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Anarchist Studies 17.2 10/11/2009 12:20 Page 5 About this issue’s cover In the summer of 2008, having just arrived ...

Author: Norry LaPorte | Reiner Tosstorff | Ralph Darlington | Kevin Morgan | Dana Williams | Nathan J. Jun

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Anarchist Studies 17.2

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About this issue’s cover In the summer of 2008, having just arrived in London, I encountered Matthew Butcher’s red and black Model for A Monument: The AnarchoSyndicalist Town Hall in the south east corner of Russell Square, adjacent to the British Museum. A write-up affixed Photo: Tim Brotherton to the model informed me that the imposing 5.5 metre-high lattice wood structure had been commissioned by Camden Council as part of that year’s London Festival of Architecture. Originally, Butcher imagined his model might occupy the site of a former communist cinema and propaganda distribution centre at 84 Grays Inn Road, but the Russell Square location was equally meaningful and appropriate, as it memorialized a squat in one of the adjacent buildings that had been closed by police in 2002. Butcher’s prefiguration of anarchism in the form of a model town hall where the local community could gather to organize the social transformation of society pointed toward moments of radicalism that crop up again and again in the history of the square and its environs. Butcher’s metaphor for radicalism’s historic transience was an anarchist-syndicalist flag painted on the model’s red rotatable roof. When the roof was set in motion the flag periodically came into view, but only thanks to human agency. Similarly, anarchism entails a constant process of renewal through critical discussion and engagement, an insight Butcher gained from a debate between Erico Malatesta and Pierre Monatte at the 1907 International Anarchist Conference in Amsterdam. Responding to Monatte’s call for anarchists to focus their efforts on building the syndicalist movement, Malatesta observed that though syndicalism is anti-parliamentary, syndicalism alone would inevitably degenerate into an instrument for the corporate needs of the unionized working class, with no regard for the non-unionized or, for that matter, those of other classes. Anarchism’s purpose, he argued, was to liberate the whole of society, and to engage all classes in that process. Syndicalism might serve as one of the means through which an anarchist society could be realized, but should never be mistaken for the goal. Matthew Butcher runs his own architectural design firm, Post-Works, and teaches at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. He can be reached at [email protected]. Allan Antliff


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Anarchist Studies 17.2 © 2009

ISSN 0967 3393

www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/anarchiststudies/

Guest Editorial Paul Chambers and Norry LaPorte The three articles by Tosstorff, Darlington and Morgan in this issue examine syndicalism from its origins in the nineteenth century through its encounter with Bolshevism to its current manifestations. They were originally presented as papers to a one-day conference at the University of Glamorgan in the autumn of 2007.1 Reiner Tosstorff ’s paper is one of the few articles of its kind available in English. It is the product of extensive research in several languages, notably communicating the former secrets of the Soviet archives to readers. Its focus is the discussions held between the Bolsheviks and foreign syndicalist organisations to set up a new, revolutionary communist-dominated Red International of Trade Unions in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution. Of course, this encounter was far from harmonious. What attracted syndicalists to talk to the communists was as compelling as it became problematic: the Bolsheviks had made a successful revolution, sweeping away ‘capitalism’ (if this is a suitable definition of Russian society) in a seeming ‘red dawn’. It comes as no surprise that the discussions between syndicalists, Bolsheviks and their supporters in the West were laden with tensions and disagreement. The fault lines ran along well established grooves, between the Leninist conception of the ‘leading role’ of the party and political activism as the means to the revolutionary end; and the syndicalists’ prioritisation of economic and industrial struggle. Unlike the Bolsheviks, syndicalists were largely opposed to working within the established, social-democratic dominated ‘reformist’ unions. Yet, as Tosstorff reminds us, we should not forget the significance of disunity between and within the fissiparous syndicalist organisations. Those breaking off the dialogue with the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the 1920s emphasised syndicalism’s anarchist ideological inheritance in a development marking the birth of Anarcho-syndicalism. Yet, even those syndicalists joining ranks with Bolshevism – most famously, Andreu Nin and Alfred Rosmer – were among the first and most vocal opponents of the Bolshevisation and ensuing Stalinisation of international communism. Importantly, this political flirtation reminds us that


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communism’s pre-1917 roots were not only in social democracy, but also in revolutionary syndicalism. In Germany – home to the largest communist movement outside Soviet Russia until the Nazi ‘seizure of power’ in 1933 – the breakaway syndicalist-type Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD) outnumbered the ‘official’ Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in Berlin, and in several heavy-industrial centres, until its unification with the Independent Socialist Party (USPD) – through the aegis of the Comintern – at the end of 1920. Internationally, many social democrats and trade unionists visited Russia after the end of the Civil War in 1920 and wrote positively of what they had seen (or, more precisely, what they had been shown). In South Wales, S.O. Davies visited Soviet Russia as a miners’ union official in 1920, and was so impressed that he remained more communist in political orientation than Labourite, despite being the long-serving Labour MP for Merthyr Tydfil. Indeed, during the early years of the Cold War, he was the only British MP to speak in Parliament in support of the Red Army’s suppression of the anti-communist rising in East Germany in 1953. In the summer of 1935, he had led a delegation to Berlin to hand a petition signed by 100 MPs to the Nazi authorities, which demanded the release from prison of the Communist leader Ernst Thälmann. Davies’ Soviet sympathies were typical of the left of ‘old’ Labour’s ‘Russia complex’: perceptions of a better world eclipsed the often grim realities of Bolshevik rule that refuted ideological claims to the contrary. While the Left of international social democracy was (generally speaking) impressed by the seeming achievements of Soviet Russia, it was syndicalists who drew attention to the nascent party dictatorship. Yet, in Germany – as in much of the ‘developed’ western world – syndicalist accounts of the ‘dictatorship’ in Russia were eclipsed by the accounts of other, less hostile, left-wing parties. Nevertheless, syndicalist activists kept the issue of Soviet political prisoners alive at factory meetings – for example in the massive Hamburg shipyards – and always exerted an attraction to activists on communism’s quasi-syndicalist ‘ultra-left’, who rejected all organisational cooperation with ‘reformism’. Although Reiner Tosstorff ’s article focuses on syndicalism in ‘underdeveloped’ southern – or ‘Latin’ Europe – it also notes its influence in the advanced, highly industrial powerhouse of Germany, the Ruhr. The region’s later industrialisation, in the ‘heavy industrial revolution’ of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and the ensuing waves of immigration, produced a fractured workers’ milieu in which social democracy was weak and syndicalism an important expression of radicalism. Syndicalism was also an expression of workers’ radicalism in areas of Germany, such as the eastern districts of Saxony around Dresden, where social democracy was Anarchist Studies 17.2


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deeply implanted but on the right of the national party organisation. In the early years of the Weimar Republic, syndicalism as an organised, political movement and as a ‘tendency’ among local communists – not least in Berlin – represented a significant challenge to Bolshevism from the left. Ralph Darlington, in his nuanced overview of syndicalism and anarchism in their French, Italian and Spanish contexts, explores national variations on an internationalised leitmotif. Along the way he critically re-addresses two commonly held assumptions: that anarcho-syndicalism thrives best in regions that remain socially and economically under-developed, and that the appeal of this movement resides with the lumpenproletariat and the landless peasantry (historically two groups with relatively low levels of political organisation) rather than the industrial working class. The discussion is foregrounded with a very useful exploration of the terms ‘syndicalism’ and ‘anarcho-syndicalism’. While in broad terms syndicalism is above all ‘revolutionary trade unionism’, it has always existed in tension with reformist tendencies and situational imperatives. Moreover, while it is formally internationalist and revolutionary, its concrete manifestations have been shaped by national traditions and contexts, resulting in many nationally specific variants on the theme, which were themselves subject over time to the flux and flow of changing leaderships and directions. Thus, as a generic term with internationalist significance, it is best understood in terms of political action rather than ideology – ‘a practical social movement engaged in working class struggle’. Ironically, ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ began life as a pejorative term deployed by the parties of the Communist International, but soon became a useful rallying point for those workers increasingly opposed to centralised political control, and for local autonomy, and ultimately played a role in the transformation of anarchism from a minority current to a movement with appreciable mass appeal. Darlington charts the exponential growth of anarchist influence in trade unionism in Italy, Spain and France, noting that rather than being always the product of supposedly ‘backward’ societies characterised by weak capitalism and underdeveloped industry, the social and economic contexts were much more fluid and regionally variable. For example, while France lagged behind Britain, Germany and the USA, the period after 1905 saw significant, if uneven growth, among the industrial workforce. Moreover, the distinctive French revolutionary tradition had shaped a culture of revolution from below, and when this was combined with an existing political culture that effectively marginalised workers, a revolutionary unionbased politics that eschewed parties and parliaments came to be seen as an attractive and necessary option that utilised the main weapon in workers’ arsenals, their power Anarchist Studies 17.2


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at the level of the shop floor. In terms of the occupational composition of those drawn towards syndicalism, from 1900 onwards workers were as likely to be drawn from large scale industries as the more traditional small scale industrial concerns, with the overall picture being one of diversity. By 1909, the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) had gained half a million new members, many clearly members of the industrial working class, which raises questions about customary notions that syndicalism mainly had its roots in marginalised sections of the workforce. Spain, a predominately agrarian society and late entrant to the industrialising sphere, dominated by an absolute monarchy backed by the army and Church, clearly fits the bill of ‘backwardness’, but again local factors, notably a century of armed struggles against the Madrid establishment, long-standing and widespread anarchist and federalist sympathies and a repressive and unstable political climate, do much to explain the broad appeal of anarcho-syndicalism. While in terms of occupational composition, the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) drew much of its strength from the agrarian labouring class, it had from its inception a heavily industrial character, reflecting its roots in the emerging industrial regions. By way of contrast, Italy, a society marked by deep rural poverty in the south (and a history of spontaneous labour uprisings) and a rapidly industrialising north (but with a lack of those political channels which might have been utilised for reform), saw the steady transmission of revolutionary union action from the south to the north rather than vice versa, although it did not gain a significant foothold in the politicised industrial classes to the same extent as in France or Spain. What we see in all these cases are particular sets of historical and cultural contexts combining with a broader affinity towards an emerging international syndicalism, while at the same time exhibiting distinct national diversities. Kevin Morgan focuses not on social movements but on an individual, Emma Goldman, utilising her story to address wider issues and themes in the early twentieth-century revolutionary Left. In a meticulously researched discussion Morgan focuses on the expressive function of anarchism in order to tease out the tensions between ‘social’ and ‘individual’ anarchism. The crucial question here is the compatibility of these distinct tendencies; Goldman’s life and principles serve as the canvas on which these tendencies are played out. Interestingly, Morgan avoids conventional analysis of the tensions between socialism and libertarianism and instead focuses on ‘elitist and popular’ or ‘democratic’ conceptions of social change’ – revolution from above or below. This allows him to engage in what he describes as ‘a less innocent reading of her anarchism’, which engages with Goldman’s fascination with and Anarchist Studies 17.2


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appropriation of elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy, her ambivalence towards syndicalist modes of operation, and her preference for individual acts of ‘propaganda by deed’. Morgan’s view is that Goldman saw herself as a vanguard figure – a herald of the revolution – who used her personal charisma, access to public platforms and privileged speaking role, notably in the pages of the literary journal Mother Earth, to transform propaganda by the deed into propaganda as deed. Sharing Nietzsche’s iconoclasm, Goldman also appeared increasingly drawn to his elitism and to the idea of the lone revolutionary as intellectual and ‘superman’, a direction arguably at odds with the practical anarchism of solidaristic social movements engaged in working class struggle, but reflective of the fact that there was not one but many anarchisms playing themselves out in this period. Chris Ealham’s article on anarchist activist-historian Jose Peirats, while not part of the original Glamorgan history conference, nevertheless nicely complements those papers, not least because it focuses on the creation of labour history. Ealham offers a fascinating account of labour history in the making, and through a poignant account of the trials and vicissitudes of Spanish anarchists in exile, situates the researching and writing of history firmly within the revolutionary struggle itself. Peirats’s history of the revolution is no dry academic account, and the history itself, emerging as it does from ‘below’ and in the context of ongoing revolutionary struggle and sacrifice, situates Peirats and his many collaborators and supporters as ‘heralds of the revolution’. In retrospect, and as Darlington notes, it appears that the influence of anarchosyndicalism as a current within international trade unionism was relatively short-lived. Arguably, the waning of the movement was less to do with internal factors and rather more to do with the disruptive activities of the nascent Comintern and the triumph of fascism in Europe. The CNT has re-emerged in post-Franco Spain, but it has struggled to adapt to a radically re-configured environment.2 While it remains recognisably ‘anarchist’ and ‘syndicalist’, these currents are of historical interest where the CGT is concerned. Nevertheless, anarchist currents continue to resonate globally, particularly in the alter-globalisation movement (but also in the praxis of environmentalist, peace and women’s movements).3 In a very real sense, the series of revolutions that ultimately led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent crisis within Marxism, the abortive protests of Tiananmen Square and the creation of a state-sponsored capitalist market in the People’s Republic of China, have helped strengthen anarchism’s hand. At the same time reformist and mainstream social democratic tendencies appear also to be in crisis in Europe. It is worthwhile therefore to re-consider seriously Darlington’s contention that the emerAnarchist Studies 17.2


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gence of anarcho-syndicalism was coterminous with a crisis in both reformist social democratic politics and orthodox Marxism. Opportunities clearly exist, more so with the emergence of the internet, and new heralds of the revolution – notably Chomsky and Klein – continue to carry the torch for anarchism and bottom-up revolution. Paul Chambers is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glamorgan. He has published on various facets of religion including religion, politics and human rights. He is the author of Religion, Secularization and Social Change in Wales (University of Wales Press, 2005). He is currently engaged on research into recent Polish migration in Wales. Norman LaPorte is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Glamorgan. He works on communism and related topics. His publications include The German Communist Party in Saxony, 1924-1933 (Peter Lang, 2003). He is writing a biography of the German communist leader, Ernst Thälmann.

NOTES 1. The first three pieces in the issue were originally presented as papers to a one-day conference at the University of Glamorgan in the autumn of 2007. We are grateful to the Division of History at the University of Glamorgan, which generously offered funding, and to the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Wales and Llafur (the Association for the Study of Welsh Labour History). The event was part of a series organised in collaboration with Kevin Morgan at the University of Manchester and Steve Hopkins at the University of Leicester. Other papers presented at these conferences have been published in a special issue of Socialist History (Issue 34). The fourth feature article in this issue, an evaluation of José Peirats’s La CNT en la revolución española by Chris Ealham, though not part of the conference, also offers an important contribution to our understanding of syndicalism. 2. See B.R. Martínez, ‘Anarchism, anthropology and Andalucia: an analysis of the CNT and the ‘New Capitalism’, Anarchist Studies 14:2, pp. 106-130. 3. D. Held and A. McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization, Cambridge, 2002, pp. 112115.



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The syndicalist encounter with Bolshevism Reiner Tosstorff Translated by Norry LaPorte

ABSTRACT The Russian Revolution of 1917 represented a great opportunity for the international Left but also exacerbated tensions between those who argued for revolution from below via industrial action and those who supported the Leninist conception of the vanguard party. This article draws from previously secret Soviet archive material and focuses on the dialogues and tensions between organs of the nascent Bolshevik state and foreign syndicalist organisations post-1917 and the subsequent emergence of a distinctive anarcho-syndicalist current. Keywords syndicalism, industrial associations, Bolshevism, Comintern, Profintern, ‘the trade union question’, ideological anarchism

This article is about the conflictual relationship of non-Russian syndicalist organisations with Bolshevism and the Communist International after the October Revolution.1 The term ‘syndicalism’ is defined as covering all of the tendencies whose self-perception gave precedence to the revolutionary trade union over the party, if not its complete replacement. This rather dismissive relationship to the organisational form of the party represented its main point of difference with the emergent communist movement. This does not mean that, aside from this main characteristic, there were not strong differences of opinion in syndicalist ranks. This could be assumed from the contemporary political language, which differentiated between Industrialists, Unionists and the ‘actual’ Syndicalists. In this way, one could differentiate between organisations in the ‘craft trade union’ tradition of the French CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail), industrial unions like the North


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American IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) – who were better known as the ‘Wobblies’ – or the then British Shop Stewards, as well as the ‘united (or unity) organisations’2 after the example of the German industrial unions, to say nothing of the more ‘exotic’ examples like supporters of the now forgotten Daniel DeLeon, who attributed to industrial associations equal rights alongside the party. These organisational differences may have influenced the relationships that particular groups forged with Bolshevism. Yet they were only a subordinate factor in the general feud about the main issue of whether trade union or party had priority in the class war. This article will not, however, deal with the complicated question of the anarchists’ – who are often wrongly equated with syndicalists – relationship to the October Revolution, since they did not belong to such trade union organisations.3 Indeed, there were significant anarchist tendencies which strongly rejected work in the trade unions as, by their nature, they inclined to reformism. Before the First World War, the self designation – above all in Romance languages – was simply ‘syndicalist’4, which meant nothing more other than trade union movement; perhaps for clarity, the adjective ‘revolutionary’ was then added. ‘Anarcho-syndicalism’ is then the later specific nexus of anarchism and syndicalism as first produced in the controversy about the Bolshevik revolution. In summary, this article deals with revolutionary trade union associations which were self-sufficient and represented an ‘industrial strategy’, from wage struggles to the general strike. They were united in strident criticism of parliamentarianism and the bureaucratisation of the ‘traditional’ trade unions; in other words, with what we today would call rejection of indirect representation.5 This portrait of revolutionary unions has its main emphasis in southern Europe. Here, syndicalism dominated the trade-union movement in many areas and was, thus, more influential than ‘Marxism’. This does not mean that syndicalism was not represented in many other countries; but that it tended to be a minority current. Before the First World War, the Bolsheviks followed the model of the ‘orthodox Marxism’of the German Social Democrats in their virulent rejection of syndicalism. Although syndicalism did not play a great role in the Russian workers’ movement, the Bolsheviks had ‘learned’ – by following debates in the international workers’ movement – that it represented a ‘negative deviation’. Lenin used this in the international debates of the Bolshevik faction. For, apart from some anarchists, it was the ‘ultra-Left’ Bolsheviks around Bogdanov and Lunacharsky who tried to make known the ideas of West European syndicalism to Russian workers and who, in Lenin’s eyes, appeared particularly deviationist.6 This negative attitude changed with the First World War. When social democracy split into supporters and opponents of the war, Anarchist Studies 17.2


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syndicalism (and anarchism) also experienced a similar development, even if those forces supporting the war were a minority. The result was that Bolshevism came into contact with syndicalist groupings in the anti-war Left (Zimmerwald and Kienthal). The outstanding example of this syndicalist, anti-war Left was produced in France with the grouping around the journal La Vie Ouvrière inside the CGT. Its editorial circle (of whom Pierre Monatte and Alfred Rosmer7 are particularly worthy of mention) worked closely with Russian revolutionaries in exile in France (around the journal Nashe Slovo). Appropriately, two of them, Leon Trotsky and, above all, Solomon Dridzo (who was later known by the pseudonym he used in the Russian movement, Alexander Lozovsky) played an important part in the future discussions between syndicalists and communists. The latter could even point to his own period of activity in the CGT before the First World War.8 In addition, after the October Revolution the Bolsheviks also directed their proclamations for the foundation of the Communist International to groupings from the syndicalist sphere and called for their participation.9 Their call fell on fertile soil. In the years 1918 and 1919, the vast majority responded positively to the news from Russia. Numerous examples can be found from across the world. At the beginning of 1918 the leading Wobbly, Harrison George, wrote from his prison cell – where he was interned for his opposition to the war – a pamphlet about the Russian Revolution under the title Red Dawn, which found a wide circulation. The Argentinean trade union federation FORA (Federación Obrera Regional Argentina) complemented its name to include the adjective communist in order to show its solidarity with the Bolsheviks (i.e. was now known as FORA-C). At the end of 1918, the central organ of the Spanish CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) wrote: Bolshevism is the name, but the idea is that of all revolutions: economic freedom […] Bolshevism represents the end of superstition, of dogma, of tyranny and of crime […] Bolshevism is the new life for which we struggle, it is freedom, harmony, justice, it is the life that we want and will enforce in the world.10

What explains this positive embrace of the Bolshevik revolution? It is all the more surprising as, in one way or another, many syndicalists came from an anarchist background or were under this type of influence; to them, all sorts of Marxist politics were treated with suspicion. The endorsements can be explained using a statement by the former Wobbly turned Communist, James P. Cannon, speaking decades later to the historian Theodor Draper about his discussion in 1919 with the co-founder of the IWW, Vincent St. John: ‘I believe he was as sympathetic at that time, as I Anarchist Studies 17.2


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was. The revolution was an action – and that’s what he believed in.’11 The Bolsheviks had destroyed the capitalist state and thereby shown that revolution was possible; by contrast, social democracy only spoke about socialism. This revolution had taken place against bourgeois parliamentarianism and under the influence of the soviets, the workers’ councils. It was, therefore, a revolution which had nothing to do with ‘politicians’. It took only one step to identify the soviets with trade unions, the works syndicates. This argument is found in numerous contemporary syndicalist statements. In this early period there was no possibility for the syndicalists to familiarise themselves systematically with the reality of Bolshevik power. Although the invitation had been extended, no syndicalists found their way to the founding congress of the Comintern in March 1919. Visiting Russia was first practically possible when the blockade of the country became ineffective in the spring of 1920 with the Bolshevik victory in the civil war. Before this, however, one question made itself conspicuous, anticipating future confrontations: the ‘trade union question’. Where communist parties were formed, they were normally created out of social democratic parties. Their members belonged to the socialist-led trade unions. Yet where syndicalist unions also existed, there was now conflict over the question of whether communists should join them, as these were unambiguously revolutionary, thus leaving the reformist trade-union associations. The discussion had great significance in Germany, for example. One of the reasons for this was the role played by the Bolsheviks’ representative, Karl Radek. Bolstered by the authority of the Russian party, he attempted to implement socalled ‘cell building’ inside the Social Democratic-led trade unions. The nascent KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), which was still trying to win a mass basis of support, carried out a party split in a manner leading to confrontation with its syndicalist tendency. It was not by chance that the syndicalist FAUD (Freie Arbeiter-Union Deutschlands) went from a position of sympathy to a position of confrontation with communism. Another example would be Sweden. In contrast to other countries in which communist parties were founded more slowly (and – perhaps it was no coincidence – where syndicalists were much stronger) the early quarrel over the trade union question did not take place. At the same time a further question emerged: that of the ‘leading role’ of the party. What this meant was whether a political party had the right to intervene in trade-union affairs, even imposing its political line on the trade unions through its members’ factional activity. Anarchist Studies 17.2


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In any case, from the positive views sketched above, a whole series of syndicalist organisations – such as the Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI), the CNT, the British Shop Stewards and the revolutionary minority in the CGT – formally declared expressions of interest in the Comintern and therefore sent delegates to the Comintern’s second congress in the summer of 1920. Others sent at least observers, who – at the same time – were furnished with the task of a sort of fact-finding mission about the situation in Russia. Some syndicalist activists, however, made their way on their own initiative, such as the Japanese Wobbly Taro Yoshiharo, or Bertho Lepetit and Marcel Vergeat, who belonged to the CGT minority (who had also sent an official delegate, Alfred Rosmer, some time before). The situation in the summer of 1920 gave the syndicalists, for the first time since the end of the war, a relatively representative gathering in Moscow. Despite much effort in Western Europe, this had not taken place since the first gathering, which took place in London in 1913 (if one discounts the consultation in Spanish El Ferrol in 1915, which was, in any case, not representative). The sending of delegates by two syndicalist organisations to the re-foundation congress of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), which was held in Amsterdam in July and August 1919, was even less of a success.12 As a concession to the oppositional tendency during the war this was to become comprehensive in membership, i.e. it would include syndicalists. There was even talk of the inclusion of Russian trade unions. But the Russians, who were in the midst of civil war and the blockade, did not come. Instead they denounced the congress as a gathering of ‘yellow class traitors’ who wanted to tie the trade unions to the Versailles system and, thus, to capitalism; their alternative was the foundation of a revolutionary tradeunion international. Both syndicalist organisations – from Germany and Holland – that participated reached a similar conclusion about the uselessness of the IFTU from a revolutionary perspective.13 It was against this background that syndicalist representatives met in Moscow in the summer of 1920. Now at the second congress of the Comintern (23 July-7 August), the syndicalists found out that their theories and strategies were incompatible with the Bolshevik understanding of the revolutionary party, although Bolshevik leaders, like Trotsky, insisted that this was not very different from the syndicalist term ‘the active minority’. Indeed, while the Bolsheviks stressed the necessity of political action as the lever to overthrow capitalist society, the syndicalists stressed economic and industrial means. At the same time, two other delegations also stayed in Moscow, who represented the left wing of the IFTU or, more precisely, the Italian Trade Union Federation and the British TUC (Trade Union Congress). In June they had begun Anarchist Studies 17.2


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discussions with the Comintern leadership and representatives of the Russian trade unions. It was decided to set up an alternative to the Amsterdam International, but it was initially left open whether this should be political – referring to the leadership of the IFTU and its majority line – or organised directly (a separate revolutionary trade-union international). Now discussions with the syndicalists began in order to include them in a manner firming up the intended challenge to the IFTU. Immediately a whole series of theoretical and practical differences were articulated. According to the leading Soviet negotiator and future leader of the RILU (Red International of Labour Unions), Alexander Lozovsky, they dealt with the following topics: the relationship between the economy and politics; the necessity of the revolutionary party; the relationship to the Comintern; the question of the form of state (workers’ councils); and, finally, the problem of a split-off from, or factional work (‘permeation’14) in, the reformist trade unions.15 On 15 July when, after long, difficult discussions, an agreement was signed calling for the foundation of the Provisional International Trade Union Council, it carried only the signatures of the Russians, the Yugoslavs, the Italians, the Georgians, the Bulgarians, the French and the Spanish. While the first five organisations were communist led (or, like the Italians, close to communism), there were only two syndicalist signatories. Rosmer signed for the minority in the CGT – which was split into several tendencies of which he represented the most pro-communist, grouped around the newspaper La Vie ouvrière. And, although the CNT had actually been very critical of this move, Ángel Pestaña signed, as he felt tied by the decision to join taken at the previous year’s CNT congress. All of the other syndicalists refused to sign. In several rather ambiguous formulations, the founding declaration expressed the necessity of removing opportunists from the trade-union movement, forming revolutionary cells in the existing trade unions and, finally, setting up a Council which, in the closest co-operation with the Comintern, should pursue the process of revolutionising the trade-union movement. After vociferous discussion it was finally possible to get the agreement of all the syndicalists, from the Shop Stewards through the USI – whose leader, Armando Borghi, did not arrive until very late in the proceedings – to Augustin Souchy of the FAUD. The basis for co-operation was now not the acceptance of the entire founding declaration, but only agreement on the principle of revolutionary class struggle. Finally, however, this support remained rather uncertain and unclear, and was also to form the basis of future differences of opinion and confrontation, especially between the Russians and Souchy. He was accused by them of deception, in that he had not understood his views in the discussion in Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Moscow as a formal obligation to actually support such a Trade Union Council back in Germany. At the end of August there was also a dispute when all of the syndicalists, apart from Rosmer, refused to sign a resolution which spoke of the necessity of organising bureaus of the Trade Union Council in the different countries in co-operation with the communist parties. In the end the Bolsheviks, using these means, could appoint the International Trade Union Council as the organisational force for a new trade union international. After many postponements, the founding congress was to be held at the beginning of July 1921 in Moscow. Most syndicalist organisations now abstained from participating in the preparations for the congress. Instead, they met in Berlin in the second half of December 1920. Those present were representatives of the IWW, the Shop Stewards, the Dutch and Swedish Syndicalists, the minority in the CGT and FORA-Comunista , and included Russian observers (from the Bolshevik-led trade unions). This conference – which is sometimes also known as a pre-conference for a yet to be organised ‘proper’ conference – was characterised by great differences of opinion; not only between the Russian trade union representatives and all of the others, but also among the syndicalists. Some, above all the Swedish and German delegates, clearly showed their mistrust of the Bolsheviks, even if they had not yet proclaimed an open break with them, and called for the organisation of their own international independent of the Bolsheviks. Others, however, looked for some sort of co-operation with the Bolsheviks. Finally, compromise formulations were found: support for co-operation with communist parties when there were common demands, and instead of ‘dictatorship of the working class’ the adoption of the slogan ‘domination of the working class’. All syndicalists were called on to go to Moscow. An international bureau was set up, which has left few traces and apparently never contacted the Trade Union Council in Moscow, as had actually been agreed. Because of these developments, discussions about the Trade Union Council and about co-operation with the communist parties shifted to the national organisations. In this regard, another factor emerged. In the summer of 1920, the syndicalist delegates had gone to Moscow not only to participate in the Comintern congress, but also to gather information about the actual situation in Russia. After their return they published reports; ironically, the most critical of them, written by Borghi and Pestaña, did not appear until a year later as, when they arrived in their homelands, they were immediately arrested. All of these reports gave unfavourable impressions of Bolshevik Russia. It was not just a question of the catastrophic economic situation; worse still, there was criticism of the political situation, the dictatorship, the oppresAnarchist Studies 17.2


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sion of revolutionaries who were not Bolsheviks, the role of the party and so forth. Because of this, the influence of what we could term ‘ideological anarchists’ was strengthened; that is, those syndicalists who were, in one way or another, in contact with groups that had an affinity to anarchism and which now saw their earlier suspicions of ‘Marxism’ confirmed. Where there were relatively unhindered conditions for political discussion, the anarchists made an impact – such as in the campaign of the French Anarchists inside the CGT-minority against those with a pro-communist position, and in the discussions in the FAUD. While contingent factors played their part, above all in the selection of delegates, with the exception of the FAUD all of them decided to participate in the founding congress of the future RILU. However, the participating organisations, with all their differences emphasised, decided to mandate their delegates to support an organisationally independent ‘economic’ international, which would not be formally subordinate to the Comintern. That the FAUD was the only organisation refusing to go to Moscow was certainly no coincidence; nor was it only the result of decades of disagreement between Marxists and anarchists. It was in Germany that the confrontation over revolutionary trade union tactics had gone furthest, that is the feud over working within the reformist mass organisations or setting up separate revolutionary unions. In the Ruhr, the FAUD had suffered badly from pro-communist splits and had in these very months experienced another defection – that of the seamen. From the beginning, the founding congress of the Red International of Labour Unions16 (or, by its Russian acronym, Profintern) – which met in Moscow from 3 until 19 July 192117 – was dominated by clashes between the Bolsheviks, supported by other communist delegates, and the syndicalists. This began with the question of mandates. Who was representative? Were delegates from communist minorities in the trade unions which belonged to the Amsterdam International also reformist, as was asserted by many – if not all – of the syndicalists? And how was the strength of these factions determined? Delegates took offence that the delegates from nonRussian republics represented overwhelmingly agrarian countries, or represented nothing other than a part of Russia. At the same time the syndicalist movement in a whole host of countries was seriously divided, and therefore appeared with a number of organisations that attributed to themselves very generous membership numbers. However, the Bolsheviks succeeded in imposing a framework for determining the number of votes by implementing a proposal by Lozovky, the main organiser of the congress for the Trade Union Council, to the party leadership in April. This was the method by which the Second International had already determined the number of votes at their congresses. Comprehensive delegations, to which a certain number of Anarchist Studies 17.2


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votes were allocated, were formed for each country, which then had to divide up the number among the competing organisations on the basis of their individual strength. While these procedures undoubtedly showed aspects of manipulation, it saved the Communists the misfortune of finding themselves in the minority. If the dispute over mandates caused a bad atmosphere, then the highpoint of this quarrel became the relationship between the Comintern and the future RILU. While two prominent syndicalists, Alfred Rosmer and Tom Mann – on behalf of the Trade Union Congress – proposed a so-called ‘organic (i.e. permanent) link’ in the form of mutual representation on the respective leadership bodies, almost all other syndicalists rebelled against this idea and voiced their support for organisational independence.18 This opposition was expressed most strongly by the majority of the French delegation, which became the spokesman of the syndicalist minority and submitted a counter-proposal. Not all syndicalists believed that the trade unions should always be the main organisations of the class struggle. They acknowledged that it would depend on historical developments within a concrete environment. But where there were strong syndicalist traditions the party would be subordinate or, at best, of the same ranking; but certainly never occupying the leading role, as the Comintern proposed as a general rule. While most syndicalists voted for the French proposal, thereby opposing ‘organic links’ with the Comintern, some did finally declare their support for Rosmer’s proposal: the resolution was not about subordination, but recognised the independent existence of the trade unions and provided only for close coordination. This support came mainly from the Spanish and a minority in the French delegation. Rosmer’s resolution passed with 287 votes, against 37 for the counter-resolution. While this point on the agenda extended over five of the seventeen sessions, there was a short continuation with the agenda item ‘tactics’. On this issue a formal discussion developed on the historical status of revolutionary syndicalism. The Spaniard Nin regarded its development as a positive synthesis of Marx and Proudhon, and the Frenchman Michel stated concisely that it was self-sufficient. They were severely opposed by the Bulgarian Dimitrov, who presented ‘Marxist orthodoxy’ in the sense of severe criticism of a deviation. In contrast, Lozovsky argued in the manner typical of the Bolsheviks’ courting of syndicalism. In the past, syndicalism had significance as a revolutionary answer to opportunism; therefore, in its time, it had been superior. Now, however, it would no longer be in a position to give the correct answer to the question of revolutionary strategy. The syndicalists would now have to form a bloc with the Communists for the formation of a revolutionary mass party, especially where they had mass influence (and where the old, Anarchist Studies 17.2


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pre-war social democracy had been weak and completely reformist). As a concession, Lozovsky proposed deleting a sentence in the statutes, which spoke of ‘ideological leadership’ over the RILU by the Comintern. Syndicalists like Nin and others declared this to be unacceptable. It also brought Lozovsky up against persistent resistance on the part of communist delegates from Germany, Bulgaria, Poland, etc, who attacked this as an unacceptable concession, but the latter finally had to yield. This discussion occupied only a small amount of time, yet the mood again became heated with the agenda point ‘organisation’, as this was about forming cells in the reformist, mass-based trade unions instead of founding separate revolutionary unions. However, it was obvious that many of the syndicalists had already exhausted their energy with the earlier discussions. The French, in particular, held back, and left the last appearances of the opposition to the representatives of the German Unionists, the delegates of the IWW, and a Canadian organisation close to them, as well as some other small associations. It is easy to understand why they behaved so decisively. The Communists stood for a united trade union organisation. Thus, they were opposed to splitting-off and leaving the existing trade unions. They even argued for dissolving the separate revolutionary unions and for joining the existing mass organisations, despite their reformism. Revolutionary cells should be created in them. Therefore, the resolution on organisational questions, which concerned itself with the situation in a whole series of countries, provided for the dissolution – or at least strict limitation – of the independent unions. While this exhausted the scheduled agenda, toward the end another question surfaced which, until then, had only been discussed by a few delegates on a purely informal basis outside of the official course of the congress: the fate of the Russian anarchists. After the Kronstadt uprising four months earlier, and the introduction afterwards of the New Economic Policy, the Bolsheviks’ oppression of their left-wing critics had been stepped up through a series of arrests in March. The anarchists imprisoned in Moscow, who had learned about the presence of the syndicalist delegates from abroad, decided in June to begin a hunger strike in order to force their release or, at least, legal proceedings. With the help of some Anarchists, such as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Alexander Schapiro, who remained at large, they took up contacts with the foreign visitors – many of whom had a political past in organised anarchism. Intensive discussions began with the Bolshevik authorities, which, by tacit agreement, were not carried out in public. After the congress, this led to the release, then deportation, of most of them. However, on the last day of the congress, the Bolshevik leader Bukharin gave a speech on the ‘counter-revolutionary Anarchist Studies 17.2


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role’ of the Russian Anarchists, especially the Makhno movement. Initially, the syndicalists were dumbfounded in their reaction; and it set off a great rebellion when the chairman, Lozovsky, refused to allow an answer from a Canadian delegate. ‘Delegates stood on chairs singing the “Internationale” when Lozovsky endeavoured to speak. For several minutes the convention floor was not unlike the New York stock exchange with every one shouting, including spectators who rushed from their seats onto the convention floor itself.’19 Finally, a French delegate, Henri Sirolle, was able to make a statement in the name of the syndicalist delegations. After some smaller points, this allowed the congress to end in greater accord, for example with the adoption of a message of greetings to the Russian workers and to Lenin. Why had the syndicalists remained so unsuccessful? The communist majority can certainly not be explained simply through manipulation of the delegates or their mandates. Undoubtedly the communists represented a significant tendency in the international workers’ movement. And the argument of some syndicalists that the communists, merely by their membership of the Amsterdam International, must already be reformist was not very convincing. That was not the view of most revolutionary workers who, at this time, came to communism. Just as unconvincing, however, was the ways in which the Bolsheviks raised the number of their mandates using delegates from all Soviet Republics. Possibly not all trade union delegates with party cards did represent what they claimed to represent. Yet, the main problem for the syndicalists, as has been shown, proved to be the disunity in their priorities. There were significant differences between the small, divided industrial unionists and those syndicalists working in mass organisations. Further, a certain fixation on the organisational question must be stated. It is interesting to note that, during the plenary meetings, not one of the syndicalist delegates posed the question of the objectives of revolutionary trade unions according to syndicalist theory: the future leadership of the socialist or collective economy. This question, which during the second congress of the Comintern still had had significance for Pestaña and Souchy, was only briefly raised by the Shop Steward leader, J. T. Murphy, in the commission on the statutes of the Red Trade Union International. Another factor, which certainly had a negative influence on the syndicalists, was that not every delegation included the best activists. This was true especially of the French, as the CGT congress was imminent and many leading members of the opposition had chosen to participate in it, instead of travelling to Moscow. In addition, behind the majority of the French delegation there was a secret ‘pact’, orchestrated by Victor Griffuelhes20, a formerly leading but now marginal veteran Anarchist Studies 17.2


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of the pre-war CGT, which had the aim of guaranteeing a syndicalist hegemony, independent of any party meddling, over the revolutionary opposition in the CGT. (When this manoeuvre was revealed in 1922, it created a huge scandal and dealt a heavy blow to the ‘pure’ syndicalists and anarchists, effectively marginalising them).21 On top of that the delegate Michel Relenk, during the congress a hard-line opponent of the communist majority, was denounced by his co-delegates because, immediately after the congress, he had submitted curious offers to the Bolshevik leadership to argue the case for the adhesion to the RILU in France, changing his mind in exchange for financial support. And Victor Godonnèche of the procommunist minority within the French delegation complained that he had had to represent a motion of the delegation majority in a commission, as the designated delegation had not turned up out of lack of interest. All in all, the syndicalists from the different countries had held a number of ‘factional meetings’ and announced the formation of a sort of organised current; but in the end nothing came of it. An international syndicalist tendency in opposition to Moscow did not initially consolidate after this congress. Time was needed for this and it would depend on the discussions inside the organisations. On the other hand, the organisational question presented here which led to such loud outbreaks of opposition, in order to proclaim incompatibility with Bolshevism, were not of such significance to all syndicalists. The counter-move made by the Bolsheviks was to grant them an important concession at the second congress of the Red International of Labour Unions in November 192222, which showed their great interest in finally winning them over: they relinquished the ‘organic connection’ with the Comintern. This helped, in particular, to win the new French revolutionary trade union federation, the CGTU (Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire) – which was founded after the split of the CGT at the end of 1921 – for the RILU (especially after the outcry after the revelation of the ‘pact’). All this reinforced the deep gulf among the syndicalists between the ‘intransigents’ and the pro-Bolshevik forces. What certainly explains the behaviour of those syndicalists who consented to a bloc with the Bolsheviks was, above all, success in struggle, which the Bolsheviks represented and which made them a magnet for every revolutionary. But something more should be added: the stress on the economic, ‘industrial’ action, on workers’ control through factory councils and on the principle of industry-wide trade unions as against craft unions, all of which were at the core of the communist understanding of trade unionism. This, and similar ideas aimed at the implementation of revolutionary trade union policies, had been missing from the Anarchist Studies 17.2


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strategy of the Second International. Ironically, but not without reason, all this earned the Bolsheviks the reproach of being syndicalists from their social-democratic opponents (such as, for example, the Menshevik trade union expert Salomon Schwartz, and other trade union leaders who were active in the struggle against communism).23 To use the words of the most prominent syndicalist defector to communism, the Catalan Andrés Nin – until his expulsion in 1928 a supporter of Trotsky and deputy to Lozovsky in the RILU leadership in Moscow – in a letter to the Madrid Anarchist Mauro Bajatierra in September 1922: Were there errors, injustices? Who doubts that? But who would have been able to avoid them? Are we all faultless? Anything but! And we did not make a revolution. And, at the same time, how absurd it would be to condemn syndicalism because it made mistakes and, not insignificantly, it would be absurd to condemn the Russian revolution for the same reasons.24

With knowledge of subsequent events, the fallacy of Nin’s evaluation is evident. But, for a complete balance sheet, several matters require our attention. A significant proportion of syndicalists who had advocated an alliance with the Bolsheviks were the first to rebel against the ‘Bolshevisation’ and Stalinisation of the Communist International. To name only the best known of these rebels, they included Alfred Rosmer and Pierre Monatte in France and Andrés Nin and Joaquín Maurín in Spain. It was no coincidence that most of these former syndicalists had good relations with Trotsky who, due to his experiences during his stay in France from 1914 until 1916, was best able to evaluate the revolutionary potential of syndicalism. It is also easy to understand why these former syndicalists were in the first ranks of opposition communists from the mid-1920s. They belonged to a generation which was deeply shaped by the revolutionary wave at the end of the war, in which they had played a prominent role. Moreover, many of them were already politically active before the war, some of them in leading positions. They had joined the Bolsheviks because they represented revolution. When matters unquestionably changed they could not acquiesce. At the same time, however, it cannot be disputed that a number of former revolutionary syndicalists, above all those from subordinate positions and largely without lengthier experience of struggle, who belonged to a younger generation and were first active from the beginning of the 1920s, now earned their livelihoods from trade union (or, sometimes, party) positions – thereby not so dissimilar from their Anarchist Studies 17.2


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reformist comrades – and furnished Stalinism with a ‘proletarian’ basis and veneer. Names that could be mentioned in this respect would be Gaston Monmousseau and Benoît Frachon in France, Giuseppe Di Vittorio in Italy, and José Díaz in Spain. However, these syndicalist traditions were pushed into the background in the course of the consolidation of Stalinism and, especially, by the course towards the Popular Front, which wanted to offer a more ‘moderate’ image of communism. This can be seen in the official historiography of individual parties. Although many of the parties in ‘Latin’ Europe (and, to some extent, Latin America) owed to syndicalism a good proportion of their mass basis as well as leadership corps, it was banished from the official historical image, and instead communism’s social democratic roots were stressed. Even the last ‘official’ history of the Comintern, which was produced by the communist parties in the 1970s, presented an analogous view at the level of the International. Finally, a few concluding words about the ‘intransigent’ syndicalists. Without tracing these developments in detail, as the Canadian historian Wayne Thorpe has already done, we should mention that this subdivision of syndicalism now found its ideological basis in anarchism to an extent which had not been so determining for pre-war syndicalism. (To which, in addition, the role of specific anarchist (affinity) groups is to be counted, which developed a particular interest in work inside the revolutionary trade unions in order to struggle against the pro-communist tendencies.) Revolutionary syndicalism became anarcho-syndicalism. At the end of 1922 the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) was founded. However, it never became an International based on mass influence (although one of the interesting – often overlooked – facets of its international impact was how it took hold in parts of Latin America).25 The reasons for this were, on the one hand, the absence of a mass basis in most countries; and on the other hand, the rather contemptuous attitude towards the International on the part of the only really mass-based organisation, the Spanish CNT, when, from 1936, this was in a position to play a revolutionary role but relinquished it. At the beginning of 1938, in a private letter following an IWMA conference on the Spanish revolution, Emma Goldman had to concede by looking back on the events surrounding RILU’s foundation: Yes, my dear, we have come to a point [where] I never expected to arrive: to have two opinions. One for the outside world and one for intimate comrades and friends. How I upbraided Bob Minor [in the summer of 1921, R. T.] when he refused to divulge to the public the horrors of the Soviet regime he disclosed to Sacha [Berkman, R. T.] and me. How naive and childish we were to believe that a Anarchist Studies 17.2


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revolution brought about by Anarchists will not impose measures wide of the mark of our ideas.26

This article summarises some of the results of my study, Profintern: Die Rote Gewerkschaftsinternationale 1920–1937, Paderborn 2004. In it are detailed references to the sources in archives and the secondary literature. In addition, the following studies should also be emphasised: Wayne Thorpe, ‘The Workers Themselves’. Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913–1923, Dordrecht, 1989, and the edited volume, Marcel van der Linden /Wayne Thorpe (eds.), Revolutionary Syndicalism. An International Perspective, Aldershot, 1990. Reiner Tosstorff teaches history at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He is the author of a history of the Profintern in German (Paderborn 2004). Other recent publications cover the history of the POUM in the Spanish Civil War and aspects of the International Labour Organisation in the inter-war period. He is currently researching a biography of the German metal workers leader in the early years of the Weimar Republic, Robert Dissmann. Email [email protected]

NOTES 1. On the fate of Russian Syndicalists and Anarchists, see Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists, Princeton, N.J., 1967, and the documentation based on sources from the Russian archives, V. V. Krivenkiï (ed.), Anarkhisty. Dokumenty i materialy 1883–1935gg., 2 vols., Moscow 1998/1999. 2. This refers to an organisational model aspiring to simultaneously perform the role of party and trade union. 3. For two case studies see: Santi Fedele, Una breve illusione. Gli anarchici italiani e la Russia sovietica 1917-1939, Mailand 1996; Jean Maitron, Le mouvement anarchiste en France. Vol. 2, De 1914 à nos jours, Paris 1975, pp. 41–55. 4. From the French ‘syndicat’: trade union. 5. Literally, Stellvertreterpolitik. 6. Robert C. Williams, The Other Bolsheviks. Lenin and his Critics, 1904-1914, Bloomington 1986. 7. On this key figure of those Syndicalists who early on became involved with the Bolshevik revolution see the special issue ‘From Syndicalism to Trotskyism. Writings of Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer’of Revolutionary History (vol. 7, no. 4. 2000).



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8. Reiner Tosstorff, ‘Alexander Lozovsky: Sketch of a Bolshevik Career’, in Socialist History (34), (2009), pp. 1-19. 9. Miloš Hájek/Hana Mejdrová, Die Entstehung der III. Internationale, Bremen 1998, p. 68. 10. Quoted in Antonio Bar, La CNT en los años rojos (Del sindicalismo revolucionario al anarcosindicalismo, 1910-1926), Madrid, 1981, p. 451. 11. James P. Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism, New York 1962, p. 305. 12. As its headquarters were also relocated here from Berlin, it became known as the ‘Amsterdam International’, see Geert van Goethem, The Amsterdam International. The World of the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU), 1913–1945, Aldershot 2006; Reiner Tosstorff, Kurze Geschichte des Internationalen Gewerkschaftsbundes. 85 Jahre Amsterdamer Internationale, Hamburg 2004. 13. Only one small syndicalist organisation from Argentina, which was also called FORA (but without the addition of ‘communist’), belonged to the IFTU until 1922; it was isolated in the international movement. 14. I am using the historical term ‘permeation’ here instead of ‘entryism’, a more familiar term, but invented and used much later than these events. But it is the term still usually used in the secondary sources on British syndicalism. 15. A. Losowski (=Lozovsky), Der Internationale Rat der Fach- und Industrieverbände (Moskau gegen Amsterdam), Berlin 1920, p. 46. In this pamphlet, Lozovsky gives his account of the origins of the international trade union council. 16. During its early beginnings, mainly the name Red Trade Union International was used, due to the British presence. But later on, growing participation from the US ‘Americanised’ its name. 17. The course of the congress was documented in a continuous bulletin (totalling 16 issues) which, afterwards, was published – together with supplementary material – as its proceedings. According to details in the RILU press and in reports published by participants, the bulletin appeared in the four languages used at the congress – Russian, German, English and French. However, of the German edition, only the first seven issues can be found, so that we have to use a complete Russian copy. (The entire edition appeared under the title: 1yi mezhdunarodnyi kongress revoliutsionnykh, professional’nykh i proizvodstvennykh sojuzov. Stenograficheskyi otchet, Moscow 1921.) Additionally, the speeches to some of the points on the agenda as well as the resolutions were published as self-standing pamphlets. The material in the RILU archive on the first congress is very fragmentary. There are no complete stenographic records of all the sessions, nor are there complete records of delegates and the congress commission. An



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18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

additional set of sources are the depictions of the course of the congress by several delegates, especially the syndicalist minority, after their return home; these are a useful addition and, occasionally, a means of correcting the official proceedings. Rosmer’s speech is reprinted in the above mentioned special issue of Revolutionary History (note 7), pp. 67-80, together with a short introduction (‘The links between the Comintern and the RILU’, pp. 60-66) by this author. George Cascaden, ‘Shall Unionism Die?’, n. p. n. d., p. 82. On this significant personality in the French workers’ movement, see Bruce Vandervoort, Victor Griffuelhes and French Syndicalism, 1895-1922, Baton Rouge 1996. For a detailed account of the ideological background, sympathetic to the anarchist and syndicalist critics of the communists within the revolutionary opposition of the CGT, very soon to become a new trade union federation, the CGTU, see David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917-1945, Westport – London, 2002, esp. pp. 113-146. Here too we must go back to the Russian version as the ostensibly published proceedings in German could not be located. See: II kongress Krasnogo Internatsionala Profsojuzov v Moskve. 19 noiabrja – 2 dekabria 1922 goda, Moskau – Petrograd 1923; Bjulleten’ II kongressa Krasnogo Internatsionala Profsojuzov v Moskve v Kolonnom zale Igo Doma Sojuzov 19-go noiabria 1922 goda, Moscow 1922. See the entry on the RILU by Salomon Schwartz, including quotes from the Action Programme and from the resolution on tactics at the founding congress, in: Ludwig Heyde (ed), Internationales Handwörterbuch, des Gewerkschaftswesens, 2 vols., Berlin 1931f, vol. 2, pp. 1348–1359, here p.1350. For Schwartz, an ‘orthodox Marxist’ in the tradition of the Second International, this ideological adaptation was the price that the Bolsheviks had to pay for their co-operation with the Syndicalists. Lozovsky elucidated the aims and methods of the Red International of Labour Unions in his pamphlet: Das Aktionsprogramm der Roten Gewerkschafts-Internationale, Berlin 1921, 2nd edition 1922. ‘Carta de Andreu Nin a Mauro Bajatierra’, in: Revista de historia moderna y contemporanea, no. 1, 1980, pp. 25–31. Vadim Dam’e, Zabytyi internatsional, 2 vols., Moscow, 2006/2007. David Porter [ed.], Vision on Fire. Emma Goldman on the Spanish Revolution, New Paltz 1983, p. 307. Robert Minor, a famous cartoonist, who visited Russia in the early days of the revolution, had originally been sympathetic to anarchism, but then became a Communist.



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ISSN 0967 3393


Syndicalism and the influence of anarchism in France, Italy and Spain Ralph Darlington ABSTRACT A commonly held assumption is that anarchism as a revolutionary movement tends to emerge in politically, socially and economically underdeveloped regions and that its appeal lies with the economically marginalised lumpenproletariat and landless peasantry. This article critically explores this assumption through a comparative analysis of the development and influence of anarchist ideology and organisation in syndicalist movements in France, Italy and Spain and its legacy in discourses surrounding the nature of political authority and accountability. Keywords syndicalism, anarcho-syndicalism, revolution, unionism, France, Spain, Italy

Many historians have emphasised the extent to which revolutionary syndicalism was indebted to anarchist philosophy in general and to Bakunin in particular, with some even using the term ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ to describe the movement.1 Certainly within the French, Italian and Spanish syndicalist movements anarchists or so-called ‘anarcho-syndicalists’ were able to gain significant, albeit variable, influence. They were to be responsible in part for the respective movements’ rejection of political parties, elections and parliament in favour of direct action by the unions, as well as their conception of a future society in which, instead of a political state apparatus, the only form of government would be the economic administration of industry exercised directly by the workers themselves. Other features of the syndicalist movements in these three countries, such as federalism, anti-clericalism and anti-militarism, were also profoundly influenced by specifically anarchist ideas and organisation.2 However if Marxism was a convergence of German philosophy,


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British political economy and French socialism,3 the traditional assumption, by contrast, that syndicalism was simply an outgrowth of anarchism, would be an oversimplification, even though the two were certainly directly related inside the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) in France, the Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI) in Italy and the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) in Spain. But in many other countries where syndicalist movements also flourished (for example, Britain, Ireland or America), anarchist influence was only of marginal consequence. After a brief clarification of the terms ‘syndicalism’ and ‘anarcho-syndicalism’, this article outlines the development of anarchist ideological and organisational influence within the syndicalist movements in France, Italy and Spain, and considers some of the factors that encouraged the development of syndicalist movements and anarchist influence within them. It re-examines two common assumptions made about the relationship between syndicalism and anarchism, including: (a) the widely favoured explanation for the success of a distinctive ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ movement in Spain and Italy, and to a lesser extent France – namely that it was a logical consequence of these countries’ social and economic backwardness; and (b) the common perception that the residual strength of syndicalism (including its anarcho-syndicalist forms) lay not with the industrial working class, but with economically marginalised, often unskilled and unorganised, workers. Finally the article provides evidence to suggest that if the development of revolutionary syndicalism was directly related to anarchist ideas and organisation, it was far from simply being an anarchist invention and it is important not to conflate the one into the other.4

DEFINING TERMS There is often a great deal of misunderstanding about the meaning of the terms ‘syndicalism’ and ‘anarcho-syndicalism’, with both terms often used interchangeably by some commentators. One useful description of the term ‘syndicalism’ has been provided by Wayne Thorpe: [It] … refers to those trade union organisations that shared a number of characteristics: they viewed class conflict as inevitable under capitalism; they espoused not only short-term goals but also long-term revolutionary objectives, especially the inauguration of a collectivised, worker-managed socio-economic order. They differed from their social democratic counterparts above all in that they considered the decisive agency of workers’ action to be the revolutionary trade union, which united workers as workers, unlike political parties, which grouped multi-class Anarchist Studies 17.2


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supporters only as voters. They were extra-parliamentary, advocating direct action by organised unions over indirect, mediated action through the political process, and they deemed the general strike to be the ultimate revolutionary weapon as well as labour’s most effective means of combating capitalist wars.5

But arguably we can define syndicalism in a rather simpler and broader sense to simply mean: ‘revolutionary trade unionism’. Such a definition would, of course, not embrace all unions that have in the past been committed to revolutionary politics, given this would also be true at times of communist and other left-wing dominated unions. But what it does underline is the equal importance of revolution and unionism – the fact that the essence of syndicalism was revolutionary action by unions aimed at establishing a society based upon unions.6 This conception differed from both socialist and communist counterparts in viewing the decisive agency of the revolutionary transformation of society to be unions (as opposed to political parties or the state), and in aiming for a collectivised worker-managed socioeconomic order to be run by unions (as opposed to political parties or the state). Of course, it is true that despite formal revolutionary declarations by the CGT during the first decade of the century, a minority of union members (organised in some of the larger unions and federations) were undoubtedly reformist in outlook. Moreover, after 1910 the union leadership as a whole moved a considerable way towards accommodating to capitalist society, tempering their previous ideas with a considerable amount of reformist activity and collaboration with the war effort, although there remained a sizeable revolutionary wing inside the Confédération. Nonetheless, despite the existence of such internal tensions and variations in emphasis over time within specific movements in France as in other countries, the term ‘syndicalism’ can generally be understood to refer to movements, organisations and/or minority groups that were committed to revolutionary objectives.7 Perhaps more problematic is the fact that ‘syndicalism’ is necessarily only a very broad term for a number of related but rather different revolutionary union movements that flourished in a variety of forms across the world. Larry Peterson has argued that the use of this term has the danger of blurring the distinctions between the movements according to a single exclusive model, when in fact syndicalism was merely one of several factions within a more general movement in favour of revolutionary industrial unionism.8 Certainly it is important to bear in mind that different movements were sometimes known by varying terms in their respective countries, including: ‘revolutionary syndicalism’ (France and Britain), ‘industrial unionism’ (America) and ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ (Spain and Italy). Although it was an internaAnarchist Studies 17.2


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tional phenomenon that grew out of similar economic, social and political conditions, syndicalism undoubtedly manifested itself concretely in direct relation to national conditions and traditions, with each country producing its own specific version or versions of the movement which were far from uniform. Arguably the colloquial description of such different movements as ‘syndicalist’ is both useful and justified because it draws attention to basic fundamental similarities between them. For example, few of the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in America called themselves ‘syndicalists’; in fact most preferred the term ‘industrial unionist’. But as Melvyn Dubofsky has persuasively argued, an examination of the language used in IWW newspapers, pamphlets, books, and speeches, reveals ideas, concepts and theories (although not all tactics) that are almost indistinguishable from those espoused by European union militants who described themselves as syndicalists.9 In other words the specific strategic approach and organisational forms adopted by individual syndicalist movements, and the variety of labels which they used to describe themselves, or have subsequently had pinned on them, are of less importance than the essential underlying nature of the movements that they had in common. We should also note that any one of the supposedly more nationally-specific terms, such as ‘anarcho-syndicalism’, are themselves somewhat problematic given the changes in leadership and direction that tended to occur over time within individual movements. Thus any attempt to substitute the broad term ‘syndicalism’ with a more defined term by no means necessarily clarifies our understanding (at least outside of context and time period) and can, in fact, sometimes be misleading. Finally, the use of the broad generic term can also be justified on the basis that syndicalism needs to be understood not only in terms of ideological doctrine, but as a mode of action, a practical social movement engaged in working class struggle. Frederick Ridley has suggested it was: ‘the sum of ideas expressed by the movement and the sum of its activities; the outlook shared by members and the form their action took’.10 Marcel van der Linden’s inclination is to regard the ideological criteria of syndicalism as the least important compared with what the movement did in practice at both the organisational and shopfloor levels.11 However, whilst the broad term ‘syndicalism’ is used in this article to refer to the varied movements that existed in France, Italy and Spain, there is also an attempt to remain sensitive not only to the considerable variations that existed between (and within) such individual movements at any one time, but also to the fact that all three movements were undoubtedly, compared with some other syndicalist movements in other countries, significantly influenced by anarchist philosophy and practice, and contained more or Anarchist Studies 17.2


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less distinct groups of anarchists or ‘anarcho-syndicalists’ who struggled for ideological and organisational control of the movements as a whole (with varying degrees of success). In this sense ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ can be defined as syndicalist ideas and activity infused with a heavy dose of anarchist colouration. Even so it should be noted that the ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ label to describe the syndicalist movement as a whole on an international scale was not actually widely used until the early 1920s. As Dave Berry has pointed out: ‘The term “anarchosyndicalism” only came into wide use in 1921-1922 when it was applied polemically as a pejorative term by communists to any syndicalists … who opposed increased control of syndicalism by the communist parties’.12 Indeed the original statement of aims and principles of the International Working Men’s Association, set up as a syndicalist alternative to both the reformist International Federation of Trade Unions and the communist-dominated Red International of Labour Unions (RILU), referred not to anarcho-syndicalism, but to revolutionary unionism or revolutionary syndicalism, depending on the translation. During the period prior to the First World War and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, ‘revolutionary syndicalism’, as a broad ideological heading, had grouped different left-wing tendencies (of which anarchists were merely one element) together on a class basis around the principle of political neutrality and absolute independence from political parties (codified in France within the Chartre d’Amiens). But during 1920-22, amidst what became a conscious and determined attempt to win over the syndicalist movement en masse to the Bolshevik conception of the revolutionary process, via the Communist International and its trade union arm RILU, the term ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ tended to be increasingly deployed. It was a reflection of the increasing gap that was to emerge between communists and their sympathizers inside the syndicalist movement and the new communist parties who were loyal to Moscow, on the one hand, and those revolutionary unionists who shifted towards a more politically doctrinaire and anarchist-influenced version of syndicalism, on the other. Significantly, during the early 1920s ‘anarcho-syndicalists’ within the syndicalist movement internationally took the lead in rejecting the primacy of the party over the unions and the Comintern over RILU implied by Leninism. They viewed the new communist parties that had emerged on the Bolshevik model not as an alternative to reformist socialist party politics but as an extreme version of the political socialists’ stress on centralised political organisation and leadership; and they insisted on the need for local spontaneity and autonomy within a federalist structure. As a consequence ‘anarcho-syndicalists’ came out in full opposition to what they regarded as being a ‘Bolshevik dictatorship’ after learning of the perseAnarchist Studies 17.2


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cution of Russian anarchists, the suppression of the soviets, and the rise of a new bureaucratic one-party state. Therefore the CGT, USI and CNT can be understood to have been in all essentials revolutionary syndicalist movements, akin to the movements that sprang up in many other parts of the world. Nonetheless each of these three movements was also subject to significant anarchist influence, more so than in many other countries. As a result the syndicalist movements in which they operated helped to transform anarchism, for a time at least, from a tiny minority current into a cause with considerable mass support (even if many so-called ‘anarcho-syndicalists’ were probably sympathizers and fellow travellers rather than committed anarchists as such). This begs the questions of why specifically ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ trends became influential in France, Italy and Spain, and what the underlying economic, social and political factors were that contributed to such a development. But before considering this question it is first necessary to trace the development of anarchist influence within each of the three syndicalist movements.

ANARCHIST INFLUENCE In France Fernand Pelloutier, who advocated an anarchist doctrine very similar to Proudhon’s, was appointed secretary general of the Fédération des Bourses du Travail in 1895 and inspired the movement with a particular kind of anarchist idealism. He aimed to make the Bourses federation the embryo of a future reorganisation of society based on workers’ control of industry, in the process replacing political forms of government. Such ideas laid the foundation stone of the CGT that subsequently emerged.13 Such developments were encouraged by the way anarchists increasingly rejected the ineffective tactic of ‘propaganda by the deed’ – acts of assassination of political leaders and terrorism of the bourgeoisie – and began to look instead to the trade unions as a potential base for support. Thus Pelloutier advocated that anarchists should penetrate the trade unions so that they could be transformed into revolutionary organisations which could counter-balance and destroy the evil influence of the social-democratic politicians. He linked the trade unions to the libertarian communist society which remained the ultimate objective of the anarchists.14 Likewise, Emile Pouget, editor of the most famous of the French anarchist papers published in Paris, called on French anarchists to enter and revolutionise the syndicats. At the International Anarchist Congress of 1907 Pierre Monatte made the connection between anarchism and the new syndicalism explicit: ‘Syndicalism … opens to anarchism, which for too long has been turned in on itself, new perspectives Anarchist Studies 17.2


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and experiences’. On the one hand syndicalism ‘has recalled anarchism to the awareness of its working class origins; on the other hand, the anarchists have contributed not a little towards putting the working class movement onto the path of revolution and to popularising the idea of direct action’.15 After a lively debate, this congress adopted a compromise resolution which opened with the following statement of principle: ‘This International Anarchist Congress sees the trade unions both as combat unions in the class struggle for better working conditions, and as associations of producers which can serve to transform capitalist society into an anarcho-communist society’.16 Many French anarchists joined the unions and were quick to see the new possibilities for the spread of their ideas. Pouget later became assistant secretary of the CGT, the main editor of the union’s paper La Voix du peuple and one of the leading theoreticians of the syndicalist movement. Other anarchists also took leading positions within the Confédération, including Georges Yvetot (secretary of the Bourses section from 1901-18) and Paul Delesalle (Bourses assistant secretary from 18981918). It was the anarchists who led the attack on the Socialist Party and political action in the CGT, and who were largely responsible for its rejection of parties, elections and parliament in favour of direct action by the unions. They reached the peak of their influence in the years between 1902 and 1908 (although always a minority element in the organisation as a whole), and remained an important minority faction opposed to the moderate leadership of the union until 1925. Anarchists in other countries also entered the labour movement in increasing numbers, with even more success than in France. In Italy anarcho-syndicalism became a potent force after the Russian anarchist Bakunin had arrived in the country in the late 1860s and won support amongst all but two of the three hundred branches of the First International.17 The acknowledged leader of Italian anarchism was Errico Malatesta, who became an almost legendary figure for his advocacy of revolutionary action by the trade unions to establish a ‘society without authority’.18 Such ideas quickly gained a mass following and when the USI was founded in 1912 by dissident syndicalists who had broken with the socialist CGL (General Confederation of Labour) the anarchists agreed to join the new organisation and seized the opportunity to build a base for the revolution. Despite its acknowledged influence in Italy, as a movement of dues-paying members anarchism was fairly modest in size. At its peak of pre-war activity, on the eve of the ‘Red Week’ general strike of June 1914, the anarchists numbered no more than 8,000, and in 1919-20 the most generous estimate would place membership between 20,000 and 30,000. But after the foundation of the Unione Sindicale in Anarchist Studies 17.2


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1912 and the victory of the anti-war faction inside the USI in 1916, the anarchist Armando Borghi took over the leadership of the Unione and anarchists played a leading role as organisers at the base.19 But the connection between anarchism and syndicalism was undoubtedly most complete and most successful in Spain, where for a long time the anarchists remained the most numerous and powerful in the world.20 In 1868 an Italian disciple of Bakunin, Giuseppe Fanelli, had visited Barcelona and Madrid, where he established branches of the Bakuninist wing of the First International. By 1877 there were 60,000 members, organised mainly in working men’s associations. Although the anarchist movement was driven underground in 1874, it continued to flourish both amongst factory workers in the Catalan region and landless labourers in the south, who became involved in spontaneous, violent and insurrectionary general strikes and rural revolts. As in France, Spanish anarchists recommended their supporters to join trade unions and take a forceful role in their activities and direction: ‘It was in this way that the “trabazõ”, the close connection between the labour union and the “specific anarchist” group – as the leading force of the former – came into being’.21 The CNT’s establishment in 1911, and the organisation’s subsequent development combined syndicalist principles of revolutionary unionism with the more traditional Spanish anarchist principles, of federalism, anti-clericalism, anti-militarism and a deep hostility to all political parties and governments. The decentralised structure of CNT organisation provided the context for a Bakunintype semi-secret society of ‘invisible pilots’ who aimed to direct the revolution. Thus, in 1927, when the anarchists thought they might lose control of the CNT to a reformist trend, they established the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), determined to ‘keep an anarchist soul in a syndicalist body’.22 Although by no means a politically homogeneous organisation, the FAI was united in the pursuit of a set of common goals to inspire and guide the CNT, and the affinity groups were viewed as the basis for a vanguard movement avowedly dedicated to the achievement of ‘libertarian communism’. Most writers on the Spanish labour movement seem to concur in the view that, with the departure of the moderate syndicalists in the early 1930s, the CNT fell under the complete domination of the FAI, effectively becoming an anarcho-syndicalist body. Certainly the FAI quickly established an ascendancy over the CNT, so that a very small anarchist minority held all its important posts and dominated its bureaux and committees. While it was never able to completely rid the CNT of reformist elements, it gained a considerable following within the Confederación. It Anarchist Studies 17.2


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has been estimated that from 1934 to 1936 membership was around 10,000 and at its height in the Civil War about 30,000.23 As David Miller has commented: ‘We can see in Spain the unique spectacle of a mass trade union movement being led along the revolutionary path by a minority of conscious anarchists – the original anarchosyndicalist strategy came to fruition’.24 The CNT became one of the few mass syndicalist organisations to survive the First World War and Russian Revolution, and with the fall of the monarchy and advent of the Second Republic in 1931 the more radical anarchist militants from the FAI saw their influence grow rapidly. By 1933 the anarcho-syndicalists effectively controlled the CNT and were subsequently to be put to a decisive test during the Civil War. Before examining the limits of, and tensions between, the relationship between syndicalism and anarchism, it is important to consider the contextual factors that contributed to the growth and development of such movements and trends.

CONTEXT OF DEVELOPMENT Whilst it is commonly assumed that the origins of syndicalism (and its distinctive anarcho-syndicalist-influenced forms in Spain and Italy and to a lesser extent France) lay in the birth pangs of a locally weak capitalism at the beginning of its industrial development,25 there are conflicting interpretations of the way in which this impacted, and its significance relative to other factors. Certainly in France the CGT emerged in a country in which economic modernisation had proceeded only slowly and large-scale industrialisation had lagged behind that of Britain, Germany or America. Despite the fact that the pace of change quickened from 1871 to 1914, small and medium sized workshops continued to play a prominent role in production, and to exist alongside rarer, geographically concentrated, more highly-industrialized enterprises. As late as 1906, workshops employing less than ten workers still employed one third of the industrial labour force; 59 per cent of all industrial workers worked in establishments of fewer than 100 employees, with only 12 per cent employed in plants of more than 1,000.26 Bernard Moss has argued that it was this ‘exceptional’ French economic development which created the conditions under which important sections of the relatively large semi-artisanal skilled workforce, faced with the growing threat of mechanisation, de-skilling and the absorption into the factory system, were encouraged towards distinctive syndicalist forms of ‘trade socialism’ based upon decentralisation and producers’ control.27 Likewise the relative absence of large powerful unions encouraged the endorsement of the methods of militant direct action extolled and Anarchist Studies 17.2


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embraced in syndicalist doctrine.28 However, there are a number of studies that counter the view that the origins of French syndicalism lie mainly with the backwardness of capitalist economic development.29 From this alternative perspective, the primary focus on ‘artisanal’ direct action on the shopfloor is misplaced given that French industry was not especially small in scale compared with some other European countries such as Spain and Italy. Although marked by uneven development, growth was particularly rapid in the decade after 1905, with the size of the industrial workforce increasing significantly. In practice, it is argued, French workers’ predilection for direct action and syndicalism was encouraged less by their work experience or skill level than by their profound distrust of the reactionary bourgeois state and parliamentary democracy of the Third Republic, and the existing political organisations. Such distrust occurred within the context of a French revolutionary political tradition, grounded on the experience of the 1789 revolution, 1830 and 1848 revolts, and 1871 Paris Commune, which established a popular culture of change from below. It was as a consequence of this political situation that sections of workers (particularly but not exclusively the skilled), who were relatively powerful in the sphere of the relations of production but powerless in the political arena, were encouraged to rely primarily on their relative bargaining power resources on the job and their own informal co-operation as the essential means by which to develop class-based action. Likewise in Spain, whilst syndicalist (particularly anarcho-syndicalist) ideas and methods of struggle appeared to fit the prevailing backward economic and industrial conditions, they were also encouraged by broader social and political factors. By the turn of the twentieth century Spain was still predominately an agricultural country at the beginning of its capitalist industrial development. For over a hundred years the country had been torn by civil war in the long and unsuccessful struggle to overthrow a semi-feudalist absolutist regime and consolidate a modern capitalist bourgeois state. Centrifugal tendencies were reinforced by the advance of industrial development in the north and north-eastern seaboards, which coincided with a growth of local Basque and Catalan nationalism directed against an agrarian and centralist ruling class in Madrid. The country was effectively saddled with a politically weak commercial and manufacturing bourgeoisie and an absolute monarchy that relied on the twin pillars of the Catholic Church and aristocratic army officers to maintain itself in power. Chronic political instability, state repression and fierce employer opposition did not create suitable conditions for the development of ‘normal’ trade union practices. Instead, syndicalist principles of revolutionary unionism combined with anarchist notions (of federalism, regional autonomy and Anarchist Studies 17.2


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independence, anti-clericalism, anti-militarism and a deep hostility to all political parties) and fell on fertile soil during the key formative years of the trade union movement, in a context where the socialist movement was relatively very weak and where indigenous Marxist theory was undeveloped. In Italy, another predominately agricultural country, an important underlying explanation for the appeal of syndicalism (and anarchism) has often been assumed to have been the profound differences between north and south, between the highly capitalised modern industrial plant with its new factory proletariat in the so-called ‘industrial triangle’ formed by the northern cities of Milan, Genoa and Turin, on the one hand, and the semi-stagnant peasant and artisan economy in the agricultural south, on the other.30 The appalling poverty of the south, perhaps the most terribly exploited industrial area in all Europe, involved conditions in which no stable trade union or socialist organisation could possibly exist. Labour revolts tended, to a great extent, to take the form of spontaneous hunger movements, which were more easily captured by anarchists than directed into the channels of organised reformist socialist agitation.31 Nonetheless the subsequent development of a revolutionary syndicalist movement (which adopted part of the anarchist tradition, but linked it to a highly localised trade unionism with direct action tactics) pulled towards it a wide layer of agricultural labourers and artisan groups, as well as some industrial workers primarily from the north of the country not the south. Therefore again, as in other countries, socio-economic factors underpinning syndicalism’s appeal can be seen to have combined with a variety of other factors, such as widespread alienation from existing political channels for redress and the perceived inadequate moderate methods of struggle of the Socialist Party-dominated trade unions. By contrast, although it is beyond the scope of this article, we can note that the influence of anarchism within syndicalist movements was effectively absent in the equally less developed Ireland, and played a negligible role in the much more economically advanced Britain and America with their more firmly established and politically conservative labour movement organisations.32 But although syndicalism as an international phenomenon was an expression of specific national circumstances there was one important common feature which created the propensity for syndicalist action and organisation on an international scale. Crucially during this period there was the weakness of firmly established institutionalised channels or organisational mechanisms that could encourage the attainment of social reform through more gradualist means. Such political mechanisms existed, but often were in embryonic stage, and under the impact of profound social change and economic crisis were found inadequate to satisfy the growing aspirations of many sections of Anarchist Studies 17.2


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newly radicalised workers. In other words, a precondition of growth, in all of these countries, was disillusionment with the ability of prevailing approaches to social and political struggle to defend working class living standards. In this sense, syndicalism was ‘spawned out of a crisis’ of reformist and socialist politics, as well as the inadequacies of the prevailing deterministic Marxist alternative.33 The more ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ tendencies of the movements in the less developed countries of France, Italy and Spain was merely one, uneven, varied, but influential expression of this phenomenon.

OCCUPATIONAL COMPOSITION Another common perception is that the residual strength of syndicalism (including its distinctive anarcho-syndicalist forms) lay not with the industrial working class, but with artisans, agricultural workers, casual labourers and other groups of economically marginalised, often unskilled and unorganized, workers.34 For example, it is assumed that the CGT had only limited support amongst the ‘genuine’ factory workers of the new large-scale heavy industries that developed in the early twentieth century.35 Likewise, there is a widespread belief that the USI attracted mainly landless labourers, as opposed to the engineering workers concentrated in the giant plants located in the industrial cities of Milan and Turin; and that the CNT also appealed primarily to rural labourers, with only limited support from industrial workers in one or two urban geographical areas of small-scale production and anarchist influence, such as Barcelona. By contrast, it is often assumed it was the mass reformist labour and socialist parties, with their affiliated trade unions, that were able to sink genuine roots amongst the rapidly expanding industrial proletariat. In other words, syndicalist bodies attracted only marginal support on the fringes of the existing labour movement, were usually reliant on the recruitment of workers neglected by the established trade unions, and were anyway to be rapidly superseded with the development of mass-production industries. Hence syndicalism’s apparent ‘irrelevance to the maturing corporate system of the twentieth century’.36 In reality the situation was nowhere near as clear cut as these simplified images would suggest. Despite attempts by historians to link various forms of labour politics to different occupational or skill groupings within the working class, syndicalism appealed, in varying degrees, to relatively diverse groups of workers – skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled – depending on the context. In France syndicalism proved to be particularly attractive to skilled craftsmen Anarchist Studies 17.2


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engaged as wage earners in small-scale capitalist production in Paris and elsewhere.37 Nonetheless after 1900 such skilled workers were increasingly joined in the CGT by new sections of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers from a variety of different large-scale industries.38 These included miners (Pas-de-Calais and Loire Valley); railway workers, notably footplatemen and drivers (nationally); construction workers, notably carpenters and joiners (Paris and elsewhere); dockers and shipyard workers (Nantes and Saint Nazaire); metal/engineering workers in small and medium-sized factories (Paris, Saint Etienne and Saint Nazaire); food industry workers, such as pastry cooks, chefs, bakers, waiters, grocery assistants in chain stores, and factory sugar and cake workers (Paris and elsewhere); and school teachers (nationally). In addition, the CGT won support from France’s vast pool of agricultural labour, notably vineyard workers in the south of the country (Midi). Certainly by 1909 the CGT had added nearly half a million new adherents, most of who were not members of the craft unions that had previously dominated the Confédération.39 In Italy the USI was comprised first and foremost of agricultural workers (landless farm labourers), who constituted over one-third of the membership, with construction workers (including masons, carpenters, and brick makers) forming the second largest group. Although trade unionism in most European countries was almost exclusively an urban industrial phenomenon, by contrast the Italian labour movement was strongly rooted in both town and country, a development related to the existence of a large group of people displaced by modernisation in agriculture, but who remained in agriculture and were not absorbed by the new industries.40 Nonetheless syndicalist membership geographically by the end of 1914 came almost exclusively from northern Italy, with almost a total absence of USI groups in any area south of Tuscany. Strength was concentrated in the Po Valley, in the areas of Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy.41 During the 1920 factory occupations that swept the country, although the socialist-led metal workers’ federation (FIOM) controlled the main industrial cities, the USI controlled Verona, Savona and Spezia, as well as enjoying extensive backing amongst metalworking and shipbuilding workers in Sestri Ponente, Cornigliano, and Campi.42 While it is true that Italian syndicalism never succeeded in capturing a mass following from the large industrial centres of Milan, Turin and Rome, immediately before and during the 1920 factory occupations, amidst a huge increase in membership generally, the syndicalists were able to gain an important foothold among some engineering workers in both cities. In Spain the CNT exercised influence amongst agricultural workers in the south (Andalucia), east (the area of the Levant around Valenica), and in north-east Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Aragon (around Saragossa). Many rural areas were characterised by the widespread use of latifunda, absentee-owned massive estates which relied upon the systematic exploitation of an underclass of landless labourers who were badly-paid, often hired on a daily basis, and liable to lay-offs and victimization, as well as subject to food shortages and long periods of unemployment. The appalling hardships of their daily existence made Andalucia’s peasants in particular receptive to the CNT’s seemingly straightforward promise to break the stranglehold of the latifundistas through seizure of the land followed by the destruction of state power.43 However, Antonio Bar has provided evidence to suggest that, contrary to the commonly expressed view, the CNT was from its beginning (and even more so in the 1930s) a labour movement of an industrial character. Thus, it was concentrated in the urban and more or less industrialised areas of the country, such as Barcelona, Valencia, Seville and Saragossa. It won significant influence in such sectors as construction, fisheries, leather and footwear, textiles, printing and a wide variety of other trades. The typical profile of the Confederación member was a manual worker in a workshop of medium to small size. By contrast, the CNT was always conspicuously weak (in terms of formal organisation at least) in the important rural areas of Spain. Even though in Andalucia, Aragon or Castille, anarchist and ‘libertarian communist’ uprisings were quite significant, the CNT as such never managed to establish an important and stable organic structure in these areas.44 Whilst it built considerable support in the cities of the south during the early 1930s, especially in Cádiz, Málaga, Córdoba and Seville, as well as in a number of Andalucian villages, ties between the cities and the villages were extremely weak and the Confederación tended to concentrate most of its efforts in the larger cities among industrialised workers.45 A particularly important stronghold of the CNT in both the period around the First World War and the 1930s was the industrial and factory workers of Barcelona and other Catalan towns. There is considerable debate among historians as to why anarchists generally and the CNT specifically found such a responsive audience in this north-eastern province.46 Some have suggested that arising from the stagnation and poverty of the agricultural sector there was a significant change in the composition of the labour force in Barcelona during the First World War, with the arrival of large numbers of rootless peasant migrants from the south (which itself possessed a long history of violent social conflict and anarchist allegiance) who were more susceptible to anarchist appeals than other groups.47 Indeed by 1930, when migrants from elsewhere in Spain formed 35 per cent of the city’s population, workers of nonCatalan origin were even more prominent in the CNT.48 Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Other historians have drawn attention to the way in which the concentration of industry in small factories and the survival of artisanal concerns may have favoured anarchist penetration.49 However it should be noted that Madrid, the epitome of a highly skilled artisanal labour force, was a bastion of the Socialist Party, and in the Basque region, where industry was also small-unit based, there was a lack of CNT implantation. In addition, in Barcelona the Confederación recruited among a wide variety of industrial workers, including those in the metalworking, construction (bricklayers and their labourers) and woodworking (carpenters) industries, as well as among textile workers, dockers and carters. A different potential factor was the way in which, in the adverse Catalan economic climate, the major employers’ federations adopted an intensely anti-union stance which made it impossible for workers to establish stable collective bargaining relations, thereby encouraging them to embrace the CNT’s emphasis on combativity and solidarity.50 In addition, Chris Ealham has convincingly located Barcelona’s anarchist movement within the context of the city’s working class communities, showing how shared hardship and poverty interrelated with the collective experience of struggle in both the factory and the streets.51 This shared ‘culture of resistance’ engendered a conscious rejection of the priorities of capitalism, be it respect for private property, police or religion, and a profound sense of solidarity. Finally, other historians have paid greater attention to the overall context of social and political relations, notably frustration at the failure of democratic reforms, as well as the national, historical and linguistic differences which separated Catalans from Castillians and which made the former highly suspicious of any form of central Spanish state apparatus.52 In other words, although it is true that the syndicalist movements in France, Italy and Spain did not implant themselves as deeply and as broadly as the reformist trade unions amongst traditionally unionised workers in large industrial factory settings, they nonetheless appealed, in varying degrees and in different contexts, to diverse groups of workers, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled. Moreover, compared to the labour and socialist labour parties, its social composition was virtually exclusively working class. We can now turn to the nature of the relationship between syndicalism and anarchism.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SYNDICALISM AND ANARCHISM If the development of revolutionary syndicalism on an international scale was directly related to anarchist ideas and organisation, it was far from simply being an Anarchist Studies 17.2


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anarchist invention, and it is important not to conflate the one into the other. It is true that, with reference to France, Yvetot claimed: I am reproached with confusing syndicalism and anarchism. It is not my fault if anarchism and syndicalism have the same ends in view. The former pursues the integral emancipation of the individual, the latter the integral emancipation of the working man. I find the whole of syndicalism in anarchism. When we leave the theories of syndicalism to study its methods, we find them identical with those of the anarchists.53

Yet anarchists generally were internally split in the extent of their enthusiasm for syndicalist methods and some were vehemently opposed. Thus, syndicalism received extensive and lively attention at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress held in Amsterdam, where Monatte took the lead in defending its principles, whilst the Italian anarchist and veteran insurrectionist Errico Malatesta challenged them for not being sufficiently ‘revolutionary’, for having a too simple conception of the class struggle, and for placing too much confidence in the general strike.54 ‘One must not be blind’, Monatte stated, ‘to see what anarchism and syndicalism have in common. Both aim at the complete destruction of capitalism and the wage system by means of social revolution. Syndicalism is the reawakening of the labour movement: it has recalled anarchism to its working class origins’.55 In reply Malatesta portrayed syndicalism as inevitably conservative, working within the established economic system for legal ends. It could not, he argued, be revolutionary since trade unions were not even agreed among themselves but defended their sectional economic interests against each other. Anarchists should join trade unions, he said, but for propaganda purposes, and to prepare for the collective control of production when the revolution arrived.56 Moreover, the core of syndicalist philosophy was not explicitly anarchist in character, despite the fact that anarchists were influential in some countries. It is true, as we have seen, that syndicalism revealed a certain affinity with the ideas of anarchism, notably its hostility to political organisation and activity, and its principles of federalism and decentralisation. But the connections should not be exaggerated. In Italy the anarchists were much less trade union orientated than the syndicalists. Alceste DeAmbris, one of the USI’s leading figures until 1914, shared the anarchists’ conception of the overthrow of the Italian regime by a spontaneous rising of the people, but believed a viable new order could not be created through barricades and violent insurrection, but only through a long, gradual process of industrial development and Anarchist Studies 17.2


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proletarian maturation. Anarchist tactics, it was argued, produced merely pointless revolts, which only appealed to peasants and declining bourgeois groups.57 The ‘pure’ syndicalists did not expect a general strike to overthrow the capitalist system in the foreseeable future and did not consider any of the strikes of the pre-war period (including the ‘Red Week’ general strike of 1914) to be definitive revolutionary episodes.58 By contrast, the anarchists, such as Borghi, placed the emphasis on the need to prevent the formation of a labour elite and promoted political strikes rather than economic ones, with a greater concern to build revolutionary consciousness than in negotiating better conditions of employment.59 Despite the fact that Borghi took over the helm of an increasingly anarchist-influenced USI from 1916, relations between ‘pure’ syndicalists and openly declared anarchists were rarely untroubled by disputes over doctrine and tactics. As a result ‘even when the USI was dominated by anarchists after 1916, it never became an anarcho-syndicalist organisation’.60 The influence of the anarchists in all three countries was also of a limited form and by no means uniform. Thus although anarchist figures exercised an influential leadership position within the CGT in the 10-15 years up to 1914, they formed a perpetually uneasy left-wing, obliged to compete with some powerful Confédération forces who favoured a form of reformist trade unionism that concentrated on collective bargaining for immediate gains; whilst others, such as Victor Griffuelhes (the CGT’s secretary general during 1901-9), merely believed in direct action for its own sake, irrespective of social theories. After 1914, with the collapse of the CGT’s revolutionary opposition to the outbreak of war, anarchist influence was pushed decisively to the margins, compounded by deep tensions within the revolutionary wing of the by now moderate-led CGT, between ‘pure’ syndicalist, ‘syndicalist-communist’ and ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ factions. Internal feuding inside the French labour movement in the post-war years, in the wake of the impasse of reformist politics, massive radicalisation and the Bolshevik revolution, culminated in a 1921 schism inside the CGT, when a sizeable revolutionary minority (including anarcho-syndicalists) left to form an alternative confederation, the Confédération Générale du Travail Unitaire (CGTU). But many French anarcho-syndicalists (and ‘pure’ revolutionary syndicalists), unable to accept increasing communist party influence inside the CGTU, formed another breakaway. Not surprisingly such schisms drove many thousands away from union activity within all three groupings, and further undermined the strength of the French labour movement generally and anarchism specifically. In Spain, the leadership of the Spanish CNT was likewise divided on a permanent basis, in this case between more moderate syndicalist elements on the one hand, and more revolutionary syndicalist and anarcho-syndicalist (and anarchist) elements Anarchist Studies 17.2


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on the other. Initially the CNT adopted a ‘pure’ form of revolutionary syndicalism, which extended from the (1907) foundation of the CNT’s parent organisation Solidaridad Obrera to 1919. But this approach, personified by Salavador Seguí, became increasingly focused on obtaining immediate material and organisational gains, and suggested that much more preparation was necessary before a revolutionary overthrow could be contemplated. In attempting to promote a more moderate trade union policy within the CNT, Seguí controversially cut short a Barcelona general strike in 1919, and followed a policy of collaboration with the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT). By contrast the anarcho-syndicalists, who resented the placing of ‘bread and butter’ issues ahead of opportunities to strike a blow at the bourgeois order, advocated revolutionary insurrectionism. At the CNT’s 1919 congress there was an attempted synthesis of the strategic and tactical principles of revolutionary syndicalism on the one hand, and anarchism on the other, with the adoption of ‘libertarian communism’ as the Confederación main goal. Over the next four years, amidst economic and political crisis, a revolutionary wave of struggles across Europe, the impact of the Russian Revolution, and widespread industrial unrest at home, the anarcho-syndicalists successfully took control of the CNT, backed by many of the new, radical elements who had emigrated from rural areas to Barcelona. However, after the CNT’s banning in 1924 the leadership fell back into the hands of more moderate syndicalist figures. It was only with the formation of the FAI in 1927, that the anarchists (including insurrectionary leaders like Buenaventura Durrutti and Juán Garcia Oliver) were to come back to the fore with the advent of the Second Republic in 1931 and the renewal of high levels of class struggle that followed. There then occurred a split between the syndicalists, some of whom were expelled from or left the CNT to form Oppositionist Unions and the Liberation Syndicalist Federation in 1932-3, and the more radical anarcho-syndicalist groups belonging to the FAI, who controlled the official CNT apparatus. Finally all the groups re-united with the onset of the Civil War in May 1936, primarily under anarchist influence.61 In reality syndicalism was always an alliance between at least three core ideological elements. First, there was anarchism, from which it took anti-state, anti-political action, and anti-militarist ideas, as well as the notions of federalism, decentralisation, direct action and sabotage. Second, Marxism also influenced it significantly to varying degrees. Of course it is true that in France, Italy and Spain syndicalism represented a reaction against the deterministic conception of Marxism as practiced by most of the socialist parties of the Second International (which combined a theory Anarchist Studies 17.2


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of the economic inevitability of socialism with reformist and bureaucratic practice). Yet despite the fact that syndicalist movement leaders might denounce socialist politicians, it seems unlikely that many individual members voted other than socialist in parliamentary elections. And despite their advocacy of ‘political autonomy’ from political parties, this did not necessarily preclude informal links with socialist parties on matters of common interest. For example, in France in 1912 the CGT and Socialist Party worked closely together in a campaign against the ThreeYear Draft Law, which proposed to extend military service from two to three years, and in Spain, despite traditional rivalry with the Socialist Party, rank-and-file pressure for co-operation between the CNT and the much larger socialist-led union confederation, the UGT, resulted in the Pact of Saragossa and nationally co-ordinated general strike action. Moreover, whilst many syndicalists dismissed ‘political action’ they were (by adopting a narrow definition of political action) basically rejecting or minimising what they saw as the dead-end of electoral and parliamentary politics advocated by the dominant wing of the socialist parties. This did not mean collaboration was necessarily ruled out between syndicalists and revolutionary socialist/Marxist elements operating inside the reformist socialist parties, who themselves rejected the emphasis on parliamentarism at the expense of the direct action of the workers. Thus the CGT was set up through the active participation of revolutionary socialists alongside radical trade unionists.62 In Italy there was a distinctive situation in which the pioneer syndicalists, who had emerged from amongst revolutionary elements inside the Socialist Party, were prepared to remain inside the party for a few years (where they succeeded in influencing mainstream socialist political debate via their oppositional propaganda and activity), even though they insisted (until their wholesale expulsion in 1908) that industrial struggle was the primary method of achieving revolutionary change.63 In addition in all three countries a number of syndicalist movement leaders inherited some central components of the Marxist tradition, in however a diffuse form. This included the Marxist conception of the necessity and desirability of class struggle (of which strikes were the primary expression) as a means of collective resistance to capitalism that could develop the confidence, organisation and class consciousness of workers; the utter primacy of the working class as the sole agency of revolution that could liberate the whole of society; and a conception of socialism arising from the need for workers to take power themselves rather than relying on the enlightened actions of parliamentary and trade union leaders who would reform capitalism on behalf of workers. Third, syndicalism was influenced by the ideas of revolutionary trade unionism, Anarchist Studies 17.2


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the notion that the unions should go beyond merely attempting to improve workers’ terms and conditions of employment within the framework of capitalist society, to become the instrument through which workers could overthrow capitalism and establish a new society. In every country the origin and development of syndicalist organisation was clearly rooted in the deep hostility often displayed by employers towards any form of independent trade unionism. In the relatively less developed Spain and Italy, whilst the land-owning classes were prodigiously reactionary and exploited the agricultural workforce, the rising class of industrialists was hardly less determined to vigorously resist any attempt to organize in unions. But the ferocity of employers’ resistance to the CNT and USI was more than matched by what happened in the more developed French context, where the backdrop to the formation of the CGT was stark class warfare. In every country, in varying degrees, workers found they had to fight for the most basic of rights to organise, strike, and picket. Many who tried to organise were sacked, blacklisted, imprisoned and sometimes killed. In such circumstances, the appeal of syndicalism’s willingness to ‘fight fire with fire’ by mounting direct, often violent, methods of industrial action proved attractive and helped to encourage revolutionary trade union aspirations among a significant layer of workers, who felt they had no other realistic means of attempting to redress their grievances.64 In other words, syndicalism represented a synthesis of these three different ideological influences, all overlaid with a singular pattern in each respective country. Moreover, we should note some additional distinct national ideological influences on each of the different syndicalist movements. For example there was a rich revolutionary tradition within the French labour movement, which exhibited a variety of ideological trends of a revolutionary kind apart from syndicalism, namely Proudhonism, Bakuninism, Blanquisim, Marxism, and Allemanism. All of these were reflected in some way amongst the elements that went on to form the CGT.65 Italian syndicalism thrived in a broader libertarian-tinged ‘second culture’, a ‘bundle of cultural practices and organisational activities associated with localism, anti-statism, anti-clericalism, republicanism and operaismo (workerism)’.66 In fact, one of the reasons why anarchism was able to prosper in countries with strong religious traditions, such as Catholic Italy and Spain, was that it helped to articulate already existing anti-clerical sentiments, with the tendency for agrarian radicalism to be directed against the landowners and their protectors, the monarchy, and in particular the Catholic Church.67 Finally, we should note that the heyday of syndicalism was maintained for only a brief period of twenty years or so. Its existence as a powerful and influential current Anarchist Studies 17.2


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inside the international trade union movement effectively came to an end with the ebb of the revolutionary workers’ struggles that had shaken many countries in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, which was followed by employers’ and state directed counter-mobilization and repression. But it was the seizure of state power by Russian workers under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, and the subsequent formation of the Comintern and RILU, which was to prove a decisive ideological and political challenge to the revolutionary syndicalist movement. Afterwards, although it remained a residual force in Europe until World War Two, syndicalism only survived as a pale shadow of its former self, being displaced partly by a rejuvenated social democracy (which succeeded in containing workers’ discontent within established channels) and partly by the new revolutionary Communist parties that were subsequently established and which were to rapidly supersede syndicalist organisations in most countries. Spain was the only important exception. As Joseph White has commented (with reference to Britain but relevant more broadly), it is difficult to think of any other distinct tendency inside the labour movement during the twentieth century ‘whose historical “moment” was as short as syndicalism’s and whose working assumptions were so completely displaced and subsumed by events and fresh doctrines’.68 But even if revolutionary syndicalism was short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful in achieving its overall aims – particularly when compared to the architects of the Russian revolution – it nonetheless made a significant contribution to the explosive wave of working class struggle that swept many countries during the early twentieth century. It expressed workers’ rising level of organisation, confidence and political consciousness. It came to represent an influential set of policy prescriptions and strategies for labour at a time when all politics was in flux and such matters as the nature of political authority and accountability were open to wide-ranging debate.69 Emmett O’Connor has suggested that in the ‘lacuna between pioneering Marxism and the triumph of Leninist realism in 1917’ the syndicalist challenge that was mounted to jaded orthodoxies was both distinctive and far-reaching.70 As we have seen, the contribution of the anarchists and/or anarcho-syndicalists to this was undoubtedly significant in France, Italy and Spain. Ralph Darlington is Professor of Employment Relations at Salford University. He has written extensively on trade union organisation and activity in both historical and contemporary contexts, and is the author of The Dynamics of Workplace Unionism (1994); The Political Trajectory of J.T. Murphy (1998); Glorious Summer: Class Struggle in Britain, 1972 (with Dave Lyddon); and Syndicalism and the Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Transition to Communism: An International Comparative Analysis (2008). He is an executive member of the British Universities Industrial Relations Association and Secretary of the Manchester Industrial Relations Society. Email [email protected]

NOTES 1. For example, see L.L. Levine, The Labour Movement in France (Columbia University Press, 1912); and R. Hunter, Violence and the Labour Movement (Arno Press, 1969). 2. Other countries in which anarchists exercised real influence within syndicalist movements included Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Holland and Portugal, but these countries fall outside the remit of this paper. 3. See V. I. Lenin, ‘The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism’, Selected Works, Vol. 1 (Moscow, 1970), pp. 66-67. 4. The paper draws extensively, but further develops, arguments outlined in R. Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism: An International Comparative Analysis (Aldershot, 2008); and ‘Revolutionary Syndicalist Opposition to the First World War: A Comparative Reassessment’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 84:4 (2006), pp. 983-1003. 5. W. Thorpe, ‘The European Syndicalists and War, 1914-1918’, Contemporary European History, vol. 10, 2001, p. 2. 6. F. F. Ridley, Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time (Cambridge, 1970), p. 1. 7. ‘Reformist syndicalism’ comes close to being a contradiction in terms, although a trade unionism committed to non-revolutionary but tactically militant sectionalism and avoidance of politics has a long history. 8. L. Peterson, ‘The One Big Union in International Perspective: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism 1900-1925’, in J. E. Cronin and C. Sirianni (eds.), Work, Community and Power: The Experience of Labour in Europe and America 1900-1925 (Philadelphia, 1983), pp. 64-6. 9. M. Dubofsky, ‘The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism in the United States’, in van der Linden and Thorpe, Revolutionary Syndicalism, pp. 207-10. A number of other historians have also used the term ‘syndicalism’ to describe the IWW, including John Graham Brooks, Paul F. Brissendon, David J. Saposs and Patrick Renshaw. 10. Ridley, p. 1 [emphasis added]. 11. M. van der Linden, ‘Second Thoughts on Revolutionary Syndicalism’, Labour History Review, 63:2 (1998). Anarchist Studies 17.2


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12. D. Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement 1917-1945 (Greenwood, 2008) p. 152. 13. See Ridley; and B. Mitchell, ‘French Syndicalism: An Experiment in Practical Anarchism’, in van der Linden and Thorpe (eds) Revolutionary Syndicalism, pp. 25-43; J. Jennings, Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas, (London, 1990), pp. 25-43. 14. D. Guérin, Anarchism: from theory to practice (London, 1970), p. 78. 15. James Joll, The Anarchists, (London, 1964), p. 204. 16. Guerin, Anarchism, p. 79. 17. D. L. Horrowitz, The Italian Labor Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1963), p. 129. 18. See V. Richards (ed.), Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas (London, 1977), pp. 113136. 19. See C. Levy, ‘Italian Anarchism, 1870-1926’, in D. Goodway (ed.), For Anarchism: History, Theory and Practice (London, 1989), pp. 25-78; C.L. Bertrand, ‘Revolutionary Syndicalism in Italy’, in van der Linden and Thorpe, Revolutionary Syndicalism, pp. 139-53; G. Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Harmondsworth, 1979). 20. See G. H. Meaker, The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914-1923 (Stanford, Calif., 1974); M. Bookchin, To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936 (Edinburgh, 1994); S. Dolgoff (ed.), Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ SelfManagement in Spain 1936-9 (Montreal, 1990); Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936 (Edinburgh, 1998); Durgan, pp. 93-112; A. Bar, ‘The CNT: The Glory and Tragedy of Spanish Anarchosyndicalism’, in van der Linden and Thorpe, Revolutionary Syndicalism, pp. 119-38; R. Alexander, The Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War: Vols. 1 and 2, (London, 1999). 21. Bar, p. 124. 22. R. Carr, The Civil War in Spain 1936-39 (London, 1986), p. 15. 23. First figure from G. Brenan, The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political; Background of the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, 1988), p. 184; second figure from Bookchin, To Remember Spain, p. 23. 24. D. Miller, Anarchism (London, 1984), p. 137. 25. For example see E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester, 1972), pp. 74-92. 26. W. Kendall, The Labour Movement in Europe (London, 1975), p. 36; R. Magraw, France 1814-1915: The Bourgeois Century (Oxford, 1983), p. 233. 27. B. Moss, The Origins of the French Labor Movement, 1830-1914: The Socialism of Skilled Workers (Berkeley, Calif.,1976), pp. 25-8. 28. W. Thorpe, The Workers Themselves: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International



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29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Labour (Dordrecht, 1990), p. 24; See also R. Magraw, ‘Socialism, Syndicalism and French Labour Before 1914’, in D. Geary (ed.), Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914, (Oxford, 1989), pp. 48-100; R. Magraw, A History of the French Working Class, Vol. 2: Workers and the Bourgeois Republic, (Oxford, 1992). See L. Berlanstein, Big Business and Industrial Conflict in Nineteenth Century France: A Social History of the Parisian Gas Company, Berkeley, Calif., 1991); and ‘The Distinctiveness of the Nineteenth Century French Labour Movement’, The Journal of Modern History, 64: 4 (December 1992), pp. 660-685. See also A. Cotterau, ‘The Distinctiveness of Working Class Cultures in France, 1848-1900’, in I. Katznelson and A. Zolberg (eds.), Working Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, N.J., 1986), pp. 111-54; and T. Judt, The French Labour Movement in the Nineteenth Century, Marxism and the French Left (Oxford, 1986), pp. 24-114. See J. A. Davies, ‘Socialism and the Working Classes in Italy before 1914’, in Geary, Labour and Socialist Movements, pp. 182-230; D. L. Horrowitz, The Italian Labor Movement (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought: The Second International, 1889-1914: Part 1 (London: 1974), pp. 732-33. In Britain the one notable leading anarcho-syndicalist figure was Guy Bowman. See A. Meltzer, First Flight: The Origins of Anarcho-Syndicalism in Britain (Berkeley, Calif., 2004). E. O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland (Cork, 1988), p. 182. For example, see E. O’Connor, ‘What Caused the 1913 Lockout? Industrial Relations in Ireland, 1907-13’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 19 (2005), p. 120, Moss, The Origins of the French Labor Movement. R. H. Zieger, Book Review of ‘Bread and Roses Too: Studies of the Wobblies’, Labor History, 11:4 (1970), p. 568. Moss, pp. 13-19. A. Kriegal and Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914: La Guerre et le mouvement ouvrier français (Paris 1964), pp. 280-85. B. Vandervort, Victor Griffuelhes and French Syndicalism, 1895-1922 (Baton Rouge, 1996), p. 247. S. J. Surace, Ideology, Economic Change and the Working Classes: The Case of Italy (Berkeley, Calif., 1966), p. 68. C. L. Bertrand, ‘Revolutionary Syndicalism in Italy, 1912-1922’, PhD, University of Wisconsin, 1970, pp. 141-142. T. Abse, ‘Italy’, in S. Berger and D. Broughton (eds.), The Force of Labour: The Western



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43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

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European Labour Movement and the Working Class in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1995), p. 140. P. Heywood, ‘The Labour Movement in Spain Before 1914’ in D. Geary (ed.), Labour and Socialist Movements in Europe Before 1914 (Oxford, 1989), pp. 235-6 A. Bar, ‘The CNT: The Glory and Tragedy of Spanish Anarchosyndicalism’, in van der Linden and Thorpe, Revolutionary Syndicalism, pp. 133-4. M. Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868-1936 (Edinburgh, 1998) p. 203. See A. Smith, ‘Anarchism, the General Strike and the Barcelona Labour Movement, 1899-1914, European History Quarterly, 27: 1 (1997). See G. H. Meaker, The Revolutionary Left in Spain, 1914-1923 (Stanford, Calif., 1974), pp. 2-9; 147; Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists, pp. 69-71. See C. Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898-1937 (London, 2005). For example see A. Balcells, El arraigo del anarquismo en Cataluña: Textos de 19261934 (Madrid: Júcar. 1980), p. 18; M. Tuñón de Lara, El movimiento obrero en la historia de España: Vol. 1 (Madrid, 1977), p. 281; 307-8. A. Smith, Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labour and Crisis of the Spanish State 1898-1923 (Berghahn, 2007). Ealham, Class Culture and Conflict in Barcelona. For example see Heywood, pp. 231-65; B. Martin, The Agony of Modernisation: Labour and Industrialisation in Spain (Ithaca, NY, 1990); A. Smith, ‘Spain’, in Berger and Broughton, pp. 171-209. Cited in R. Hunter, Violence and the Labor Movement (New York, 1914), p. 247. E. Malatesta, ‘Syndicalism: An Anarchist Critique’ in G. Woodcock, The Anarchist Reader (London: Fontana/Collins, 1980), pp. 220-25. P. Monatte, ‘Syndicalism: An Advocacy’, ibid., p. 213. E. Malatesta, ibid., p. 222. See also V. Richards (ed,) Errico Malatesta: His Life and Ideas, Freedom Press, 1977), pp. 113-36. D.D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Manchester, 1979), p. 74; Bertrand, ‘Revolutionary Syndicalism in Italy’, p. 145. Cited in B. Riguzzi, Sindacalismo e riformiso nel Parmense (Bari, 1974), p. 129. A. Borghi, Anarchismo e sindacalismo. Conferenza tenuta il 3 aprile 1922 a Roma del Fascio Sindacale d’Azione Diretta (Rome, n.d.), pp. 45-8. C. Levy, ‘Currents of Italian Syndicalism before 1926’, International Review of Social History, 45 (2000), p. 243. A. Bar, Syndicalism and Revolution in Spain: The Ideology and Syndical Practice of the CNT in the Period 1915-1919 (New York, 1981); G. H. Meaker, The Revolutionary



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Left in Spain, 1914-1923 (Stanford, Calif., 1974). B. Moss, ‘Socialism and the Republic in France’, Socialist History, 18 (2000), pp. 146-7. Levy, ‘Currents of Italian Syndicalism’, p. 213. Dubofsky, pp. 36-8. See Ridley, pp. 25-52. Levy, ‘Currents of Italian Syndicalism’, p. 228. G. Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (Glasgow, p. 223). J. White, Tom Mann (Manchester, 1991), p. 170. R. Price, ‘Contextualising British Syndicalism c.1907-c.1920’, Labour History Review, 63:3 (1998), pp. 261-76; D. Howell, ‘Taking Syndicalism Seriously’, Socialist History, 16 (2000). pp. 27-48. 70. E. O’Connor, Syndicalism in Ireland (Cork, 1988), p. 1. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.



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ISSN 0967 3393


Herald of the future? Emma Goldman, Friedrich Nietzsche and the anarchist as superman Kevin Morgan Abstract: This article focuses on the life and work of Emma Goldman as an exemplar of wider issues and currents in the revolutionary left in the twentieth century, notably the tensions between libertarianism and communism. The focus is on Goldman’s fascination with and appropriation of elements of Nietzsche’s iconoclastic philosophy at a time when anarchism was travelling in the opposite direction towards revolutionary trade unionism and ultimately anarcho-syndicalism. Finally Goldman offers an anarchist alternative to syndicalism but an alternative that has its dark side. Keywords: Goldman, Nietzsche, social anarchism, individual anarchism, propaganda by deed, Mother Earth

In the early twentieth-century heyday of American anarchism, Emma Goldman more than anybody personified the movement for a wider public. Journalists described her as its ‘red queen’ or ‘high priestess’. A sometime collaborator complained of her ‘cult of personality’.1 Twice, in 1892 and 1901, Goldman was linked in the public mind with the attentats or attempted assassinations that were anarchy’s greatest advertisement and cause of notoriety. Already reaching wide audiences through her journalism and lecture tours, Goldman cemented her reputation with her book Anarchism and Other Essays, published in 1910. This began with a biographical essay by Hippolyte Havel expounding what by now was the Goldman legend of the ‘pure and simple’ anarchist moulding hearts and minds by sheer eloquence and energy.2 Refusing embodiment in party rules and structures, anarchy


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thus achieved symbolic representation through the force of the charismatic individual. As Goldman remarked on serving a prison sentence for alleged incitement to riot, the prosecution’s target was not ‘little Emma Goldman’ but the spirit and principles of anarchy itself.3 The present article explores a relatively neglected aspect of the spirit and principles thus exemplified by Goldman. Its point of departure is the quality of ‘egotism’ with which Goldman seemed at once to reconcile and confuse the commitments to individualism and unforced mutuality coexisting within anarchism. An early newspaper interview registered this perfectly: There are some that, if asked why they are Anarchists, will say, ‘for the good of the people’. It is not true, and I do not say it. I am an Anarchist because I am an egotist. It pains me to see others suffer … So, because what others suffer makes me suffer, I am an Anarchist and give my life to the cause, for only through it can be ended all suffering and want and unhappiness.4

Goldman is sometimes categorised as an anarchist communist. That she was moved by human suffering, and by its terminable causes in structures of oppression, was to be powerfully attested throughout her career. What remained ambiguous was the agency of the afflicted in the removal of these sufferings. Anarchism, in her own time and for the foreseeable future, was necessarily the movement of a minority. What was nevertheless unclear was whether its demonstrative forms, from assassination to the temporary occupation of public spaces, were intended as a catalyst or as a surrogate for wider mobilisations; or whether indeed they primarily served an expressive function in respect of anarchists’ own collective egotism. Despite obvious differences in rhetoric and value-systems, similar tensions have characterised disparate minority movements for social transformation; especially those whose minority status was linked with perceived limitations of popular consciousness. It was on these grounds, not just those of conspiracy, that Lenin in the same period justified his notion of the vanguard party.5 Though Goldman’s and Lenin’s names are rarely linked except as contraries, hers too was expressly a movement of the ‘avant-garde’, upholding a better future against the tenacity of the past in the actually existing present.6 In her explicit legitimation of such minorities, Goldman even spoke, as the Bolsheviks later acted, against the ‘compact, immobile, drowsy mass, of the Russian peasant’.7 Anything but a Leninist, her brief and ill-starred support for the Bolsheviks suggests if nothing else that they may have shared a common instinct of revolutionary voluntarism. Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Such considerations offer fresh ways of conceptualising the tensions commonly recognised as existing within anarchism. Standard accounts, like those of Daniel Guérin and David Miller, recognise a basic tension between what Guérin describes as ‘social’ and ‘individual’ anarchism.8 Although Guérin notes that the differences between these approaches have been overstated, anarchists themselves devoted considerable effort to discussing the differences between Stirnerite individualism and the anarcho-communism most identified with Peter Kropotkin.9 The same tension has also served to locate anarchism somewhere between, or else transcending, socialism and liberalism. In their History of Economic Doctrines, Charles Gide and Charles Rist described it as ‘a curious fusion of Liberal and socialist doctrines’.10 So did the anarchist Rudolf Rocker in his Anarcho-Syndicalism.11 Michael Freeden, employing the same reference points, has more recently described anarchism as an umbrella term covering distinct, perhaps incompatible tendencies.12 Given the modern predicament of reconciling principles of liberty and equality, a maximalist recognition of both – ‘complete liberty’, wrote Malatesta, ‘with complete solidarity’ – is an attractive and defensible position, if open to criticism on grounds of rigour and immediate practicability.13 Precisely the refusal to compromise on essentials, at the cost of imprisonment, exile or political ostracisation, is the outstanding characteristic brought out by Goldman’s several biographers. Without calling into question her qualities of moral and political courage, I want to propose a less innocent reading of her anarchism. Goldman was not, it is true, primarily a thinker but an animator. According to one recent biography, her life provides not ‘intellectual solution’ but a personal exemplar of ‘unfailing effort towards liberation’.14 The slipperiness of such a notion, however, lies in imprecision as to who was to be liberated, by whom and from what. In affirming a sort of absolute value of human emancipation, against oppressions identified with the existence of government itself, anarchists at first sight avoided if they did not entirely resolve such dilemmas. An unfailing vocabulary of liberation, however, disguised some quite basic transitions. With the ebb and flow of the movement with which she identified, what Goldman sometimes depicted as the liberation of the many was also reconfigured as liberation from the many. As Alice Wexler observes, despite the seeming consistency of her anarchist commitments, Goldman swung ‘between extremes of faith in and contempt for the masses, between belief in revolution and despair’.15 This sense of election may not have been inherent in anarchism itself. It does, however, suggest the need to historicise both the movement and its ideas. Goldman’s deep ambivalence towards the masses may thus be located more specifically within the contemporary literary culture to which she was at least as receptive as to specifically anarchist texts. Anarchist Studies 17.2


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The fault-line here does not lie between socialism and liberalism, but between respectively elitist and popular or ‘democratic’ conceptions of social change. Goldman’s rejection of democracy, like Lenin’s, reflected scepticism as to structures of oppression which the claimed authority of the people merely dissimulated. That their real authority offered any immediate alternative to this deception was in both cases unclear. In Freeden’s terms of logical or cultural adjacency, the ‘core’ anarchist concept of freedom might rather be advanced at the expense of the masses who, through docility, complicity or active persecution, threatened this quality of freedom. The same quality was embodied, not so much in particular moral or legal practices, as in the free and implicitly superior individual. In Political Parties Robert Michels assimilated this to his notion of an irrepressible tendency to oligarchy, but in older forms than that of the mass party. ‘These’, he wrote, ‘are the means utilized by the apostle and the orator: the flaming power of thought, greatness of self-sacrifice, profundity of conviction. Their dominion is exercised, not over the organization, but over minds; it is the outcome, not of technical indispensability, but of intellectual ascendancy and moral superiority.’16 In exploring these issues, particular attention is given here to the fascination felt by Goldman for the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Though Nietzsche’s contempt for the masses was extended with some vehemence to anarchists and other political radicals, Goldman was hardly alone among these in deriving inspiration from his writings. As a movement which in most of Europe and North America lacked any immediately plausible conception of popular social agency, it may be that anarchism was especially susceptible to such influences. Nevertheless, these again are suggestive of a wider historical moment in which the prospect of a new and higher humanity captured radical imaginations without as yet having revealed its catastrophic darker side. As it did so, in the militarism of the Great War and in the authoritarian regimes which followed, Nietzschean ideas of the superman became discredited. For the anarchist who upheld them, like Herbert Read, a quality of ‘aloofness’ was now advanced at the expense of a more messianic role.17 The dilemma to which this then gave rise, of sustaining the refusal of existing structures of oppression in spite of scepticism as to the promise of epochal transformation, is one that remains. Goldman once more offers illumination; for as one of Bolshevism’s most persistent left-wing critics in the 1920s, she was among the first to register what had previously seemed unimaginable: that the revolution itself might fall victim to the tyranny of the masses.



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PROPAGANDA AS THE DEED At the root of Goldman’s anarchism lay the notion of propaganda by the deed. In the years in which she first embraced its precepts, anarchy was identified in the public mind with a series of sensational attentats symbolising its rejection of established authority and affirmation of a state of open social war. Removed in this way were heads of state or government in Italy, France and Spain, and others who were simply bystanders in the imposition of authority. The resulting publicity and political reaction helped generate the image of a movement at once at the margins of society and at the centre of its political consciousness.18 It was on this paradox that Goldman, without the support of party or popular mandate, established herself as a figure of national repute. Like other anarchist propagandists, she rejected preconceptions of the movement as merely one of ‘bomb throwers’.19 She also understood, however, that precisely this misconception helped stimulate the wider interest on which her growing fame depended. Her attitude to political violence was consequently equivocal and inconsistent. No ‘truly great Anarchist leader’, she claimed on one occasion, ever advocated violence.20 She might have added that none, in her view, should condemn it either; rather, they should indict the order of society that was ultimately the cause of every act of violence, whatever its immediate source. At the international anarchist congress held in Amsterdam in 1907, it was Goldman and her American comrade, the German-born Max Baginski, who successfully moved a resolution upholding the right of ‘Individual and Collective Terror’.21 The origins of this outlook predated Goldman’s anarchism. As a girl in St Petersburg she was already moved by the example of the ‘heroes and martyrs’ executed in 1881 for the assassination of Alexander II.22 These sentiments were reinforced when she made contact with anarchism after moving to the USA in December 1885. Goldman was one of many radicals and socialists initially moved by revulsion at the 1887 Haymarket executions. These were effectively state reprisals for the throwing of a bomb in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, and the victims’ place in the anarchist pantheon was cemented by their dignity and courage in the face of judicial terror and the absence of serious evidence against them. Goldman in her autobiography described awaking after their execution with ‘a burning faith, a determination to dedicate myself to the memory of my martyred comrades, to make their cause my own’.23 She always regarded Chicago as a city of cowardice and disgrace, whom only its martyrs redeemed.24 On two occasions, Goldman was more directly implicated in such actions. In 1892, her comrade and lover, Alexander Berkman, tried to kill the Carnegie steel Anarchist Studies 17.2


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boss Henry Clay Frick.25 Failing in the attempt, Berkman was given a draconian prison sentence, serving fourteen years. With its element of ‘voluntary Anarchist selfsacrifice’, this, he wrote, was the ‘first terrorist act in America’, and as his confidante and accomplice Goldman’s emotional identification with the ‘heroic moment’ and figure of the hero-martyr was immeasurably reinforced.26 Understandably, the line she trod between the explanation and advocacy of such actions was a thin one. An article she wrote in 1901, after the assassination of the Italian king by the anarchist Bresci, proved especially fateful. ‘Each age’, it urged, ‘has had its John Browns, its Perovskayas, its Parsons, Spies, and Angiolillos, and its Brescis, who were misunderstood, persecuted, mobbed, tortured, and killed, by those who could not reach the sublime heights attained by these men’. Perovskaya was one of the Russian nihilists executed in 1881. Parsons and Spies were two of the Haymarket victims. John Brown, the American abolitionist executed in 1859, provided an indigenous exemplar much invoked by anarchists. The Spaniard Angiolillo assassinated the reactionary politician Canovas in 1897. The construction of a lineage of hero-martyrs – Goldman’s ‘heralds of the coming Social Revolution’ – was still at this point combined with the rhetoric of a great popular ferment. A figure like Bresci, while personifying the ‘noble’, the good and sublime, was thus described as sprung from the toiling masses, leaving hundreds more ‘to lay down their lives to free mankind from tyranny, power, ignorance, and poverty’ – and from a ‘thoughtless multitude’ of slaves as well as tyrants.27 Almost certainly among the article’s readers was the young Polish-American Leon Czolgosz.28 Three months later Czolgosz shot and killed President McKinley at the Pan American Exposition at Buffalo. Reputedly he did so under the influence of Goldman’s oratory. He had certainly attended a lecture in which Goldman defended those carrying out such acts, and the resulting furore against her was enormous. That Czolgosz had no real record of activity in the movement hardly mattered to Goldman, for whom his execution provided another of the black-edged dates figuring so prominently in the anarchist calendar. ‘While the memory of despots and tyrants … is maintained only through artificial and arbitrary means’, she wrote in connection with the Haymarket victims, ‘that of the pioneers and advance guards of humanity, perpetuates itself from generation to generation … pointing the way to great and daring deeds’.29 Extensively commemorated on its fifth and tenth anniversaries, ‘October twenty-ninth, 1901’, the date of Czolgosz’ execution, provided a further ‘heroic moment’ and revered addition to the pantheon.30 The use of violence in and of itself meant little to Goldman. Certainly by this time, even her most inflammatory utterances showed little sign of the language of Anarchist Studies 17.2


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retribution sometimes used by anarchists.31 Instead, she brought out two rather different themes unevenly over time. One was an almost instrumental rationale for propaganda by the deed, precisely as a sort of political advertisement. Invoking the denial to anarchists of rights of free speech and assembly, she held that violence could be justified wherever ‘the organized force – government – leaves us no other method of propaganda’.32 She also saw that such methods could bring results. In France, she wrote in 1896, a series of attentats achieved ‘more for the spreading of our principles than ten years of writing and speaking’.33 Individual acts of violence, she told a Detroit newspaper, ‘set men to thinking’ and provided the catalyst allowing other forms of propaganda to take effect.34 In North America, even as Goldman distanced herself from the promotion of revolutionary violence, it was to the ‘Czolgosz act’ that she attributed the anarchist resurgence in the years that followed. As she wrote to Kropotkin in 1907, ‘never before was Anarchism so much before the public eye as it has been since 1901’.35 This validation of the ‘Czolgosz act’ reinforced a conception of political agency that was heroic, performative and expressed rather in the willing exposure to martyrdom than in the act which occasioned it. This was the second and more deeply rooted of Goldman’s vindications of the attentat. Dismissing the delusion of a terrorist conspiracy, she invoked instead the dauntless individual whose lone assumption of responsibility mirrored her own aversion to the constraints of collective obligation. Czolgosz may or may not have been an anarchist. He was certainly a ‘beautiful soul’ whose sensitivity to suffering and injustice set him apart from his fellows and demanded their ‘reverenced silence’. His was in no sense an ‘unanarchistic’ act.36 Though the method of the attentat became increasingly superseded in the early years of the century, Goldman never lent her voice to what she called the ‘slimy, creepy, cowardly renunciation’ of those moved to acts of violence.37 Through the memorialisation of the deed, it even proved its durability as a source of propaganda. Moreover, with the ceding of anarchism’s terrorist phase to the mass agitational forms of anarcho-syndicalism, Goldman’s persona remained strongly marked by the individualism of the attentat. Though she wrote about syndicalism and half-heartedly sponsored a short-lived syndicalist league, it is telling that the latter’s manifesto should have characterised direct action as its ‘method of propaganda’.38 Goldman, in any case, was in no real position to organise such activities, and perfected instead the ‘method of propaganda’ of the public platform and individual lecture tour. Testing the limits of free speech, severely threatened in the aftermath of the Czolgosz affair, she used the platform itself as a form of dyamite, as the attentat’s exemplary qualities Anarchist Studies 17.2


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were enacted in more conventional forms and propaganda by the deed gave way to propaganda as the deed itself. Harassment by the authorities or vigilantes called on similar qualities of political courage in the voicing in this way of themes of social and sexual radicalism. At the same time, notoriety itself proved a tangible resource, allowing her to exploit what she called ‘the American craze for celebrities’.39 While continuing to draw on anarchy’s communistic strand, Goldman thus symbolised a more individualist tradition through the projection of personal charisma and assumption of a privileged speaking role. Increasingly she spoke in English, symbolising conscious reorientation to the cultural and political mainstream, sometimes to audiences’ disappointment.40 She could be scathing about the deficiencies of local anarchist groups and the ‘dingy little halls’ they seemed to prefer to meet in. She also thought them too centred in their own language-group activities to connect with a wider American public. Controversially, she therefore circumvented these dependencies after 1909 by using Ben L. Reitman as her tour manager.41 With more prestigious venues, the results were to be seen not only in the size but in the ‘quality’ of her audiences; indeed, some cynics commented, in the cars which the latter left parked outside.42 ‘It is not in the laboring man, the lowest classes, that I find my hope’, Goldman acknowledged already in 1901.43 Instead, she addressed herself to the ‘intellectual proletarians’ who in her brighter moments reminded her of the Russian idealists who had first caught her imagination.44 Berkman, released in 1906, was less impressed: Goldman’s home seemed to him like a literary salon where the spirit of revolution was all but smothered.45 The ‘planless, sporadic disease, known as “touring the country”’, he commented even before his release, was a ‘useless disturbance … of the sleeping zoo’.46 With the changing conception of her public, Goldman’s rationale for such activities changed. Fluent in several languages and widely read in European literature, she hankered for more durable means of expression and repeatedly expressed declining faith in the ‘wonder worker’ of the spoken word.47 With this in mind, in 1906 she founded the monthly journal Mother Earth, which for the next decade she regarded as the central raison d’être of her work. Styling itself a ‘magazine devoted to social science and literature’, it is through Mother Earth above all that Goldman can be located within the contemporary world of letters as well as an anarchist milieu. As well as signed essays and reviews, she contributed vivid diary-reports from the speaking tours which were the paper’s principal source of funding. Day-to-day editorial direction was delegated, first to Baginski, with whom she conceived the project, and later to Berkman. Goldman’s was nevertheless the dominant personality, and no party, board or readers’ group existed to constrain it. Indeed, it was this freedom Anarchist Studies 17.2


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from ‘sectarian favouritism’ that Goldman believed to be the paper’s greatest asset. ‘I have no claim on anyone who does not feel the impetus to assist’, she wrote on one occasion. ‘Nor do I propose that any one should have a claim on me.’ Some comrades understandably viewed the journal as little more than her personal vehicle.48

DYNAMITE OF THE SPIRIT A distinctive feature of Mother Earth was the prominence of the writer as the embodiment of value and social purpose. Particularly under Berkman’s editorship, beginning in March 1907, space was always found for labour struggles and the proponents of direct action. Campaigns over free speech, birth control, in due course over conscription, were also central to the magazine. Moreover, in a period of literary as well as political ferment, an eclectic mix between them was a feature of other radical papers, such as the British New Age. None, however, projected quite such an image of the hero as man of letters. ‘For years’, Goldman wrote, ‘I longed to create a medium through which I might express myself in words more durable than oral language’.49 For this validation of the role of the socially engaged writer, contemporary examples abounded. Gorky, Ibsen, Shaw, were among those lionised in Mother Earth, both for their social iconoclasm and for the fearless expression they gave to it. All were playwrights, Gorky intermittently, Ibsen and Shaw primarily so; and in combining the immediacy of performance with the permanence of the written word the theatre became a special fascination of Goldman’s. The very occasion for Mother Earth’s launching had been the holding of a benefit performance by a visiting Russian drama troupe with which she had become involved. Increasingly, the theatre also provided a subject for her lectures, and the subject of her second book published in 1914.50 Some found these lectures less radical than they expected. Berkman thought them a distraction; others that she was becoming worthy, even dull.51 Far from wishing to adulterate her anarchism, Goldman insisted that the drama posed a greater possible menace and more powerful inspiration than the ‘wildest harangue of the soapbox orator’.52 But she also conceded that it was to the ‘intellectual proletarian’ in particular that the medium was particularly suited.53 Disenchantment with the spoken word, clearly meaning less the stage and lecture hall than the ‘soapbox’ and free public meeting, suggested diminished faith in the figure of the people to whom the spoken word was addressed. The writer in this register did not just represent the voice of an inarticulate majority – Goldman’s ‘conscious expression’ of a ‘dumb unrest’.54 Nor was the motif of going to the people to be instructed by them a very consistent one.55 Instead, the writer as social Anarchist Studies 17.2


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demiurge tended to be depicted as a figure apart from the time and rising above it. It is in this connection that the influence of Nietzsche is clearly attested, both directly and as mediated through the literary culture of the day. Not just his scorn for movements like anarchism, but Nietzsche’s presumed identification with the intellectual origins of fascism, may explain its elusiveness in the Goldman of anarchy’s collective memory. It hardly figures, for example, in Peter Glassgold’s excellent Mother Earth anthology; and Nietzsche is not among the ‘guiding spirits’ to whom Candace Falk traces Goldman’s status as one of the ‘great humanitarians of her time’.56 A recent discussion by Leigh Starcross has helped redress the balance, but without really exploring the implications of Goldman’s Nietzscheanism for her anarchism.57 This, however, is more than usually necessary. Sympathetic commentators have placed considerable stress on Nietzsche’s ‘polyvocality’, or else cautioned against overly literal readings of Nietzschean metaphor.58 Just these protean and ambivalent qualities demand precision in the discussion of specific applications. Nietzsche’s special attraction for the ‘Socialistically inclined’ was often ascribed to his ‘destructive energy’.59 As ‘the primary liberatory project’, the late John Moore comments, anarchism more specifically had a claim on ‘one of the greatest iconoclasts of all time’.60 Certainly, Nietzsche’s identification with a sort of literary anarchism was a common one.61 Nevertheless, given the sometimes terrifying expressions of twentieth-century iconoclasm, perhaps the primacy of both project and thinker need approaching in a Nietzschean spirit of revaluation. In his attacks on established religion or on the ‘new idol’ of the state, reproduced in Mother Earth,62 Nietzche’s emancipatory appeal is relatively unproblematic. Against whom or what, on the other hand, was the destructive energy behind such concepts as the superman or will to power to be directed? Like the eugenicist sentiments that also crept into Mother Earth, sometimes under the same Nietzschean impulses, suggestions of hierarchy or prescriptive authority sat uneasily with a movement usually defined in terms of their denial. It was certainly so with Goldman. Though she first encountered Nietzsche in Europe in 1894-5, it was to Baginski, her sometime lover and ‘kindred spirit’, that Goldman attributed her deeper understanding of the philosopher’s thinking.63 It was also under Baginski’s editorship that Mother Earth’s Nietzschean enthusiasms were most clearly signalled. Its opening address, signed by Goldman and Baginski, set an appropriate tone in appealing ‘to those who strive for something higher, weary of the commonplace; to those who feel that stagnation is a dead weight on the firm and elastic step of progress; to those who breathe freely only in limitless space’. If these were not sufficiently Nietzschean cadences, extracts were reprinted from key texts Anarchist Studies 17.2


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like his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Dawn and Antichrist; and space found for an exposition of Nietzsche’s individualist ethics by Helen Stoecker.64 Greater space constraints as well as editorial preferences may explain why coverage under Berkman’s editorship was less generous. Nevertheless, Starcross shows how between 1913 and 1917 Goldman gave no fewer than twenty-three lectures on Nietzschean themes.65 The texts of the lectures unfortunately do not survive. Nevertheless, sufficient traces of Goldman’s Nietzscheanism remain to suggest some plausible connections. Like the Russian revolutionaries who sought to reconcile Nietzsche and Marx, Goldman made no attempt to justify the former’s misogynism – indeed, she implicitly repudiated it66 – or his alleged racism. She was not, on the other hand, one of those who sought to explain away Nietzsche’s scorn for democracy. On the contrary, she appeared to find it liberating. In her autobiography she described the ‘undreamed-of ’ raptures to which Nietzsche carried her by the beauty of his vision, the magic of his language, the ‘fire of his soul’ – and the allure of the superman.67 Discussing the issue with James Huneker, one of Nietzsche’s foremost American champions, she recalled insisting that it was precisely in respect of his ‘aristocracy of the spirit’ that Nietzsche should be regarded as an anarchist. ‘All true anarchists’, by the same token, were in her view aristocrats.68 The cult of the attentat, whether in word or deed, can be seen from this perspective as the expression of a sensibility lifted above mass slavishness and mediocrity. Writing of Czolgosz, forsaken and yet ‘tower[ing] above our stifling social existence’, Baginski evoked another of Nietzsche’s best-known works in alluding to the ‘human, all-too-human’ failure to recognise in his action the ‘bursting of a human heart under the pressure of an unbearable life’.69 Famously, Nietzsche denounced anarchism as the lowest expression of ressentiment or a resentful slave-morality.70 He nevertheless provided a language with which the anarchist hero could be depicted as a sort of overman. Berkman, recalling his own failed attentat in his Prison Memoirs of 1912, described the revolutionary as one emancipated from the ‘merely human’ and transcending instincts of pity or self-regard.71 R. Hinton Thomas even mentions a German anarchist on trial for a similar action citing Nietzsche as part of his defence.72 The view that the value of an act was determined by its origin, not its results, would certainly have fitted here; for who better than the Attentäteri could claim, as Nietzsche urged, to determine his own categorical imperatives?73 Goldman, by the time she wrote her autobiography in the late 1920s, had so far discarded instrumentalist arguments for such actions as to describe Berkman’s ‘heroic moment’ as exposing a ‘merely utilitarian’ rationale for political action in favour of the ‘inner forces’ to which alone the idealist was accountable.74 Anarchist Studies 17.2


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In Mother Earth, particularly under Baginski’s editorship, Nietzsche was repeatedly invoked in grandiose terms. One contribution linked him with the ‘great Anarchistic playwright’ Ibsen and the still greater Shaw. All, in their insight into the ‘irretrievable defects of humankind’, were said to conceive of a ‘race of Better People than the human race’ comprising the Supermen and Superwomen who would live their lives ‘beyond good and evil’.75 Maxim Gorky, whose image of the revolution’s ‘stormy petrel’ followed immediately after the magazine’s opening editorial, provided a still more romantic figure.76 Visiting the USA amidst considerable publicity after the 1905 revolution, he combined Nietzschean projections with outspoken support for workers in struggle and the exposure by a yellow press of his supposed marital irregularities.77 As initial acclaim gave way to controversy and denunciation, the parallel evidently registered with Nietzsche’s neglected genius.78 Leonard D. Abbott, one of Goldman’s inner circle of contributors, thus pictured Gorky as ‘a very Christ of the proletaire’, arms outstretched, message as yet unheeded. ‘Like a Nietzschean Superman he turned to the mountains’, Abbott continued, ‘… and worked all the Summer, persistently, ceaselessly … his grim, impenetrable figure standing out in bold relief against a panorama of almost Alpine grandeur’.79 The imagery of mountains and limitless space, compellingly rendered in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, suggested aspiration and the impulse to freedom. But there was also a somewhat ambivalent attitude to the teeming cities left behind.

BEGETTERS OF THE FUTURE Goldman once linked Nietzsche with Kropotkin, through a common embrace of popular anti-authoritarianism expressed ‘wherever the people have retained their integrity and simplicity’.80 While the sentiment was supported in Kropotkin’s work, it was not in Nietzsche’s writings.81 In any case, a love of simplicity was tangential to the attraction either writer held for Goldman. She had little interest in imagined pasts, as evoked by Kropotkin, or in the myriad forms of free association Kropotkin believed grew independently of the state and provided the basis for its casting aside.82 Goldman took a much more critical view, extending her institutional critique to the counter-cultural activities of the anarchist movement. In her essay on ‘The child and its enemies’, published in 1906, she identified ‘free community’ with the ‘free individual’ capable of withstanding community pressures and the adoption of educational initiatives predicated on the principle of ‘free unfoldment’.83 One of the basic issues this posed was touched upon in the preface to Goldman’s Anarchism collection. Defending Nietzsche’s ‘giant mind’ from shallow critics, she Anarchist Studies 17.2


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protested that his ‘vision of the Uebermensch also called for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves’.84 Her view suggested that the presently exceptional was to become generalised. The argument or apologia was widely advanced by left-wing Nietzscheans; indeed, it is only on such a basis that to describe them as such is not an oxymoron. In its left-wing variation, too, the transcendent qualities of the future provided the basis for a searing critique of the present, its dominant ‘slave’ morality included. This, indeed, was what Nietzschean anarchism had in common with maximalist forms of socialism; for it was precisely in prefiguring the future that inhered the exceptionality of the few who stood apart from the herd. ‘Do I exhort you to love of your neighbour?’, asks his Zarathustra. ‘I exhort you rather to flight from your neighbour and to love … of the most distant man and of the man of the future …’85 Nevertheless, the claim rested on dubious foundations. For Nietzsche, as for anybody using the term intelligibly, the notion of aristocracy could not be universalised, but presupposed what he called the pathos of distance and a ‘select’ species capable of raising itself to a higher existence. It therefore meant ‘slavery in some sense or other’, or at least the fulfilment by the majority of the routinism and functionality in which it allegedly found its idea of happiness. One could perhaps imagine a conception of the heroic or the superman in which its necessary differentiation from the presently inadequate or inferior was left implicit: like an Über-Samuel Smiles producing parables of self-help without the concomitant tales of failure.86 This was not, however, the case with Goldman. Rather, the Übermensch concept, while mapping uncertainly onto the future itself, allowed the clearest differentiation of those who in an age of mediocrity already prefigured that future. She did not, like some left-wing Nietzscheans, depict Nietzsche’s view of democracy as wrong-headed or superficial.87 On the contrary, as Huneker suggested, she was contemptuous of the ‘mob’.88 Her view was almost inseparable from the cult of the attentat, whether in the literal or merely literary sense. The setting aside of conventional morality and sanctification of the revolutionary martyr licensed a scorn for the ignorant mass whose indifference both required such acts and was left untouched by them. To mark the tenth anniversary of Czolgosz’ death, Mother Earth included a piece by Baginski on Stolypin’s execution and another of Goldman’s tributes to Czolgosz. In this she roundly condemned the ‘mob soul, so appalling in its massiveness’, and the ‘cowardice and moral weakness’ of the radicals by whom Czolgosz had been foresaken, ‘even like Christ’. She used similar terms to depict Berkman, the ‘Chicago martyrs’ and the MacNamara brothers, convicted in 1911 for the bombing of the Los Angeles Times building. Berkman’s own Prison Memoirs also had a chapter on his release from prison: ‘The resurrection’. Even those who perished on the scaffold Anarchist Studies 17.2


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or in the electric chair, she wrote, were in reality ‘not dead; they live with us always unto all eternity … [and] supply the leaven by means of which will rise a new and beautiful world’. Those failing to recognise this redemptive power were typically described as ‘Judas’ figures.89 These images seem at first glance to be of anything but Nietzschean provenance. Nor can they apparently be squared with the contempt for martyrdom Nietzsche expressed in expounding his philosophy of the Antichrist.90 Even so, consideration of his characteristic insights and contrarieties in this connection only further underlines the ambivalence towards the idea of the people that was the essence of the attentat. Purportedly seeking to rescue the Christ-figure from its perversion by Christianity, Nietzsche described the crucifixion, not as sacrifice, but as affirmation of a new way of living, both as its proof and as its ‘strongest test’.91 Almost it was an attentat against the self; the sort of spiritualisation of cruelty, including cruelty to the self, which Nietzsche regarded as the basis of higher culture.92 Similarly in the attentat, whose executor was also potential victim and martyr, the shattering of the ‘morality of mediocrity’ suggested affirmation in Nietzschean terms of the higher type of being whose values were self-determined.93 Whether or not these values included the pity that Nietzsche so despised, the anarchists’ Christ-figure certainly served to expose hypocrisy and cringing abasement. The ‘people’, Goldman wrote, evoking a lineage of anarchist martyrs, ‘forge their own chains and do the bidding of their masters to crucify their Christs’.94 This theme of sacrifice as indictment was strikingly expressed in the tributes to Czolgosz. His last words, Goldman recorded, were, ‘I did it for the good of the people’: But the people knew him not, the people passed him by in blind hatred. Yet with all that, he was flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood. He suffered for them, endured humiliation for them, gave his life for them. His tragedy consisted in his great and intense love for the people, but unlike many of his brother slaves he could neither submit nor bow his neck.95

The contrast between the people’s present debased condition and future idealisation was precisely the rationale for revolution. Goldman in the same breath could thus invoke the ‘sublime and inspiring vista’ of labour, ‘conscious of its power’ and risen from its present ‘pale, trembling, cringing condition’, while indicting the ‘mocking, fiendish monster’ that meanwhile ‘sap[ped] the life element from its slaves’.96 The adjustment of these different emphases was subject to wide variations. Nevertheless, by the time of her article ‘Minorities versus majorities’ Goldman was Anarchist Studies 17.2


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giving voice to the frankest, most essentialist elitism. With the triumph of ‘numbers’, and the replacement of the craft worker by ‘brainless, incompetent automatons’, the individual had become subjugated to ‘the inertia, the cravenness, the utter submission of the mass’. This, of course, was a view of modern industrialism widely held on the left. Nevertheless, as Goldman also invoked the ‘individual giants’ to whom she stated all human progress was due, specific indictment of capitalism gave way to a wider philosophy and world-view that was authentically ‘Nietzschean’. ‘Ours’, she insisted, ‘is merely a poignant repetition of the phenomenon of all history: every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and economic liberty, emanates from the minority, and not from the mass’. Always the few were ‘misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed’. Always the mass ‘clings to its masters, loves the whip, and is the first to cry Crucify! the moment a protesting voice is raised …’97 Distrust of the mob may explain why Goldman turned to Nietzsche as a subject for her lectures after 1913. Like Helmut Herzfelde’s adoption of the English name John Heartfield, the choice of subject alone breathed defiance of xenophobic passions. At the same time, the war itself, and the mass emotions it engendered, provoked a new sensitivity to the brutality of the mob. Already encountering jingoism in Britain during the Anglo-Boer war, Goldman had described not the government but the ‘people themselves’ as the greatest threat to freedom. ‘By the “people”’, she went on, ‘I do not only mean the ignorant, whisky-saturated, patriotism-maddened workers, but also the mental wage slaves: clerks, bookkeepers, cashiers, typewriters, commercial travelers, and other flunkeys to money and titles’.98 Similarly, in ‘Minorities versus majorities’ the sabre-rattler Roosevelt embodied mob psychology, and the shame of the mass was conveyed by its willingness to serve as the instruments of violence and coercion.99 With the wider conflagration after 1914, radicals and individualists of all kinds saw in the machinery of total war, supposedly driven by ‘democracy’, a sort of consummation of the tyranny of the ‘herd’ or ‘mob’. It was thus that Goldman could describe Nietzsche as ‘The intellectual storm center of the war’.100 In a Mother Earth editorial, he was saluted for having ‘brilliantly and passionately arraigned the State, the moneyed mob, the parasitic aristocracy and above all the cringing submissive canaille – all of whom are the real cause of the war’.101 A four-line poem of Morrison Swift followed four issues later. Out of the soot-heap of a nation sunk in greed; Out of the hell-swamp of a people in black need, The cry goes up for men of brains or will of steel, Who are not sheep, who follow not, who stand alone, who lead.102 Anarchist Studies 17.2


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The sentiments seemed clear. Who could say, however, whether wills of steel were needed to prosecute the war or bring down its perpetrators? Swift’s ideas in many respects resembled Goldman’s and he was described as an anarchist; but by 1917 he was also an advocate of military preparedness as the threat now loomed of the storm extending to America itself.103 In the coming age of wars and revolutions there were to be countless such transitions, and the anarchist movement such as Goldman had known it was to be one of the casualties.

UNTIMELY REVOLUTION Goethe in his notebook copied Thraseas’ maxim: ‘he who hates vices hates mankind’.104 In any genuine project of societal transformation the tension this implies can be detected. On the one hand, there is the optimistic view of human potentiality and the vision of a better society. Differing in the details of its social arrangements, and in the means of its achievement, this typically envisages the unforced fulfilment of this potentiality through the positive qualities of association or, at very least, the extinction of forces making for social conflict. In such a vision lies the emancipatory dynamic shared by anarchism and other radical social movements. It is why Kropotkin found it natural to locate the anarchists on or to the left of the socialists. It also helps explain the dedication and commitment to which these movements gave rise, and patterns of disinterested activism which again were a shared characteristic. The anarchist, as Goldman put it, even as her assurance in the fact was slipping, was ‘inseparably allied with the future’.105 But alliance with the future meant ambivalence towards the present. David Miller makes the point that Goldman, like Kropotkin, did not envisage the ‘conscious minority continuing to play a role after the revolution’.106 This might have mattered more had the prospect been less remote, and had Goldman given it more attention. Her anarchism, however, was intended as a ‘living influence’, not just a ‘theory for a distant future’; and she was commended in Mother Earth precisely because she eschewed ‘fancy pictures’ of the co-operative commonwealth. In its present equation, moreover, the balance of Malatesta’s formulation was heavily tilted away from solidarity towards a Nietzschean spirit of freedom.107 However vague, fantastical and even messianic its forms, it was difficult even to imagine the better humanity of the future without also affirming the corresponding limitations of the actually existing humanity of the present. The Nietzschean overman was never just the product of self-overcoming. Always it carried the sense of innate difference which, in terms of Nietzschean metaphor, involved indiscriminate dehumanisation. Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Whether registered in terms of victimhood, acquiescence or collusion in the systems that oppressed them, a compact majority – Goldman took the phrase from Ibsen – was constructed as problem or threat with, at best, unrealised potential as the agent of emancipation. This in turn gave rise to a strong self-identity as a form of leadership. For anarchists this was not expressed as a set of party structures, hierarchical or otherwise. Equally, in her pre-eminence and unequal access to resources Goldman was also unconstrained by such structures. More perhaps than any other movement of the left, anarchist history until recently tended to be written in terms of its leading figures, exactly as Michels might have advised. Such tensions, however, were not specific to anarchism. In an article of 1901, Goldman rounded off a diatribe against the ‘fools and slaves’ of the American workers with an important caveat: ‘of course’, this referred only to the ‘average worker’ – the sort that socialists in Anglophone countries sometimes thought of as ‘Henry Dubb’.108 ‘The intelligent worker of America’, Goldman went on, ‘is the intelligent worker of the world; he stands up for his rights, and works with those whose aim in life is the establishment of equal liberty in all phases of life’.109 This language of the intelligent worker helps to locate her anarchism within a much wider culture of the pioneer. In the papers of the British ethical socialists, for example, strikingly ‘Nietzschean’ formulations can be found prior to any of Nietzsche’s works being translated into English.110 Of more direct relevance to Goldman was the expression of similar ideas by the revolutionary syndicalists who sometimes featured in Mother Earth. Emile Pouget, for example, denounced the mass suffrage as empowering the ‘unconscious and inactive’ at the expense of ‘the minority who carry the future within themselves’.111 Georges Yvetot, author of the anti-militarist Nouveau Manuel du Soldat, described the crowd as ‘stupefied by work and alcohol, by the prejudices of the family, the school and the barracks’.112 Hubert Largardelle, founder and editor of Le Mouvement socialiste, expounded a more considered philosophy of the syndicats as the movement of an elite in the interests of the mass.113 Within the USA, the syndicalist W.Z. Foster provided the quintessential rationale for the ‘militant minority’ in his pamphlet of 1912, Syndicalism: In every group of human beings … there are to be found a certain few individuals who exercise a great influence over the thoughts and actions of the rest of the mass of individuals composing the group. They are the directing forces of these groups – the sluggish mass simply following their lead. They are natural leaders and maintain their leadership through their superior intellect, energy, courage, cunning, organizing ability, oratorical power, etc., as the case may be.114 Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Because of its protean character, histories of anarchism have sometimes projected a strong sense of its defining qualities in order to construct it as coherent narrative subject. A classic account like George Woodcock’s, while faithfully registering differences within anarchism over the question of organisation, retrospectively provides a sort of surrogate for organisation in the form of this shared identity. Frequently, as in Woodcock’s case, this allows the accommodation of thinkers like Tolstoy, not necessarily regarding themselves as anarchists. It also, as in the same instance, allows the marginalisation of thinkers like Nietzsche, whose names were similarly linked with the anarchists, but in contexts that may now seem more troubling.115 It is precisely Nietzsche’s susceptibility to diverse and often contradictory readings that demands the political historian’s attention. A Nietzschean strain has clearly been identified in explorations of the deeper roots of Bolshevism.116 Without reducing Nietzsche to a proto-fascist, it also offers insight into the ‘modernist’ elements within European fascism.117 The distinctions between these movements mattered profoundly; often they were literally an issue of life and death. But at the same time the fundamentally metaphorical character of ideological families, which had no genetic basis and were subject to myriad forms of ideological and prosopographical miscegenation, needs also to be registered. As Allan Antliff observes, there was not one but many ‘anarchisms’, in harmony, conflict or uneasy coexistence, and at different moments of formation or decline. But by the same token these ‘inherently multiple and equivocal discourses’ may be found harmonising, conflicting and coexisting with the similarly disparate non-anarchisms which helped to define them, and from which they might variously emerge, or equally sink into.118 For activists and public figures like Goldman, the issue involved quite basic moral and political choices, which were rarely so straightforward as that between the ‘liberatory project’ and the ‘repressive project’.119 Recovering this particular strand in anarchism is a reminder that these choices were always difficult ones and could be made in unpredictable and sometimes unsettling ways. In lieu of a conclusion, one might return to the parallel Bolshevik history that proved such a defining one for the left, and so corrosive of the anarchist tradition. Deported to Russia at the end of 1919, Goldman in her autobiography was to describe her horror at hearing her sometime hero Gorky justify Bolshevism on grounds of the ignorance and backwardness of the Russian masses. ‘No Russian writer had ever spoken in such terms before’, she observed, as if she had never herself made mention of their drowsy immobility.120 Indeed, the irony went further. Both Gorky and Goldman had been avid Nietzscheans; both were attracted, even intoxiAnarchist Studies 17.2


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cated, by the vision of the Übermensch. Goldman thought of Gorky as ‘the living affirmation … that the creative artist cannot be suppressed’ and for years had sought to elucidate his genius for American audiences.121 Now, however, their paths seemed to criss-cross without ever meeting. In the earliest phase of Soviet power, it was Gorky, not Goldman, who employed the Nietzschean title Untimely Thoughts in condemning Lenin’s regime precisely on grounds of its persecution of the higher culture of the intelligentsia.122 Goldman, slower than Kropotkin to take their measure, at this time still defended the Bolsheviks; whether as the superman’s triumph or that of the herd was as yet unclear. The story had not yet produced its final twist. Gorky, having made his peace with the Bolsheviks, was made the focus of a Stalinist literary cult. Necessarily understated, as Nietzsche was reclaimed by the Nazis, a link may nevertheless be traced between the god-building projects of the 1900s, in which Gorky had been involved, and the Stalinist remaking of man.123 Goldman, meanwhile, having registered the catastrophic failings of the regime, henceforth gave voice to these with indomitable honesty. In time, as disillusion deepened, she was to admit her loss of faith in both the revolution and the masses and give vent to what one biographer describes as ‘elitist tirades’.124 In her immediate revulsion from Bolshevism, however, Goldman was galvanised into a reaffirmation of the revolutionary idea in movingly libertarian terms. It was the people itself that was now cast as martyr, and the revolution that was ‘nailed to the Bolshevik cross’.125 The Nietzschean notion of a ‘fundamental transvaluation of values’ continued to be expressed, but in specific terms – of justice, brotherhood, equality, dignity and an ‘instinctive’ sense of equity – for which a Nietzschean provenance was altogether doubtful.126 Isolated by her anti-Bolshevik stance, she found sustenance in the older messianic strain and the ‘sublime prophets, teachers, pioneers, rebels who dreamed, worked, suffered and died for larger freedom, greater beauty, finer meaning of human personality’. In once more dingy meetings, ‘small and dead’, it was this, as she reminded her old comrade Ben Reitman, that gave her the courage to swim against the stream: For I have learned through tears and blood that the intrinsic human value is not successful meetings, or the adulation of the public … The only enduring and abiding value is the value to stand out against friend and foe, to be inseparably allied with the future.

‘You are of yesterday Ben’, she continued, ‘we are of the future’.127 The paradox of Goldman’s elitist libertarianism awaited resolution. Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Kevin Morgan is Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Manchester. He has published widely on the left in Britain and in comparative perspective, relating communism to broader social, cultural and political movements in Britain and Europe. Email: [email protected]

NOTES 1. Johann Most, Freiheit, 18 June 1898, cited Candace Falk et al, eds, Emma Goldman: a documentary history of the American years. 1. Made for America, 1890-1901 (henceforth: Documentary History, 1), Berkeley Cal., University of California Press, 2003, p.335. 2. Hippolyte Havel, ‘Biographic sketch’ in Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), New York: Dover Publications, 1969 edn, pp. 38-40. 3. New York World, 20 August 1894 in Documentary History, 1, p. 207. 4. Goldman, interview with Nellie Bly, New York World, 17 September 1893 in Documentary History, 1, p. 157. 5. Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin, Merlin edn, 1980, pp. 29-37. 6. Goldman, ‘Light and shadow in the life of the Avant-Guard’, Mother Earth, February 1910, pp. 383-91. This was the title Goldman gave the series of reports from her lecture tour appearing in Mother Earth between February and June 1910. 7. Goldman, ‘Minorities versus majorities’ in her Anarchism and Other Essays, p. 76. 8. Daniel Guérin, trans. Mary Klopper, Anarchism: from theory to practice (1965), New York & London: Monthly Review Press, 1971, edn, pp. 3-7; David Miller, Anarchism, London & Melbourne: Dent, 1984, part 1. 9. See for example Max Nettlau, ‘Anarchism: communist or individualist? – Both’ (1914) in Peter Glassgold, ed., Anarchy! An anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth, New York, Counterpoint, 2000, pp. 79-83. 10. Charles Gide and Charles Rist, A History of Economic Doctrines: from the time of the physiocrats to the present day, Harraps, 1917 edn, p. 614. 11. Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Secker & Warburg, 1938, pp. 21-5. 12. Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: a conceptual approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 311-12. 13. E. Malatesta, Anarchy, Freedom Press, 1942 edn, p. 2. 14. ‘Forging her place: an introduction’ in Documentary History, 1, p. 83; Theresa Moritz and Albert Moritz, The World’s Most Dangerous Woman. A new biography of Emma Goldman, Toronto: Subway Books, 2001, p. 6. Anarchist Studies 17.2


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15. Alice Wexler in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas, eds, Encyclopedia of the American Left, New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 edn, pp. 273-5. Wexler’s biographies are particularly good on Goldman’s politics; see her: Emma Goldman; an intimate life, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984; and Emma Goldman in Exile: from the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War, Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1989. Candace Falk, Love, Anarchy and Emma Goldman, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984, is stronger on the personal aspects of Goldman’s life. 16. Robert Michels, Political Parties. A sociological study of the oligarchical tendencies of modern democracy (1915), New York: Transaction Publishers edn, 1999, p. 326. 17. ‘Nietzsche, like the admirers of our contemporary dictators … is apt to praise as a superman a figure who is merely inflated with the unconscious desires of the group. The true superman is the man who holds himself aloof from the group …’; Read, The Philosophy of Anarchism, Freedom Press, 1940, pp. 13-14. 18. Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists. The heroic years 1868-1936, New York: Free Life Books, 1977, pp. 120-1. 19. Miriam Michelson, ‘A character study of Emma Goldman’, Philadelphia North American, 11 April 1901, Documentary History, 1, p. 444. 20. Goldman, interview in New York Sun, 6 January 1901 in Documentary History, 1, p. 426. 21. Goldman, ‘The international anarchist congress’, Mother Earth, October 1907 in Candace Falk et al, eds, Emma Goldman: a documentary history of the American years. 2. Making Speech Free, 1902-1909 (henceforth: Documentary History, 2), Berkeley Cal.: University of California Press, 2005, p. 242. 22. Goldman, Living My Life (1931), New York: Dover edn, 2 vols, 1970, p. 28. 23. Goldman, Living My Life, p. 10. 24. See for example ‘On the road’, Mother Earth, May 1907, pp. 128-9. 25. See Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), London: C.W. Daniel edn, 1926, ch. 1. 26. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, p. 58; Goldman, Living My Life, p. 507. 27. Goldman, ‘Gaetano Bresci’, Free Society, 2 June 1901 in Documentary History, 1, pp. 455-6; also Goldman in Liberty, October 1895, Documentary History, 1, pp. 225-6. 28. See ‘Forging her place: an introduction’ in Documentary History, 1, pp. 73-9. 29. Goldman, ‘The crime of the 11th of November’, Mother Earth, November 1911, pp. 263-6. 30. See e.g. the reprinting of ‘The tragedy at Buffalo’, Mother Earth, October 1906 and the article on Czolgosz by Max Baginski in the same issue; also Goldman, ‘In justice to Leon Czolgosz’, Mother Earth, October 1909, pp. 239-41; Goldman, ‘October twenty-ninth, 1901’, Mother Earth, October 1911, pp. 232-5.



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31. See however ‘Anarchy in Spain and New York’, New York World, 17 August 1897, Documentary History, 1, pp. 274-9 for an earlier example. 32. Goldman, ‘An open letter’, Free Society, 17 February 1901 in Documentary History, 1, p. 435. 33. Firebrand, 24 May 1896 in Documentary History, 1, pp. 237-8. 34. Goldman in Detroit Sentinel, 25 July 1898 in Documentary History, 1, p. 342. 35. Goldman to Kropotkin, 31 May 1907, in Documentary History, 2, p. 227. 36. Goldman, ‘The tragedy at Buffalo’, Free Society, 6 October 1901 in Documentary History, 1, pp. 471-8; Goldman to Walter Channing, 18 October 1902, Documentary History, 2, p. 95. 37. Goldman cited Glassgold, Anarchy!, p. 315. 38. The manifesto is cited in William Z. Foster, From Bryan to Stalin, London: Lawrence & Wishart edn, 1937, p. 59. 39. Goldman, Living My Life, pp. 154-5; see also e.g. Goldman to Metropolitan Magazine, 4 December 1903 in Documentary History, 2, p. 167. 40. Louis J. Domas, reports on Goldman lectures to Commissioner of Immigration, Boston, Mass., 19 November and 14 December 1907. 41. Goldman, ‘On the road’, Mother Earth, May 1907, p. 132; Goldman, Living My Life, p. 469. 42. Goldman, ‘A review of the New York activities’, Mother Earth, April 1914, pp. 53-4; Goldman, Living My Life, p. 529. 43. Miriam Michelson, ‘A character study of Emma Goldman’, Philadelphia North American, 11 April 1901, Documentary History, 1, p. 443. 44. Goldman, ‘Two months and after’, Mother Earth, January 1915, p. 365; Goldman, Living My Life, pp. 28, 154. 45. Berkman, Prison Memoirs, p. 493. 46. Berkman to Goldman, 12 March 1905 in Documentary History, 2, p. 152. 47. Goldman, ‘Preface’, in Anarchism and Other Essays, p. 41; Goldman to Maz Nettlau, 31 (sic) June 1900 in Documentary History, 1, p. 412. 48. Goldman, ‘The joys of an agitator’, Mother Earth, November 1908, p. 349; Goldman, Living My Life, p. 552. 49. Goldman, ‘To my readers’, Mother Earth, December 1906, pp. 7-8. 50. Goldman, The Social Significance of the Modern Drama, Boston: Richard Badger, 1914; see also e.g. Goldman, ‘The modern drama: a powerful disseminator of radical thought’ in her Anarchism, pp. 241-71. 51. Margaret Anderson, ‘Emma Goldman in Chicago’, Mother Earth, December 1914 in Glassgold, Anarchy!, p. 87; Goldman, Living My Life, p. 540.



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52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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Goldman, Social Significance, p. 5. Goldman, ‘The power of the ideal’, Mother Earth, May 1912, p. 89. Goldman, ‘Modern drama’, p. 241. See however Goldman, ‘Intellectual proletarians’, Mother Earth, February 1914, pp. 369-70. ‘Raising her voices: an introduction’ in Documentary History, 2, p. 10. Leigh Starcross, ‘ “Nietzsche was an anarchist”: reconstructing Emma Goldman’s Nietzsche lectures’ in John Moore, ed., with Spencer Sunshine, I Am Not a Man, I am Dynamite! Friedrich Nietzsche and the anarchist tradition, Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 2004, pp. 29-39. See for example Daniel Colson, ‘Nietzsche and the libertarian workers’ movement’ in Moore, I Am Not a Man, pp. 12-16. Nation, 12 June 1913, cited Patrick Bridgwater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony. A study of Nietzsche’s impact on English and American literature, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1972, pp. 17-18. Moore, ‘Attentat art: anarchism and Nietzsche’s aesthetics’ in Moore, I Am Not a Man, p. 127. See for example Havelock Ellis, ‘The ideals of anarchy – Friedrich Nietzsche’, Quarterly Review, October 1896, pp. 299-328; Édouard Schuré, ‘L’individualisme et l’anarchie en littérature. Frédéric Nietzsche et sa philosophie’ in Revue des Deux Mondes (1895), reprinted Bruno de Cessole and Jeanne Caussé, eds, Nietzsche 1892-1914, Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose/Éditions des Deux Mondes, 1997, pp. 59-90. February 1913, pp. 409-11. Goldman, Living My Life, pp. 216-19, 239. Stoecker, ‘The newer ethics’, Mother Earth, March 1907, pp. 17-23; see also e.g. Mother Earth, June 1906, pp. 15-7; August 1906, pp. 41-6; April 1907, pp. 82-5; June 1907, p. 175. These are listed in Starcross, ‘“Nietzsche was an anarchist”’, pp. 37-9. See Goldman, interview, Chicago Inter Ocean, 8 August 1908 in Documentary History, 2, p. 286. Goldman, Living My Life, pp. 172, 239. Goldman, Living My Life, p. 190. Baginski, ‘Leon Czolgosz’ (1906) in Glassgold, Anarchy!, pp. 16-21. Human, All-tooHuman was the title of a book of Nietzsche’s published in 1878. See e.g. Saul Newman, ‘Anarchism and the politics of ressentiment’ in Moore, I Am Not a Man, pp. 107-26.



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71. Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), London: C.W. Daniel edn, 1926, pp. 7-8. 72. R. Hinton Thomas, Nietzsche in German Politics and Society 1890-1918, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983, p. 50. 73. Nietzsche, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003 edn, pp. 62-3; Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, p. 151; Nietzsche, The AntiChrist (1888), in Nietzsche, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 10. 74. Goldman, Living My Life, pp. 190, 507. In Berkman’s Prison Memoirs, on the other hand, a propagandist motivation is still clearly stated. 75. John Franklyn Phillips, ‘A railway episode’, Mother Earth, June 1907, pp. 194-6. 76. Gorky, ‘Song of the storm-finch’, reproduced in Glassgold, Anarchy!, pp. 153-4. 77. See Edith W. Clowes, ‘Gorky, Nietzsche and god-building’ in Nicholas Luker, ed., Fifty Years On: Gorky and his time, Nottingham: Astra Press, 1987, p. 132; Mary Louise Loe, ‘Gorky and Nietzsche: the quest for a Russian superman’ in Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Nietzsche in Russia, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986, pp. 251-73. 78. Alexander Kaun, Maxim Gorky and his Russia (1931), New York: Benjamin Blom edn, 1968, appendix 1: ‘Maxim Gorky in the United States’. 79. Leonard D. Abbott, ‘An impression of Maxim Gorki’, Mother Earth, March 1908, pp. 32-4. 80. Goldman, ‘Peter Kropotkin’, Mother Earth, December 1912, pp. 325-7. 81. For Nietzsche’s view see Beyond Good and Evil, p. 264. 82. See e.g. P. Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, London: Chapman & Hall, 1913 edn, ch. 3. A possible exception was a formative American myth recurring in Goldman’s writings, though even this was depicted less in terms of human institutions than of a natural paradise, ‘vast, boundless, full of promise’ – and falling victim to the predatory few. See the opening Mother Earth editorial by Goldman and Baginski, March 1906, pp. 1-3. 83. Goldman, ‘The child and its enemies’, Mother Earth, April 1906, pp. 7-14; also Goldman, ‘“La Ruche” (The Beehive)’, Mother Earth, November 1907, pp. 388-94. 84. Goldman, ‘Preface’, p. 44. 85. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 86-8. 86. Which of course was precisely Smiles’s method; see his preface to the 1866 edition of his Self-Help. 87. See for example A.L. Tait, ‘Lunacharsky: a “Nietzschean Marxist?”’ in Rosenthal, Nietzsche in Russia, pp. 275-92.



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88. James G. Huneker, ‘A sentimental rebellion’ in his Visionaries, New York: Scribners, 1905. 89. Goldman, Living My Life, p. 304; Berkman, Prison Memoirs, p. 57; ‘Observations and comments’, Mother Earth, December 1907; Goldman, ‘The crime of the 11th of November’, pp. 265-6; Goldman, ‘The source of violence’, Mother Earth, December 1911, pp. 206-8. 90. Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, p. 52. 91. Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, pp. 30-7 92. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 159-60. 93. E.g. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 195-6, 201-2. 94. Goldman, Living My Life, p. 304. 95. Goldman, Living My Life, pp. 113-14. 96. Goldman, ‘Labor Day’, Mother Earth, September 1908, pp. 297-9. 97. Goldman, ‘Minorities versus majorities’, pp. 69-78 passim. 98. Goldman, ‘Observations and suggestions’, Free Society, 22 April 1900 in Documentary History, 1, p. 395. 99. Goldman, ‘Minorities versus majorities’, pp. 73-4, 77. 100. Starcross, ‘ “Nietzsche was an anarchist”’, pp. 37-8. 101. ‘Observations and comments’, Mother Earth, January 1915, p. 34. 102. Morrison I. Swift, ‘Real men and women’, Mother Earth, May 1915, p. 103. 103. See William O. Reichert, ‘The melancholy political thought of Morrison I. Swift’, New England Quarterly, 49, 4, 1976, pp. 542-58. 104. G.H. Lewes, The Life and Works of Goethe; with sketches of his age and contemporaries, London & Toronto: Dent, 1908 edn, p. 55. 105. Goldman to Ben Reitman, 15 April 1926. 106. Miller, Anarchism, p. 96. 107. Goldman, Living My Life, p. 556; William C. Owen, ‘Proper methods of propaganda’, Mother Earth, August 1908, pp. 250-1. 108. See Stuart Macintyre, A Proletarian Science. Marxism in Britain, 1917-1933, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 205-8; 109. Goldman, ‘An open letter’, Free Society, 17 February 1901 in Documentary History, 1, p. 436. 110. ‘Lily Bell’, Labour Leader, 1 September 1894. 111. Jeremy Jennings, Syndicalism in France. A study of ideas, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 32-3. 112. Jennings, Syndicalism in France, pp. 31-2. 113. Jennings, Syndicalism in France, pp. 94-5.



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114. Earl C. Ford and William Z. Foster, Syndicalism (1912), Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990 edn, ed. James R. Barrett, pp. 43-4. 115. George Woodcock, Anarchism. A history of libertarian ideas and movements, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975 edn. 116. See Rosenthal, Nietzsche in Russia, esp. Glaser, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3-48, and part III, ‘Nietzsche’s influence on Russian marxism’; Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: ally and adversary, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 117. Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: the sense of a beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, Basingstoke: Palgrave 2007. 118. Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism. Art, politics and the first American avant-garde, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2001, p. 2. 119. Moore, ‘Attentat art’, p. 127. 120. Goldman, Living My Life, p. 743. 121. Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia, London: C.W. Daniel edn, 1925, pp. 17-18. 122. Maxim Gorky, trans. Herman Ermolaev, Untimely Thoughts. Essays on revolution, culture and the Bolsheviks 1917-1918, London: Garnstone Press, 1968. For Goldman’s similar assessment, see for example her article ‘The tragedy of the Russian intelligentsia’, Time and Tide, 31 July 1925, pp. 748-9. ‘Verily the Dictatorship is a chariot-wheel which grinds beneath it everything that is best in Russia, most relentlessly of all its Intelligenstia.’ 123. See Mikhail Agursky, ‘Nietzschean roots of Stalinist culture’, also Isabel A. Tirado, ‘Nietzschean motifs in the Komsomol’s vanguardism’, in Rosenthal, Nietzsche and Soviet Culture, pp. 235-86. 124. Moritz, World’s Most Dangerous Woman, p. 49; Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, pp. 166, 220. 125. ‘Emma Goldman on the Bolsheviks’, Freedom, May 1922, p. 31. 126. Goldman, My Disillusionment, pp. 257-63. 127. Goldman to Ben L. Reitman, 15 April 1926, also Goldman to Harry Weinberger, 6 April 1926, both in Candace Falk, Stephen Cole and Sally Thomas, eds, Emma Goldman. A guide to her life and documentary sources, Chadwyck Healey, 1991.



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The ‘Herodotus of the CNT’: José Peirats and La CNT en la revolución española Chris Ealham ABSTRACT This article examines the background to the acclaimed history of the Spanish revolution, La CNT en la revolución española (The CNT in the Spanish Revolution) that was written by José Peirats. The origins of this book can be traced back to the Spanish anarchist movement in exile in France during the immediate aftermath of World War Two. It is the study of an activist-historian, for whom historical writing constituted part of an open-ended intellectual project, a guide to action, an attempt to convince, influence and raise questions in the minds of others, all of which were integral elements of his lifelong struggle in pursuit of freedom and liberty. Peirats, one-time secretary-general of the CNT, was a former brick maker, a working class autodidact, and a product of the movement to which he devoted his life. Key words José Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, Spanish civil war I am a modest writer who emerged from the fired clay of an oven. José Peirats

José Peirats’s La CNT en la revolución española (The CNT in the Spanish Revolution) is the history of one of the most original and audacious, and arguably also the most far-reaching, of all the twentieth-century revolutions. It is the history of the giddy years of political change and hope in the 1930s, when the so-called ‘Generation of ’36’, Peirats’s own generation, the generation of workers and landless labourers who found it impossible to live under the old order, who yearned for a better Spain, rebelled against the inequitable and repressive structures of ‘old Spain’. It is also the


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history of a revolution that failed, and which was followed by years of despair, defeat and Diaspora, as Franco’s dictatorship set about cleansing society of the ‘Generation of ’36’. During the long winter of Franco’s obscurantist reaction, the insurgent ‘Generation of ’36’ paid the price for daring to challenge the traditionalist and élitist verities of the agrarian and industrial oligarchies in front of firing squads, in mass, unmarked graves, in German concentration camps, in Franco’s prisons or in exile. This book emerged from the huge population movement provoked by Franco’s attempt to rid Spanish society of revolutionaries and ‘silence’ the ‘Generation of ’36’.1 The origins of this book are to be found in France, at the second congress of the Movimiento Libertario Español-Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (MLECNT), which was held in Toulouse, in October 1947, some eight years after the conclusion of the civil war.2 In one of the less publicised moments of the congress, Benito Milla and his friend, Peirats, a 39 year-old anarchist exile and secretarygeneral elect of the MLE-CNT, proposed the publication of a historical study of the revolution. Not only was this project firmly in keeping with the traditional concern of the anarchist movement for history and culture,3 but many exiled anarchists were acutely aware of the need to offer an alternative to the one-sided, distorting and selfjustifying official history being produced by the academic apologists of the dictatorship, whose incessant propaganda offensive denied the place of the anarchists and the entire left in Spain’s history.4 In this context, to write a history connoted a readiness to stake a claim to the past, the present and the future of Spain. Initially, it seemed, the proposal made by Milla and Peirats went unheeded. This is best explained by the exigencies of exile, for, while many of those at the congress undoubtedly grasped the desirability of producing such a history, this project was pushed onto a secondary plane by the burden of everyday life: the imperatives of organising the fight against Franco, and the daily struggle for survival in exile in a country then undergoing post-war reconstruction. Yet, such was the enduring cultural and educational commitment of those who had developed intellectually within libertarian circles, Milla and Peirats had already sown the seeds of what would, in just a few years, germinate into the most comprehensive survey of the CNT’s revolutionary activities during the 1930s. A large part of the responsibility for this rests with the indefatigable work of Martín Vilarrupla, the self-proclaimed ‘Minister’ for Culture and Propaganda on the CNT secretariat. For Martín Vilarrupla, the history project became an abiding concern: first, he convinced a few comrades of the importance of recording the revolutionary experience of the 1930s; more importantly, he acquired several small offers of material support; and finally, he set about finding the best possible author for the history. Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Following lengthy consultation with the anarchist movement’s ‘intellectuals’5, Martín Vilarrupla was convinced by the arguments of Antonio García Birlán (a.k.a. ‘Dionysios’), one of the most sagacious of the exiles, who insisted that Peirats was the most capable figure to undertake this work of history. And so, in the first of many ironies and twists of fortune that accompanied the creation of La CNT en la revolución española, Martín Vilarrupla resolved to enlist the authorial services of one of the individuals who had originally planted the idea for a history of the revolution so firmly in his own mind. Typical of many other CNT ‘intellectuals’, Peirats was an autodidact, a selfeducated proletarian: he commenced his life as a worker at the age of eight and later stole hours from his sleep in order to continue his education. A brick maker by profession, like many of his generation, the CNT was Peirats’s school, while prison served as his university. Despite the cultural deficit imposed upon Peirats from birth, in his twenties he emerged as one of the leading lights in the vast constellation of newspapers that surrounded the CNT and the anarchist movement. In stark contrast to many of his contemporaries in Spain, both inside and outside of the anarchist movement, Peirats’s journalism revealed a keen eye for synthesis and an aversion to an excessive reliance on adjectives, making for a direct, concise and clear prose style, based on short, clipped sentences. These features were allied to a powerful and emotive narrative style, characterised by vast reservoirs of humanity and a mordant irony. (These features would become hallmarks of his writing and, indeed, of La CNT en la revolución española.) It was not until 1948 that Martín Vilarrupla tracked down his chosen historian. At this time Peirats’s term as secretary-general of the CNT-MLE was over. Despite being re-elected by an overwhelming majority, Peirats refused to continue as secretary-general on principle, believing that it was wrong for any one individual to occupy such an important position for two consecutive terms, particularly since this was one of the few positions within the anarchist movement that was remunerated.6 Peirats was also a reluctant historian; in his memoirs he made no mention of having given any further consideration to the history project that he and Milla had proposed a year earlier. Indeed, despite Peirats’s longstanding cultural activities, his immediate perspectives were dominated by the everyday struggle for material survival in the adverse circumstances of exile: at roughly the same time that Martín Vilarrupla approached Peirats to write the history, he was about to establish a logging co-operative with a group of fellow exiles.7 Unsurprisingly, therefore, Peirats flatly rebuffed Martín Vilarrupla’s suggestion that he become a historian. But Martín Vilarrupla remained undeterred: he was as stubborn as he was Anarchist Studies 17.2


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tireless, and he remained convinced that Peirats was the ideal choice of historian. And so, a year later, in 1949, Martín Vilarrupla repeated his offer to Peirats, leading to a heated yet fraternal discussion: ‘You’re the one who will write this book’, Martín Vilarrupla informed a protesting Peirats, whose protests he quashed: ‘Quiet, let me speak! I know your game. You’ll say that they are many better candidates than you – Alaíz, “Dionysios”, Gaston Leval, García Pradas …’ ‘I agree with you. They are better …’, retorted Peirats. ‘I said, “Be quiet”! They may be “better” … But you’re going to do it. You will write this book because you’re resolute and you have self-respect.”8

Peirats’s resistance evaporated in the face of Martín Vilarrupla’s arguments, and shortly afterwards he started work on a book with the working title Historia de la revolución española. Always modest, and never prone to flights of arrogance, Peirats’s humility instilled in him a critical self-doubt that would guide his hand as he wrote his history: ‘Would I be capable of repaying the confidence that my comrades have invested in me?’9 This unflinching desire to serve those who had shared the path of revolution and exile with him would temper his resolve in the years to come. The first task confronting Peirats was the same task that confronts every historian: the need to locate the primary bibliographical material that constitutes the empirical infrastructure of historical writing. The vicissitudes of revolution, repression and exile in 1930s Spain made this far from simple. As the Francoist army extended its grip on republican territory, the Confederation lacked the resources to transport its supporters and wounded out of Spain and much of the CNT-FAI archive and the documentation produced by the revolutionary collectives and communes was destroyed. In Barcelona, the epicentre of the revolution, vast clouds of smoke rose above the city as documents were destroyed in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of the forces of repression. As Peirats later noted: Hundreds of thousands of bonfires issued grey columns into the sky, a myriad gaseous molecules which moments before had been precious material: books, journals, collections of newspapers, bulletins, minutes, reports and archives of correspondence.10

This valuable source material was tragically but unavoidably lost to the historian forever. Such a precaution was, nevertheless, justified by the painstaking efforts of Anarchist Studies 17.2


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the Francoists to seize and piece together any remaining trade union records and membership documentation, materials which were later used by the authorities to prosecute those guilty of committing the ‘red crimes’ of revolution and resisting fascism. Following the partial relaxation of repression, and the achievement of the bloody objectives of the counter-revolution, this material formed the basis of the state archive in Salamanca and provided the documentary basis for the highly tendentious, pro-régime ‘history’ writing of Eduardo Comín Colomer.11 For Peirats, the archival materials in the Salamanca archive were as far beyond his reach as those that had been destroyed in Barcelona in 1939. Peirats was therefore forced to rely on whatever documentary material he could find outside Spain. Although this material was far from scarce, he confronted a series of obstacles when it came to gaining access to this documentation. For instance, the CNT-FAI archive, which had been placed in the safekeeping of the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam in 1939, was relocated in London for the duration of World War Two and remained unclassified, in a state of complete disorder.12 Another set of problems flowed from the dispersal and fragmentation of the CNT across south America and western Europe, where it was further divided into regional committees, all of which retained important documentation. Besides these geographical divisions, there were splits and factions in an organisation that was frequently beset by deep jealousies and internal rivalries; in these circumstances, documents could be withheld on the basis of petty personal or sectarian whim.13 If this was not enough, the problems facing the historian were further compounded by both the decentralised structure of the CNT (in practice a series of loosely-federated regional union bodies), and by the uneven and localised nature of the revolutionary process of the 1930s. Consequently, Peirats was highly dependent on the cooperation of the myriad local union committees to loan him their internal documentation. Peirats’s first step was to issue a circular to all CNT local federations in France and South America, calling on them to provide him with any information on the collectives that they had withdrawn from Spain. This yielded significant, albeit predictably uneven, results.14 Peirats also benefited from the collaboration and support of Amsterdam’s International Institute for Social History, which generously supplied him with photocopies of internal bulletins and other materials. This was most welcome, since Peirats lacked the financial resources that would enable him to visit Amsterdam. Yet, perhaps most decisive of all was the collaboration of Aristide Lapeyre, who made available to Peirats his extensive archive of Spanish labour newspapers, which covered the pre-civil war period and the years of the revolution. As Peirats’s reputation as a researcher and collector of historical documents grew, he was Anarchist Studies 17.2


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also able to exchange source materials with other historians and writers, particularly the North American Burnett Bolloten, who was then busy preparing his own monumental study of the left during the civil war.15 If Peirats gradually resolved the difficulties he faced regarding documentation, on an everyday level he continued to encounter enormous and unrelenting material privations throughout the time in which he was preparing his history. When Martín Vilarrupla successfully enlisted Peirats’s pen to write the history, full assurances had been given that the CNT would meet the day-to-day living expenses of what would effectively be its historian in residence. Early on, before Peirats even commenced work, there were signs of the problems that lay ahead. Just to bring Peirats to Bordeaux, where he would write part of the history, it proved necessary to hold a raffle among grassroots cenetistas in order to purchase his train ticket.16 While Martín Vilarrupla’s promises of financial assistance were unquestionably made in good faith, both he and Peirats were fully apprised of the scarcity of the CNT’s internal resources and the erratic and abruptly changing nature of its funding priorities. If, as is likely, at the start of the book project some – even sufficient – money had been put aside by the organisation to cover Peirats’s living expenses, it would have been uncharacteristic of the organisation for such a fund to be ring-fenced in any way. Moreover, the nature and activities of the CNT had always been such that union funds could quickly disappear on a variety of extraordinary, unforeseen and incalculable expenses, such as legal defence and prisoners’ welfare in Spain, pressures which were all the greater owing to the offensive of the dictatorship against the CNT and the generally precarious economic circumstances facing activists during the exile years. Given the above, the promise of a small subvention from the CNT was no guarantee of a meal ticket, or the chance to secure a comfortable existence during the uncertain years of exile, and it almost certainly did not influence Peirats’s decision to write the history. Rather, by accepting to write the history, Peirats entered into a Gorkian world, a bohemian-like existence shaped by unremitting privations, personal suffering and physical hardship. On one level, Peirats’s origins, his experiences of working-class life and of the proletarian bohemia imposed by low wages and the constant threat of unemployment, prepared him for the challenges and sacrifices that lay ahead. Yet it is also possible to argue that the harsh economic circumstances facing Peirats were increasingly cushioned by his unswerving commitment with history: like any historian, his motives were vocational, his life dominated by the intrinsic pleasure of writing history. At the start of the writing process, during the especially harsh winter of 1949-50, Peirats took up residence in a very modest, and extremely cold, Bordeaux hotel room Anarchist Studies 17.2


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which, by night, served as his study. From the beginning, Peirats worked tirelessly on his history, the icy night air of his room serving as a willing accomplice as he stole countless hours from his sleep, working long into the night and the early hours of the morning. His days were taken up outside, researching in local libraries and, in particular, in the archive room of Tierra y Libertad. It was here that Peirats amassed a huge amount of notes on documentary materials that later comprised much of the empirical infrastructure of La CNT en la revolución española. It is worth emphasising the awful conditions under which Peirats worked at this time. In his unpublished memoirs he paid generous tribute to the concierge of the otherwise inhospitable and unheated Tierra y Libertad archive room, who brought him coffee and, ironically given his previous work as a brick maker, hot tiles on which he rested his feet as he wrote. Other spheres of Peirats’s life were similarly Spartan. The ‘allowance’ that he received from the CNT was never adequate and did not cover his living expenses, let alone permit him to enjoy any of life’s luxuries. The intestinal fortitude and perseverance displayed by Peirats during these years certainly confirmed the wisdom of Martín Vilarrupla’s choice of author (‘You will write this book because you’re resolute and you have self-respect’). Indeed, once he had committed himself to write the history, Peirats showed no signs of wavering. If anything, Peirats seemed to derive strength from the manifold privations that his new lifestyle imposed upon him; incredibly, his single-mindedness and growing vocation as a historian enabled him to make frequent sacrifices in order to facilitate his research in situations where weaker or more egotistical individuals probably would have viewed compromise to be either possible or reasonable. This is evidenced by Peirats’s description of his life as a fulltime and frequently unpaid writer, when his daily existence resembled that of a bohemian poet: Working like a beast, eating little and badly, washing and darning clothes, making economies even with correspondence costs. A stamp for America was an expensive luxury, equivalent to a morsel of cod or a good spread …17

Shortly afterwards, in the spring of 1950, Peirats made further economies, leaving his modest hotel to sleep on a folding bed (with bugs) in the kitchen of a sympathetic CNT comrade, an arrangement that allowed him to live more frugally, and to devote his ‘allowance’ in full to research expenses and writing materials.18 The disinterested solidarity of anonymous exiled CNT members in Bordeaux and beyond, who generously met many of Peirats’s living expenses, and who took turns to invite him for lunch and dinner, played a decisive role in the completion of La CNT en la revoluAnarchist Studies 17.2


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ción española. This was mutual aid in action, for Peirats was only too happy to share his growing knowledge of the CNT and the revolution with his hosts, who would enthusiastically probe him about his research and his writing over the dinner table. In the light of the personal sacrifices already made by Peirats, it is difficult to imagine the despair he must have felt when, in May 1950, Martín Vilarrupla informed him that the fund set aside by the CNT to meet both his living expenses and the publishing costs of his history was ‘exhausted’. While the failure of the CNT to meet its financial commitment could not have come as a shock to Peirats, the news that his historical work was seemingly at a premature end was nothing less than devastating. Penniless, he went to stay with Federico Arcos, an anarchist friend from Barcelona, who was then living in exile in Toulouse.19 Once again, it was Peirats’s tenacity, his optimism of the mind and his refusal to accept defeat that kept his history on track. Confident in the knowledge that the vast majority of activists wished him to serve as secretary-general of the newly-established CNT Intercontinental Committee, the transatlantic nexus that aimed to unite the exiled Spanish anarcho-syndicalists of Europe and South America, Peirats presented the organisation with an ultimatum: he would serve as secretary-general on the understanding that money be found to allow him to proceed with his historical writing.20 The gamble paid off: a small sum of money was found to enable him to resume working on his history. At this stage, doubtless chastened and scarred by the earlier threat to the future of his book, Peirats changed his working title from Historia de la revolución española to La CNT en la revolución española; this change was far from cosmetic: it signalled a desire to narrow the focus of the book and thereby enhance his chances of completing his study prior to any future financial contretemps. As Peirats later reflected: Given the wave of books that had already appeared either ignoring or insulting us, the most important thing was to bring out a book that could let the world know that in Spain there had not just been a civil war but also a social revolution, and that this unknown revolution had been carried out by the anarchists in the face of opposition and hostility of those both inside and outside their ranks. Above all, it had to reveal the constructive work of the Spanish revolution.21

On a more positive note, the appearance of his Estampas de exilio en América,22 a volume based on Peirats’s experiences in exile in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Venezuela and Ecuador during 1939-47, would have instilled him with a new sense Anarchist Studies 17.2


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of purpose as a writer, doubtless encouraging him to press on to finish his history, notwithstanding the succession of setbacks and the daily demands that his role as CNT secretary-general placed on his time. Yet any psychological stability or peace of mind that Peirats had attained was short-lived. The truly precarious nature of life in exile was brutally revealed to him, when he was arrested by French police in Toulouse on 6 February 1951 and accused of receiving 3 million francs from armed expropriations.23 Weeks earlier, on 18 January, an armed gang unsuccessfully attempted to seize the contents of a postal van in Lyon, in the south of France. As the gang made its escape, two policemen and a bystander were killed, and a further six bystanders were left wounded. Eye-witness reports that the gang members spoke with Spanish accents prompted a hysterical newspaper campaign in France, and in Spain, where the Francoist press attributed the attack to an exiled Spanish anarchist ‘action’ group based in the CNT’s ‘School of Terror’ in Toulouse. Amid huge media hysteria in France, over 2,000 policemen were mobilised, including detachments of the paramilitary CRS, in the hunt for the ‘Gang des Espagnols’. The attention of the French police immediately focused on the exiled Spanish anarchist ‘action groups’, some of which favoured golpes económicos (‘armed expropriations’) as a means of financing the anti-Francoist resistance. Under considerable public and official pressure to make arrests, the police launched a sweeping clampdown on the émigré community and on the CNT’s organisation in France, detaining 20 exiles, including Peirats, then CNT secretary-general.24 Seen by police as the ‘Head of the CNT’, Peirats was repeatedly tortured over a two-day period. Peirats stoically resisted repeated humiliations, beatings, threats, and whippings, convinced that his ordeal was a ploy by the French authorities to furnish a pretext for banning the Spanish anarchist movement and fully aware of the damage any weakness on his part would bring to the organisation and to the Spanish émigré community.25 (The communist PCE had only recently been criminalised as the Cold War heated up in France.) It is possible that Peirats had been implicated in the ‘confession’ of one of the first detainees, who perhaps calculated that this would end their own suffering at the hands of the police. Certainly, as secretary-general, he was one of the public faces of the CNT in exile and his name was well-known. Yet Peirats’s arrest is open to a more sinister interpretation. The initial arrests were of anarchist guerrillas from the Movimiento Libertario de Resistencia (MLR), a guerrilla group that prosecuted armed resistance to the dictatorship in Spain and whose tactical differences with the rest of the exiled anarchist movement had led to the expulsion of its members from the CNT in 1947.26 If therefore relations between the MLR and the CNT were Anarchist Studies 17.2


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already fraught with tension, they could only have been aggravated by an official CNT press statement released shortly after the Lyon events. In what was a clear attempt by the CNT secretariat to avoid any complications with the French authorities, it denied that any of its members were involved in the Lyon attack. More controversially, however, the CNT press statement attributed the failed robbery to what it described as ‘Spanish criminals’ who, it was claimed, portrayed themselves as members of the anti-Francoist resistance in an attempt to ennoble their actions. As far as the MLR was concerned, in the best light, the tone of these criticisms alone was worthy of contempt; in the worst light, it was possible for the MLR to conclude that they were being ‘fingered’ to the police by the CNT leadership. It is, therefore, not beyond the realms of possibility that Peirats, who had also been CNT secretarygeneral at the time of the expulsion of the MLR, and who was clearly unpopular with its activists, was in turn ‘fingered’ to the police by MLR-affiliated detainees. (There were other interpretations of the arrests. For instance, exiled Spanish dissident communists and French socialists suggested that the legal ‘scam’ organised against Peirats was hatched by Stalinist members of the French police.27) Other detainees included Francisco ‘Quico’ Sabater, the legendary guerrilla fighter, who hailed from the same neighbourhood as Peirats in Barcelona’s ‘red belt’.28 While Sabater’s group did not perpetrate the Lyon attack, he had launched at least one such armed expropriation in France for which he had earlier been arrested and acquitted due to lack of evidence. The new climate of hostility towards Spanish anarchist émigrés provided the gendarmerie with an opportunity to beat a confession out of Sabater. No stranger to ‘third degree’ police tactics, Sabater was assaulted so savagely that at one stage he attempted to throw himself naked from a top floor window at Lyon police station, only to be seized by police and dragged back inside to ‘safety’.29 Another detainee, Pedro Mateu, one of Peirats’s close collaborators on the CNT secretariat who, prior to the civil war, had formed part of a group that had spectacularly assassinated the Spanish Prime Minister in the bourgeois heart of Madrid, was left almost deaf due to the blows he received.30 There is no doubting the readiness of the French authorities to exploit the media-fuelled outrage following the Lyon killings to launch an offensive against the exiled Spanish anarchist community. The direct action methods of resistance employed by the CNT and the MLR against the Franco dictatorship had caused significant disquiet in official circles since the Paris government had decided to normalise relations with Madrid. In CNT circles, rumours were rife that a banning order had already been prepared by the Interior Ministry in Paris.31 It seems almost certain that had Peirats ‘confessed’, then the ‘proven’ involvement of the CNT secreAnarchist Studies 17.2


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tary-general in armed criminality would have had profound repercussions for the legal status of the organisation in France. Battered and bruised, Peirats was transferred to Pérrage jail in Lyon, while the police continued to prepare its fictitious case against him and the ‘Gang des Espagnols’. Notwithstanding the trauma of this ordeal, or perhaps as a diversion, Peirats steadfastly continued with his historical work, and part of La CNT en la revolución española was written during his incarceration. In fact, his sojourn in Pérrage inspired him to keep his pen active, particularly when he discovered that his new residency had earlier been used to imprison Pyotr Kropotkin, who, like Peirats, was an engagé activist-historian of the anarchist movement.32 Outside the jail, Peirats’s supporters wasted no time in mobilising for his release. Peirats’s defence campaign attracted supporters from across the left, including the Catalan dissident communist exile, Jordi Arquer, and a number of French socialist leaders. Several leading French intellectuals spoke out in favour of Peirats, the most famous of whom being the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus who, addressing an April 1951 meeting of ‘Les Amis de l’Espagne republicaine’ in Paris, denounced the ‘torture’ of ‘irreproachable militants’ like Peirats.33 As the clamour for Peirats’s release grew, Henri Torrez, a prestigious Parisian lawyer, applied the judicial coup de grace: with considerable aplomb and brio, he demolished the contradictory web of lies and falsehoods concocted by the police against the accused. And so, in June 1951, Peirats was released on probation, on the understanding that he would reside in the Toulouse area. Seven months later – a full year after his original detention – all charges against him were dropped. Upon his release from jail, Peirats displayed a new determination to complete La CNT en la revolución española in the shortest possible time, thereby avoiding any further setbacks, whether of a material or judicial nature. He achieved this. Volume I was duly completed before the end of 1951. In order to speed up the publication, the text was prepared for publication by CNT typesetters as Peirats completed each chapter, so the book went to the press almost as soon as it was finished.34 Despite this success, Peirats was uncertain about the future of the history, a mood that was glimpsed in the introduction to volume one in which he reflected sanguinely that: ‘It is our ambition, at the very least, to see the publication of a second volume … Time, along with the resources and goodwill of our sponsors, will tell.’ Privately, Peirats was dominated by fears that the legal and material uncertainties of life in exile would hinder the completion of the work. Indeed, he remained on probation, having to report to the police in Toulouse on a weekly basis. Yet Peirats found much-needed support and solidarity when he least expected it. For instance, Anarchist Studies 17.2


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one of his contacts in New York, Frank González, ended up sending Peirats his old jackets and suits, in addition to copies of CNT publications and bulletins that embellished volume 2 of the history.35 And then there was Peirats greatest strength: his single-mindedness. And so he immersed himself fully in his writing, promptly starting work on the remaining two volumes, which were completed in 1952 and 1953 respectively, a truly astounding effort of intellectual will on the part of a selfeducated brick maker-turned-historian.36 When considered alongside the abundant body of writing produced by Peirats in the course of his life, La CNT en la revolución española stands out, beyond doubt, as his magnum opus, a work that earned him the status of the ‘Herodotus of the CNT’.37 Notwithstanding the author’s efforts to narrow the scope of his book project in order to bring the project to fruition, the final three-volume study vastly exceeded the original hopes of Martín Vilarrupla, who conceived of a fairly specific study of the revolutionary collectives. Instead, La CNT en la revolución española is a case study of a mass anarcho-syndicalist organisation, its militants and its supporters in revolution. The survey of the revolutionary social transformations is the culminating point of Volume I, the mammoth Chapter 15, in which the workings of the collectives are explored in all their local complexity. Based heavily on reports about the collectives in the libertarian press during the civil war, on daily bulletins produced by the information services of the CNT-FAI, and on the published minutes of collective assemblies, as well as the responses to a questionnaire that Peirats sent to ex-collectivists exiled in France and South America, the rich historical detail of this chapter underscores Peirats’s triumph over the initial problems he encountered in gaining access to source materials. Indeed, the expansive and solid empirical basis of Peirats’s history ensured that it quickly superseded the earlier study of the Spanish revolution written by Diego Abad de Santillán, the HispanoArgentinean anarchist intellectual.38 Nearly sixty years after its initial publication, some practitioners of labour history might contend that La CNT en la revolución española is little more than an old-fashioned ‘top-down’ political history of a labour union, which, owing to its reliance upon congress reports and conference proceedings, ignores perforce the aspirations and the praxis of the union rank-and-file. Certainly, given the age in which it was written, La CNT en la revolución española inevitably bears some of the hallmarks (along with some of the shortcomings) of the first wave of labour history; for instance, there is the occasional tendency to suggest that all workers were consistently revolutionary in orientation. Similarly, Peirats offers few insights into the cultural meaning of participation in the CNT-FAI for rank-and-file Anarchist Studies 17.2


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activists, just as there is little exploration of the everyday lives of those which he described elsewhere as: the men of combat … the men of action … the anonymous militants who swarmed among the alluvial mass of dues-paying members … the pre-eminent functional engine of the unions … the nervous cells that put the machinery of the CNT in motion from below …39

Nevertheless, when we consider the manifest ambivalence of the CNT-FAI hierarchy to the revolution of July 1936, a revolution which, as Peirats reminds us, was, more than anything, the spontaneous and unguided work of anonymous grassroots union militants, it is possible to regard La CNT en la revolución española in a very different light: it is a history of the voiceless landless labourers and industrial workers who lived and struggled ‘from below’, in the streets, in the fields and in the factories of Spain, and who, in the summer of 1936, set about establishing new revolutionary relations in agriculture, in industry and in various areas of social life without any assistance ‘from above’. Accordingly, the resolutions produced in the assemblies of the revolutionary collectives, along with many other documents and union press releases, constitute a barometer of popular opinion and of the aspirations of communities of workers and landless labourers in free assemblies, a vivid reflection of the intentions of those who were taking control of their own lives, and not simply following the dictates and slogans of leaders and intellectuals. To Peirats’s credit, he was the first to attempt to relate this revolutionary experience ‘from below’. Indeed, while he periodically refers to the ‘leaders’ of the CNT, he always regarded the locum tenens of revolution and historical change to be not the wisdom or the heroic endeavours of great men but, rather, the untutored energies and aspirations of large collectivities of anonymous masses, of those who often go unrecorded in written history but who, very rarely, such as in 1930s Spain, grasp an opportunity to make their own history by struggling for a better world. The appearance of La CNT en la revolución española affirmed the stature of Peirats as a historian of the Spanish revolution. Thereafter, numerous leading foreign and Spanish academic historians regularly acknowledged their intellectual debt to Peirats, who, until his death in 1989, freely and patiently shared his vast reservoirs of knowledge and information about the Spanish revolution. Besides the many historians who entered into correspondence with Peirats, there was also a steady stream of visitors to his house, the doors of which were always open to anyone in search of the answers to questions about the collectives, or to historians attempting to locate Anarchist Studies 17.2


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source materials. With a characteristically prescient appreciation of the historical moment, Peirats sought to alert researchers to one scarce source of information that was disappearing with time: the memory of those who, like himself, had lived through the experience of revolution. ‘Be swift, because a valuable and rich mine is being exhausted’, Peirats would regularly tell visiting historians: ‘These men from our ranks are taking the secrets of the collectivisations with them to the grave.’40 Such was the interest aroused by the publication of La CNT en la revolución española, the stocks of the first volume were exhausted by the time Volume III appeared in 1953. Despite the reprint of Volume I in 1956, by the late 1950s all three volumes were sold out. It is likely that the bulk of the first edition ended up in the hands of CNT militants past and present, or of survivors of the ‘Generation of ’36’. For obvious reasons, La CNT en la revolución española did not go on open sale in Spain, although copies were smuggled across the French border and distributed by the clandestine anti-Franco resistance. Only towards the latter part of the 1950s, when the first edition was already out-of-print, did foreign and exiled academic historians come to learn of La CNT en la revolución española. In his keenness to find a wider audience for his work, and to ensure that the Spanish revolutionary experience of the 1930s did not become relegated to the footnotes of European history, Peirats expended much time and energy to ensure that any spare copies of his increasingly scarce history made their way to academics and intellectuals in both Europe and America. Peirats even issued regular appeals to exiled CNT activists to loan or donate their copies of La CNT en la revolución española to interested foreign historians or to academic institutions, and it was only thanks to the sacrifices willingly made by CNT veterans that many university libraries managed to acquire a copy of the first edition. The reluctance of any publisher to organise a new edition of what was increasingly a rare and much sought-after study was the source of considerable frustration for Peirats. Finally, in the early sixties, Peirats set about preparing an abridged version of La CNT en la revolución española in the hope that a single tome distilled from the original three-volume study would prove more attractive to publishing houses. The result was Breve storia del sindicalismo libertario spagnolo (Genoa: Edizioni RL, 1962), a single-volume study of the revolution which, while necessarily lacking the expansive documentary basis of La CNT en la revolución española, enjoyed enormous success across the world: in 1964 a Spanish language edition appeared under the title Los anarquistas en la crisis política española41 and there have been subsequent reprints;42 an English version of this work appeared in 1976,43 a second edition being published in 1990;44 and a French edition was published in 1989.45 Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Ironically, the appearance of Los anarquistas en la crisis española probably served to delay the appearance of a second edition of the magnum opus on which it was based. Thus, it was not until 1971, some twenty years since the appearance of the first edition, a time during which La CNT en la revolución española was, for the most part, unobtainable, that all three volumes were reprinted. The climate of the early seventies – the heady days of worker-student radicalism that followed Paris ’68 and the opprobrium directed at Stalinism following the invasion of Czechoslovakia – aroused an interest in anti-statist revolutionary projects in general, and the Spanish revolution in particular, which favoured the reprint of La CNT en la revolución española by Ruedo ibérico, the great Paris-based anti-Francoist publishing house. Besides a new introduction and a few corrections of textual errors and alterations that were made in the light of new source materials and documents, there were no significant modifications to the original text. The 1971 edition remains the definitive edition of La CNT en la revolución española: all later Spanish-language editions have been based on this version, as was a four-volume Italian version.46 The first English translation is also based on the 1971 edition.47 Tellingly, Peirats had no desire for personal gain: in his contractual dealing with Ruedo ibérico, he insisted that all royalties were to be paid to the CNT.48 After the death of Franco in 1975 and the demise of his dictatorship, the 1971 edition finally went on sale in Spain, amid a climate of great political optimism and of hopes for imminent cultural, economic, political and social change. Given the huge public interest in the revolutionary history of 1930s Spain, a history that had been suppressed and falsified for nearly forty years of dictatorship, unsurprisingly the second edition of La CNT en la revolución española quickly sold out. Aware of the burgeoning market for Peirats’s history, Ruedo ibérico decided to publish a third edition of the work, although this project was halted following the death of its founder and owner, José Martínez. For a number of years La CNT en la revolución española was, therefore, once again, out-of-print. Only in 1988 did the long-awaited third edition appear.49 In the course of the fifty-odd years since its first publication, Peirats’s history has become an obligatory point of reference for all students of the Spanish revolution, essential reading for anyone interested in the development of internal politics within the anti-Francoist camp. With the exception of the ideological henchmen of the Franco dictatorship, all historians, irrespective of their political persuasion or approach, have continued to accord enormous value to this study. Thus, the liberal north American historian Gabriel Jackson recognised that ‘[t]he internal evidence of [Peirats’s] writing shows [him] to be intelligent, and humane …’.50 Academic histoAnarchist Studies 17.2


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rians have also praised Peirats for his use of source materials; for instance, Julián Casanova, who has written extensively on the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement, acknowledged that La CNT en la revolución española ‘is the best documented work to have left the pen of a militant … [it] has served as the basis for numerous later works.’51 Similarly, Paul Preston has described La CNT en la revolución española as ‘indispensable’.52 Perhaps the greatest tribute to Peirats’s work is the fact that it continues to be cited by every new generation of historians of the Spanish revolution, just as it continues to appear in the bibliography of most important new books on the Spanish civil war. It is, without doubt, a prime documentary source, containing much material that continues to be inaccessible elsewhere.53 In addition to their praise for Peirats’s oeuvre, liberal historians, such as Jackson, have impugned Peirats for his alleged absence of ‘objectivity’.54 Although I do not wish to revisit the polemic surrounding the more assumed than real ‘objectivity’ of liberal scholarship,55 it is necessary to point out that those historians who condemn Peirats’s ‘partialities’ from the smug vantage point of ‘objectivity’ generally fail to appreciate the genuine significance of Peirats’s historical writing. Indeed, it is precisely Peirats’s ‘partialities’ that give his historical writing its power and resonance. It is necessary to explore these themes more fully. First, we need to appreciate the importance of La CNT en la revolución española as a counterbalance to the school of historical falsification established by the propaganda machine of the Franco dictatorship after 1939. When Peirats’s history appeared the historians ‘of order’ loyal to the regime were busy propagating a series of historical myths to legitimise the dictatorship and its repression and, simultaneously, distort the history of the revolution and of the Spanish left as a whole. For instance, one of the central myths disseminated by historians such as Comín Colomer was that, in the summer of 1936, the Spanish Communist Party was on the brink of seizing power in a revolutionary coup, a catastrophe that was only averted by the alertness and bravery of the Spanish army. Another major theme of Francoist historiography was the nonconsensual nature of the civil war collectives that ‘enslaved’ the honest, law-abiding Spanish peasantry, ‘the backbone of mother Spain’, which could only be liberated from the ‘Red Terror’ in 1939. In the face of this unalloyed intellectual repression, there was little scope for ‘impartiality’ or ‘objectivity’. And it was precisely the prorevolutionary ‘bias’ of Peirats’s history that helped to redress the historical balance and recuperate memories of a revolutionary transformation that the ‘official history’ of the regime sought to obliterate from the history books. In doing so, La CNT en la revolución española exposed the emptiness of the claims of the dictator’s apologists and, simultaneously, attacked the legitimacy of the dictatorship. Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Secondly, the astoundingly rich historical detail of La CNT en la revolución española reflected Peirats’s insider knowledge of the CNT.56 No historian, either before or after him, has benefited from the same unrivalled access to rare or sensitive documents, internal sources and official CNT documentation. Moreover, the confident and frank nature of the responses by former collectivists to Peirats’s questionnaire can be explained by their affection for and trust in a well-known and respected comrade. Indeed, at a time when the dictatorship was still repressing leftists for their part in the revolutionary events of the 1930s, one cannot expect a questionnaire from an unknown academic historian to have elicited equally open responses. Peirats was, therefore, in a highly privileged position, a position that many historians could only dream of occupying. Added to this, La CNT en la revolución española is enriched by an experiential element: this is an example of history written from personal experience; it is the political autobiography of a revolutionary determined to historicise the vicissitudes of the struggles through which he lived and which he helped create. Peirats writes as one who experienced the glory of the revolution just as he later lived through its disfigurement and suppression at the hands of its enemies. The immediacy of these experiences did not diminish Peirats’s rigour as a historian. As he later reflected in his memoirs: The documentation that I amassed opened my eyes to the magnitude of the Spanish revolution. In Spain, the trees had concealed the woods from my field of vision. I had my own ideas about that momentous period but I never appreciated that Providence, if it exists, had brought to us the gift of living through such an extraordinary age.57

His conversion into the historian of events through which he had lived made it possible for him to engage with his own past, as well as that of the CNT, allowing him to question deeply held myths about the CNT, the revolution, and the civil war. And there were occasions when this experiential element actually enhanced his critical judgements. Take for example the manner in which Peirats questioned the authenticity of one of the most famous and much-cited expressions to be attributed to an anarchist figure during the civil war: ‘We renounce everything except victory …’, a watchword which seems to prioritise the war above the revolution, and which was credited to Buenaventura Durruti, the libertarian militia leader, shortly after his death. Having served as a journalist for much of the civil war, Peirats was in an excellent position to reveal that Durruti had never actually uttered any such expression: Peirats had reported on the very meeting at which the ‘official’ CNT press later Anarchist Studies 17.2


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claimed that Durruti had effectively reneged upon the revolution in favour of the war, and his extensive notes revealed that no such declaration had been made. This direct experience enabled Peirats the historian to conclude that the words imputed to Durruti were part of a cynical fabrication by those who then controlled the CNT propaganda machine to exploit the prestige of one of the anarchist movement’s most charismatic figures in order to pursue its own political and strategic objectives during the war.58 Incidents such as these lend strength to the verdict of Ignacio de Llorens, who correctly observed that Peirats was ‘the person who knows the Spanish libertarian movement best and who best knows how to relate its history’.59 Lastly, as Peirats made clear in the introduction to the second edition of the book, he never entertained any illusions that his history could be ‘impartial’ or ‘objective’.60 Instead, La CNT en la revolución española is committed history, a history written in an engagé style; it is based on a systematic and coherent interpretive framework: it is an attempt to write a history that illustrates the social alternatives facing humanity, a history premised on the assumption that the revolutionary road to freedom is preferable to all those that lead to the subjugation of the human spirit and social servitude. (This approach lends particular puissance to Chapters 8 and 9, where the irruption of the masses in the streets during the struggle against the attempted military coup of July 1936 is discussed. In celebrating the revolutionary energies of the anonymous masses, Peirats leaves the reader with a strong sense of the political and social order teetering on the brink of collapse as the reactionary army fought against all odds to preserve a traditional way of life.) Unlike those historians who conceal their likes and dislikes under the veil of ‘objectivity’ and ‘balance’, Peirats espouses a revolutionary ‘subjectivity’: his loyalties and partialities are glaringly obvious at every twist and turn of his narrative, there is no subterfuge, hidden agenda or sleight of hand. In this respect, Peirats’s historical writing is far more neutral than the study by César Lorenzo,61 the son of Horacio Prieto, the CNT secretary-general at the height of the alliance between the CNT leadership and the republican state during the civil war, and whose history of Spanish anarchism is a thinly-veiled attempt to defend the memory of his father and to ‘settle scores’ with the ‘pure’ anarchists who opposed ‘collaborationism’ with the Republic. In Peirats’s case, in his writing, as in his life, he was never afraid to reveal his colours: he praises his heroes and vilifies his villains; nowhere does he hide or disguise his preferences or dislikes. He stood for the revolution and for all those who supported it, he exalted the revolutionary energies of the CNT and its grassroots militants; meanwhile, he damned those who sought to contain or to place obstacles before the revolutionary project, be they self-proclaimed counter-revolutionaries, the weak-willed liberals who sought to reach a deal with the Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Francoists, conniving Stalinists, dithering reformists or wavering revolutionaries.62 In particular, Peirats vents his anger on the various factions inside the CNT who favoured ‘collaboration’ with the Republic and who sought to detain the revolution, mercilessly criticising the union’s past, his union’s past. All this occurs from a consistently anarchist position, resulting in what has been described as ‘a devastating critique of the anarcho-syndicalist leadership’.63 Peirats’s history is then a history with a cause. A committed revolutionary until the end of his life, he was an activist-historian, his historical writing constituting part of an open-ended intellectual project, a guide to action, an attempt to convince, influence and raise questions in the minds of others, all of which were integral elements of his lifelong struggle in pursuit of freedom and liberty. He was not alone in this struggle, and in this respect Peirats’s history, which documents the hopes and desires for social transformation of hundreds of thousands of workers in the 1930s, is the political autobiography of his generation, the ‘Generation of ’36’, the generation which made a revolution only to suffer defeat in a civil war, the ‘lost generation’, which Franco and his supporters sought to silence in unmarked graves, concentration camps and exile. Yet, while many thousands of his generation were lost to history, or became embittered and disenchanted during exile, Peirats refused to remain silent. I would like to express my gratitude to Federico Arcos, Richard Cleminson, Mark Hendy, Stuart Christie and Frank Mintz, as well as two anonymous referees, for their comments on earlier drafts of this article. Arcos also kindly presented me with a copy of Peirats’s unpublished memoirs. I am also grateful for funding through the Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Cultura research project. Chris Ealham teaches history at the University of Saint Louis (Madrid Campus). He is the author of Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898-1937 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010) and has published numerous articles on Spanish anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements. He is currently preparing a biography of José Peirats. Email: [email protected]

NOTES 1. For Franco’s attempt to impose ‘silence’ on Spain, see Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936-1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Anarchist Studies 17.2


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2. CNT, II congreso del MLE-CNT en Francia (Dictámenes y resoluciones), Toulouse: Ediciones CNT, 1947. 3. See especially Pere Solà i Gussinyer, Els Ateneus Obrers i la cultura popular a Catalunya (1900-1936): L’Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular, Barcelona: Edicions de la Magrana, 1978 and Francisco Javier Navarro Navarro, A la revolución por la cultura: Prácticas culturales y sociabilidad libertarias en el país valenciano (1931-1939), Valencia: Universitat de València, 2004. See also Chris Ealham, Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 18981937, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 34-53. 4. See Alicia Alted, ‘Education and Political Control’, in Helen Graham and Jo Labanyi (eds.), Spanish Cultural Studies: an introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 196-201 and Carolyn Boyd, Historia Patria. Politics, History and National Identity in Spain, 1875-1975, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, pp. 232-301. 5. These ‘intellectuals’ were overwhelmingly proletarians educated within the structures of CNT reading groups and cultural associations and the anarchist athenaeums. 6. Letter from Federico Arcos, 21 February 2000. In his unpublished memoirs Peirats criticised the way that remunerated positions had proliferated in the CNT in exile. When he arrived in France from south America in 1947 he found that there were 7 remunerated members of the CNT National Committee, compared to 1, the secretary-general, from the pre-civil war period ( José Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 8, p. 12). When Peirats took over as secretary-general he immediately set about cutting back these positions. 7. Triunfo, 21 August 1976. According to Arcos, ‘The work at the farm was hard and barely produced enough for everyone to subsist. In the end he [Peirats] left completely broke.’ (Letter from Federico Arcos, 21 February 2000.) 8. José Peirats, ‘Una experiencia histórica del pensamiento libertario. Memorias y selección de artículos breves’, Anthropos Suplementos, 18, 1990, p. 102. 9. Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, p. 10. 10. Frente Libertario, March 1971. 11. His two main works are Historia del anarquismo español, Barcelona: Editorial AHR, 1956 (2 volumes) and Historia del Partido Comunista de España, Madrid: Editorial Nacional, 1965 (3 volumes). See also Joaquim Ferrer, Josep Maria Figueres and Josep Maria Sans i Travé, Els papers de Salamanca: història d’un botí de guerra, Barcelona: Llibres de l’Índex, 1996. 12. It is quite likely that this archive would have been transferred to Salamanca had it fallen into the hands of the Nazis. It is also possible that the materials might have been either lost or destroyed by the Nazis. Indeed, according to John Saville’s keynote



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13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

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address to the London Socialist Historians’ Group in May 1999, at the end of World War Two a number of barges moored on the Rhine were discovered to contain records from the Amsterdam archive. On the CNT in exile, see Angel Herrerín López, La CNT durante el franquismo. Clandestinidad y exilio (1939-1975), Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2004. Peirats’s unquestionable success in amassing a vast body of documentary material doubtless gave rise to the erroneous claim that ‘Peirats has for decades been the leading archivist of the CNT in exile’. (Gabriel Jackson, ‘The Living Experience of the Spanish Civil War Collectives’, in Newsletter of the Society for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies, 1970, volume 1, number 2, pp. 4-11.) The first edition of Bolloten’s history appeared as The Grand Camouflage, New York: Praeger, 1961 (reprinted 1968). In the late seventies a new edition appeared: The Spanish Revolution: The Left and the Struggle for Power during the Civil War, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979, while the definitive third edition was published posthumously: The Spanish Civil War, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Letter from Federico Arcos, 21 February 2000. Cited in Victor García, ‘José Peirats Valls: una bibliografía biografiada’, Anthropos, 102, 1989, p. 18. Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, p. 20 According to Arcos, ‘For some time we were sleeping in the same bed, the only one we had in the very small place where I was staying.’ (Letter from Federico Arcos, 21 February 2000.) Letter from Federico Arcos, 21 February 2000. Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, p.20. Paris: Ediciones CNT, 1950 Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, p. 32. David Wingeate Pike, Jours de gloire jours de honte: Le Parti communiste d’Espagne en France, depuis son arrivée en 1939 jusqu’à son départ en 1950, Paris: Sedes, 1984, p. 224. Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, pp. 32-34. On the schism between the MLR and the CNT, see Paz, CNT, 1939-1951, pp. 320-1. Peirats later claimed that the charges levelled against him following the Lyon events were part of a plot to prevent publication of his history, the first volume of which was due to be completed that same year. See Peirats, ‘Una experiencia histórica …’, pp. 103106, for his version of events. For Sabater see the study by Antonio Téllez, Sabaté: Guerrilla Extraordinary, London:



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❙ 102 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42.

Davis-Poynter, 1974. See also the most recent study by Pilar Eyre, Quico Sabaté, el último guerrillero, Barcelona: Península, 2000. Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, p. 50. Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, p. 49. Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, p. 68. Triunfo, 21 August 1976. Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, p. 68. Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, p. 77. Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, p. 78. La CNT en la revolución española, Toulouse: Ediciones CNT, 1951-3 (3 volumes). Peirats has been described as ‘our first historian, the “Herodotus of the CNT”’ (Prologue by Víctor García to José Peirats, La Semana Trágica y otros relatos, Móstoles: Madre Tierra, 1991, p. 17) and as ‘the Herodotus of the first libertarian syndicalist movement’ (Francisco Carrasquer, ‘José Peirats, de los pocos que quedan’, Polémica, October 1989, p. 20.) The work in question – Porqué perdimos la guerra (una contribución a la historia de la tragedia española), Buenos Aires: Imán, 1940 – was used by Peirats in the preparation of this book, despite the fact that it was based largely on the reminiscences and views of the author, a leading protagonist in both the revolution and civil war of the 1930s, and, therefore, lacked the documentary basis of this current study. José Peirats, Figuras del movimiento libertario español, Barcelona: Picazo, 1978, pp. 5, 297; cited in Ignacio de Llorens, ‘José Peirats. La historia como escenario de la libertad. Presentación de su figura y obra’, Anthropos, 102, 1989, p. 43. Frente Libertario, May 1972. Unfortunately, this cry was unheard, and the voices of the ‘Generation of ’36’ often went unheard in exile, just as they went unheard before the revolution. Partly the problem here was the manner in which the powerful winds of exile disseminated the ‘Generation of ’36’ across the world. Added to this, was the lack of interest of historians in oral testimony before the 1970s. While there is still no published oral history of the Spanish revolution, in recent years there have been attempts to make amends. Of particular note here is the work of the Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo in Madrid, which has done much to publish the memoirs of members of the ‘Generation of ’36’ and to bring together recorded interviews with CNT-FAI veterans. Buenos Aires: Alfa, 1964. Curiously, the publisher of the second Spanish edition released this book under two different titles: the first remained true to the original, whereas the other was Los anarquistas en la guerra civil española, Madrid-Gijón: Jucar, 1976.



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43. The Anarchists in the Spanish Revolution, Detroit-Toronto: Black-and-Red, 1976. 44. The London-based Freedom Press published the second edition in 1990. 45. Les Anarchistes espagnoles. Révolution de 1936 et luttes de toujours, Toulouse: RégrevesSilena, 1989. 46. La CNT nella Rivoluzione Spagnola, Milano: Antistato, 1976-8 (4 volumes). 47. The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, Hastings: The Christie Press, 2001-2006. 48. Interview with Marianne Brull (Barcelona), 6 November 2005. 49. This edition was published jointly by Ediciones Madre Tierra in Móstoles, Madrid, and the La Cuchilla press in Cali, Columbia. 50. Jackson, ‘The Living Experience . . .’, pp. 4-11. 51. Julián Casanova, ‘Guerra y revolución: la edad de oro del anarquismo español’, 1, Historia Social, 1988, p. 64. 52. Paul Preston, ‘The Historiography of the Spanish Civil War’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, p. 190. 53. A point that was emphasised by Vernon Richards, who noted that ‘[o]f the source books on the revolution … [La CNT en la revolución española is] the most important work available to the student.’ (Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, London: Freedom Press, 1983 (3rd edition), p. 222.) 54. Jackson also predictably described Peirats’s writing as ‘almost religious in tone … so thoroughly convinced in advance, on theoretical grounds …’ (‘The Living Experience …’, pp. 4-11.) 55. Noam Chomsky, ‘Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship’ in American Power and the New Mandarins, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. 56. Peirats has often been described mistakenly as the ‘official’ historian of the CNT. See, for example, Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868-1936, Edinburgh/ San Francisco: AK Press, 1998 (2nd edition), p. 9. 57. Peirats, Unpublished memoirs, vol. 6, book 12, p. 26 58. José Peirats, ‘Razones y sinrazones de la participacion libertaria en el Gobierno’, Polémica, 22-25, July 1986, p. 64. 59. Peirats, ‘Una experiencia histórica . . .’, p. 5. 60. As Peirats recognised in his Introduction to the second edition, one of the strengths of his writing is ‘The tone of the aficionado, which no supercilious historian will ever excuse … [I]t must remain as partisan as when it was born. It is not an objective book and this is how it will remain … The author has been a militant anarcho-syndicalist since his youth. And moving from making history to writing history one cannot be coldly objective. These advantages, rather than any abilities as a writer, allow me to grapple with issues facing Spanish anarchism in the 1930s in a way that would be



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impossible for a professional historian.’ ( José Peirats, La CNT en la revolución española, Paris: Ruedo ibérico, 1971, volume 1 (2nd edition), p. 14.) 61. Les Anarchistes espagnols et le pouvoir, 1868-1969, Paris: Seuil, 1969. (There is a Spanish edition: Los anarquistas españoles y el poder, Paris: Ruedo ibérico, 1972.) 62. This point concerning Peirats’s honesty was made in one review of the third Spanish edition of La CNT en la revolución espanola. See also Francisco Carrasquer, ‘El libro de Peirats: “La CNT en la Revolución Española”’, Polémica, June-July 1990, pp. 22-4. 63. Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists, p. 9.



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ISSN 0967 3393


REVIEW ARTICLES Searching for an anarchist sociology Liberation Sociology Joe R. Feagin and Hernán Vera Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO, 2008, 2nd Edition, 318 pages

Critical Sociology Steven M. Buechler Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, CO, 2008, 288 pages

I have been searching for a compelling treatise of anarchist-sociology. The last few years have offered me some thought-provoking contenders. For example, professional introspection has occurred with self-conscious progressive American sociologists, resulting most notably in Michael Burawoy’s ‘public sociology’. Both Liberation Sociology and Critical Sociology extend other progressive-minded views of sociology. Each is clearly on the ‘left’ end of the socio-political spectrum and sympathizes with society’s most oppressed. Each takes a challenging view of authority (although not always conceptualized as such) and articulates an agenda of emancipatory social change. Neither, however, pulls from an anarchist tradition, nor do they articulate an anarchist analysis and vision for society. A clear difference between the two books is their intended audiences. Liberation Sociology is written for academic sociologists, presumably interested in ‘making a difference’ in society. The book’s goal is to critique the epistemological ways of knowing social facts and acting to change the world. Critical Sociology, on the other hand, is not written for academics. At least, it is not written for professional sociologists. Thus, there is less disciplinary introspection and more discussion of what makes sociology critical. This text includes the ontology of sociology and is less interested in disciplinary internal debates than with critiquing society. Liberation Sociology is largely a broadside attack upon instrumental-positivistic research, particularly that done via quantitative methods (especially surveys). The


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authors detail the weaknesses implicit in these research methods, keenly attributing these methods to the Chicago School, structural-functionalism, and elite clientelism. Regrettably, the contributions of quantitative methods are rarely noted, nor the theoretical benefits of mixed methods and how qualitative and quantitative methods can reinforce each other. The voices of deliberately marginalized sociologists are emphasized, including women and people of color (e.g. Jane Addams and W.E.B. DuBois). In focusing on these voices – as well as other more prominent sociologists, including Durkheim and Mead – the authors point to sociologists who have openly worked for social change, and not feigned ‘neutrality’ as the still-obviously-pro-system Chicago School and others do. This second edition’s epilogue includes ideas about teaching liberation sociology to students. This addition saves the book from being short-sighted and unconcerned with those who most routinely encounter sociology: students. A principle weakness of Liberation Sociology is that it circumscribes the empowering potential of (capital-S) Sociology to actual practitioners (mainly academics). The in-depth discussion of various social change agents focuses almost exclusively on specific academics. While this may be due to the book’s target audience, it also portrays sociological ideas as being mainly useful to people with PhDs who are properly trained to use the ideas. For example, the premiere examples in the chapter on ‘participatory action research’ are troubling. Some examples are not participatory at all, other research projects only occurred when external funding was available from hierarchical sources, in very few projects did the ‘subjects’ influence the project’s focus and carry out their own research, and only one or two could be said to actually have empowered the subjects or expanded their self-determination. ‘Liberation’ here is something that happens to people, not something that the disempowered direct themselves. Ideas of selfmanagement, self-determination, and direct democracy (classic anarchist principles of liberation) are notably absent. The second weakness to Liberation Sociology is that it almost exclusively focuses on the individual acts of ‘great sociologists’ or other individuals. Collectivities and organizations are subtly avoided, with the exception of Sociologists Without Borders and the Sociology Liberation Movement. Curiously, the latter, although perhaps the most appropriate example of liberation sociology (given its name), is only mentioned in passing and never actually elaborated upon; unfamiliar readers will be left feeling tragically uninformed. Critical Sociology would work well as an introductory read for those interested in sociology, including undergraduates and even anarchists. It provides an overview of Anarchist Studies 17.2


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many of the ideas, social facts, and theories that make up the sociological canon, but in a comprehensive fashion that is very readable, and dare I say radical. The author’s concerns in many ways parallel an anarchist’s concerns about hierarchical society: capitalism, the state, media-driven culture, and major forms of inequality (class, race, and gender). A somewhat out-of-place series of chapters in the middle of the book consider individuals, the self, and micro-interactionist views. What preserves Buechler’s critical theme, however, is the rare emphasis upon how power still matters in terms of symbolic interaction and social constructionism. The final chapters round-out Buechler’s forward-looking critical sociology by tackling globalization, social movements, and democracy. The latter two are especially important for anarchist audiences, as Buechler clearly articulates how social movements drive progressive change in society and why democracy matters (and the obvious limitations of the present unequal political economy and representative ‘democracy’). There are a few limitations. As an advanced survey book, Critical Sociology seems to want to explore ‘major areas’ within the discipline, regardless of how they contribute to a critical sociology – for example, Charles Cooley’s ‘looking glass self ’ is surely interesting, but just how ‘critical’ is it? Curiously, ‘anarchism’ appears in the book once – ‘market anarchism’ is used as a synonym for ‘chaos’, thus indicating the author’s limited appreciation of what anarchism entails to actual anarchists. Additionally, potentially sociological elements that could anarchize an understanding of society – autonomy, mutual aid, and decentralization – are notably absent. In a chapter called ‘Toward a Critical Sociology’, Buechler focuses wholly upon Critical Theory as developed by the Frankfurt School, in particular the work of Jürgen Habermas. This raises the question of how distinct Buechler’s vision is, or whether it is merely a restatement of Habermasian sociology. Finally, while staking out a sociology that could articulate a better world, the book does not fully grapple with the ways in which this could occur. Thus, the emphasis is largely on criticism of the existing order, as opposed to a radical, value-driven, pre-figurative social order in line with anarchist practice. The exception is the final chapter in which the author details ways in which democracy could be expanded in US society. Although Liberation Sociology and Critical Sociology are important texts and are worthwhile reads for anarchist scholars, I will have to continue my pursuit for an anarchist-sociology. It will, undoubtedly, have to be articulated by an actual anarchist-sociologist. Dana Williams University of Akron Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Anarchist theory and the pitfalls of the reductio ad politicum Against the State: An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory Crispin Sartwell Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008 ISBN 978-0-7914-7448-8; $14.95/£10

Anarchism is not just misunderstood, but misunderstood in well-worn and predictable formulas. A shrewd critic could easily catalogue these formulas, just as Aristotle once catalogued the fallacies, and even assign them pretentious-sounding names. Near the top of any such list would be the reductio ad politicum – the reduction to the political – according to which anarchism is nothing more than opposition to states, governments, and other properly political entities. One encounters this fallacy chiefly, though not exclusively, in the rare attempts of Anglo-American philosophers to take anarchism seriously as a political idea.1 A.J. Simmons, for example, summarizes it tidily when he claims that ‘commitment to one central claim unites all forms of anarchist political philosophy: all existing states are illegitimate’.2 From this ‘central claim’ follows what Simmons calls the ‘minimal moral content’ of anarchism – namely, that the subjects of illegitimate states lack general political obligations.3 In other words, if a state is illegitimate its citizens have no specifically political obligations to obey the laws of that state, even though they may have a host of non-political reasons (or distinct and separate moral reasons) to obey them. That the views of so-called ‘classical anarchists’ tend, without exception, to be much stronger and more comprehensive is not surprising, since Simmons’ definition of anarchism, and all others like it, simply does not apply within their tradition. The word ‘anarchy’, which comes from the Greek anarkhos, does not principally mean ‘without a government’ or ‘without a state’, but rather ‘without authority’. As David Weick notes, ‘anarchism is more than anti-statism, even if government (the state) is, appropriately, the central focus of anarchist critique’.4 As ‘the generic social and political idea that expresses negation of all [repressive] power’,5 anarchism is


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committed first and foremost to the universal rejection of coercive authority, which includes capitalism, autocratic religions, patriarchy, heterosexism, white supremacy, and imperialism, as well as states and governments. It is because they ignore this dimension of anarchism that we accuse Simmons and his ilk of committing the fallacy of reductio ad politicium.6 Crispin Sartwell is no stranger to this tradition. In the introduction to Against the State, he claims to have been an anarchist since the age of 12 and mentions reading Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Alexander Berkman’s The ABC of Communist Anarchism in his youth (p.3). He has written previously on the classical anarchists and recently co-edited a volume of Voltairine de Cleyre’s essays.7 Even his definition of anarchism – ‘the view that all forms of human association ought to be, as far as possible, voluntary’ (p.4) – is certainly orthodox. In fact, it’s an improvement on most orthodox formulations, since, as Sartwell himself puts it, ‘the emphasis on voluntariness […] gives anarchism a more positive flavor and captures some of the reasons that many idealists have been and continue to be inspired by the idea’ (p.4). Lastly, Sartwell goes out of his way to confirm what he stated above – i.e., that anarchism is more than the view that government should not exist. Sounds promising, right? Unfortunately, Sartwell doesn’t really deliver on this promise. On the contrary, he ends up limiting his analysis more or less precisely to the view that government should not exist, thereby lending further credibility to, if not committing outright, the reductio ad politicum. Now, in fairness, Sartwell’s decision to focus his critique on the state may be a simple matter of emphasis. In subtitling the book An Introduction to Anarchist Political Theory, for example, perhaps he intends to make clear that politics is only one aspect of anarchist theory. Nowhere does Sartwell make this explicit, however. Despite his familiarity with the broader anarchist tradition – a familiarity to which, again, he calls brief attention – he simply plunges headlong and without any explanation into an analysis of anarchism as anti-statism. In the book’s conclusion (‘Towards Something Else’) Sartwell seems to be promising a more comprehensive analysis in an eventual sequel, but even here his remarks overlook non-political (e.g., economic, social, sexual, racial, etc) forms of oppression. All of this being said, Sartwell provides a fairly thorough overview of anarchist political theory. His critique of the state begins with a definition of free action as voluntary (uncoerced) action. From here he argues that ‘political liberty is the overcall condition of a life over a segment of time in which one is not subject to coercion by political or state authorities, or is subject to coercion only to some limited extent’ (p.23). He then defines anarchism as ‘the view that all forms of Anarchist Studies 17.2


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human association ought to be voluntary, or […] that people ought to have maximal human freedom’. If anarchism is true, he claims, it follows quite straightforwardly that there ought to be no government. Sartwell’s arguments, though extremely trenchant and comprehensive, are scarcely novel. His basic strategy is to assume that statism – not anarchism – inherits the burden of proof, which in turn implies that anarchism does not require positive justification. (Anarchism is only obliged to refute justifications of statism and to defend itself against statist objections.) On these grounds Sartwell argues for anarchism by refuting arguments for the state. This is essentially the same strategy employed by John Simmons’ Moral Principles and Political Obligations.8 In that book, Simmons defines what he calls the ‘principle of voluntarism’, according to which the only morally significant relationships are those we voluntarily assume. He proceeds to argue that none of the major theories of legitimacy and political obligation in the tradition can adequately account for voluntarism, which in turn lays the groundwork for philosophical anarchism (there are no legitimate states because we have no general political obligations). To be fair, some of Sartwell’s approaches to particular objections are very creative, and in all events he certainly does more than just parrot Simmons. That said, the overall methodology of Against the State is still a bit too close to Simmons for my taste. This is unfortunate, since Sartwell, unlike Simmons, genuinely seeks the abolition of the state so far as I am aware. Instead of arguing that the state lacks justification, he would have been better off making the case for its abolition. Perhaps he will do so in future work. Therefore, although this book arguably contributes to anti-statist philosophy, it does not provide, contrary to its title, an introduction to anarchist political theory. Such an introduction would need to engage with the full range of the anarchist tradition, and this, in turn, would require a much wider analysis than Sartwell provides.

NOTES 1. See, for example, A.J. Simmons, ‘Philosophical Anarchism’, in J. Sanders and J. Narveson (eds.), For and Against the State (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); R.P. Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). 2. Simmons, p.19. 3. Ibid., p.22. 4. D. Weick, ‘Anarchist Justice’, in H. Ehrlich, et al. (eds.), Reinventing Anarchy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p.139. Anarchist Studies 17.2


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5. Weick, p. 139; cf. Peter Kropotkin, Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution, ed. M.A. Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), p.150. 6. R. Rocker, Anarchosyndicalism (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938), p.20; cf P.J. Proudhon: ‘The economic idea of capitalism, the politics of government or of authority, and the theological idea of the Church are three distinct ideas, linked in various ways, yet to attack one of them is equivalent to attacking all of them.’ (What is Property: An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government, London: William Reeves, 1969, p.43); cf. E. Malatesta, who claims that in fighting the ‘exploitation and oppression of man by man,’ the anarchists likewise seek ‘the abolition of private property [i.e. capitalism] and government’ (E. Malatesta, ‘Towards Anarchism’, in Man!: An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commentaries, ed. M. Graham, London: Cienfuegos Press, 1974, p.75). 7. Voltairine de Cleyre, Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre – Anarchist Feminist, Genius, ed. Sharon Presley & Crispin Sartwell (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005). 8. A.J. Simmons, Moral Principles and Political Obligations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).

Nathan J. Jun Midwestern State University



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REVIEWS

Chris Carlsson, Nowtopia: How pirate programmers, outlaw bicyclists and vacant lot gardeners are inventing the future today! Oakland, C.A. and Edinburgh: AK Press, 2008 ISBN 9781904859772

Published by an anarchist press and printed on recycled, acid-free paper by unionised labour, Nowtopia is about walking our talk. It’s a book that refuses to separate private from public, thought from action, ends from means, and it presents an argument in which small, local, individual and collective actions have wider public and political significance. Indeed, they might even change the world … a bit. Nowtopia is a good example of a growing phenomenon in the world of utopian experimentation and activism. This phenomenon involves a shift of focus from changing the future to changing the now, from grand and long-term planning to immediate action. It involves a desire to create a better (not perfect) world today, in the here and now, which is situated immediately outside (and sometimes inside) our own front doors. It is a utopianism of the now and a politics of the local. I call it a ‘politics’ because, for me, politics is about change, power and the social distribution of goods and resources, but this phenomenon is, in many ways apolitical. It eschews conventional vehicles of change (like political parties). It often rejects ideology. At the same time, it is profoundly anarchistic, rejecting hierarchical structures and drawing on the belief that we can learn to run our own lives. This phenomenon is observable inside intentional communities, autonomous social centres, local regeneration programmes, and this book offers a new batch of case studies, drawn from experiments within DIY culture, emancipatory practices and egalitarian ethics. Nowtopia emerges from and comments upon this growing trend. Carlsson is not just an observer of life on the margins. He is active: participating, forming and moulding ‘nowtopia’. Like many of the people in his book, he’s a busy man: he ‘is’ a writer, graphic designer, publisher, community organizer, founder of ‘Critical Mass’


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(an outlaw cycle movement), and director of ‘Shaping San Francisco’ (a multi-media project) – http://www.chriscarlsson.com/. The book provides interesting and sometimes uplifting introductions to activities that transgress conventional relationships between work, labour, and money. These include vacant lot gardening, an ‘alternative’ art festival, outlaw bicycling, free software and alternative (fuel) technologies. Carlsson explores the ethics and practice of these activities, situating them within a theoretical framework drawn from anarchism, permaculture and a version of Marxism. This, for me, is the weakest aspect of the book: I was unconvinced by his attempts to couch people’s experiences in terms of class and to present participants as members of ‘a new working class’. However, as an exercise in using the edges and valuing the margins (permaculture principles), the book excels. It suggests that small-scale local actions can be enabling, both individually (as participants develop skills, confidence and selfesteem) and collectively (as communities develop around these practices). All communities can, of course, be exclusive, and the book valorises these (if you are the wrong kind of cyclist: if you wear cycle shorts, observe cycle lanes and/or don’t fix your own bike – then you should skip the ‘Outlaw Bicycling’ chapter: it’s not for you). Carlsson celebrates and explores these new communities, enquiring into the motivations of people who work ‘for nothing’ (ie unwaged, voluntarily, or work not associated with salary and wages), suggesting that utopian outcomes exceed the practical or concrete ‘products’ of these experiments. These outcomes are a ‘good’ in themselves but they take on a special significance when located within a eutopian ethics of co-operation. In the final chapter, Carlsson discusses the dangers of co-option: co-operation and open-mindedness are not the only utopian impulses in town. What he calls capitalism (which I would variously describe as commerce, multi-national corporations and/or private property relations) contains and represents strong utopian desires which perennially threaten to consume radical alternatives. This is important: for Carlsson, ‘the better world that awaits’ is beginning now and the cases discussed in Nowtopia represent tentative stepping stones towards this (p.252), but utopia is under constant and powerful threat from the forces it opposes. So I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in everyday attempts to change the world for the better. I would recommend it to academics and practitioners, although there is a danger both will find it unsatisfactory. Academics may feel frustrated about theorization, methodology and rigour, while practitioners may feel alienated by the same things, for different reasons. However, I think it’s Anarchist Studies 17.2


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worth the risk and that people should read this book prepared to be irritated, stimulated, challenged, provoked and, perhaps, inspired by these stories of everyday utopianism. Lucy Sargisson School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham

Stuart Christie, We, the Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927-1937 Edinburgh/Oakland, West Virginia: AK Press, 2008 ISBN 9781904859758

This reprint of Stuart Christie’s history of the Iberian Anarchist Federation constitutes an important addition to the neglected history of the renowned anarchist organization that formed one of the strands of the broad Spanish and Portuguese libertarian movement in the early twentieth century. Unlike Gómez Casas’ Anarchist Organisation: The History of the FAI (1986), which is largely sympathetic to the FAI, this book begins its account in a generally positive mode to end up by depicting the organization as a manifestation of the betrayal of the libertarian aspirations and actions of the mass of anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists active in the period of the Spanish Civil War and revolution (1936-9). While the Portuguese element of the FAI is barely mentioned (it had to operate clandestinely from the early 1930s), the Spanish component is presented as a vibrant anarchist organization with close links to the mass syndicalist union, the CNT (National Confederation of Labour). Any accusation of control of the CNT by the FAI, however – an often cited topic – is consistently dismissed by Christie. Rather, in Christie’s view, ‘the FAI developed as a direct response by rank and file militants to manoeuvres by the national leadership of the CNT to overturn the revolutionary objectives and constitution of the CNT’ (p.40). This supposed dichotomy between the revolutionary anarchists of the FAI (before their downfall and integration into the apparatus of the state, just like the CNT) and the reformist-leaning syndicalists informs much of the book. But there are limitations to this analysis. First, it is necessary to discuss further what precisely made up the ‘rank and file’ of the CNT – setting up sharp distinctions between the rank and file and an increasingly elitist reformist ‘leadership’ does not explain how Anarchist Studies 17.2


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such a division occurred in the first place. Secondly, it is necessary to provide some context on the historical ideological background and evidently reformist roots of some sectors of the CNT, that is, from republican and moderate socialist traditions alive and well in the last years of the nineteenth century. Many joined the CNT simply because it was effective in combating the factory owners rather than through any explicit ideological commitment. Thirdly, and despite what is mentioned above, the dichotomy between revolutionary anarchism and reformist syndicalism is not so clear-cut, either historically or in the period of the Civil War and revolution. The FAI, as Christie notes, attended the cross-party meeting in August 1930 in San Sebastian, which was to determine the transformation of the monarchy into a Republic in April 1931, not as an official delegate organization but in all but name (pp.74-5). Further, at the FAI congress in 1936, some members were expelled for alleged collaboration with political figures – the seed of future governmental participation was already growing within the Iberian Federation (pp.92-3). Tension between certain sectors of the CNT and the FAI resulted from the very concept of revolutionary change that each organization held dear. It is not sufficient to hint that the CNT leadership wanted to consolidate the union merely to turn it into a defender of the status quo (p.88) or to reject the politics of Joan Peiró as gradualism and hence intrinsically reformist (p.89). Perhaps the spontaneity and free will that guided the FAI (p.100) were not adequate as a revolutionary tactic? The fact that there were reformist tendencies in the CNT cannot be denied. But the analysis here, which by the end of the book details the ‘fall’ of the FAI into the most crass opportunism and governmental collaboration alongside its erstwhile enemies in the CNT, does not explain this degeneration. Why did the ‘rank and file’ of both the FAI and the CNT not do more to halt this? Was there anything in the history of the CNT and the FAI that presaged this tactic? Were the ‘revolutionary gymnastics’ sponsored by the FAI adequate as a revolutionary tactic? Unfortunately, despite the detail of this book and the wide range of sources employed, we do not find out what possible direction organized anarchism should take, even though the Friends of Durruti organization is perhaps hinted at as a means of arresting the reformist slide of both CNT and FAI. With the organizational model of syndicalism and anarchist specific groups apparently rejected, in the light of the failures of the CNT and the FAI in the 1930s what tactics should now be adopted by libertarians? Unfortunately, Christie does not venture squarely into this territory. Richard Cleminson Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, University of Leeds Anarchist Studies 17.2


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В.В. Дамье, Забытый Интернационал: Международное анархо-синдикалистское движение между двумя мировыми войнами, Т. 1: От революционного синдикализма к анархо-синдикализму, 1918-1930, Т. 2: Международный анархосиндикализм в условиях «Великого кризиса» и наступления фашизма (1930-1939)

V.V. Damye, A Forgotten International: The International Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement Between the Wars – Vol. 1: From Revolutionary Syndicalism to Anarcho-Syndicalism, 1918-1930; Vol. 2: International Anarcho-Syndicalism during the Great Depression and the Rise of Fascism, 1930-1939. NLO Editions, Moscow, 2006 & 2007, 904 & 736 pp., illustrated

Damye’s book is the first attempt at a general history of the IWMA (International Working-Men’s Association), the international organisation of anarcho-syndicalist unions. The focus of the study is the origins of the IWMA, its influence, its role in the international labour movement and the ideological debates which took place within it. The author uses a periodisation which is based on the internal processes of the IWMA and also linked to the global dynamics of socio-economic and political developments, as well as to important moments in the history of the anarcho-syndicalism movement. The first period (1918-1923) is characterised by a revolutionary wave and the aggravation of social antagonisms around the world as a consequence of the First World War. According to Damye, this period comes to an end with the organisational creation of an international anarcho-syndicalist movement, namely the founding of the IWMA at the congress of anarcho-syndicalist trade unions in Berlin (25 December 1922 – 2 January 1923). The second period (1923-1931) is characterised by a downturn in the revolutionary wave caused by political and socioeconomic stabilisation around the world. The period ends with events such as the world economic crisis of 1929-1931 and its political consequences, and the overthrow of the monarchy in Spain. The latter contributed strongly to the rise of the most influential sector of the anarcho-syndicalist movement, the Spanish CNT (National Confederation of Labour). The third stage (1931-1939) covers the activities of syndicalist organisations during the economic crisis, the crushing of several of them by dictatorial regimes (in Germany, Japan and Latin America), and the CNT’s participation in the revolution and civil war in Spain in 1936-1939. This Anarchist Studies 17.2


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period was ended by the definitive defeat of the anarcho-syndicalists in the Spanish civil war and the beginning of the Second World War. The fourth and final period in the IWMA’s itinerary analysed by Damye coincides with the 1939-1945 war. During these years the IWMA secretariat was moved to neutral Sweden, and was practically paralysed. At the same time, its member sections in different countries in Europe and the Americas, as well as other syndicalist organisations, continued their activity independently. Unfortunately, the time-frame chosen by the author did not allow him to discuss the history of the post-war anarcho-syndicalist movement, from 1945 to the present. On this period, Damye limits himself to a brief overview at the end of the work. These will be the subject of a second book. The author does not limit himself to the history of the IWMA as such. He also examines problems of the genesis of the theory and practice of revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism in 1890-1945, the highpoint of the movement. He deals with a number of important questions in the historiography of the anarchist movement, such as the participation of anarcho-syndicalists in the antimilitarist movement during the First World War, and in the Russian, German and Spanish revolutions (1917-1921, 1918-1920 and 1936-1939); and in the anti-fascist resistance to the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco, as well as to the nationalist dictatorships in Japan and some Latin American countries. Whole chapters are devoted to the contribution of anarcho-syndicalists to the Resistance during the Second World War (including the maquis in Italy and France, and the Warsaw uprising of 1944). The author makes an original attempt to draw a distinction – by analogy with what happened in 1914-1918 – between ‘defencist’ and ‘internationalist’ positions in the European anarchist movement. The study covers the syndicalist movements of Europe, Asia, the Americas, Australia and even South Africa. Certain chapters are given over to the analysis of the movement in particular countries, such as Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Russia, Portugal, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, the USA, Cuba, Japan and China. The book also contains information on the activities of the anarcho-syndicalist organisations of other countries. Damye has provided a fairly detailed account of the theoretical discussions within the worldwide anarcho-syndicalist movement. The reader can learn about the positions adopted by important theorists such as Lopez Arango, R. Rocker, Hatta Suzo, H. Rüdiger etc. The book is illustrated with many photographs and drawings of the symbols of syndicalist organisations. It would not be an exaggeration to see this book as an encyclopaedia of anarcho-syndicalism. On the other hand, little space is given to the activity and theoretical Anarchist Studies 17.2


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development of syndicalism in Russia. And yet there is evidence to suggest that it was in Russia that the very term ‘anarcho-syndicalism’ (‘trade union anarchism’) was invented.1 This subject deserves to be studied in greater depth, particularly since the theoretical discussions and the practical experience of the Russian anarchists during the revolution of 1917-1921 contributed greatly to the development of the theory and practice of the international anarchist movement. Damye’s book will be of great use to students of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism and the labour movement.

NOTES 1. Cf: Новомирский [Кирилловский Я.И.]. Из программы синдикального анархизма. Б. м., 1907.

Dmitri I. Roublev History, Moscow State University for Environmental Engineering (Translated by Julia Goussev, Praxis Research & Education Centre and Victor Serge Memorial Library, Moscow)

Félix Fénéon, Novels in Three Lines Translated and introduced by Luc Sante New York: New York Review Books, 2007 171+xxxi pages, paperback £7.99, ISBN: 978-1-59017-230-8

Strikes and suicides; epidemics, bomb scares and burglaries; rapes, murders and the shady doings of politicians – all sell newspapers. In 1906, the French anarchist Félix Fénéon wrote up hundreds of such episodes in brief for the column Nouvelles en Trois Lignes (news/novels in three lines) in the Paris daily, Le Matin. Luc Sante, who has translated most of them in this collection, calls them a milestone of modernism. The pieces were, like much of Fénéon’s writing, anonymous. He chose elusiveness; aspired, he said, to silence. A dandy who made his living as a clerk at the War Office, he simultaneously participated in avant-garde artistic and literary circles as an influential editor and critic, while producing anarchist propaganda aimed at workers. When he was arrested in 1894 as part of a government crackdown on anarchists, Anarchist Studies 17.2


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detonators were found at his workplace. Eventually acquitted (though probably guilty) of participating in bomb plots, Fénéon lost his job and turned to mainstream journalism for his livelihood. The poet Mallarmé pointed out that Fénéon’s writings were the real detonators. How explosive, though, were these novels in three lines? Produced as ephemera, without explicit political or artistic pretensions, there is little here as striking as this earlier example of his terse commentary for the anarchist press: ‘Dead sick of himself after reading the book by Samuel Smiles, (Know Thyself), a judge just drowned himself at Coulange-la-Vineuse. If only this excellent book could be read throughout the magistracy.’1 His work for Le Matin displays a similarly mordant wit and concision: ‘In Oyannax, Mlle Cottet, 18, threw acid in the face of M. Besnard, 25. Love, obviously’ (p.161). But many items could be space fillers in any provincial newspaper – more mundane tweets than haiku. The translation can be clunky; the claims for Fénéon as stylist might have been strengthened by including the French originals beside the English versions, to give a better sense of the rhythms and placement of words. Or a freer rendition might, paradoxically, better replicate Fénéon’s precision. At their best, though, form and content combine with a twist to produce a sudden overturning of the expected: a moment of subversion. Not detonators, perhaps, but firecrackers. Reminding us that Fénéon was a champion of post-impressionism, Sante compares the cumulative effect of the Nouvelles to a pointillist painting representing ‘the whole world, with all of its contradictions’ (p.xxxi). But this rendition of a modernising society, in which railways and submarines, explosives and telephones play their parts in an ever-recurring series of (mostly) unfortunate events, is hardly the whole world; to say so is to accept a version framed by the demands of mass journalism. Sante’s tendency to overstatement here as elsewhere undermines his arguments. Fénéon is a fascinating character, and overall the book raises interesting questions about the relationship between form, style, and politics. The many contemporary illustrations – unfortunately unattributed – are an additional bonus.

NOTES 1. Quoted in Joan Ungersma Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-deSiècle Paris (Yale and London: Yale University Press, 1988), p.250.

Judy Greenway (http://judygreenway.org.uk/) Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Keith Flett (ed.), 1956 and All That Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. viii + 237 pp ISBN 9781847181848. £34-99

This volume prints contributions to a conference held by the (SWP-oriented) London Socialist Historians Group in 2006 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of a notable year, 1956. The de-Stalinization of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Union followed by the Russian suppression of the Hungarian Revolution are of particular importance for Trotskyists since the ensuing exodus from the Communist Party of Great Britain enabled them for the first time to become a significant component of the British left. In addition, Soviet intervention in Hungary coincided with the British and French invasion of Suez in a vain attempt to reverse Egyptian nationalization of the canal. Keith Flett’s non-existent editing of the texts particularly ill-serves the chapter most likely to interest readers of AS, but which regrettably cannot be recommended: Alan Woodward’s ‘The Libertarian Response in the UK to the Hungarian Uprising of 1956’, dealing principally with Castoriadis (in France!) and the Solidarity group. On the other hand, further reports by Terry Brotherstone on the Trotskyists Peter Fryer and Brian Pearce, and Christian Høgsbjerg on C.L.R. James (and, in this case, decolonization), Anne Alexander’s account of the mobilization by Nasser of Communists to repel the invaders, and Neil Davidson’s revelatory discussion of Alasdair MacIntyre’s fifteen years of Marxist writings, should go far to compensate an eclectic reader for this disappointment. David Goodway (http://www.goodway.go-plus.net/)

Wayne Price, The Abolition of the State: Anarchist and Marxist Perspectives Authorhouse 2007, Bloomington Indiana, 196pp

Wayne Price’s The Abolition of the State: Anarchist and Marxist Perspectives explores one of the main features of anarchist political theory, namely, the role and nature of the state, as well as questions surrounding the strategies and social forms Anarchist Studies 17.2


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required for its dissolution. The state, as defined by Price, being the ‘dominant power of a territory […] a bureaucratic-military machine standing above, and alienated from, the rest of class-divided society, serving the interests of the upper class’ (p.9). The secondary topic of the book is a comparative analysis of various anarchist and Marxist approaches to these questions. While the question of the state has served as the basis of one of the major historical disagreements between these two revolutionary traditions, non-Leninist marxisms have periodically converged with socialist anarchisms. Price, as a ‘Marxist-informed anarchist’ (p.8), feels that both traditions have a great deal to learn from each other. Both topics have contemporary relevance, as indicated by the resurgence of anarchist thought in the post-Soviet era and the continuing efforts of anarchists and Marxists to engage in meaningful dialogue. In this sense, Price’s varied political background and experience – from pacifism and Trotskyism to his current ‘Platformist’ anarcho-communism – is an asset in this undertaking. The book is divided into three parts. Forming the bulk of the work at eight chapters, Price first summarizes the theoretical bases of anti-statism, the chief obstacles which might hinder this objective, and how a libertarian socialist society might function. In the next section Price looks at three historical examples where antistatist ideas were further tested, developed and/or found a limited field of practical application. The book concludes with a short outline of Price’s conception of anarchism as ‘nothing but the most extreme, consistent, and thoroughgoing democracy’ (p.164). In terms of Price’s primary objective, a theoretical and historical treatment of anti-statism, it is essentially a restatement of the basic libertarian socialist positions. Its chief merits are twofold. First, it is written clearly and is free of much of the jargon that often obscures these arguments. Second, theoretical perspectives are often reinforced by fairly mainstream contemporary examples, showing both their benefits and limitations. For example, Price points to the material and community benefits of cooperatives as democratic institutions and as evidence of the capacity of workers to manage their own affairs without bosses or bureaucrats. He goes on to show how the transformative potential of cooperative enterprise is restricted by the exploitative nature of capitalist economies. Price’s discussion of popular militias – as alternatives to professional militaries – similarly draws on a variety of actual examples, ranging from World War II era partisan detachments to the modern Swiss army. As for his secondary topic, Price gives a refreshingly non-sectarian overview of Marxist conceptions of the state. Following the arguments made by Marx, Engels, and council communist Paul Mattick on workers’ self-organisation, Price states that Anarchist Studies 17.2


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‘even from a Marxist perspective, there is no such thing as a workers’ state’ (p.49). However, Price fails to elaborate on his assertion that ‘in the last analysis, Marxism is flawed in several basic ways’ (p.8). Price directs his critique at Leninism and social democracy – currents also criticised extensively by councilists, left communists, autonomists, and others. Of course, ‘Orthodox’ Marxism no more represents the variety of the Marxist tradition than primitivism or individualism does for anarchism. Here, Price’s assessment of Marxism’s strengths and weaknesses may have benefitted from a fuller account of left or ‘libertarian’ marxisms. Overall, Price’s Abolition of the State falls somewhere between an introductory text on anti-statism and movement literature. The book restates traditional libertarian socialist perspectives in an accessible way, while the analysis clearly comes from a long-time militant, concerned both with effecting change and formulating coherent, theoretical positions towards emancipatory ends. It might be read alongside recent works like Lynd and Grubacic’s Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History or earlier writings like Chomsky’s Government in the Future. Saku Pinta, PhD student Department of Politics, History & International Relations, Loughborough University

Mastaneh Shah-Shuja, Zones of Proletarian Development Open Mute, London 2008

This book’s title plays on a phrase familiar to most psychologists. Vygotsky, a psychologist in Russia before and after the 1917 seizure of power, coined the term ‘zone of proximal development’ as an element within his account of ability and development. The zone of proximal development identifies the difference between a person’s performance on a task unaided and their performance in the company of a more experienced peer who offers guidance. Instead of emphasising fixed notions of individualised intelligence it directs attention toward the ability to benefit from instruction in social settings. Similarly, ‘zones of proletarian development’ (ZPD) are co-created situations within which groups of oppressed people become better able to appreciate the character of their oppression and, simultaneously, rehearse and acquire the resources and Anarchist Studies 17.2


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skills necessary to challenge it. This learning is both social and practical, worked up in activity occurring under material conditions organised by capitalism and its attendant oppressions. ZPD turn ‘quantitative growth in the struggles of different strata of the proletariat into a qualitatively new type of struggle’ (p.31), and, Shah-Shuja argues, are characterised by confrontations with capital where the proletariat acquire abilities not just in themselves but for themselves. There are problems with Vygotsky which Shah-Shuja recognises. To address them she also utilises analytics drawn from Bakhtin, and from activity theory or CHAT (cultural-historical activity theory). From Bakhtin she takes the notion of the utterance as unit of analysis, and the understanding of carnival as a transgressive, unruly happening which renders all equal and, in its negation of all orthodoxy, challenges every authority. From CHAT she takes a form of sociological-psychological analysis that understands activity as dialectically constituted within historically and materially constituted, tool-mediated systems, which it has the potential to transform, as well as merely reproduce. However, the text is also brimming with concepts borrowed from other sources, including mainstream and critical psychology, feminist social theory, Deleuze and Guattari, Situationist theory, and writers on organisation from Kautsky and Lenin to Pannekoek and Cardan (i.e. Castoriadis). This potentially dry material is consistently enlivened by an original array of cartoons, detourned images and photographs, amplifying the flashes of humour running through the text. Shah-Shuja presents three case studies, one demonstrating each of the three primary theoretical frames. ‘Vygotskian May Days’ analyses the London May Day demonstrations of 1999 to 2003. Moments of these events, Shah-Shuja argues, constituted ZPD within which skills necessary to confront capital were rehearsed and shared. Her analyses touch upon the detournment of Winston Churchill’s statue, the development of shared strategies to neutralise surveillance and press cameras, the use of graffiti, slogans and music, and the various ways in which more experienced demonstrators ‘scaffolded’ the activity of others by providing the minimum amount of guidance necessary for them to be successful for themselves. The second case study analyses Iranian football riots in 2001, primarily using the Bakhtinian notion of carnivalesque. Shah-Shuja shows how aspects of carnival identified by Bakhtin (parody, grotesquerie, drinking, eating, sexual contact, excess, hysteria) helped to constitute the riot’s politically transgressive character. Under the repressive conditions glossed by Khatami and furthered by Ahmadinejad, and in a cultural context characterised by religiosity and widespread, visible state violence, these activities were sometimes able to acquire particular political potency. Towards Anarchist Studies 17.2


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the end of this section, Shah-Shuja argues that carnivalesque can be seen as the temporary supercession or negation of ‘spectacular’ capitalist social relations. Carnival creates forms of ZPD by uniting elements of experience (such as emotion and intellect) frequently falsely separated under spectacular capitalism. Shah-Shuja also highlights the ‘dark’ moments of progressive violence that carnival sometimes contains, and which were sometimes evident in the Iranian riots. The third case study uses CHAT to analyse the contrasts between two large London demonstrations: the poll tax demonstration of March 1990 that ended in a riot, and the huge anti-war demonstration of February 2003 which passed off largely without incident. In both, activity was mediated symbolically by theoretical concepts, historical accounts, leaflets, slogans and chants. In the 1990 demonstration, the later riotous activity was also mediated by tools including placard sticks, flags and poles, megaphones, rocks, improvised shields and Molotov cocktails. Amongst other analyses, Shah-Shuja contrasts the restrictive, bourgeois individualist slogan dominating the 2003 demonstration (‘Not In My Name’) with the generalised slogans of the proletarian minority (‘Bin Bush, Bin Blair, Bin Bin Laden!’) and of the 1990 poll tax demonstration (‘Bollocks to the Poll Tax!’; ‘Communities… charge!’). Seen as activity systems both demonstrations, dialectically, offered different potentials for learning and innovation. The case studies are followed by a substantial discussion of revolutionary organising, within which both Leninism and anarchism are excoriated and lessons gleaned from the three analyses are synthesised. In this section, as elsewhere, no critique is left uncritiqued or unqualified, and the level of scholarship is impressive. Shah-Shuja does an excellent job of challenging notions of riotous crowds as necessarily reactionary, instead emphasising their selectivity and the sensuous, practical intelligence of their actions. In treating them as ZPD, zones of learning and progression, she moves beyond abstract notions of ‘consciousness raising’ and highlights the progressive potentials they bear. However, this is no mere valorisation of disorder for its own sake: the analysis is nuanced and careful, conducted in full awareness of the ways in which violence can also be reactionary. The analyses largely separate what happens during demonstrations from the arduous and extensive symbolic, material and affective activity that occurs continuously within networks of activists. This activity both produces demonstrations and contributes strongly to their character, but its effects – and the effects upon it of learning within ZPD – are not addressed. There are also elements of political positioning that can read as dogmatic since stances are sometimes simply asserted rather than worked through. Overall, though, this is an excellent, thought-provoking text Anarchist Studies 17.2


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that rescues elements of psychology and sociology from themselves at the same time as it offers fresh analytic perspectives that decisively rebut the reactionary views (originating with Le Bon) that still prevail. John Cromby Department of Human Sciences, Loughborough University

Nicolas Walter (ed. David Goodway), The Anarchist Past and Other Essays Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2007 254pp., £9.99

Nicolas Walter’s death in 1999 ended a long involvement with British anarchism. Walter had been a member of the Labour Party in the early 1950s, but Suez and the Soviet invasion of Hungary radicalised him. He became active in CND and the Committee of 100, and was a part of the ‘Spies for Peace’ group which in 1963 exposed government plans for the aftermath of a nuclear war. He made his first contribution to Freedom in 1959, becoming a mainstay of the paper for the rest of his life. He also contributed to the influential Anarchy magazine. Walter wrote for Freedom in the years that it was accused by class-struggle anarchists of being ‘quietist’, ‘philosophical’, ‘pacifist’ and ‘evolutionary’. He argued against those who took a more class-based view of anarchism, not least Albert Meltzer, a committed anarcho-syndicalist, with whom he conducted lengthy polemics. Meltzer said of Walter that ‘He seemed to have the idea that he was the official spokesperson of the anarchist movement […] He had carried on a seemingly endless feud with me […] I suppose it was because I refuted his revisions of our history and distortions of our ideas’.1 Yet after Meltzer’s death in 1996, Walter generously recalled that ‘He subjected me to a stream of abuse for over thirty years. But it takes all sorts to make a revolution.’2 That sentiment summed up Walter’s view of the movement as a broad church and is reflected in The Anarchist Past and Other Essays, a collection of his writings edited by David Goodway. As well as discussing recognisably anarchist figures like Bakunin and Kropotkin, the book includes observations on libertarian elements in the thought of Gerrard Winstanley, William Godwin, Tom Paine and even the Marquis de Sade. The work highlights Walter’s expertise in the early history of British anarchism. Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Amongst the reviews, essays and even obituaries included are priceless details on seminal activists such as Charlotte Wilson, Joseph Lane, Edward Carpenter and Dan Chatterton. A review of John Quail’s The Slow Burning Fuse (1978), for example, identifies the long-forgotten Leonard Motler (a deaf mute who had abandoned the pro-war socialist movement for anarchism in 1914) as being among the first to condemn the Bolshevik coup in Russia. In December 1917 Motler wrote in his selfpublished journal, Satire, that ‘The Russian Revolution is running agley. These little things happen when the people permit new rulers to pose as their saviours, instead of saving themselves by running the country on their own’ (p.205). Walter was a fluent Russian speaker and his pieces on Kropotkin, the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, Kronstadt and Emma Goldman’s disenchantment are all detailed and informative. His observations on the role of Russian anarcho-syndicalists show their increasing influence within the labour movement before they and all nonBolshevik currents were suppressed. Nicolas Walter’s politics may not have been to everyone’s taste, but we should not be overly deterred by old Albert Meltzer’s dismissal of him as a liberal and an academic, albeit one who wrote about anarchism. The Anarchist Past is still a valuable read.

NOTES 1. A. Meltzer, I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels: Sixty Years of Commonplace Life and Anarchist Agitation (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996), p.213. 2. R. Wynne-Jones, ‘After the Anarchy, the Comedy’, The Independent, 26 May 1996.

Keith Hodgson Wigan & Leigh College

Damian F. White, Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal Pluto Press, 2008, 236pp

Murray Bookchin was nothing if not a stimulating, original, and controversial figure. While his pioneering ecological critique, as well as his historical, political, and philosophical works, made significant contributions to left libertarian thought, Anarchist Studies 17.2


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Bookchin’s views also elicited a response from nearly everyone he came into contact with; in more recent years, his polemics and disagreements often overshadowed the content of his ideas. It is no surprise then, that following his passing in 2006, a string of work has been published examining, assessing, and interpreting Bookchin’s intellectual legacy. The most recent contribution to this growing body of work, and the first scholarly book-length study on Bookchin’s thought, is Damian F. White’s offering Bookchin: A Critical Appraisal. White’s well-researched treatment finds its niche in an exegesis and clear exposition of Bookchin’s social ecological critique – in which he accentuates the reconstructive and utopian dimension of his ideas as well as percipient criticisms of environmental reductionism or determinism – along with an assessment of Bookchin’s thought in relation to a variety of contemporary ecological perspectives. The first section of the book introduces Bookchin’s ideas, placing the development of his thought into the social, political, and historical environments from which it emerged. White provides an excellent summary of Bookchin’s intellectual development and influences, from the Communist Party and union activism of his youth, through to his ecologically-infused anarchism and ‘mature’ writings on social ecology. In the next section, White outlines Bookchin’s social theory and analysis of ecological destruction as being tied to social hierarchy and domination. Here, White suggests that contemporary ecological research in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, geography, and history offers ‘a much more dynamic and diverse view of eco-social relations’ than what Bookchin presents in his Ecology of Freedom (p.32). White also defends Bookchin’s critique of the dangerous oversimplification, and potentially authoritarian or racialist conclusions, of neo-Malthusian thought. Part Three analyses Bookchin’s reconstructive notion of a ‘legacy of freedom’, in which White embarks on an examination of Bookchin’s ethical and ontological perspectives, the project to harmonize human communities and the natural environment, and his libertarian municipalist vision of a renewed, directly democratic polis. White concludes with an overview of Bookchin’s later writings, and, notably, his break with anarchism in favour of a new ‘communalist’ formulation, as well as an evaluation of his legacy and main insights. White’s study deserves to be widely read, and not only as an in-depth, scholarly primer on Bookchin’s ecological thinking and social theory. White’s appraisal has the benefit of maintaining a critical distance both from Bookchin’s ideas and from those of his detractors, while highlighting specific themes relevant to contemporary ecological thought. Readers already familiar with Bookchin’s work, or those coming Anarchist Studies 17.2


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from an anarchist perspective, will encounter much to engage with, and some questionable positions; in particular, White’s placing ‘green’ or ‘eco-capitalism’ and reformism in a positive light. Saku Pinta, PhD student, Department of Politics, History & International Relations Loughborough University


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