Read Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism Online
Authors: Peter Marshall
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With Bakunin however the emphasis was more on destruction than innovation.
Bakunin more than any other anarchist thinker is responsible for the violent and menacing shadow of anarchism. Intoxicated with the ‘poetry of destruction’, he not only sided with Satan (’the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds’) in his rebellion against God, but declared that the ‘The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too!
11
To further the cause of freedom, he was willing to resort to secret societies, manipulation and deceit and called for an invisible dictatorship once the revolutionary storm broke out. Under his influence the Jurassian Federation in Switzerland adopted the principle of class dictatorship in 1874, although they specified: ‘The dictatorship that we want is one which the insurgent masses exercise directly, without intermediary of any committee or government.’
12
Although Bakunin was against systematic terror and suggested that ‘there will be no need to destroy men’ he welcomed civil war as a prelude to social revolution.
13
He undoubtedly contributed to the sinister side of anarchism which has attracted disturbed and criminal elements, individuals who delight more in illegality and conspiracy than in building and creating.
Bakunin further enhanced his reputation as a destructive revolutionary by his association in the 1870s with the young Russian student Sergei Nechaev who partly inspired the character of Stavrogin in Dostoevsky’s
The Possessed
(1871–2). Nechaev was not only involved in the political murder of a student but wrote a series of pamphlets arguing that the revolution justifies any means, however destructive. In his
Catechism of a Revolutionary
, he declared of the revolutionary: ‘Day and night he must have one thought, one aim — merciless destruction.’ In his
Principles of Revolution
, he went even further:
We recognise no other activity but the work of extermination, we admit that the form in which this activity will show itself will be extremely varied — the poison, the knife, the rope, etc. In this struggle, revolution sanctifies everything alike.
14
But while Nechaev was no anarchist, and it is now known that Bakunin was not the author of the pamphlet, the stance came to be seen as characteristically anarchist. Marx and Engels tried to associate Bakunin with Nechaev’s amoral position, and describe his anarchism as synonymous with terrorism: ‘There [in Russia] anarchy means universal, pan destruction; the revolution, a series of assassinations, first individual and then
en masse
; the sole rule of action, the Jesuit morality intensified; the revolutionary type, the brigand.’
15
The victim could plead innocence but the accusation stuck.
After the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune of 1871, and the repressive measures of governments throughout Europe against radicals, it is true that some anarchists grew impatient with gradual reform through
education and participation in the labour movement and began to adopt a strategy of ‘propaganda by the deed’ to speed up the advent of the revolution. The doctrine had been advocated earlier by the Italian Republican Carlo Pisacane, a follower of Garibaldi and Proudhon. In his political testament, he wrote:
The propaganda of the idea is a chimera. Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but educated when they are free. The only work a citizen can do for the good of the country is that of co-operating with the material revolution.
16
Another Italian, Carlo Cafiero, who had once been Marx’s and Engels’ trusted agent, came under the spell of Bakunin and developed the doctrine in a more destructive direction. After the failure of the Bologna rising in 1874, Cafiero and Errico Malatesta decided to resort to symbolic actions like taking over a village to encourage the Italian peasantry to revolt. They also led the move in the international anarchist movement towards more violent forms of action. After attending, in October 1876, the Bern Congress of the International, they urged that ‘the
insurrectionary deed
designed to affirm socialist principles by actions, is the most effective means of propaganda’.
17
In
Le Révolté
in Switzerland in 1880, Cafiero went even further by arguing like Nechaev that the revolutionary end justifies any means:
Our action must be permanent rebellion, by word, by writing, by dagger, by gun, by dynamite, sometimes even by ballot … We are consistent, and we shall use every weapon which can be used for rebellion. Everything is right for us which is not legal.
18
During the desperate social unrest of the 1880s many anarchists felt that the only way to speed up the collapse of the capitalist State and bring about the revolution was to go on the attack. They felt justified in opposing the ‘State terrorism’ of the masses with acts of individual terrorism against the agents of the State or the owners and managers of industry, arguing that the force which maintained the existing order had to be overthrown by force. Others decided that they wanted to defend the workers against the State, to demoralize the ruling class, and to create a revolutionary consciousness amongst the workers. They did not expect the acts themselves to overthrow capitalism or the State: assassinating a despot would not get rid of despotism. But as Alexander Berkman observed ‘terrorism was considered a means of avenging a popular wrong, inspiring fear in the enemy, and also calling attention to the evil against which the act of terror was directed.’
19
The anarchist practice of ‘propaganda by the deed’ reached its apogee
in the 1880s and 1890s when kings, presidents and ministers were attacked throughout Europe. The perpetrators were often motivated by a sense of retribution.
These acts of terrorism not only sparked off repressive measures against anarchists in general but gave the anarchist cause a reputation for violence which it has never been able to live down. It has consequently done enormous harm to the movement. It even became the fashion for criminals to claim a link with anarchism after being caught for a sensational crime.
In the midst of the terrorist outrages and growing class war at the end of the nineteenth century, Kropotkin appeared to many of his contemporaries to rise above the anarchist movement as a kind of gentle saint. Oscar Wilde pronounced Kropotkin’s life one of the two most perfect lives he had come across: ‘a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia’.
20
But Kropotkin’s attitude to revolutionary violence was ambivalent at best, and there is an uncomfortable mixture of quietist and aggressive elements in his thinking which is typical of many an anarchist. He certainly rejected Bakunin’s tendency to resort to deceit and manipulation, and went beyond Godwin’s reliance on an intellectual elite; he stressed the need to propagandize amongst the people. He had a great confidence in the capacity of even illiterate peasants and workers for clear thinking. In his early days, he offered a limited defence of terror and felt that illegal protest and violent struggle are acceptable if the people involved have a clear idea of what they are doing and aiming at.
21
Indeed, like Sorel, he even suggested that violent revolution can have a beneficial effect on the oppressed: ‘revolutionary whirlwind … revive[s] sluggish hearts’.
22
Towards the end of his life, Kropotkin was repelled by the spate of terrorist acts and the disastrous effect they were having on the anarchist movement. And yet he still tried to explain them as the inevitable outcome of repressive social conditions. ‘Personally’, he wrote to a friend, ‘I hate these explosions, but I cannot stand as a judge to condemn those who are driven to despair.’
23
In a speech commemorating the Paris Commune in London, Kropotkin further rejected the slur that anarchism was
the
party of violence, arguing that all parties resort to violence when they lose confidence in other means. On the contrary, he maintained:
Of all parties I now see only one party — the Anarchist — which respects human life, and loudly insists upon the abolition of capital punishment, prison torture and punishment of man by man altogether. All other parties teach every day their utter disrespect of human life.
24
Eventually, by the 1890s, he came to disapprove of acts of violence except those undertaken in self-defence during the revolution. He now argued that conditions favoured peaceful evolution rather than violent revolution.
As his friend Elisée Reclus wrote: ‘Evolution and revolution are two successive acts of the same phenomenon, evolution preceding revolution, and the latter preceding a new evolution born of a future revolution.’
25
Kropotkin therefore increasingly sought to encourage existing libertarian and voluntary tendencies in society.
Of all the great anarchist thinkers, Tolstoy was of course the most uncompromising in his pacifist rejection of violence. His position was based on a strict interpretation of the Christian commandment: ‘Thou shalt not kill’; he even interpreted the principle to mean that you should not kill a criminal who seems about to murder a child. It is precisely because government is ultimately based on violence — the soldier’s gun — that Tolstoy wanted to see it abolished; it is nothing less than ‘an organization for the commission of violence and for its justification’.
26
The means he adopted was to refuse to co-operate with the violence of government through civil disobedience and non-resistance.
Gandhi, who called himself a kind of anarchist and looked to an ideal of ‘enlightened anarchy’, developed Tolstoy’s method of non-violent action into an effective means of mass struggle, and managed to break the British hold on India. His declared that ‘The ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy.’
27
By being prepared to break the law and to be punished accordingly, Gandhi’s followers wielded enormous moral power which proved greater than the force of the bayonet. Such a course of action of course relies on widespread public sympathy and at least a minimal moral sensibility on the part of the oppressing authorities. The Sarvodaya movement has continued his strategy of non-violent direct action.
Although she collaborated as a young woman with Alexander Berkman in his attempt on an industrialist’s life, Emma Goldman became an anarchist precisely because she felt human beings are capable of leading peaceful, ordered, and productive lives when unrestricted by the violence of man-made law. Indeed, she defined anarchism as ‘the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary’.
28
Towards the end of her life, she increasingly felt that the Tolstoyans who renounced all violence were right.
Although by the turn of the century, propaganda by the deed in the form of isolated acts of terror was largely abandoned in favour of education and industrial action, it had done great harm to the anarchist movement. It not only meant that governments introduced severe measures against anarchists, but the fear of anarchism continued long after, as the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s in America demonstrated.
While the terrorist strand within the anarchist tradition has been significant, it has always been a minority trend. The advocates of terrorism are more than balanced by a pacifist wing. Godwin was not the only anarchist to
recognize that war is ‘the inseparable ally of political institutions’.
29
Claiming to be the supreme authority within a territory, the State is ready to use its monopoly of force in the form of its police and armed services against its dissenting citizens as well as foreign peoples. Since a State compels its people to fight the people of another State, the war of one State against another State invariably becomes a war of the State and its military apparatus against its own people. It was on these grounds that Tolstoy opposed the State and government. To deliver men from the terrible evils of armaments and wars, Tolstoy called for ‘the destruction of those instruments of violence which are called Governments, and from which humanity’s greatest evils flow’.
30
The carnage of the First World War led Randolph Bourne to conclude that ‘War is the health of the State.’ The experience of war has disastrous psychological consequences:
The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organised. War sends the current of purpose and activity flowing down to the lowest level of the herd, and to its most remote branches … The slack is taken up, the crosscurrents fade out, and the nation moves lumberingly and slowly, but with ever accelerated speed and integration, towards the great end, towards that
peacefulness of being at war.
31
Bourne further noted how in wartime the State achieves a uniformity of feeling and hierarchy of values which it finds difficult to realize in peacetime. The herd instinct drives people into conformity and obedience to the State and encourages a kind of filial mysticism.
Other pacifist anarchists began to stress that violence is the most authoritarian and coercive way of influencing others, and authoritarian means cannot be used to achieve libertarian ends. The use of violence encourages authoritarian and hierarchical organization, as standing armies show only too vividly. A violent person moreover is unlikely to develop a libertarian character. As the Dutch anarchist Bart de Ligt wrote: