We do not fear anarchy, we invoke it : the First International and the origins of the anarchist movement

341 Pages·2015·2.91 MB·English

by  Graham

Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter One
Anarchism Before the International 9
Chapter Two
The Founding of the International 57
Chapter Three
The Debates on Property 81
Chapter Four
Bakunin and the Alliance 99
Chapter Five
The 1869 Basel Congress and the Syndicalist Consensus 109
Chapter Six
The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune 139
Chapter Seven
From Out of the Ashes: The Defeat of the Commune and the Rise of the International in Italy and
Spain 155
Chapter Eight
Very Real Splits in the International 167
Chapter Nine
The Antiauthoritarian International and the Emergence of the Anarchist Movement 197
Chapter Ten
From Collectivism to Communism and Propaganda by the Deed 215
Chapter Eleven
The End (of the International) and the Beginning (of the Anarchist Movement) 239
Endnotes 263
Index 303
Introduction
ON SEPTEMBER 28, 1864, delegates representing European workers met at
Saint Martin’s Hall in London, England, to create the International
Workingmen’s Association (the “International” or “IWMA”). Stirring speeches
were given regarding “the fraternity of peoples” and the “cause of labour.”1 But,
who would have suspected that from this organization would ultimately spring
an international anarchist movement? After all, none of the delegates identified
themselves as anarchists and there were no recognizably anarchist movements in
Europe at the time.
The stated purpose of the organization was not even to create an international
revolutionary movement, but to provide support for workers across national
boundaries in their struggles against an increasingly international capital. In
response to strikes in England and France, capitalists were bringing in lower-
paid “blacklegs,” or “scabs,” from other countries to replace striking workers,
foiling attempts to improve working conditions. Work was also being sent
abroad to countries with lower wages and workers who could be more easily
exploited.
Yet, by 1872, when the anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814–1876) and his
associate, James Guillaume (1844–1916), were expelled from the International
at the instigation of Karl Marx (1818–1883), a significant portion of the
International’s constitutive associations had adopted an anarchist stance. Those
associations reconstituted the International along antiauthoritarian lines and
provided the foundation for an international anarchist movement.
The purpose of this book is to describe how this came about. I do not pretend
to present a work of original scholarship. My goal is simply to present a
historical narrative, which, unlike other works on the International, focuses on
the anarchist currents within the organization and how, from these various
currents, an international anarchist movement emerged in the early 1870s. In the
process, I will be referring to some original documentation neglected in other
works on the subject. My hope is to dispel some common misconceptions and
sometimes misrepresentations regarding the ways in which anarchist ideas
spread within the International, leading to the creation of avowedly anarchist
movements, primarily in France, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, but also in
Russia, Germany, and the Americas.
Before the International was founded in 1864, there were people who
sometimes identified themselves as anarchists, but it would be difficult to
describe them as forming part of an anarchist movement. One of the premises of
this book is that anarchism only assumed the status of a genuine movement after
people with anarchist sympathies became involved in popular struggles, starting
with the struggle of European workers for self-emancipation. Consequently, I
distinguish between anarchism as a body of ideas and anarchist movements.
In the first chapter, I survey the various anarchist currents in Europe that
predated the International. I do this in order to show that anarchist ideas had
already emerged in Europe, particularly during the revolutionary struggles that
swept across the continent in 1848–1849, and to demonstrate what influence, if
any, they had on the emergence of anarchist tendencies in the International.
Despite the focus of this book, I do not agree with the view that “anarchism”
can only be conceived as a historically embodied movement or movements
having a common genesis in the struggles within the International between the
so-called authoritarians (Karl Marx, his allies, and the “Blanquists,” followers of
the French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui) and antiauthoritarians (Bakunin and
his associates). Such a “genealogical” or “historicist” approach conflates
anarchism as a body of ideas with anarchism as a movement. It results not only
in a Eurocentric approach to anarchism, but one that excludes from the anarchist
pantheon even those European anarchists who were active prior to the founding
of the International, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) and Joseph
Déjacque (1821–1864).2
This approach also precludes the possibility of anarchist ideas and movements
emerging independently at different times and places in different circumstances.
If during an era of social upheaval in China around 300 CE, a Daoist like Bao
Jingyan expressed views substantially similar to those expressed 1500 years later
by European anarchists during another era of social upheaval, and the latter’s
views are generally accepted as “anarchist,” then there is no reason why Bao
Jingyan cannot be described as an anarchist too.3
Bao Jingyan’s motto was “Neither Lord Nor Subject,” which is remarkably
similar to the nineteenth-century anarchist battle cry, “Neither God Nor Master.”
As with later self-proclaimed anarchists, Bao Jingyan opposed hierarchy and
domination, seeing them as the cause of poverty, crime, exploitation, and social
conflict; rejected religious beliefs that justified such a state of affairs; looked
forward to the revolt of the masses; and advocated a voluntary society without
rank or status, and the inequalities of wealth and power that inevitably
accompany them. If adherence to such beliefs by a European worker or
intellectual in the nineteenth century qualifies them as an anarchist, then so
should Bao Jingyan should qualify as well, despite the temporal and
geographical distances that separate them.
In order to determine whether someone’s views, or a movement, can be
described as “anarchist,” an analytical approach is unavoidable. One must come
up with some identifying or defining characteristics of anarchist doctrines and
movements that distinguish them from other ideas and movements. One cannot
simply rely on self-identification. Just because someone claims to be an
anarchist does not make it so. By the same token, just because someone never
identified him-or herself as an anarchist does not mean that his or her ideas
cannot be qualified as anarchist.
Neither can anarchism be reduced to the ideas (and actions) of particular
individuals. This sometimes leads to the fallacy that anarchism is whatever
particular anarchists say it is, regardless of their personal idiosyncrasies,
inconsistencies, and foibles; or, worse, that anarchism is whatever these
individuals said and did, before they identified themselves as anarchists
(Bakunin) and after they had ceased to do so (Proudhon). If anarchism is nothing
but the sum of all the ideas and actions of everyone who ever identified
themselves as anarchists, then anarchism would simply be an incoherent
mishmash of contradictory ideas and approaches.
As will be seen, the members of the International who came to describe
themselves as anarchists did so on the basis of some fundamental tenets that they
quite self-consciously argued distinguished them from other currents in the
International. They also recognized as anarchists people who held similar views
and had influenced them in coming to their own conceptions of anarchism, such
as Proudhon. What, then, were those views that distinguished them, and those
they regarded as their precursors, as anarchists?
During his polemics within the International against the “authoritarians” and
“bourgeois socialists,” Bakunin set forth six primary grounds for distinguishing
his anarchism from the views of his opponents: first, his rejection of any kind of
institutional, coercive authority (antiauthoritarianism); second, his opposition to
the modern state, even as a “transitional” power to abolish capitalism
(antistatism); third, his opposition to any participation in existing systems of
government or “bourgeois politics” (antiparliamentarianism); fourth and fifth,
his advocacy of voluntary federation during the struggle against capitalism and
the state and in a postrevolutionary society (federalism), so that the revolutionary
means were consistent with the revolutionary ends (libertarianism); and sixth,
his call for the immediate abolition of the state and capitalism through direct
action, including insurrection and the expropriation of the means of production
by the workers themselves (social revolution).
In identifying Proudhon as an anarchist, Bakunin focused on Proudhon’s
critique of the state and private property, his opposition to the authoritarian
politics of the Jacobins and any sort of “revolutionary” dictatorship, and his
concept of “agro-industrial federation,” a libertarian form of socialism wherein
the state and capitalism are replaced by voluntary federations of agricultural,
industrial, and communal organizations with no central authority above them.
Where he differed from Proudhon was in his advocacy of insurrection and
expropriation and in his rejection of Proudhon’s view that capitalism and the
state could be gradually supplanted through the creation and ever-widening
expansion of voluntary associations of workers, peasants, professionals, and
other functional groups with access to free credit through their own credit
unions, or a “people’s bank.”
Following Bakunin’s approach, anarchism, whether his, Proudhon’s, or
someone else’s, can be distinguished from other doctrines on the basis of its
antiauthoritarianism, antistatism, antiparliamentarianism, federalism,
libertarianism, and advocacy of direct action. Bakunin included Proudhon in the
anarchist camp despite Proudhon’s opposition to insurrection and expropriation
and his gradualist approach. Bakunin recognized that, despite these differences,
Proudhon was still an anarchist. Both advocated direct action, though Proudhon
favored a nonviolent approach.
While Proudhon and Bakunin were both proponents of “social” revolution,
Proudhon’s social revolution was conceived in gradual, pacific terms, not in
insurrectionary terms, in contrast to Bakunin. Furthermore, all socialists of their
era agreed on the need for some kind of “social” revolution, given the failure of
the preceding “political” revolutions (the French Revolution and the European
revolutions of 1848–1849). Consequently, advocacy of social revolution does
not distinguish anarchism from other doctrines, such as socialism.
For the purposes of this study, therefore, I will proceed on the basis that
anarchism can be defined as a view that rejects coercive authority, the state, and
participation in existing systems of government, and that advocates federalism
(or voluntary association), libertarianism, and direct action. This is consistent
with Proudhon and Bakunin’s conceptions of anarchism and, as will be seen in
the chapters that follow, the views of those members of the International who
came to identify themselves as anarchists and to create an international anarchist
movement.
Arguably, some of these six defining characteristics can be derived from the
others. For example, the state and government can be seen simply as specific
examples of coercive authority, so that antiauthoritarianism is the primary
defining characteristic of anarchism. As Sébastien Faure (1858–1942) put it,
“whoever denies Authority and fights against it is an Anarchist.”4 Be that as it
may, in historical terms, I believe that it was on the basis of these six
characteristics that anarchism came to be distinguished from other political
orientations. These six criteria help flesh out the content of anarchism in a more
substantive sense, providing a more robust and “political” conception of
anarchism as something more than mere antiauthoritarianism. To define
anarchism simply on the basis of what it is that anarchists oppose fails to take
into account the positive anarchist alternatives to authoritarian institutions and
practices that also distinguish anarchism from other doctrines.
The antiauthoritarian wing of the International can be seen as a precursor to
both anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism. The term “syndicalism” is
derived from the French word for trade union, syndicate. Revolutionary
syndicalism can be broadly defined as the doctrine that the working class,
through its own trade union organizations, can abolish capitalism and the states
that protect it, by means of working-class forms of direct action, such as strikes,
boycotts, and sabotage, culminating in a general strike, the expropriation of the
capitalists by the workers themselves, and the creation of workers’ self-
management.
Revolutionary syndicalists also favored federalist forms of organization similar
to the voluntary federations advocated by anarchists. However, some
syndicalists did not completely oppose political participation, arguing only that
the revolutionary unions themselves should remain independent from political
parties, while their members were free as individuals to participate in politics
and to support the political party of their choice. Thus, revolutionary syndicalism
can be described as “apolitical” in this sense, whereas anarchism is explicitly
“antipolitical”; that is, anarchists are opposed to participation in existing political
institutions, political parties, and elections. Syndicalists who adopted an
anarchist stance often referred to themselves as “anarcho-syndicalists” to
distinguish themselves from the “apolitical” revolutionary syndicalists. As we
shall see, there were both anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist elements in the
International.
My use of the term “libertarianism” to refer to Bakunin’s view, shared by other
anarchists and most syndicalists, that “liberty can only be created by liberty,”
may be confusing to contemporary readers but is historically accurate.5 Long
before advocates of laissez-faire capitalism began identifying themselves as
“libertarians” around the mid-twentieth century, anarchists had already been
calling themselves libertarians as early as Joseph Déjacque in the 1850s.6 During
the 1890s in France, “libertarian” became a popular synonym for “anarchist”
because people who identified themselves as “anarchists” were liable to
imprisonment under the so-called lois scélérates, or “exceptional” laws, banning
anarchist propaganda.7 “Libertarian socialism” and “libertarian communism”
became terms used by anarchists to distinguish their views from what they
regarded as the “authoritarian” socialism and communism of the Marxists,
primarily on the basis that anarchists advocated libertarian means for achieving
anarchist ends.
Another point of clarification: the International Workingmen’s Association is
today commonly referred to as the First International. However, other than in the
title to this book, I will be referring to it simply as the “International.” This is
mainly because that is how it was referred to at the time of the events recounted
in this book. The International only came to be referred to as the “First”
International after the founding of the so-called “Second” International in 1889,
which was dominated by Marxist political parties, and from which the anarchists
were excluded in 1896 on the basis that they were opposed to participation in
existing political systems. Then there was the Marxist-Leninist “Third”
International created by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Russian Revolution,
which became an instrument of Soviet foreign policy, and the “Fourth”
International, founded by Trotsky and his followers in 1938 after his break with
Stalin.
The tendentious use of the “Second,” “Third,” and “Fourth” International
labels (and then “Fifth” or “Sixth,” ad infinitum or ad nauseum, depending on
your point of view) suggests that the only legitimate heirs to the “First”
International were the various Marxist political parties, whether social
democratic or Marxist-Leninist. However, as I hope to show in this book, the
anarchists were as much, if not more so, the successors to the “First”
International as were subsequent Marxist political parties. In fact, when the
International was split in 1872 by the effective expulsion of the anarchists at the
Hague Congress, there were no clearly Marxist political parties or movements,
nor would there be until the 1880s.
One of the main purposes of this book is to show that the so-called “First”