Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (100 page)

While the anarchist movement lost ground after the First World War, a few isolated but vigorous groups, mainly to be found amongst Jewish, Italian and Spanish immigrants, continued to carry forth the message. The Jewish
Fraye Arbeter Shtime
and the Italian
Il Martello
and
L’Adunata dei Refrattari
(which published the writings of Luigi Galleani among others) kept anarchist ideas alive.

Before the depression, anarchism hit the headlines not so much because of its influence, but because of the tragic case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a shoemaker and a fishmonger. In 1921 they were condemned to death ostensibly for an armed robbery which took place at a shoe factory in South Braintree, Massachusetts, but insidiously for their foreign birth and anarchist beliefs. Despite international protests, they were electrocuted in the State of Massachusetts six years later. Anarchism was certainly their strongest passion and they believed in revolutionary violence.
¹⁴
While Sacco may have been guilty of the robbery, Vanzetti’s innocence is almost certain. Their case became a
cause célèbre
, joining up anarchists and communists in their defence and radicalizing a whole generation of liberals. ‘Give flowers to the rebels failed’, translated Vanzetti from an anarchist poem whilst awaiting execution; at least he and his comrade have had their fair share of garlands, if not an official pardon.

Most historians pronounce the death of the anarchist movement in the United States with the passing of Sacco and Vanzetti, but its ideas were still kept alive. The Catholic Ammon Hennacy was converted to anarchist pacifism in prison during the First World War for opposing the ‘blood tax’. Inspired by Tolstoy, he went on with Dorothy Day to develop the Catholic Worker movement. He called for a ‘One-Man Revolution’, advocating rural simplicity and voluntary poverty. Dorothy Day who set up
The Catholic Worker
in 1933 went on to find the social answer to
The Long Loneliness
(1952) in community.

Peter Maurin, who was involved in the Catholic Worker movement in New York City, called for ‘personalism and communitarianism’. Like the IWW, he wanted to build the new society in the shell of the old, believing that the best way to find God is through brotherly love. He advocated
houses of hospitality based on mutual aid to replace State welfare: ‘he who is a pensioner of the State is the slave of the State’.
¹⁵
In the long-term, he called for a ‘Green Revolution’ which would bring about workers’ control in decentralized factories and a shift from the city to the land. In the place of the State, he advocated a community of families, combining private and communal property.

With the growing prosperity of the United States and its workers seemingly won over to the American dream, anarchism as an organized movement virtually disappeared after the depression. Before the Second World War, Emma Goldman returned to the United States, agitated on behalf of her Spanish comrades, but was taken up more as a relic of a bygone era than as an exponent of a dangerous creed. Her earlier support for Francisco Ferrer’s method of rational education after his execution had helped sparked off the influential Modern School Movement in the United States. It insisted on the child being the centre of gravity in the educational process. In practice, the movement tended to be hostile to academic learning, but it prepared a whole generation of libertarians.
¹⁶

During the Second World War, anarchist ideas were revived by a new generation of young intellectuals who recognized the unseemly health of the State. On the east coast, David Wieck, Paul Goodman and others in New York asked
Why
, and moved on to
Resistance
, while Dwight Macdonald brought out the anarchist-pacifist journal
Politics.
On the west coast, Kenneth Rexroth helped set up the San Francisco Anarchist Circle, attracting old Italian and Jewish anarchists and young poets like Kenneth Patchen, who was eventually to achieve some fame as a Beat.

After the war, anarchists involved themselves in the Civil Rights Movement and the Students for a Democratic Society. Paul Goodman called for revitalized self-governing communities to replace the increasingly centralized and militarized American State. The New Left in the sixties, with its emphasis on decentralization, participation and direct action, reflected many of the fundamental beliefs of anarchism. The emerging counter-culture also concerned itself with the transformation of everyday life. A massive non-conformist youth culture developed across the land, especially in California, New York and New England, although its libertarian rhetoric was often a disguise for a self-indulgence which never really threatened the Establishment. It petered out into street-fighting amongst the Yippies inspired by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and the spluttering pyrotechnics of the Weathermen.

The seventies and eighties in the United States saw a resurgence of right-libertarianism, with ‘anarcho-capitalists’ like Murray Rothbard drawing inspiration from Spooner and Tucker. The Libertarian Party became in the eighties the third largest party in the country. Philosophers like
Robert Paul Wolff have argued in
Defence of Anarchism
(1970), rejecting all political authority on grounds of the individual’s moral autonomy. Paul Feyerabend attempted an anarchist theory of knowledge in his work
Against Method
(1975), maintaining that historical explanations are the only feasible accounts of scientific success and that ‘anything goes’ in science. The ex-Marxist Fredy Perlman journeyed via Situationism to become an anarchist visionary in his neo-primitivist
Against His-story, Against Leviathan!
(1983).

The rump of the Industrial Workers of the World still exists, and the Libertarian Workers Group formed in New York in the late 10,70s became a section of the International Workers Association in 1984. At the same time, the communitarian tradition in North American anarchism has come through in the social ecology of Murray Bookchin and cultural and philosophical writings of John Clark. Journals like
Anarchy: Journal of Desire Armed
in Columbia, Missouri,
Social Anarchism
in Baltimore,
Kick It Over
in Toronto,
Black Rose
in Boston,
Fifth Estate
in Detroit, and
Our Generation
in Montréal are breaking new ground in libertarian theory. American anarchists are
Reinventing Anarchy
in the peace, feminist and Green movements.
¹⁷
Anarchist thinking and practice pervade much contemporary radical debate and alternative culture and have been a major influence on the anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements.

T
HE
VAST
UNDERDEVELOPED
CONTINENT
of Latin America has proved a fertile ground for anarchism. Despite the continent’s rich potential, its perennial problems of poverty, military rule and imperialism made the uncompromising stance and extreme demands of anarchism particularly attractive. The fraud, corruption and violence of political life made the coercive nature of the State only too transparent.

The original Indian empires of the Aztecs and Incas had of course been highly hierarchical and authoritarian. But the Spanish destroyed the indigenous civilizations and reduced most of the Indians to landless peasants. In the mid nineteenth century, the
latifundia
system developed in which lands were seized from the Indians and vast estates were concentrated in the hands of a few families. A
patrón -peón
relationship, based on patriarchy and subservience, became part of the rural culture.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the ex-colonies were still closely linked to Spain and Portugal and anarchist ideas were brought in by waves of European immigrants to the towns. It was primarily in the industrial centres in the Eastern countries of Latin America that the strongest labour movements developed and anarchism took root.

Foreign capital and a large influx of immigrant labour, especially from Italy and Spain, were the two principle causes of industrialization in the second half of the nineteenth century. The factory owners, many of whom were foreigners, were attracted by the chance of easy profits, and industrial relations tended to be violent and rough. As a result, anarchism, especially in its syndicalist form, dominated the working class movement in Latin America until at least 1930.
¹
In several countries, the struggles between the anarchists and the State from 1900–20 virtually reached the proportion of an undeclared civil war. Even after the success of Russian Revolution encouraged many workers to turn to communism in the 1930s, anarchism left a permanent mark on the continent and continues to make its presence felt today.

Argentina best illustrates the general principle that the degree of anarchist activity in a Latin American country depended on the extent of its industrialization and the number of its Italian and Spanish immigrants. As the
most industrialized and urbanized country in the region, Argentina developed the most powerful anarchist movement. While some contacts were made with the peasants, it remained a predominantly a workers’ movement based in the cities.

Argentinian sections supporting Bakunin were affiliated to the First International in 1872 and delegates attended the Saint-Imier Conference in 1877.
²
Malatesta stayed in the country from 1885 to 1889 and his
Questione Sociale
had a widespread influence on the Italian workers who were at the centre of the growing anarchist movement. The celebrated anarchist paper
La Protesta
was founded in 1897 and has continued on and off ever since.

Due to the sudden growth of trade-unionism, the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA) was set up in 1901, largely inspired by the Italian Pietro Gori. Its unions were called
sociedades de resistencia
and were considered the principal weapons to propagate the anarchist ideal amongst the proletariat and to undertake strikes, direct action and ‘revolutionary gymnastics’.

At the fifth Congress of FORA in 1905 the anarchists emerged victorious in the struggle against the social democrats. The Congress passed a resolution declaring that ‘it advises and recommends the widest possible study and propaganda to all its adherents with the object of teaching the worker the economic and philosophical principles of anarchist communism’. FORA was opposed to any other form of trade-unionism, including revolutionary syndicalism since the latter wanted to maintain the class structure beyond the social revolution: ‘We must not forget that a union is merely an economic by-product of the capitalist system, born from the needs of this epoch. To preserve it after the revolution would imply preserving the system which gave rise to it.’
³

FORA then launched a series of spectacular strikes; in one year alone, twelve local ones became general. In the first decade of the century, the government declared a state of emergency five times. The violence culminated on May Day 1909 in Buenos Aires when an anarchist procession was suddenly fired on by the police. In revenge, a young anarchist called Simon Radowitsky shot the Chief of Police. The familiar pattern of strikes, bombings and arrests continued, with all civil liberties being revoked. Despite the repression,
La Protesta
continued to be circulated. In 1919, the membership of FORA had reached twenty thousand once again, and the country came near to revolution during the
Semana Trágica
(Tragic Week) following a general strike organized by FORA. Over a thousand people were killed, and fifty-five thousand imprisoned.

Although the Bolshevik success weakened FORA in the twenties, it remained the largest working-class organization in Argentina. It declined
in the following decade until FORA was finally merged with the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores into the Confederación General de Trabajadores in 1929. In the mean time, more purist anarchist groups were revitalized by militant immigrants like the Italian Severino di Giovanni.
⁴

From 1931 the era of military governments began. Yet anarcho-syndicalism still left its impact in the country’s political culture and even contributed to the rise of Peronism after the Second World War.
⁵
In 1951, the populist President Peron declared paradoxically that ‘We are moving towards the Syndicalist State’ and organized one million people into ‘self-governing collectives’. During his rule, which ironically allowed greater participation of the people, the whole anarchist movement went underground.

In 1955 the Argentine Anarcho-Communist Federation (founded 1935) changed its name to the Argentine Liberation Front (FLA). In the sixties the FLA came out strongly against Castro’s communism.
⁶
But while rejecting doctrinaire Marxism it believed that capitalism could transform itself into a more libertarian structure. The events in Paris in May 1968 radicalized a new generation while a popular rebellion in Rosario and Córdoba in the following year renewed revolutionary hopes. Since then the brutal military dictatorships, the Malvinas war, and the rise of social democracy have kept Argentinian anarchism on the political margins. Nevertheless, the economic crisis of 2001–2 gave rise to factory occupations and neighbourhood assemblies run on anarchistic lines.