more interested in the industrial federations, and more anxious to introduce stronger methods of direct labour struggle. Thus, confronted by the employers, who fought the workers’ boycotts with boycotts of their own — the lockout, the blacklist, and so on — the corporative Congress of Toulouse in September 1897, under the influence of Pouget especially, adopted sabotage as its means of action (‘sabotage’, derived from the Scottish ‘ca’ canny’; see the famous report Boycottage et sabottage by the Congress’ commission on boycott). ‘Labour unity’, an organic accord between the federations and the ‘Bourses’, and the publication of a syndicalist daily, were also agreed on at Toulouse; these were further results of Pouget’s efforts, and the first step toward a more effective CGT. From that time on, committee members and officials who were less interested in social ideas gradually withdrew or were no longer elected, which made it comparatively easier for young anarchists who were not involved in socialist politics, and even for some ‘Allemanists’ and Blanquists, to take over the functions of those who had left. Such changes took place without greatly affecting the opinions of the rank and file of the membership; they simply surrendered all action to those courageous and resolute men who were able to prove their usefulness and tenacity and thus gain prestige and popularity.

This new generation dominated the Paris Congress in September 1900. La Voix du Peuple (The People’s Voice), the weekly Pouget edited, was founded on 1 December that year, and Pouget proclaimed syndicalist theory and practice in writings, distinguished by their clarity and precision. Among these were: Grève générale réformiste et Grève générale révolutionnaire (The reformist General Strike and the revolutionary General Strike); Les Bases du Syndicalisme; Le Syndicat (1904); Le Parti du Travail (1905) (The Labour Party); L’Action Directe (1907). Following these were: La Gréve, Label et Boycott, Sabotage, Antimilitarisme, La Grève Générale, another series: La CGT, Le Sabotage, LOrganisation du Surmenage: Le Systeme Taylor (1908, 1910, 1914), and the utopia which appeared under the signatures of Emile Pataud and Pouget himself: Comment nous ferons la Révolution (How we shall make the Revolution).

Pouget supported the hypothesis of the syndicalist organisation as the fundamental organisation of the new society. Delesalle (1900), basing his ideas on Pelloutier’s, sustained the same hypothesis of the syndicalist organisation as the embryo. Griffuelhes in 1909 (Le Syndicalisme révolutionnaire), however, expressed grave doubts about the validity of this proposition, maintaining that we cannot foresee the shape of things to come, any more than the writers and philosophers of the 18th century could have indicated the exact form the 1789 revolution would take, though it showed many signs of coming and they themselves were preparing it. In 1908 Pouget had proclaimed emphatically that the syndicates were the embryo of the organisations of the new society and that these groups would accomplish the task of social transformation (see La Conféderation Générale du Travail, p.26). Thus the two outstanding syndicalists who were the pillars of strength in the CGT until 1908, and who, so far as is known, had collaborated in full harmony, differed on this question, which often took the forefront. In fact, Pouget was definitely in favour, while Griffuelhes was at first against it, later taking the agnostic position.

Pouget reaffirmed — or weakened, if you will — his stand in his 1909 utopia; upon this work Kropotkin, after mature reflection, formulated his judgement in his preface to the French edition of 1911, and to the revised text of the Russian edition of 1920, all of this preceded by many observations contained in some letters which should be known. Kropotkin was greatly perplexed; although Pouget’s plan might not please him as an affirmation of the will of collective labour, he nevertheless questioned just where in that — situation there would be room for anarchism, so dear to him but a thing vague and non-existent to Pouget and Pataud. For these men, it had no existence prior to their new society — represented by the continuing CGT — nor during that society, nor, since they were describing a society congenial to anarchism, would there be any need to abandon it for another system. In the meantime, Griffuelhes, in contrasting the systems planned in the pre-revolutionary period with the incomprehensible events which took place during the early part of the French Revolution, well understood that planned systems, which are created in a vacuum, offer the maximum, while revolutions accomplish the minimum, since their makers lack experience, are beset with obstacles, and become disorientated in the face of a multitude of unforeseen factors.

At the time Pouget was writing his utopia, he had already formulated the new theory of the ‘councils of worker delegates’, which were also considered the ‘embryos of the new revolutionary power’. The ‘associations of districts’ (Kropotkin), the ‘syndicates’ (in Spain until 1888, then Pouget’s and so on), the ‘Soviets’ (of 1905, and in Bolshevik theory), are already three rival embryos, and the free community offers still another possibility, and so on and on.

It is interesting to observe the development of syndicalism during the years 1900-1908. The Bourses du Travail, the basis of the free community, Pelloutier’s ideal, all took second place when they were confronted with the ‘Federation of Industries’, which was intended to replace the State. Just as happened twenty years earlier between the Broussists, the Communists and the Guesdists — all conquerors of the State — so now the statists relegated the communists to a back seat. When the stake is power, the greater power proves more attractive. At the Congress of Montpellier (September 1902), the Bourses and the Federations constituted that joint organisation, which functioned from 1903 onwards; ten years later, the need was felt for departmental unions of the syndicates (that is, the conference of July 1913). The struggle against Millerandism, against militarism, the acrimonious (more often than pleasant) relations with syndicalist organisations in other countries — especially with the reformist and Social Democratic Germans, led by Karl Legien — the antagonisms between revolutionaries and reformists within the CGT itself, and a number of strikes — some of them won quickly, others lengthy and difficult — all these filled the years from 1900. And at the Congress of Bourges (Autumn 1904) it was felt that a decisive step could be taken to prepare the demand for an eight-hour day by direct action, either voluntary or by force, on the occasion of 1 May 1906.

This action confronted the forces of the CGT, so far as yet untried, with a definite task which was to bring them a certain mysterious prestige. It involved a commitment and a formal promise, to be fulfilled at short notice. It was ill advised. The CGT carried on an impulsive, feverish agitation, which was met by government resistance, persecution, the suspicion of wanting to provoke a massacre, and also the ferocious opposition of the employers of labour. The agitation did not succeed to any appreciable extent. In that same month of May 1906 the elections put the Socialists, and Jaurès particularly, in the lead, with the result that syndicalism was practically eclipsed. The insurrectionist revolutionary spirit of Hervé, at the time, attracted the restless element among the anarchists and syndicalists, who were engaged in fruitless agitation, but Hervé got rid of them when he suddenly changed his course and dashed headlong in the opposite direction.

The Congress of Amiens, held in October 1906, which was justly considered the apogee of the CGT, was really its supreme effort. The revolutionary cause was victoriously affirmed in the famous resolution, commonly known as ‘The Charter of Amiens’, in commemoration of the famous communal constitution of the 12th century (of which Augustin Thierry made a study in 1856). It was one of the finest syndicalist declarations, drawn up doubtless by Pouget. It held that the syndicate, now a resistance group, would in future be the group entrusted with production and distribution, the basis for social reconstruction. This task would call for the participation of all the workers, whatever their political or philosophical views might be, since, as individuals, they would be free to act according to their personal opinions, provided they did not introduce such opinions into the syndicate. Direct economic action against the employers was the only thing that mattered, and these organisations should not concern themselves with parties or sects, which are completely free to work for social reconstruction outside the organisations or alongside with them. The ideas summarised above, which form the basis of the no less famous slogan of syndicalism, to be sufficient unto itself, do not seem to me to be a proud call for exclusivism and distrust aimed at socialism and at anarchism. In the then existing situation, it was chiefly, it seems to me, the creation of a line of demarcation which was to prevent Socialist intervention within the syndicate. It would not preclude the entry of Socialists into the syndicates; they would be respected, but would not have the right to give a political cast to economic groups. The syndicalist militants, it appears, were not greatly concerned about the anarchists in this matter; these were their friends and they were syndicalist militants themselves, such as Pouget and his comrades. Or they were merely theoretical opponents, who abstained from practical syndicalism, but not in any proportion that might have weighed the balance. What was not wanted was the political Socialists, but the syndicalists could do nothing more against them than set up that line of demarcation, and the Charter of Amiens managed to do it very tactfully.

As for the future, any generalisation is fundamentally a usurpation, a dictatorship, since it passes judgement upon minorities, those which are called ‘exceptions’. And each general usurpation brings others in its train. Thus, the proclamation of the Socialist State as the master of the world of the future has brought forth a similar declaration on the part of the International or the CGT as master of the world of the future, then the Soviets followed suit. All three are or will be species of States.

After Amiens, whatever may be said, French syndicalism faced enemies who were more than ever determined to use any means available to dominate it. The reformists, always in a minority with their numerous small syndicates, did not want to wait any longer. Hervéism flourished in the ‘La Guerre Sociale’ group, gaining converts among the younger generation. A syndicalism, this time truly exalted, was hoisted high by some intellectuals (see the journal L’Action directe, 1908). Likewise, a syndicalism truly inspired by enthusiasm and devotion to the cause was lauded by some sincerely militant groups of workers, especially from the building trades, the ‘terrassiers’ (excavators of foundations), and there was a small war against the scabs, the so-called ‘foxes’ — chasses au renard (fox—hunting forays).

It was at this juncture, during the ministry of Clemenceau in 1908, that the CGT found itself trapped in a peculiar situation which put an end to the revolutionary influence it had exerted since 1900. Asa protest against a massacre of workers during a prolonged strike a short distance away from Paris, some hot-headed Parisians proposed holding a mass meeting in that locality. The plan was accepted, against the advice of seasoned militants. When the day came, Clemenceau’s soldiers closed in on the demonstrators, manhandling, beating and killing. All the leading militants were imprisoned for many months and then released without trial. A one-day general strike of protest in Paris was sabotaged by the reformists. Others seized this opportunity for an intrigue against the secretary of the organisation, who was in prison. The miners, who were reformists, entered the CGT in order to add their weight to the reformist section. Pouget, who was among those arrested, withdrew from the syndicate on that occasion; Griffuelhes no longer wished to continue as secretary but kept up his militant work, and later at the Congress of 1910 exposed all the intrigues in the CGT. Louis Niel, the new secretary elected in February 1909, was a reformist of an ambiguous type and his position became untenable within a short while. Then Léon Jouhaux was elected as a man who had the confidence of revolutionaries. The CGT, in its activities from 1909 to 1914, abandoned none of its principles and none of its demands; it published the daily La Bataille Syndicaliste (The Syndicalist Battle) from April 1911; it became closely organised and grew in membership. But everybody realised that its vitality had failed since 1908, and that perhaps its hopes, its rising vigour, its influences on public opinion had collapsed even as early as 1906. Only enthusiasts like James Guillaume refused to admit it. The group around ‘La Vie Ouvrière’ took on the biggest task of affirming and intensifying its ideas. Far be it from me to suggest that blame for the failure of the CGT could be laid upon the militants; they had done everything within their power, though some of them may have slipped, through the years, into routine and officialdom. It was the stifling atmosphere of the pre-war period when, without our realising it, without our understanding it, insidious forces were at work setting the stage for the great holocaust.

The Russian Revolution of 1905-1906, the enormous prestige of the CGT from 1904 to 1906 and the war alarms of 1906, almost coincided in time, just as did the Russian repressions led by Stolypin in the grim years of the Russian Terror (1907-1909) and Clemenceau’s persecutions of the anti-militarists of the CGT during the same years. In Russia, the nationalists and pogrommakers enjoyed protection; in France, Hervé became a turncoat. While syndicalism remained uncommitted, and those terrible deviations took place in the direction of corporativism, of a ‘realistic’ syndicalism and of a fascist mentality, all of them sheltered under the umbrella of Georges Sorel who, though he may have had socialist aims and aspirations, was nonetheless rendered culpable through his indulgence and compliance with circumstances.

It was also unfortunate that other countries, where syndicalism was still in its early stages, knew only the CGT of the years 1909 to 1914, and believed that should be their model; thus they were imitating a form whose spirit, alive and potent in 1900-1908, had already departed. On the international scene, there was the singular situation that the CGT considered itself equal only to the great national organisations, almost all Social Democratic, and the syndicalists tried, therefore, to work along with these. Consequently, these spurious interrelationships, especially with the Germans, only heightened the national animosities of those years. And, too, the CGT, involved in these formal connections, refused to stimulate syndicalist movements which arose in the difficult struggle against the massive reformist organisations, nor did it want to have anything to do with efforts to create a Syndicalist International. Such efforts were made by the Dutch, the British, the Germans; we should also note James Guillaume’s unremitting labour to unite the Swiss, the Spaniards, the Italians, around the ideas and the sphere of friendship of the CGT. All these efforts to create international relations culminated in animosities, misunderstandings and the formidable trickeries to which the London Congress of September 1913 bore witness.

Kropotkin’s syndicalist sympathies have been greatly exaggerated. He was a true anarchist, which implied a sympathetic attitude toward any progress in the direction of liberty (voluntary association), solidarity (communist co-operation) and the creation of revolutionary forces (the proletariat organising and rebelling). But, knowing as he did the authoritarian habits to which the masses are addicted, he considered it necessary to plan for the penetration of the masses and their stimulation by libertarian militants, in much the same way as the Alliance acted within the International. Militants like Pelloutier, Pouget and their friends did just that. Political socialists and the moderates had inspired the syndicates since the collapse of the revolutionaries of the International, from 1871 to 1892. He was gratified, on his return from the United States in January 1898, to see the libertarians gaining supremacy in the syndicates, and, for instance, saluted the three currents of ideas which already existed in embryo: the federation of syndicates, which would take the factories and the task of production into their hands; the co-operatives, which would take care of distribution; and the commune, which would take the land, the houses and so on, for the needs of its members. He also realised, however, that the socialists and the anarchists had good reason to stay aside as ‘theoreticians’ rather than being absorbed in some practical activity which might serve a limited section of workers only (see T. N., 24 August 1895).

The student group in Paris declared itself, in a pamphlet published in 1898, in favour of anarchist activity within the syndicates but definitely rejected the embryo hypothesis; the syndicate, they maintained, which is useful in present-day struggles, will either be dissolved or undergo changes, yielding its place to free productive associations. Kropotkin, in a letter addressed to the Paris students in April 1897, did not call for the hypothesis of the embryo. Pierrot made no mention of this hypothesis in his Syndicalisme et Révolution in 1905. His English articles and his letters from 1900 to 1902 reveal his proposal for a British ‘Labour Convention’, an International Federation of all existing trade unions, an International Workers’ Alliance (witha secret nucleus) or Syndicalist Workers’ International — all these proposals directed toward reviving socialist activity among workers confronted with political Socialists, whose rising influence he observed (see ‘La Réaction dans l'Internationale’, T. N., 14 September 1901). He was heartened by the great strikes of 1902, 1903 (see ‘Las Guerras obreras’ in La Huelga General (Barcelona), 5 May 1903; Le Réveil (Geneva), 4 June 1904, the preface to the Italian translation of Words of a Rebel; a letter to James Guillaume, 5 May 1903, etc.). He wrote to Guillaume: ‘In a word, we have worked [referring to Le Révolté — La Révolte — Temps Nouveaux] precisely in the direction which you have indicated and planned since 1869. And — it is to be noted — this, after all, is the tendency which has dominated over the others. You cannot help but approve of the recent syndicalist development’ (12 June 1903; Guillaume began again to take part in the movement).

When writing for young Russian anarchists (in ‘Le Syndicat russe’, which appeared in August-September 1905), Kropotkin advised socialists and anarchists to create independent syndicates, but in the following month, October 1905, he declared that the place for anarchists was with the people and that by devoting themselves to organising work, they would be wasting their energies in a task which, after all, was being done by others. This long view was fully justified by circumstances. And since he saw, very soon, that anti-organisational, expropriationist and individualist tendencies prevailed over all others — which he realised in Paris in September 1905 and thereafter — he sided with his Russian comrades, in the Russian journal in London (from October 1906 to July 1907), and in other publications, in favour of syndicalist activities; he declared that anarchists considered the syndicates to be embryo-cells (‘yaicheiki’ in Russian) of future social reconstruction. The dilemma thus presented itself: was it necessary to enter the syndicate already existing in Russia or to form anarchist syndicates? He was mindful of what had taken place in Spain, where anarchists formed non-partisan syndicates and gained influence in such syndicates. In Russia, however, since it would become necessary to recognise the Social Democratic Party on entering the syndicates, Kropotkin favoured creating new syndicates, though they might be small. On reading the first two volumes of L’Internationale by Guillaume, in 1907, Kropotkin could not control his indignation over the time lost during the period of Social Democratic domination. His feelings were best expressed in the following letter he wrote to Guillaume on 6 August 1907:

For twenty years, the syndicates have been victimised by the Dupires and the Baslys, until the anarchists, having established their right to exist by the use of dynamite, turned to the syndicates in order to find in them a field for our ideas. But if we had not, during that period, made a clear separation from the Baslys and the Guesdes — in tactics, in organisation, in our mode of thinking — it is impossible that our ideology would not have assumed a clear and distinct form.

In his preface to Gogeliia’s pamphlet on syndicalism, he also wrote in August 1907 that this study showed

the extent to which the current opinions of the French syndicalists are organically linked with the early ideas formed by the left wing of the International

and how

the closest rapport between the left wing of the International and present-day syndicalism, the close rapport between anarchism and syndicalism and the ideological contrast between Marxism and the principles of Social Democracy and syndicalism, stand out in sharp relief through the facts reported in this work.

Gogeliia had quoted, as an example, Yvetot, who wrote in Le Libertaive (17 December 1905), that our syndicalist anarchism completely coincided with Bakunin’s federalist anarchism. Pelloutier had written in 1895 that, in the same way that the ‘Allemanist’ party and the syndicates were shaking off the yoke of Marxism, even so the communist anarchist movement was seen as now continuing the work of Bakunin and devoting itself to the education of the syndicates.

It seems to me that, except for his letter of 1909 to Pouget (which is unknown but which is the basis for his 1911 preface to the utopia of Pataud and Pouget), Kropotkin had written very little on the syndicalism of 1908-1914. In his article in Freedom (July-August 1912) on ‘Syndicalism and Anarchism’ and in his essay on the development of anarchist ideas, in the Encyclopédie du Mouvement Syndicaliste in May 1912, he plays it down, and makes no mention of the hypothesis of the embryo. On 2 March 1914, on the occasion of a bitter polemic between himself and Guillaume, he wrote to Bertoni:

My opinion is absolutely that which was expressed by Malatesta in Volontà on 7 February 1914, and with which you agree. The syndicate is absolutely necessary. It is the only form of workers’ association which allows the direct struggle against capital to be carried on without a plunge into parliamentarianism. But, evidently, it does not achieve this goal automatically, since in Germany, in France and in England, we have the example of syndicates linked to the parliamentary struggle, while in Germany the Catholic syndicates are very powerful, and so on. There is need of the other element which Malatesta speaks of and which Bakunin always professed.

In the article which Kropotkin refers to, published in Volontà, Malatesta had stated: ‘Bakunin expected a good deal from the International but nevertheless founded the Alliance, which was the very soul of the International in all the Latin countries.’ “The other element’, of which Kropotkin speaks is, therefore, the Alliance, to which he himself had belonged since 1877 and which he supported in his letters of 1881 and 1902. The Alliance, according to Kropotkin, was indispensable in keeping the masses of workers united, in this manner leading in the direction of ‘atheism, socialism, anarchism, revolution’, in Malatesta’s words, for otherwise other forces would influence the syndicates in favour of Social Democracy, Catholicism, and so on. Malatesta wrote, with characteristic frankness:

Why conceal certain truths now that they are in the domain of history and can serve as a lesson for the present and for the future?

It turns out that neither Bakunin nor Kropotkin, nor, for that matter, even Guillaume (who only became convinced later), believed that the sections or syndicates were the type of association which would automatically produce a practical solution of current problems and thereby constitute a legitimate basis for the free society of the future. Such a society calls for an emotional element, for the will to act, for the experience of liberty, and these factors, even if they developed under the best conditions, still require a stimulus, a rallying call and some educational support on the part of those who are best prepared. The Spanish Internationalists, who had proclaimed since 1870 that the present organisation of their association could become the structure of future society, themselves belonged to the period of the Alliance, while Guillaume, Pelloutier, Pouget, Kropotkin possessed all the dynamics for personal and ideological leadership, with connections, publications and so on at their disposal. They were initiators, who had to make up for the lack of knowledge and the inertia of the poorly educated groups.

If it had been simply said that, in the event of a revolution, and obviously after its victory, the existing organisations, if their actions proved useful and effective, would probably become a bulwark of strength during the early stages but that, if something new had to be created without clinging to the past, there was little probability that yesterday’s alignments could be of use on the morrow — if this had been said, it would have done away with all the misunderstandings on the part of over-zealous pleaders who interpreted the exaggeration of 1869 too literally. All of that had been said in order to stimulate the creation of a new society, not to cast it in a preordained mould, for, if it should be built out of the presentday organisational material, it will not be any freer than it is now. Such an act would be tantamount to the limitation of the idea, the abandonment of hopes; while aspiring toward a new form, we would be condemned to see the perpetuation of the present scene. It would not be true reconstruction but rather a repetition of a pattern that has nowhere yet — either in the International or the CGT or the CNT now in existence — produced harmony or enduring and practical mutual relations. Hence it would be a poor beginning to make use of these organisations. Even if there were a real, earnest desire for it, it would immediately become the equivalent of a forced crystallisation, an intangible organism, something like a provisional government or some committees or councils — in other words, it would be a dictatorship. Those who still believe in this theory are cradling false hopes.

Kropotkin wrote otherwise in his article ‘Insurrection and Revolution’. He said, for instance:

Precisely because we know that an uprising can overthrow and change a government in one day, while a revolution needs three or four years of revolutionary convulsion to arrive at tangible results, at a substantial and enduring change in the redistribution of the economic forces of a nation; it is precisely for this reason that we say to the workers: the early insurrections of a revolution can have no other purpose but to shake up the governmental machine, to stop it, to break it. And it is necessary to do this in order to make further developments of the revolution possible. …

In any event, if we should expect the revolution, from its earliest insurrections, to have a communist [libertarian] character, we would have to relinquish the possibility of a revolution, since in that case there would be need of a strong majority to agree on carrying through a change in the direction of communism. …

It is only after the government of the State and its moral foundations have been weakened and overturned that we shall begin to proclaim and define anarcho-communist ideas among the masses. It is only then, once the initial obstacles have been thrust aside and overcome, that life will present to us the great problem of economic equality; then and only then, will anarchists, inspired by the events, be able to devote themselves to the demolition of old forms and the construction of new relations. Then, and never otherwise, will anarchism and communism reveal themselves as the inevitable solutions.

Then will begin the revolution that represents our aspirations and more or less responds to our desires (London, 20 July 1910).

As we read these words, what shall we say about Kropotkin’s concept of syndicalism? It is evident that Kropotkin, stirred by the growing strike agitations and syndicalist affirmations during 1902-1907, had encouraged syndicalism; that he was strongly inspired by the Red Week of Barcelona in 1909, the peasant insurrections in Mexico, and the continuous guerrilla warfare in Russia during those years. But as he grasped the real significance of these events, he no longer spoke of ‘the twenty-four hours’ of change, or of ‘taking from the pile’, as he did in The Conquest of Bread. He realised that anarchist communism might be attained after a few years of revolution — not at its very start.

Malatesta’s position on the question of syndicalism is set forth in many of his articles and, better still, in the discussions at the International Congress of Amsterdam in 1907, as well as in his later articles in Temps Nouveaux and Freedom. In Malatesta’s view, just as the general strike could not take the place of revolution, neither could syndicalism replace anarchism. The general strike and syndicalism are mere forms and framework, while revolution and anarchism are the objective that should be attained, and the spirit that should prevail in these forms. That spirit, whether it lodged in an Alliance or an Iberian Anarchist Federation, in a secret or a public association, or in some men of action and firm libertarian resolve, will inspire the syndicates, educating and impelling them toward libertarian communism. Otherwise there will be other forces, to direct them toward other objectives. There are always ‘others’ inside the syndicates, who are only waiting for an opportunity to act in their own interest.

All this is simple, and there was no need for some thirty years of discussions and polemics, which are still going on. The free society of the future will certainly not become the prize of a war of conquest. It does not belong either to the victorious army, even if the syndicates should be the victors, or to the great leaders who guide them, any more than we recognise the conquests of Napoléon, Lenin or Mussolini. The syndicates of those who view the future otherwise would be a militarism, an economic fascism preoccupied with dreams of conquest and supremacy. The true revolutionary struggle overcomes obstacles, clears the ground and so far as it is able, turns without delay to its great new task. And this might probably face the danger of being restricted, slackened and hindered if it were held within the old guidelines, even though they should be represented by the syndicates.

‘Let us start with a clean slate — make a tabula rasa of the past’ — this is the spirit of the future.

18. French anarchism 1895-1914. The years 1895-1914. The War. Communism and libertarian activities. Conclusion.

The years 1895-1914 doubtless saw the greatest variety of anarchist manifestations. But up to the later years of that era, until the new Spanish experience, there was — in my opinion — a long period when very little that was new emerged. It was almost a time of waiting, when a conscious effort had to be made not to lapse into uniformity. The active, public propaganda of anarchist ideas declined, and a certain passivity set in toward general events. These are my personal impressions, though I know that there were many exceptions, and I am not unaware of the causes of this so-called ‘decadence’ or ‘epigonism’; it may be that this is a phasé in the growth of an idea, which needs periods of quiescence and stability before it can return its upward thrust.

It cannot be denied that so much enthusiasm was felt for anarchist communism as it was formulated in The Conquest of Bread that little attention was being paid to the ideological development which was taking place in Kropotkin himself, who remained neither inactive nor immutable. Thus, when Merlino disappeared, when the ‘amorphists’ were not saying anything, when Malatesta abstained from formulating any reservations, Kropotkin’s anarchist communism — embellished with the words of Pietro Gori and Sébastian Faure and revolutionised by the powerful words of Galleani — was not subjected to discussion, and, in those years of prosperity, not even the theory of ‘abundance’ was questioned.

In France, there was already the same feeling of assurance about the ‘participation of the people’ through syndicalism; its awakening was certainly due to anti-statism and anti-parliamentarianism and to the stimulus of vehement action on the part of the anarchists, but its members never had that strong spirit of revolutionary and anti-State unity which has so often been attributed to them. In fact, a certain exclusivist type of ambition appeared among them, which was antagonistic to all those who did not belong with them, whether they were libertarians or political socialists.

The great persecutions, especially those in France, in Italy and in Spain, had neutralised many of the more brilliant men and had introduced insidious changes into the conditions of public life. While such changes did not outlaw all the means of propaganda, they imposed restrictions, and whatever ground was lost at that time was never regained. It became necessary to speak less openly, and if the discussions we conducted through our publications and at our meetings did not suffer for lack of strong declarations, what was said had less repercussion in a public that could have been larger and could have produced new forces for us. A few years later, the firm affirmation and the initiative passed on to the syndicalists and the anti-militarists, finally reaching unreal and extravagant heights in the insurrectionism and the neo-Blanquism of Hervé only to fall flat on their faces in total collapse when Hervé later defected. This attracted restless young men, who (as had happened earlier among the anarchists) were entering these movements (as they are now entering Communist groups) in search of a vanguard party of attack. It may be said that the loss was not a great one; nevertheless, in France it produced a comparatively large area of silence around the anarchist movement, a silence which the splendid words and the assiduous propaganda of so many comrades could not counteract to any extent.

Notwithstanding all these circumstances, things did not have to happen just this way in France. There was — we must say it — a real abdication. Propaganda was resumed in 1895, and it was not seriously obstructed by the ‘exceptional laws’ (lois scélérates). Besides, the propaganda was carried on for just a few years; in its most effective form, it lasted hardly five years — from 1889 to 1893. There was need to continue it, and this certainly was done from May 1895, but not with the former ardour, which at one time rose spontaneously and launched its defiance against the entire bourgeois world. Now it felt it was sheltered in the shade, under the protection of the great mass marshalled in the syndicates. There was nothing more to fear; at the same time, nothing was done to place anarchism decisively in the forefront. They were anchored in a safe harbour, shielded from any storm. And that is why after 1895 anarchism in France found itself bringing up the rear and — as I see it — it has no longer been able to regain the ground it had needlessly abandoned.

Other factors played their part, too. From 1895 there was an outburst of ideological sub-species which had not attracted any attention in the proceeding years. Among them were the naturism of that era, which was a defence of savage primitivism, followed by the naturism which was based on diet, vegetarianism and so on, as well as the little centres of the simple life — of short duration — all those little systems from Gravelle and Zisly to Butaud and Sophie Zaikowska and others. Neo-Malthusianism, first propagated with great perseverance by Paul Robin, gained considerable ground, not merely as a side-issue that might be of interest to individuals but as something essential which completely absorbed many minds, either on its material basis or in its bearing on the sex question. It led to discussions of the sex problem; while this was no doubt a matter of free choice for the individual, its effect upon our movement was to create a diversion of energy and attention. From Paul Robin to the numerous publications of E. Armand and his En Dehors, there was a tremendous mass of material of interest to an observer or student, but, from the practical point of view, it caused a great dispersal of libertarian energies during all those years. Dabbling in Esperanto and artificial ad hoc tongues absorbed other energy; for the sake of carrying on an exotic correspondence in these languages, or for exchanging a few letters, say, with Japan, they neglected the study of languages of neighbouring European countries — English or German, Spanish or Italian — which could have enlarged their knowledge and stimulated European contacts. Antimilitarism, as I have elsewhere pointed out, however tenaciously it may have been proclaimed, was directed chiefly against the outward features of militarism, the barracks, the army, rather than its specific causes — patriotism, lack of knowledge of other peoples, or the sinister games played by diplomacy, industry and finance.

There were ‘popular universities’, ‘the theatre of the people’, centres for child education and other useful and congenial activities, suitable for an era of great tranquillity, but they brought little added energy and little new. force to anarchist ideas in the years which witnessed the CGT, with its immense prestige, Jaurés and Hervé with a prestige which perfectly matched that of the CGT, the intellectual ‘Dreyfusards’ who later climbed to real power, as Clemenceau did, and to no less real power, as Jaurès did, who became promoters of nationalist causes — one of the causes of the war — such as the ‘Courier Européen’ group and so on; in the years, that is, when all these forces gained a hold on the people and upon public opinion. In these circumstances, it always seemed to me, anarchists had something else to do than meddle with Esperanto, sexual Neo-Malthusianism and other such deviations. This they failed to do and they were relegated to second place. To outward view, there was a brilliance and a swing in the CGT, in Jaurès and Hervé, but it was difficult to grasp how few anarchists between 1881 and 1894 had attracted world attention.

Thus from the weakness that was first consciously willed, a relaxation (partly under compulsion), which was considered practical, the next step was to show a real weakness, which did not diminish. There were discussions with the syndicalists on the question of functionarism; there were congresses in 1913, with a good deal of noise and drumbeat, calling for separation from the individualists. This was finally achieved after twenty years, and it was little enough: sharp tension with the syndicalists, a break with the ‘illegalist individualists’ (if this was truly right and proper and necessary in 1913-1914, why wasn’t it so twenty years earlier?).

In the course of those twenty years, there were three young intellectuals, all physicians, who published good work which I would say showed intellectual initiative, and active revival of the ideas of the Temps Nouveaux. They were Dr Marc Pierrot, Michel Petit (Dr Duchemin) and Max Clair (Dr Mignon). There were writers of some reknown and great diversity; among them were Charles Albert (Daudet), Victor Barrucand (author of Le Pain gratuit... (Free Bread) of 1896), René Chaughi (Henri Gauche), Manuel Devaldés, Georges Durupt, André Girard, Émile Janvion, C. A. Laisant, Albert Libertad, André Lorulot, Paraf-Javal, Jacques Sautarel, Laurent Tailhade. Some of the older writers continued working: Grave, S. Faure, Hamon, Bernard Lazare, Malato, Louise Michel and others. These multiple efforts, however, had little cohesion among themselves; hence they were more effective as literature. Or they fell into one of the three categories that had evolved — anarchists who were friendly to Temps Nouveaux, those who displayed greater animation, the friends of the Libertaire, and those who followed the Anarchie of Libertad. After finishing the above, I have worked on and then written the syndicalist chapters covering the years 1895 to 1914 and the anarchist chapters from 1895 to 1906, and I found my sombre evaluations of that period more than confirmed in the course of this work.

These are the principal developments of anarchist thinking I have endeavoured to describe in my history, which stops at 1914, at the onset of the First World War. With reference to the countries which did not participate in the War, it concludes at any characteristic date shortly after 1914; as for the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries it continues to the present day, since there has been no break in the continuity.

The war found the anarchists in all countries unprepared for its explosive imminence, but they resigned themselves to it, and soon proceeded, like everyone else, to take sides in the conflict. It was not hard to predict what each one would do or say. Men’s minds in the various lands, which had for years (and at all times) been groomed to respond to the political interests of their countries, were now fully formed, and few anarchists were immune to the influence of their environments. The air was saturated with accepted notions, conventional opinions and the peculiar illusions which people entertained concerning small nationalities and the virtue and defects of certain races. There were all sorts of plausible justifications for imperialism, for financial controls and so on. And, since Tolstoy had been dead since 1910, no voice of libertarian and moral power was heard in the world; no organisation, large or small, spoke up. Thus, in the last forty years, all the wars were allowed to take place in many countries, with unconcern on the part of the people — including that series of preludes to the First World War which had its beginning in 1911, with Italy’s attack on Turkey.

In all these wars, no sympathies were expressed with either one side or the other. Such being the case, how could one find the individual moral force and the collective organised force — how could it have been possible for all to unite spontaneously in rebellion against the First World War, which was merely another step in the series of wars, insurrections and revolutions since 1848? Was there anyone who did not cry, in Paris in 1848, for a war against Russian despotism? Was there anyone who, from 1859, did not greet with enthusiasm the national wars and national insurrections which were animated with a strong desire and a resolve to turn into wars? When Garibaldi in Naples opened the way, the army of Piedmont followed in his footsteps. The Polish insurgents of 1863 had the firm hope that France and England would threaten Russia with war or would make war. The International never amended the text of its inaugural Manifesto, written by Marx, which is an incitement to a world war against Tsarist Russia.

War, insurrections, revolutionary hopes, were always inextricably linked together. Proudhon from 1859 to 1862, and later Tolstoy, were the only libertarians of note who opposed such ideas. Even Reclus (in 1870) and Malatesta (in 1876) were no exceptions. Small wonder, then, that all socialists, as well as anarchists, found themselves virtually in a position of having ‘nothing to say’ on the subject, either in 1914 or in 1918 or at any time thereafter — except for some individual acts of protest, of abstention or of rebellion.

The Russian Revolution of March 1917 broke out in the midst of the World War; it had no 'repercussion in any other country. In the summer of that year there was a series of acts of a socialist character on the part of the workers, there was expropriation of lands and acts of Jacquerie by Russian peasants against the landowners. Then came the Bolshevik coup d’état of November 1917. To those who knew the personalities involved and the parties, familiar to them for a great many years through their writings and publications, through their public actions in 1905-1906, through socialist congresses and so on, it was a Marxist takeover, supported by a section of revolutionary socialists and by many anarchists. To people in other countries, however, who had not paid much attention to these personalities or to what was going on in Russia, it appeared as the triumphant social revolution, a unique event of the first order, a dream come true, in its extent and in its speed. Although, because of this fortunate ignorance on the part of many, the Russian Revolution was able to sway the minds and the imaginations of peoples, in 1917 and again in 1918, with hardly any critical voice lifted against it, it failed to win over the two strongest libertarian movements of that period, the Spanish and the Italian. And, before the true revolution had even started, the formidable repression of 1920-21 commenced; the dictatorships started in 1922 and 1923. In the countries where authoritarian socialism prevailed, the Russian Revolution had violent repercussions, as in Central Europe in 1918 and 1919. But what was done, was done under the banner of intensified authoritarianism, which sowed the evil seed of authority with such thoroughness that it brought forth the appalling developments we are now witnessing.

All of this inevitably produced reactions in the libertarian movements, which had been materially and morally weakened, intellectually starved since 1914. A cult of numerical size arose, and there were also authoritarian infiltrations. A slight increase in the membership of the syndicates controlled by the authoritarians led the libertarians to the erroneous conclusion that there was less of a chance for an anarchist counter-attack (which, in fact, was now considered useless by the old anarchists, since, for them, there was to be only ‘pure syndicalism’ in the future). While this problem was being discussed in rather limited groups, the masses placed themselves in millions at the orders of arrogant authoritarian imposters, and withdrew from us. This induced others, as well, to join the ranks of authority and they too were lost to us.

The greatest advances still made by anarchism at that time — in Italy, from the Congress of Florence in April 1919 to September 1920, that is, in the period of the occupation of the factories; in Spain from the Regional Congresses in Sans (Barcelona) of August 1918 to the National Congress in Madrid of December 1919 — were hampered as much by governmental repression as by enmity on the part of political socialists (an enmity which persists to this day, against tiny libertarian effort), and by that latest product which is their quintessence, their mercenaries par excellence, the Fascists. Originating with the mobs roused to fanatical rage by a handout of pennies and a glass of whisky, the pogrom-makers, the ‘black hundreds’, the sick in body and the sick in mind, obsessed with the idea of some nationalism or a virulent anti-socialism, were all quickly organised into free syndicates, the fasci. This was the pack of hounds which was let loose against progress in any form by those in power and those who pay them. Since these developments did not bring the authoritarian socialists to a realisation of the evil of authority, it was difficult to feel any solidarity with them, and thus the libertarians — as was their duty — fought against the entire authoritarian world, including the so-called ‘socialists’. It could not be otherwise. And it certainly did not increase the number of our enemies, since the authoritarian socialists had always been our enemies.

We have observed, however, that, in the hours and days of real action, many popular forces joined the libertarians in revolt, without paying much attention to the political socialists, who used their high posts of command to discredit the movements (as did the Italian Confederation of Labour in 1914 and in 1920) or used their parliamentary votes to ratify deportation (as did the Spanish Socialist deputies in 1933). The ‘Red Week’ of Romagna and Ancona in June 1914, the numerous revolts, which took place in January 1932, in January and December 1933 and on various occasions in Spain, have shown that real actions in these days do not fail to receive popular support. Also, the people instinctively keeps its distance from Moscow’s Communists, who could only offer a new despotism. All this is in favour of a good cause, if we place ourselves firmly on a basis of action and with this aim proceed to build up libertarian mentalities.

These post-war years have brought savage persecutions — Fascist brutality against Italian anarchists; acts of barbarism in Barcelona from 1920 onwards; deportations of foreign-born anarchists from the United States, and the martyrdom of Ricardo Flores Magón and of Sacco and Vanzetti; the continued imprisonment of Tom Mooney and of other syndicalists; the tragedies of Gustav Landauer and Erich Mühsam in Germany; the fate of many anarchist comrades in Russia, and the sufferings of so many others in the prisons and in the Arctic Siberian points of deportation in the Soviet Republic; the persecutions and executions in Argentina in 1930-31; all the dead, all the deported, the judicial and government prisons in Republican Spain of 1931-35. All this forms a catalogue of sufferings inflicted by Fascists and Bolsheviks, by the bourgeois and the Social Democrats working in full accord, and demonstrates that the authoritarians of the entire world are one body and one soul.

May all the anarchists, all the libertarians, all freedom-loving human beings become a united force, which, while preserving the autonomy of each of its members, will practise mutual aid among all of them. May this force, by overthrowing authority in one place, weakening it in another, through our own genuine progress, develop in innumerable ways in order to advance liberty on a small scale and a large one, within ourselves and around us, anywhere and everywhere.

Let us have hope. For authority, powerful as it may be, can bring forth nothing but evil. All the good in the world has come, is now coming and will always come only with liberty and from liberty.

M. Nettlau
30 October 1932
(revised in July 1934)

Note

For those interested in further reading I have tried to facilitate the eventual search for items as much as possible. I have also indicated a number of reprints, later editions, and arbitrarily, some titles which may be of interest and helpful.

The bibliographies attempt to give all necessary details of titles Nettlau mentions in his text. In a number of cases, I have indicated a location where a copy or a run of a title can be found. As the reprint or microform market has to some extent also taken on rare anarchist publications, things have become much easier in recent years.

The largest collection in the world of anarchist materials is housed in the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. The basis of this was Max Nettlau’s own collection and archives. The Institute may be contacted and its (entire) catalogue accessed through the Internet. (http://www.iisg.nl)

Concerning anarchism in general, and the anarchist press in particular, there exist a number of bibliographies which should make the researcher’s (or interested reader’s) life easier by reducing time and effort to find a title. There are, though, only two which can really be recommended, as they combine both reliability and a reference to generally accessible holdings:

Leonardo Bettini, Bibliografia dell’anarchismo, Vol. 1: Periodici e numeri unici anarchici in lingua italiana (Part 1: those published in Italy; part 2: those published abroad). Florence: cp editrice, 1972-1976. [All published]. (For the Italian anarchist press).

René Bianco, Un siécle de presse anarchiste d’expression francaise 1880- 1983. Thèse pour le Doctorat d’Etat. Aix-Marseille, 1987; 7 Vols.; of interest here is the part entitled Répertoire des périodiques de langue française, Vol. 1-3, and Avant-propos et sources. (For the French press). Both are not yet complete and are not free of mistakes, but both are admirable and impressive in what has already been achieved.

For at least one country (France) there exists a fairly large number of anarchist periodicals on microfilm which are therefore relatively easily available (interlibrary loan). The institution responsible for this publishes comprehensive catalogues useful for everybody working in the field: Association pour la Conservation et la Réproduction de la Presse, B.P 21, F-77313 Marne la Vallée, France.

Abbreviations used:

BL — British Library, London
BN — Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
IISH — International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam
ACRPP — Association pour la Conservation et la Réproduction de la Presse
mf — Microform

Bibliography — Periodicals

A Short Bibliographical Guide To Nettlau’s Historical Work

Although this book has been published on several occasions under the title A (short) history of anarchy, the author intended it to be less a history than a “guide". His own title was Anarchy through the times, and the work was meant to facilitate entry into a vast subject, and also to serve as a guide to and through a number of historical works on the subject which he had already published or at least written. This concerned in the first place what he himself called his History of Anarchy, a very bulky and comprehensive work, the text of which, though unfinished, runs to more than 3,700 pages. In his lifetime, only three volumes out of nine could be published, as a result first of the economic crisis in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and then the advent to power of Hitler in 1933. So when he prepared this one-volume introduction for publication in 1934, he complemented it with a “postscript" explaining the circumstances in which the work had been done, explaining also his reasons, or at least some of them, for undertaking this work, and defending himself against the reproach that the main work had been written in German:

(...) in my present situation, when access to a large part of my own collection and to the great libraries of other countries has been rendered impossible for me, and when almost all of the old comrades who are better informed are passing away, without there being any possibility of collecting their reminiscences and clarifications, even now I have no lack of documentation, and have been able (...) to turn out a number of publications and books (...) But it seems that now (...) possibilities for issuing historical material are disappearing. I believe that, objectively, this is regrettable, since those of my friends and our comrades who have helped me over all these years in my documentation, and who are still doing so, were convinced that all this material would help preserve the history of anarchism freed of inaccuracies, carefully presented, lifted as far as possible above legend, rhetoric, and triviality. It is, of course, not necessary for everyone to know all the details which, for lack of space, I have always forced myself to reduce to a considerable extent. But this should be no reason to stimulate or to impose a penury that would have us always content with legends and rhetoric when all other small groups, which boast of a historical past, are working hard to retrieve it. In this respect, socialism, both old and modern, is already being explored in dimensions most of us are nearly completely unaware of. But as everybody can well imagine, in this immense socialist literature anarchism appears always as an aberration, as a withered branch, as a nothing, for which these writers predict a total disappearance, with the complete triumph of either their bolshevism or a statist-capitalist-socialist reformism. That is what has been proclaimed and is being proclaimed through the enormous propaganda carried on by the authoritarians, which we should not ignore any more than freethinkers could close their eyes to the immense clerical propaganda. Those who have any interest in history at all, and who look back, can realise the amount of work that was necessary to extricate the memory of Bakunin and the Alliance from all Marxist perversions and falsifications. I plead here, after all, for a cause that none of the many militants I have known ever denied, and that would find more support if our means of action had not become so restricted. (...) It has occasionally been reproached to me that I wrote these books in German, which is my native language. I published them in German because the comrades of Der Syndikalist in Berlin were in 1922 and 1924 the only ones in Europe to offer me the opportunity to publish such historical books. This proved no obstacle to comrades Santillán and Orobón Fernández who learned this language and translated some of these books (...) If in 1923 or 1924 anyone had suggested to me that these books could be published in French or in English, I would have written them in these languages. But no one ever thought of it (...) and I am not the one to be blamed (...) I can only think of one little thing that gave me pleasure, and that is that Malatesta, who knew English, took the trouble to acquire a reading knowledge of German and was able to read the historical volumes, as he wrote to me. Would such an effort have been impossible for those younger than he was? After all, how many languages had I to consult in order to assemble the material for this truly international history? [original edition (1935), p. 340-343]

It could and should be added that, more than sixty years later, all these books have been very little read and used, at least by the academic and professional historians, and if so, then mostly very selectively. (One exception is Soviet or Russian historians, by whom it seems that, apart from ideological differences, the historian Nettlau was always held in remarkably high esteem.) Whoever cares to compare only this short introduction into the subject with one or other of the much more recent examples of “History of Anarchism”, will certainly be surprised by the - easily avoidable - inaccuracy or incorrectness of these publications, which after all have been produced under much easier conditions, with access to far more facilities, than Nettlau ever enjoyed.

Of the incredibly vast production in the field by Nettlau, at least the most important should be mentioned here for those who may eventually follow up further one or the other subject.

Nettlau wrote the first of the general overviews of the development of anarchist ideas early in his career as a historian, as an unsigned series of articles for John Most’s paper Freiheit, which Most then reprinted (without permission from Nettlau and without giving him the opportunity to correct any of the numerous misprints): Die historische Entwickelung des Anarchismus. (= Internationale Bibliothek, No. 16). New York: Freiheit, 1890; 16 pp.,... (first in Freiheit, 19 April to 17 May 1890). This was used in revised and enlarged form for Nettlau’s introduction to his edition of Bakunin’s works: Oeuvres. Fédéralisme, socialisme et antithéologisme. - Lettres sur le patriotisme. - Dieu-et l’État. Paris: P-V Stock, Éditeur, 1895 (later labelled Oeuvres Vol. I; many times reprinted until 1980); extracts were published in English translation: N., “The Evolution of Anarchism”, in Freedom, Vol. IX, No. 96 [93]: May 1895, p. 6-7.

In the following years he was preoccupied with the work on his huge biography of Bakunin, though he “improvised” in two weeks, at the request of E S. Merlino, in 1893 a bibliography of anarchism, which to Nettlau's relief was not published, as the manuscript was burnt in September 1893 with most of Malatesta’s papers in a fire in Malatesta’s room in Islington (112 Islington High Street). Invited by Elisée Reclus, he repeated this effort in Spring 1896; the result appeared as Bibliographie de l’Anarchie. Preface by Élisée Reclus. Brussels: Bibliothèque des “Temps Nouveaux” / Paris: P-V Stock, 1897 (reprints New York: Burt Franklin, (1968); Geneva: Megariotis Reprints, 1978; Glashutten im Taunus: Verlag Detlev Auvermann [now Vaduz: Topos Verlag], 1976). This was the first serious bibliography in the field, still full of mistakes, misprints and a number of misunderstandings by the typesetter, which in subsequent years (and until very recently) has been plundered and copied without acknowledging the source, as revealed by the scrupulous repetition of the mistakes…

Nettlau corrected and updated the bibliography in the volumes of his History of Anarchy, which he began writing in 1925. Betwen the mid- 1890s and 1924 he produced no other general overview of the history of anarchist ideas. He began this again at the request of a French anarchist, Lucien Haussard, in a series of articles for Haussard’s paper L’Idée anarchiste, the publication of which was not yet finished when the paper stopped after 13 issues (“L’Idee anarchiste. Son passé - son avenir”, in L’Idee anarchiste (Paris), No. 1: 13 March 1924; No. 4 - No. 13: 24 April - 15 Nov. 1924). Nettlau was invited several times to continue the work, and he wrote a longer version, published in Yiddish in the Freie Arbeiter Stimme (New York), and another, even longer one for the Suplemento of the Argentinian anarchist daily La Protesta: “La idea anarquista, su pasado, su porvenir” (La Protesta - Suplemento semanal (Buenos Aires), Vol. III No. 113:17 March 1924, No. 120 - No. 137: 5 May - 1 Sept. 1924; - repr. in La Revista blanca. Sociología, ciencia y arte (Sardanola-Barcelona), No. 28 - No. 60: 15 July 1924 - 15 Nov. 1925 (occasionally jumping a number); - repr. as a small book, with a preface by Vladimiro Munoz and an epilogue by Rudolf Rocker: Breve historia de la anarquia. n. p. [Toulouse]: “Cenit”, n. d.).

In 1925, invited by Rudolf Rocker, Nettlau began to write his definitive Geschichte der Anarchie (History of Anarchy). Originally planned as one volume, the History grew in size while Nettlau proceeded. When he was half-way through, it was clear to him and agreed by the publishers, the German anarcho-syndicalist Union and their publishing outfit, that the size would grow to two volumes; after the publication of the first (and then the second) volume, much more material was sent to him by older comrades. Separated from the bulk of his own collection and a large part of his older excerpts and notes, he was also invited not only to Berlin to use Rocker’s collection, but by other friends to use their collections and archives, first of all Jacques Gross in Geneva, Fritz Brupbacher in Zürich, and then from 1928 onwards also the Montseny-Urales family in Barcelona. He complemented this by sending out questionnaires to older friends and comrades, and arranged to meet a number of them to interview them about events, people, movements. In this way the character of the whole enterprise changed somewhat, and what had been begun as a rather straightforward history of anarchist ideas, became also one of different movements, and in a way a sort of autobiography of the movement, alongside his own reminiscences, the recollections of people involved in the events and movements (after all, he himself had participated in quite a few of the developments he was now describing and analysing).

Of this monumental History of Anarchy only the first three volumes were published in Nettlau’s lifetime; publication was resumed in 1981 and 1984, and it is now being re-issued and published for the first time in its entirety. The whole work will come to nine volumes (plus a supplementary volume with bibliographies, indexes and related materials):

Vol. I: Der Vorfrühling der Anarchie. Ihre historische Entwicklung von den Anfängen bis zum Jahre 1864. (The early Spring of Anarchy. Its historical development from the beginnings to the year 1864.) Originally published Berlin: Verlag “Der Syndikalist”, 1925; several reprints; edited by Heiner M. Becker, with introduction, Errata, index, and illustrations, Munster: Bibliothek Thélème Verlagsgesellschaft, 1993 [i.e. 1994].

(Antiquity and Myths. - Middle Ages. - Rabelais and other Utopians. - From La Boétie to Diderot. - Sylvain Maréchal. - From Winstanley to Burke’s Vindication. - The later 18th century and the French Revolution. - William Godwin. - The libertarian sides of Fourierism. - Libertarian elements in Robert Owen and in early English socialism. - William Thompson. - Josiah Warren and American individualist anarchism. - The older European individualist anarchism. - The communist-anarchist group of L’Humanitaire, 1841. - R J. Proudhon. - French Proudhonism. - Proudhonism and other anarchistic beginnings in Germany. - Max Stirner and his circle. - Proudhonism in the rest of Europe. - Anselme Bellegarigue. - Joseph Déjacque, Ernest Coeurderoy, and other anti-authoritarian currents in the middle of the 19th century - Anarchism from 1848 to Bakunin and the First International, 1864; Carlo Pisacane.)

Vol. II: Der Anarchismus von Proudhon zu Kropotkin. Seine historische Entwicklung in den Jahren 1859-1880. (Anarchism from Proudhon to Kropotkin. Its historical development in the years 1859 to 1880.) Originally published Berlin: Verlag “Der Syndikalist”, 1927; several reprints. Edited by Heiner M. Becker, with introduction, Errata, index, and illustrations, Münster: Bibliothek Thélème Verlagsgesellschaft, 1993 [i.e. 1994].

(Proudhon’s last years, 1859-1864; Federalism and Mutualism. - Michael Bakunin from his beginnings to 1864. - Bakunin’s revolutionary and associationist-federalist ideas in the years 1864-1867. - Proudhonist workers and students; César De Paepe and the brothers Reclus. - Prehistory and foundation of the International (28 September 1864). - The Polish question, Proudhonism, and the beginnings of collectivist anarchism in the International (1864-1868). - The International, the League for Peace and Freedom, and Bakunin, 1867-1868. - Collectivist anarchism 1868-1869; Bakunin and César De Paepe. - From the Congress of Basle, September 1869, to the Summer of 1870; collectivism in Belgium and France. - The Commune of Paris, 1871, and Communalism. - Bakunin and the International, 1870-1871. - Marx v. Bakunin; the London Conference and the Congress of The Hague; the Circular Letter of the Jurassians and the anti-authoritarian Congress of St. Imier; the years 1871 to 1873. - The Anti-authoritarian International, 1873-1875; César De Paepe and James Guillaume. - Beginnings of communist anarchism, 1876. - The Berne Congress of the International (October 1876). - Peter Kropotkin in the years 1874 to 1876. - The International and Kropotkin January to August 1877. - Last Congress of the International in Verviers, September 1877; the Jurassian Federation until the end of 1878. - Le Révolté, Geneva, in 1879, and Kropotkin's The Anarchist Idea from the Point of View of its Practical Realisation (October 1879). - The year 1880 and the communist anarchism of the Congress of Chaux-de-Fonds, October 1880.)

Vol. III: Anarchisten und Sozialrevolutionäre. Die historische Entwicklung des Anarchismus in den Jahren 1880-1886. (Anarchists and Social Revolutionaries. The historical development of anarchism in the years 1880 to 1886.) Originally published Berlin: ASY-Verlag, 1931; several reprints; - edited by Heiner M. Becker, with introduction, Errata, index, and illustrations, Münster: Bibliothek Thélème Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996.

(On the origins of communist anarchism in the years 1876 to 1880. - Peter Kropotkin in Geneva, London, and Thonon, from October 1880 to his imprisonment in December 1882. - Paul Brousse and the French International (1877-1878); the socialist movement in France since 1879; the withdrawal from the movement and the later activities of Paul Brousse. - Anarchist beginnings in France since 1877; the International and the first groups; the socialist Congresses of 1880 and 1881; Louise Michel. - The Italian International from 1877 to 1881 and the defection of Andrea Costa, 1879. - The Spanish International in its development since 1868, and its change into the National Federation of Spanish Workers in 1881. - Anarchist beginnings in German language movements up to 1878; Eugen Dühring. - Johann Most and the London Freiheit 1879 to Spring 1881. - The International since 1877 and the prehistory of the London Congress Qune 1880 to July 1881). - Delegations and declarations addressed to the London Congress, 1881. - Proceedings of the International SocialRevolutionary Congress in London (14-19 July 1881), from unpublished documents. - The anarchist movement in France from Summer 1881 to 1885. The trials in Lyon and Paris (Louise Michel; Émile Pouget). Frenchspeaking Switzerland from 1883 to the transferral of Le Révolté from Geneva to Paris (March 1885). - The Italian movement from Summer 1881 to the end of 1884; Malatesta in Egypt, 1882; Italian International, 1883-1884, La Questione sociale (Florence, 1884); F. S. Merlino and the years 1885 to 1889. - The Spanish National Federation from 1881 to 1886; collectivist and communist anarchism; Cosmopolitan Anarchist Congress 357 of Barcelona, July 1885. - Anarchist propaganda and social-revolutionary actions in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and German-speaking Switzerland from Summer 1881 to 1886. - The beginnings of modern socialism in England; Joseph Lane; the Socialist League; William Morris and Edward Carpenter; The Anarchist; Kropotkin and the Freedom Group, 1886. - The social-revolutionary and anarchist movements in the United States of America, 1880-1886; Johann Most in New York; the 4th May 1886 in Chicago; Dyer D. Lum and others; Robert Reitzel. - Le Révolté in Paris, 1885; Kropotkin's years in prison since 1883 and his liberation, January 1886; Elisee Reclus; the abundance hypothesis and its critique by Malatesta; summary and reflections on the more complete and harmonious development of anarchism after 1886.)

Vol. IV: Die erste Blütezeit der Anarchie: 1886-1894. (The first flowering of anarchy: 1886-1894.) First published Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Topos Verlag, 1981; new edition (considerably revised) by H. M. Becker, with introduction, index, and illustrations, Münster: Bibliothek Thélème Verlagsgesellschaft (to be published in Spring 1997).

(Kropotkin, his ideas, propagandistic and scholarly work from 1886 to 1896. - F. S. Merlino. - Malatesta from 1889 to 1894. - The Spanish movement and its development, 1886 to 1893 (Spanish Regional Federation and its development; the Catalonian strikes, 1890-1892; the tragedy in Jerez, 1892; El Productor; Paulino Pallás' and Santiago Salvador Franch’s acts, and the first great repression from 24 September on). - The renunciation of the economic dogma by some Spanish anarchists (Antonio Pellicer, Tárrida del Mármol, Pedro Esteve, Ricardo Mella). - French anarchism in the years 1886 to 1895: Jean Grave and La Révolte, Émile Pouget and Le Père Peinard, Sebastien Faure, Charles Malato; the Illegalists and their critique by Kropotkin and others; the two periods of violent anarchist protest, 1891/92 and 1893/94, the repression of 1894, and the new start in 1895. - Anarchist sympathisers among the young artists and writers; Élisée Reclus, J. M. Guyau, Leverdays, and Zo d’Axa. - The Italian movement from 1891 to 1894, and the first period of repression, from 1894 on. - William Morris, the Socialist League, the London Socialist League, and the Freedom Group; Oscar Wilde; Auberon Herbert; English Tolstoyans. - The International conferences and congresses and the anarchists in the years from 1883 to 1896; International anarchist reunions, conferences, and attempts towards an organisation, 1889 to 1900. - Critics of anarchist communism; summing up of the anarchist idea’s development so far and its prospect.)

Vol. V: Anarchisten und Syndikalisten. (Anarchists and syndicalists.) Part I. First published Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Topos Verlag, 1984; new edition (revised) by Heiner M. Becker, with introduction, index, and illustrations, Münster: Bibliothek Thélème Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996.

French syndicalism up to 1909. - The German anarchists in exile, the “Independent Socialists”, and the different libertarian currents in Germany; Gustav Landauer, Raphael Friedeberg: their ideas and their followers until 1915. - Austria-Hungary (all languages) up to 1914. - Switzerland; Belgium; Holland; Scandinavia; Russia and the other countries of East and South-East Europe; Caucasus; North Africa; Asia: China, Japan, and Korea; the International Tolstoyan movements.)

Vol. VI (in 2 parts): Anarchisten und Syndikalisten. (Anarchists and syndicalists.) Part II. Edited by Heiner M. Becker, with introduction, index, and illustrations, Münster: Bibliothek Thélème Verlagsgesellschaft (Summer 1997).

(The Italian movement(s) from 1894 to the Spring 1915. - Spain from Autumn 1893 to the end of 1933. - Cuba; Florida, and the rest of the USA; Panama; Argentine (from the beginnings to 1930); the other countries of South and Central America.)

Vol. VII (in 2 parts): Anarchisten und Syndikalisten. (Anarchists and syndicalists.) Part III. Edited by Heiner M, Becker, with introduction, index, and illustrations, Münster: Bibliothek Thélème Verlagsgesellschaft (Autumn 1997/1998).

(The USA from 1886 to 1920. - Kropotkin up to the War, 1914. - England; Australia; New Zealand; South Africa. - The French anarchist movement from 1895 to 1914; syndicalism from 1909 to 1914. - Antimilitarism from 1906 to 1914. - The Anarchist International from 1907 on; the International Syndicalist Congress in London, 1913; the founding of the IWMA (1922), and its activities.)

Nettlau regarded the History as not yet completed, and would have liked to carry forward in particular the history and development of the Spanish and Italian movements, which would have made up another volume. This was delayed by the sale of his collection in 1935 and then made impossible through the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, which caught him in Barcelona, and the subsequent political events.

He wrote, however, at the same time that he was working on the later volumes, a number of shorter summaries. The most important one is, of course, the one which he originally finished in October 1932 and revised two years later and which is presented here in an English translation; written in French, it was written at the request of and translated by Diego Abad de Santillán, and published by the bookclub of the Spanish anarchosyndicalists, the Guilda de Amigos del Libro, and part of the edition distributed through the liberal publisher Editorial Maucci: La Anarquía a Través de los Tiempos. Barcelona: Guilda de Amigos del Libro & Editorial Maucci, (1935); 349+(3) p.+ If. Errata (=Biblioteca universal de estudios sociales).

It has been reprinted and translated a number of times: Reprint, with preface by Carlos Díaz, Madrid, [etc.]: Ediciones Júcar, 1978; (= Biblioteca Júcar de política, 49). - As Historia de la anarquia, with a preface by Santi Soler, Barcelona : Zafo, 1978; - (repr. Barcelona : Antalbe (= Colección Documento), 1979. - Swedish transl. by Helmut Rudiger: Anarkismen genom tiderna. Stockholm: Federativs forlag, [1954]. - Italian transl. by Giuseppe Rose: Breve storia dell’anarchismo. Cesena: L’Antistato, [1964]. - French transl. by Martin Zemliak [i.e. Frank Mintz]: Histoire de L’anarchie. [Paris]: Editions du Cercle/Editions de la Tête de Feuilles, (1971); (= Archives révolutionnaires); new edition, revised and with additional materials (Paris): Artefact, (1986; with index). - A very expensive (and not very good) American transl. by “Scott Johnson” was published in 1979: Anarchy through the times. New York: Gordon Press, 1979; (= History of anarchism series).

Nettlau also wrote a number of other resumes, one of which he started in July 1930 and finished in March 1931, published in Russian translation in Probuzhdenie (Chicago), reprinted in Ocherkipo istorii anarkhicheskikh idei i stat’i po raznym sotsial’nym voprosam. (An outline of the history of ideas of anarchy and other articles on various subjects.) [Detroit]: Profsoiuz, 1951; the English manuscript, Outline of the history of anarchist ideas, is preserved in the Yelensky papers at the IISH in Amsterdam.

In March 1937, he wrote also in English a summary of some of the English material, published in Spain and the World and signed X.X.X., “Anarchist Ideals from the Root” (Spain and the World, Vol. I No. 9: 2 April 1937 - No. 13: 4 June 1937 [“I. William Godwin's ‘Political Justice' (1793)”, No. 9:2 April 1937; - “II. From Winstanley and Godwin to 1850”, No. 10: 16 April 1937; - “III. The Anarchist Revival in the Wake of the Revolution of 1848”, No. 11: 1 May 1937; - “IV Joseph Lane and William Morris”, No. 12:19 May 1937; - “V Kropotkin since 1866. Later Developments. Conclusion”, No. 13: 4 June 1937]), to which should be added an article he wrote in 1905: “Anarchism in England fifty years ago”, Freedom (London), Nov.-Dee. 1905 & March 1906 (reprinted by B. R. Tucker in Liberty (New York), February 1906, and as a pamphlet by Joseph Ishill under the title: Anarchism in England one hundred years ago. Commentary note by Benjamin R. Tucker. Berkeley Heights, N.J.: The Oriole Press, 1955; repr. London: Carl Slienger, 1976).

Of related interest, and in some respects deepening and extending his treatment of the subject, is a short history of utopias: Esbozo de historia de las utopias. Trad, del alemán por Diego Abad de Santillán. (= Cuadernos economicos. 8); Buenos Aires: Ediciones Iman, 1934 (repr. in Luis Gomez Tovar and Almudena Delgado Larios, Utopias Libertarias, Vol. III. Madrid: Ediciones Tuero / Fundacidn Salvador Seguí, 1991); and a history, and commented publication of documents of the First International in Spain, written between September 1928 and October 1931, published only in 1969 (edited, revised and with additional materials by Renée Lamberet): La Première Internationale en Espagne (1868-1888), Dordrecht-Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company (1969; 2 vols.).

These general approaches towards a history of anarchism were complemented by a number of biographies and biographical studies. First of all, there are the numerous works Nettlau wrote on his “hero” Bakunin, so numerous that not even all of those which are still important can be mentioned here. The most important was and still is the big biography he wrote mostly in London between 1896 and 1900, and which still remains important for much information that Nettlau obtained verbally, or for documents of which the originals have been lost: Michael Bakunin. Eine Biographie. (The Life of Michael Bakounine). Privately printed (reproduced by the autocopyist) by the author. London, 21.2.1896 - 8.7.1900 (3 Vols., handwritten, with about 1.290 folio-pages, in an edition of 50 copies [one of which is in the British Library]; repr. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971). Nettlau continued to work on the subject with interruptions for the rest of his life, and produced after studying the Bakunin papers held by his family in Naples (which are now lost), four volumes of manuscript additions, which have remained unpublished [the whole has been prepared for publication, scheduled to begin after completion of the publication of Nettlau’s History].

Nettlau wrote several short introductions to the life and work of Bakunin: Michael Bakunin. Eine biographische Skizze. With an afterword by Gustav Landauer. Berlin: P Pawlowitsch, [October] 1901; in a slightly different version in Italian translation by Libero Merlino: Michele Bakounine. Uno schizzo biografico. With a preface by E. Reclus. Messina: Biblioteca dell’Avvenire sociale, 1904. In the early 1920s he wrote again several short biographical introductions, one for Russian anarchists, another one for Mexico: Miguel A. Bakunin (un esbozo biografico). Mexico, D.F: Ediciones del Grupo Cultural “Ricardo Flores Magón”, 1925. Between 1924 and 1927 he wrote (in German) another long biography of Bakunin in four volumes, which includes much material previously unknown, but is still “abbreviated” and less complete than the 1896 version; this remains unpublished, though translation and publication was begun by Abad de Santillán: Biografia de Miguel Bakunin. Vol. I. Buenos Aires: Editorial La Protesta, 1931 (only 64 pp., published as supplements to the Suplemento de la Protesta; preliminaries and biography up to the beginning of 1836; the publication was interrupted by the military coup in Argentina and the suppression of the labour movement).

Several other studies (in book form) treat Bakunin in connection with certain movements: Bakunin and the International in Italy, written at suggestion of Malatesta (who also finished the translation from the French, after the original translator had died) and provided with an important preface by Malatesta: Bakunin e l’lnternazionale in Italia dal 1864 al 1872. Geneva: Edizione del Risveglio, 1928 (several reprints; Rome: Savelli, 1970, 1975); and on Bakunin and the International in Spain: Miguel Bakunin, la Intemacional y la Alianza en Espana (1868 -1873). With a preface by E. Nido. (Biblioteca de La Protesta, 1). n. p. [= Buenos Aires: Editorial La Protesta] 1925 (repr. with introduction and notes by Clara E. Lida.. (New York): Iberama Publishing Co. Inc., 1971 [= Colección Historia Social de Espana, dirigada por Jose Nieto Ruiz]). Also important, though virtually never used by later writers on Bakunin, is Nettlau’s publication of Bakunin's long memoir of justification after he had broken with his former friends around James Guillaume. “La Memoria justificativa de Bakunin sobre la Baronata (28-29 de Julio de 1874)” (in Suplemento quincenal de La Protesta (Buenos Aires), Vol. VIII No. 315, 31 October 1929, pp. 560-566; No. 316, November 1929, pp. 595-599). Easily accessible and therefore useful is. also the republication in one volume of a number of articles on Bakunin that Nettlau wrote tor Freedom and Spain and the World: Writings on Bakunin. London: Carl Slienger, (1976). To all this should be added the introductions he wrote for the Argentinian and then Spanish edition of Bakunin’s works he prepared, translated by Abad de Santillan: Miguel Bakunin, Obras completas, Vols. 1-5, Buenos Aires: Editorial La Protesta, 1924-1929; republished 1938-1939 in Barcelona: Editorial Tierra y Libertad, 1938-1939 (= Biblioteca Universal de Estudios Sociales), this time complemented by a sixth volume (1938; Vols. 1-5 have been reprinted: Barcelona: Ediciones de La Piqueta, 1977-1986).

This short and necessarily incomplete guide to Nettlau’s historical work cannot end without mention of his biographies of the two anarchists particularly dear - and personally known - to him, Malatesta and Reclus.

He wrote a series of biographies of Malatesta, starting in 1921/1922, and originally written at the suggestion of Siegfried Nacht and especially Thomas Keell (the first articles were published in Freedom, after Malatesta had corrected the proofs). Some of these were, much to Nettlau's grief, mutilated by the translators and publishers (an Italian and an English version of 1922 and 1924 respectively), but he considered the German and Spanish editions reliable: Errico Malatesta. Das Leben eines Anarchisten. Berlin: Verlag “Der Syndikalist”, 1922; repr. Berlin: Karin Kramer Verlag, (1973), under the title Die revolutionaren Aktionen des italienischen Proletariats und die Rolle Errico Malatestas. Introduction E Amilie [i. e. Bernd Kramer]. - Errico Malatesta. La vida de un anarquista. Translated from the German by Diego Abad de Santillan, revised and enlarged by the author. B(uenos) Aires: Ed. La Protesta, 1923 ( = Pensadores y propagandistas del anarquismo).

After Malatesta’s death, Nettlau completed the biography in a number of articles in German (published in Die Internationale, Berlin) and Spanish (La Revista blanca); the Spanish articles were republished as a pamphlet: La Vida de Errico Malatesta (4 de diciembre 1853 – 22 julio 1932). El hombre, el revolucionario, el anarquista. Introduction by Federica Montseny. Barcelona: Biblioteca de La Revista blanca, 1933 (repr. n. p. [Bordeaux]: Biblioteca “Tierra y Libertad”, 1945 [= Precursors de la libertad, No. 18]).

Nettlau wrote in the 1920s several versions of a biography of Reclus; in the Labadie collection may be found the (incomplete) English manuscript of one written in 1925 for and serialised in the Yiddish paper Freie Arbeiter Stimme “Élisée Reclus. A biographical essay”. In 1927/28 he wrote a more complete German biography, published as a book in Berlin: Élisée Reclus. Anarchist und Gelehrter (1830-1905). (= Beitrage zur Geschichte des Sozialismus, Syndikalismus, Anarchismus, IV) Berlin: Verlag Der Syndikalist” Fritz Kater, 1928 (reprint Vaduz/Liechtenstein: Topos Verlag AG, 1977). After having completed this, Nettlau visited Paul Reclus on his way back from Barcelona in 1928 and was able to use the papers of Paul’s father Élie Reclus, and a part of Élisée Reclus’ papers now presumably lost. He made use of these for the revised and considerably expanded Spanish translation by Valerian Orobón Fernández: Eliseo Reclus. La vida de un sabio justo y rebelde. Barcelona: Publicaciones de “La Revista Blanca”, n. d. [1929-30]; 2 vols.

Of the many other biographical articles and studies he wrote mostly in the 1920s and 1930s, are of interest here (because referred to in the text), a long essay on Landauer, written on the occasion of the publication of his correspondence: “La Vida de Gustavo Landauer segun su correspondencia” (in La Protesta - Suplemento quincenal (Buenos Aires), Vol. VIII, No. 309, 31 July 1929, pp. [353]-392; repr. in Gustav Landauer, Incitación al Socialismo, Buenos Aires: Editorial Americalee, (1947), pp. 187-325); and obituaries he wrote after Tcherkezov died in 1925: “Recollections of W. Tcherkesoff” (in Freedom, No. 430-432: Oct.-Nov. 1925 - Jan. 1926; a French version, somewhat more comprehensive, in Plus loin (Paris), 15 Sept. -15 Nov. 1925).

Nettlau did not write a biography of Kropotkin, and actually refused to do so; one of the reasons was that Rudolf Rocker intended to follow up his biography of Most with one of Kropotkin. Nettlau, however, did treat Kropotkin extensively in his History, and in many articles; an incomplete but useful list of his writings on Kropotkin is to be found in Hug's Kropotkin-bibliography. In the text Nettlau refers directly to a series he published in 1933/34: “El periódo revolucionario y la revolución segun Pedro Kropotkin”, in La Revista blanca, Vol. 11, No. 252:15 Nov. 1933, p. 353-355; No. 253:23 Nov., p. 372-375; Vol. 12, No. 256:14 Dec., p. 65-67; No. 257: 21 Dec. 1933, p. 81-82; No. 259: 3 Jan. 1934, p. 114-117.

[1] Beiträge zur cymrischen grammatik. I. (einleitung und vocalismus.) Leipzig: Druck von Konig & Freter, 4 March-April 1887; other parts were later published in French or English journals. He was amused to find later that, in the catalogue of the British Museum library, he appeared as two persons: Max Nettlau of Neuwaldegg (for this thesis) and Max Nettlau the anarchist.

[2] Published anonymously first as a series in The Commonweal, new series, Vol. 1 no. 8 — no. 19: 4 August 1893 — 6 Jan. 1894, and then separately as a pamphlet: Why we ave Anarchists. London: The Commonweal, 1894; 27 pp.; translated into several languages.

[3] An Anarchist Manifesto. Issued by the London Anarchist Communist Alliance. London: Printed and published at the Metropolitan Printing Works, 127 Ossulston Street, Euston Road, N.W, [May 1,] 1895; 15 pp.

[4] Nettlau was also the author and compiler of the pamphlet: “Revival of the Inquisition. Details of the tortures inf[l]icted on Spanish political prisoners.” Reprinted from Freedom. London: Publ. for the Span. Atroc. Committee by J. Perry, 1897; 23 pp. [signed Spanish Atrocities Committee; with prefatory note by Edward Carpenter].

[5] Published in Freedom (January — April 1900) and reprinted as a Freedom Pamphlet: Responsibility and Solidarity in the Labour Struggle, also a review of the policy lately discussed by the German Social Democracy and Edward Bernstein. (= Freedom Pamphlets, no. 12). London: “Freedom” Office, May 1900; 23pp. — The Freedom Group also sent it as a report to the International Anarchist Congress in Paris, Summer 1900.

[6] Vol. I — Vol. XV, 1911-1930; published in Leipzig and edited by Karl Grünberg; reprinted Graz 1964-1966 (with an index-volume) and Frankfurt/M, 1979. Nettlau contributed e.g. several large articles on Bakunin and the movement in Italy (Vol 2, 1912), in Spain (Vol. 4, 1914), and in Russia (Vol. 5, 1915); on the International Labour Union, London 1877-78 (Vol. 9, 1921); on discussions in the Communist Working Men’s Club London (Vol. 10, 1920); and on the Spanish International (Vols. 14 & 15: 1929-1930).

[7] “Biographical and bibliographical Data of Max Nettlau, March 1940”, a manuscript edited by Rudolf de Jong in International Review of Social History (Assen), Vol. XIV (1969), pp. 444-482 (480); translated from the German.

[8] “Une lettre”, in Les Temps nouveaux (Paris), Vol. 19 no. 4:24 May 1913, pp. 5-6; my translation from the French.

[9] To Siegfried Nacht, 16 April 1930 (IISH); my translation.

[10] “Die Völkerwanderungszeit im Licht moderner Forschung und sozialen Gedanken (Schluß)”, in Die Internationale ... (Berlin), Vol. II no. 12: Oct. 1929, pp. 12-16 [276-280] (13 [277)).

[11] Letter to Christiaan Cornelissen, 31 Jan. 1935 (translated from the French); it concerns Cornelissen’s Les Générations nouvelles. Essai d’une éthique moderne. Paris: Mercure de France, 1935.