For those interested in anarchism’s storied past—and curious as to what its future may hold—we are happy (ecstatic) to present Chris Ealham’s new book, Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937. The following excerpt is from Chapter 6, “Militarised anarchism, 1932–1936,” which charts a period of insurrection, militarization, and expropriation for the CNT. Missing from below are thirty footnotes and a rose-colored-glasses view of the Barcelona working-class.
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In an attempt to save the organisation from collapse, the armed groups within the orbit of the CNT and the FAI initiated new forms of fundraising. It is not certain from where the instruction emanated. It has been suggested that the FAI Peninsular Committee issued an appeal to the defence committees and its own grupos for money. Yet it is far from certain that the FAI had authority in such matters, and it is more likely that the order came from the Catalan CRT, which was ultimately responsible for the unions, press and prisoners’ welfare in the region. However, what we can be sure about is the fact that the recourse to illegal funding strategies cannot be explained solely in terms of the economic crisis of the CNT, for many revolutionary groups faced economic limitations on their activities during the 1930s and did not follow this path. Rather, it was the rise of the radical anarchists, for whom armed actions were central to all social protest, which sealed the switch to illegal fundraising tactics. Indeed, in much the same way as the radicals justified the illegality of the unemployed, so also did they rationalise that which funded the movement, drawing a sharp distinction between the term ‘robber’ and those who requisitioned money for ‘the cause’. Thus, just as the armed grupos were called upon to fill the vacuum left by the decline in CNT syndical muscle, so too were they required to secure the internal funding of the Confederation.
There was no single funding mechanism. In some cases, a form of ‘revolutionary tax’ was levied against employers and companies, who were informed of the sum involved (which depended on company size and which might run into tens of thousands of pesetas for large enterprises), the method of payment and the sanctions for non-payment, which ranged from the threat of sabotage against plant to the murder of managers. Since the authorities discouraged employers from meeting these ‘tax’ demands, it is difficult to know how often it was paid. We can nevertheless get a sense of how the ‘revolutionary tax’ operated from anecdotal evidence in the memoirs of managers and activists and from the press following the killing of employers for non-payment. There is also evidence that the ‘revolutionary tax’ was imposed on businesses that had been involved in strikes with the CNT and were thus held responsible for exhausting the resources of both the movement and their supporters. In l’Hospitalet, the Comité libertario pro-revolución social (Libertarian Committee for Social Revolution) levied the ‘tax’ on high-profile businessmen, such as Salvador Gil i Gil, a local councillor active in the repression of street traders.
Yet the most common method of funding was armed expropriation, normally involving attacks on banks and payrolls. As one militant explained, ‘to raid a bank was an episode of the social war’. Although, as we saw in Chapter 2, this strategy was used by anarchist groups after World War One, it was first utilised by CNT squads in the republican period during the wood workers’ strike (November 1932 to April 1933), when pickets punished intransigent employers by expropriating their cash boxes and safes. Sometimes, businesses owned by right wingers were also deliberately targeted. This funding tactic became highly attractive because, as one activist explained, ‘one well prepared attack and you get away with a sum of money equal to four weeks collections’. By 1934, expropriations were a recurring feature of urban life, sometimes bringing as much as 100,000 pesetas into union funds at a single stroke.
The expropriations presented Companys, who replaced the recently deceased Macià as president of the Generalitat at the end of 1933, with a sharp dilemma. On 1 January 1934, in accordance with the devolution programme specified by the Catalan Autonomy Statute, the Generalitat’s newly formed Comissaria d’Ordre Públic (Public Order Office) assumed responsibility for policing. Determined to demonstrate its competence in the realm of public order to a suspicious centre-right government in Madrid and a critical Lliga in Barcelona, the Generalitat increased ‘the drive to persecute robbers, murderers and wreckers’, fearing that anything less would give the impression that order had been lost. Responsibility for the new autonomous Catalan police rested with Josep Dencàs and Miquel Badia, Generalitat interior minister and Barcelona police chief, respectively. While apparently Catalanising the security forces, Dencàs and Badia, both of whom had close links with the quasi-fascist ERC youth movement, the escamots, politicised policing in a way that had never been seen before. Along with his brother Josep, Badia drafted the violently anti-CNT, anti-migrant escamots into the Catalan police; the Sometent was also purged and replaced by escamots. Meanwhile, Jaume Vachier, an ERC councillor and businessman, took charge of the Guàrdia Urbana.
Because the expropriations were viewed as a deliberate attack on Catalan institutions, the grupistas were now repressed without quarter. The legal sanctions applied against grupistas and expropriators were stern: anyone found in possession of explosives could expect a prison term of up to twenty-two years; armed robbery normally meant a sentence of between thirteen and seventeen years, while the crime of firing at the police was normally punished with nine years in jail. Yet this did not deter the expropriators, who compromised the key professional claim of the police – that the force detected crime – for if the grupistas were not detained in flagrante delicto they proved difficult, near impossible, to apprehend. In fact, when cornered, the expropriators, who were equipped with a range of weaponry, including pistols, sub-machine-guns and grenades, were a genuine match for the security forces. Following a payroll heist at a factory in central Barcelona, one grupo used guns and grenades to break through a police cordon and, when they were later intercepted by an asalto patrol in Santa Coloma, another gun battle ensued, after which the expropriators disappeared.
The elimination of the ‘cancer of banditry’ was a key factor in the evolution of the new autonomous police. Police Chief Badia, who was known to his admirers as Capità Collons (Captain Balls), took personal responsibility for the repression of the expropriators, regularly joining the front line during shoot-outs and picking up a number of gunshot wounds in the process. According to one Barcelona faísta who had connections in catalaniste circles, Badia planned to establish a special police unit dedicated to the extra-judicial killing of anarchists, an initiative that was blocked by the personal intervention of Companys, who feared the consequences of a return to the pistolerisme of the early 1920s. Nevertheless, Badia succeeded in raising the stakes in the war against the expropriators and the grupistas, adding a new viciousness to the history of policing in Iberia. Independent doctors regularly confirmed that suspected grupistas leaving the Comissaria d’Ordre Públic had been brutally mistreated and, according to anarchists and communists who had experience with the police during the monarchy and the Republic, the autonomous Catalan security forces were the most vicious of all. In one notorious case, following a shoot-out between police and an armed gang on the outskirts of the city, Badia left wounded ‘murcianos’ without medical treatment, and it was only after a heated argument with a Guardia Civil commander that an ambulance was called to the scene. There is also evidence that the Generalitat police adopted a policy of selective assassination of ‘FAI criminals’. The first suspicious death occurred in early 1934, when the body of a young faísta was found on wasteland on the outskirts of Barcelona. Although the deceased had apparently earlier participated in a gunfight with the police, the fact that he died from a single shot from a police-issue revolver suggested that he had been summarily executed. In a separate case, an unarmed cenetista was shot and killed in broad daylight by an off-duty policeman in a Les Corts street. Memories of 1920s police tactics were evoked again when an unarmed grupista was shot in the back after he allegedly ‘attempted to escape’. Meanwhile, in mid-April, after a gunfight in which over 200 rounds were exchanged, Bruno Alpini, an Italian anarchist and expropriator, was killed on Paral.lel in what was regarded in anarchist circles as a classic act of Ley de Fugas. The following month, two more expropriators were shot dead by police in the drive to ‘clean up’ Barcelona.
Despite intense police pressure, the number of expropriations showed no sign of abating throughout 1934 and 1935, demonstrating that increased policing does not necessarily reduce illegality. This very point was recognised in a police report published in the press in April 1935: ‘When a trial for robbery or an assassination occurs, immediately new robberies are committed…an established chain of punishable events.…It is this continuity that it is vital to break’. There are several reasons for this ‘continuity’. First, it was impossible for the authorities to provide a permanent guard for the numerous large sums of money transported around and concentrated within the city that were targeted by well-drilled and selective expropriators, who apparently launched attacks when they knew they had a good chance of escape. Moreover, since speed was one of the expropriators’ main allies, they used cars, often hijacked taxis or stolen from the rich, that they knew were faster than police models. The expropriators also recognised that, if they were injured, they would be looked after by the organisation and could receive medical attention from doctors supportive of the CNT–FAI.
Second, the expropriation squads were deeply rooted in the social formation and were virtually impossible for the police to infiltrate. Recruited from proven activists from the defence committees and the prisoners’ support committee, as well as some of the more willing and capable members of the grupos de afinidad, the expropriators were trusted individuals, many of whom during earlier, less repressive times had organised union collections in workplaces and barris. Some expropriators were ‘professional revolutionaries’ in the classic sense; they had experience of evading the police from the postwar years, possessed the necessary pseudonyms and false identities and tended to move around, staying with comrades and in ‘safe houses’. In a positive sense, this commitment to the movement explains the high level of probity among the expropriators, who also needed little reminder of the sanctions that would have been applied to anyone who attempted to abscond with the organisation’s money.
In addition to the unity derived from a common ideology and shared objectives, the expropriators also relied on the affective ties of kinship and neighbouring. Many expropriators were recruited from local families with a history of anarchist and union activism. Moreover, the family structure, so often associated with the stability of the existing order, frequently gave considerable coherence to the high-risk activities of the expropriators. In one squad, a father and son worked together. Meanwhile, Los Novatos, a grupo de afinidad active in funding initiatives, included five brothers from the Cano Ruiz family and two other sets of brothers, all of whom resided within a square kilometre of one another in the La Torrassa barri.
The esprit de corps that so typifies such close-knit groups ensured that, when the security forces succeeded in detaining members of a squad, they stubbornly refused to betray their comrades by talking to the police or by passing information on to the authorities. Indeed, detained grupistas relied on a version of omertà, repeatedly informing police that they had occasioned upon their accomplices in a bar or cafe, that they could not remember anything about their appearance and that they had failed to ask their names. Grupistas also frequently told police that these same strangers had lent them any arms they had in their possession at the time of their arrest, a completely unbelievable story concocted not to appear credible but to frustrate police investigations. Meanwhile, anyone who gave in to police pressure ran the danger of being perceived as a traitor, a perfidy that was dealt with in summary fashion.
A few other observations can be made about the expropriators. They were invariably male. Women rarely participated and, when they did, their involvement was almost exclusively of an auxiliary nature. The expropriators were also predominantly young and single. Even the more seasoned activists in the squads were normally under forty, while the most active expropriators of the 1930s were in their early twenties, such as Josep Martorell i Virgili, dubbed ‘Public Enemy Number One’ in the bourgeois press, who was only twenty when arrested, by which time he had launched a series of bank robberies for the CNT and for the anarchist movement.
The expropriations provide yet another example of the readiness of the anarchists to mobilise beyond the factory proletariat and channel the rebellion of those deemed unmobilisable by other left-wing groups. This was perhaps epitomised by the presence of several former detainees from the Asil Durán borstal among the expropriators, such as the aforementioned Martorell. The eclectic tactical repertoire of the anarchists, their continuing ability to combine ‘modern’ with older protest forms, increased the vitality of their resistance struggle, and, in equal measure, scandalised the ‘men of order’.
Two members of the Void Network from Greece and one US comrade were in the bay area recently, where they gave a series of kick-ass talks. The occasion for their visit (and their extensive US tour) was the publication of We Are an Image from the Future: The Greek Revolt of December 2008, just released by AK Press.
The illustrious dave id of Indybay wrote a nice review of their event at the BASTARD conference (that’s the Berkeley Anarchist Students of Theory and Research and Development, in case you were wondering). And he also provided an audio link to their entire hour-and-fifteen-minute talk, which you can listen to below. It seemed to be an amazing and inspiring experience for everyone who attended, so I highly recommend giving it a listen.
If you missed the talk and/or are blown away by the audio link below, don’t despair. The “We Are an Image from the Future Tour” has about three dozen more events planned for cities around the country…with more to be added. You can check out their schedule here.
The Left Bank Books collective is going to have to (very temporarily) close up shop this fall. Here’s how you can help:
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Friends of Left Bank Books!
As you (hopefully) know, Left Bank Books is still alive and well, after 36 years in the Pike Place Market. We are still run collectively, and we still carry a wide variety of general books, while specializing in left-wing and anarchist materials.
HOWEVER—as you know, several independent bookstores have folded recently, both because of the economic crash, and competition from Amazon, etc. The demise of independent bookstores would also spell the demise of small presses, whose publications are ignored by the corporate chains.
Left Bank is facing an extra challenge as well: Our building will undergo earthquake retrofitting sometime this fall. We will be forced to close for up to three months. We have never closed before, and we are determined to reopen ASAP!!
WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT TO HELP US SURVIVE! In these hard times, we don’t want to ask for donations. But what would help enormously is this:
Purchase a Left Bank Gift Certificate before we close. Keep it for yourself, or gift it to a friend. If enough people do this, we will be able to save in advance some of the revenue we will lose during the closure. With that money, we will be able to pay our ongoing expenses, while building up our stock of great books for our re-opening.
You have several options: You can come into the store and buy the gift certificate. You can send a check in the amount you want to spend, and we will mail the GC to you. You can call in your request, and pay with a credit card.
Above all, you can pass this letter on to everyone you know who would care about the ongoing success of Left Bank. That’s 36 years of people! No need to stop at the borders of Seattle—if people don’t mind spending part of their gift certificate on postage, we will happily mail books to them.
In Solidarity,
The Left Bank Collective
Left Bank Books
92 Pike Street (corner of First and Pike)
Seattle, WA 98101
(206) 622-0195
The AK Press Oakland warehouse crew got a surprise workout yesterday when a truck arrived from our printer carrying five pallets of quality literature for you, dear readers. And so we offer you this photographic evidence of our truck-unloading prowess. We did it all for you—and with the help of some smooth pallet-jack maneuvers by the truck driver, Jack (unfortunately not pictured but still dear to our collective heart).
I’m talking, of course, about the San Francisco Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. The 15th annual, actually, which the entire AK collective attended this past weekend.
Since we’ve already dedicated two blogposts telling you about the event in advance, and listing the incredible lineup of AK authors and allies who spoke, I’m going to keep this one short on text. We’ll call it a photo essay. You’re welcome.
A couple things I can’t let just slip by, despite my promise to shut up at the beginning of this post:
First, did you see our new shirts? There’s a semi-close up of the four of them up there, all designed by our friend John Yates, and all completely effing awesome, if you ask us. Bookfair patrons got the first go at ’em, but lucky for you, dear internets, all are now available on our website.
And finally, we want to extend a thank you to all our hardworking volunteers (including Jeff, pictured above reigning over the sale table, as he has for all of eternity, as far as I’m aware.), and all the folks who show up year after year, to talk to, inspire, and support us at the SFBAABF. You guys are the best!
Those of you attending the Left Forum this year in New York should, as always, stop by the AK Press table and say hi. You’ll also have a chance to check out several AK authors who are giving talks. Here’s the lowdown:
Left Forum 2010
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD:
Rekindling the Radical Imagination
March 19-21
Pace University
One Pace Plaza
New York, NY 10038
As many of you know, some of the editors of AK’s amazing new book on the Greek Insurrection of 2008 are here in the US this month (and next) on a tour to promote the book and build solidarity between activists and anarchists in Greece and the United States.
Last night, the window of their borrowed car was smashed while it was parked in a quiet Berkeley neighborhood, resulting in the loss of hundreds of dollars of books, pamphlets, videos, and other merchandise, as well as a video projector and a number of external hard-drives and other electronic equipment. On top of the cost of gas and travel across the US and back again, this is a staggering financial blow.
The Greeks need your help to continue the tour, and recoup their losses (especially the video projector, which was owned by their collective in Greece). If you are able to make a donation to help defray the expenses of window repair, and replacement equipment and stock, please do so! Your donation would be greatly appreciated – any and all donations received through the button below will go directly to our Greek friends. Please help out if you can!
A new agitational paper is circulating around the bay area: Holler From the Rooftops. Long-time anarchist rabble-rouser Tommy Strange is at the helm. Tommy’s not the guy at every meeting and gathering, not the guy “on-the-scene” making a name for himself, he doesn’t travel the country going from book fair to book fair. When he says “ I don’t back down and I haven’t gotten soft,” he’s not full of shit. I invited Tommy to some anarchist meetings a while back and he told me, “I want action, I don’t wanna go to school.” How could I argue?
Here’s a link to some of the content from the first issue. Hopefully folks out there will see fit to contribute to the paper; not for Tommy’s sake, but because he’s bottom-lining a new (tried and true?) way to communicate our views to potential comrades. There’s a whole world to win, and Tommy’s not gonna get bogged down debating each and every nuance of your favored political persuasion. As every decent anarchist paper has done throughout history, Holler seeks to make our ideas known and accepted by those outside our circles, while holding the line.
To get a copy. contact Tommy (POB 40656, SF, CA 94140) or ask for one to be included in your next AK order. We’ve got a bundle or two that we’re including in mailorder shipments as you read this.
Why a local newspaper? Why now?
A free newspaper is the only way I see an individual reaching out to complete strangers, outside of the internet, and building some coherent base of radical face-to-face democracy. If you sell it, it ends up in only certain bookstores, and only certain people will pick it up. It’s not something I think I should be doing with my inability to write journalistic concise articles, or that I think I will excel at, but it’s a push forward for myself personally, even if only as an act of desperation. It is not simply a venue for news, facts, and horrors that the media leaves out—though on the surface that may appear to be its purpose—but a connecting point for strangers to make some attempt at bottom-up resistance.
What’s the editorial vision for the paper? Where is Holler from the Rooftops coming from? And whom do you see as the audience?
If I don’t quit—as I consider every other day, since I have that American infection of desiring immediate gratification—I would like it to be a left socialist/anarchist venue for what tiny portion of the masses that it can reach. Perhaps a mixture of the Anderson Valley Advertiser or Counterpunch, mixed with the urgency of old time anarchist papers such as the Masses and Rocker’s Arbeter Fraynd. As an editor, my main goals would be to find ten or more people to contribute, create a lengthy letter section, and act as a filter on a hard-line libertarian socialist viewpoint.
There are not many choices, many ways to look at history or present day problems, or two sides to every story. There is only one ethical “common ground” in which I view the choices for the future, and it is certainly not original, nor is it a naïve, unsubstantiated belief in human needs or human nature. I find no value whatsoever in presenting a Trotskyist or Leninist version of socialism, or revolution. The letters section is another thing. I will print many views there.
On the look of the first issue though, the paper definitely needs more workers’ voices that are not barking this intransigent view, but speaking from experience and the heart.
The last thing I want it to be is Tommy’s monthly rant, which the first issue is.
The audience is meant to be the workers, small business owners, people who still might even, after all the shit that is coming down, call themselves middle class….who have come to the obvious conclusion that there has to be another future, and we have to start building the road now. As I have handed out hundreds to complete strangers, and seen surprise and interest, I would say my overuse of the word “atomization” is not wrong. We live among millions in the USA that are just so sick of the experts and politicians, and in the past twenty years, due to great left book publishers and the internet, there are millions educated about how change really comes about. I don’t believe this paper will have anything to do with a large “spark.” I’m too cynical for that. But I do believe I have to try to create some kindling. To predict what is going to happen shortly in our lives, can either be a cynical intellectual exercise that brings on despair and inaction, or it can be a reasoned and optimistic heartfelt outlook that demands all contact possible to find real community based on physical proximity and common desires.
Your intention is for Holler to become a monthly paper. Tell us about the local independent and radical media in SF and what a paper like yours has to offer.
There is no mass radical print in the bay area. A strange thing in itself. There are tens of thousands in the bay area doing amazing organizing work, mutual aid, and education projects. The people here have the hearts and minds capable even of a long general strike against the wars. I doubt I can spark that. And I can’t change the defeatist “it can’t happen here” mindset absorbed from the ruling class’ and elites’ propaganda, among a large enough number of people. …I don’t think so anyway… More simply, it is a tangible thing you or I can pass on. Thirty percent of the country doesn’t even go on the web still, let alone to far left discussion forums. Yes, I have a problem with people relying on the internet thing as a main source of discussion. I’ve spent years in discussion forums online. Outside of its indispensable use as a great organizing avenue for actions and its obvious use as a source of information and cheap fast communication, when it comes to a “discussion forum,” …I find it dogmatic and flywheel and most often dominated by men who have too much time on their hands…(myself included for years). There is nothing comparable to face-to-face democracy. It creates responsibility and human bonds: comradery comes from the socialistic desires inside all of us. Typing alone is typing alone. (more…)
It’s shaping up to be a great spring; we’ve got authors out on the road promoting their new books every month from now through the fall … so stay tuned for tour details for Seth Tobocman, Ben Dangl, AK Thompson, Tricia Shapiro, Cindy Milstein, Jeff Coant, Void Network, Team Colors, and more!
In the meantime, our friends in the Pacific Northwest and Ontario have got a great couple of weeks ahead of them: Matt Hern tours the NW next week, and Michael Schmidt, South African co-author of the excellent Black Flame, tours Ontario, with the help of Common Cause. Check out the full schedules below!
And, note: we’re currently looking for funding to bring both Lucien van der Walt (Black Flame) and Raul Zibechi (Dispersing Power) to the US this summer/fall. So please get in contact if you happen to work with an organization or a university that might be willing to cover travel costs for either of these
folks!
Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, 11:30AM SF County Fair Building, Ninth Avenue and Lincoln Way, at Golden Gate Park
Studio for Urban Projects, 7-9PM 3579 17th Street, San Francisco
Monday, March 15 | Matt Hern in Seattle, WA
Left Bank Books, 7PM 92 Pike Street, Seattle
Tuesday, March 16 | Matt Hern in Olympia, WA
Orca Books, 6PM 509 4th Avenue East, Olympia
Wednesday, March 17 | Matt Hern in Portland, OR
The Red & Black Cafe, 7PM 400 Southeast 12th Avenue, Portland
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Michael Schmidt in Canada
South African journalist Michael Schmidt heads to Canada next week for a week-long tour of Ontario to promote Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, organized by the wonderful folks at Common Cause. Be sure to check out one of Michael’s events if you’re in the area!
Monday, March 15 | Michael Schmidt in Waterloo
Wilfrid Laurier University, 4-6PM School of Business and Economics, Room 2260
75 University Avenue West
(Sponsored the Communication Studies and Global Studies departments.)
March 16 | Michael Schmidt in London, details tba
March 17 | Michael Schmidt in Hamilton
McMaster University, 12-2pm MUSC Rooms 311 and 313
1280 Main St. West
Limited seating.
Please RSVP at commoncauseontario@gmail.com
(Sponsored by the LIUNA-Mancinelli Professorship in Global Labour Issues and the School of Labour Studies.)
Sky Dragon Centre, 7-9pm
27 King William Street
Hamilton, ON
Organized by Common Cause Hamilton commoncausehamilton@gmail.com
March 18 | Michael Schmidt in Montreal, details tba
March 19 | Michael Schmidt in Ottawa
University of Ottawa 3:00pm Desmarais Building room 3120 (DMS)
(the newer building at ‘Laurier Station’ on the Transitway)
Exile Infoshop 7pm 256 Bank St, 2nd floor
(at the corner of Bank and Cooper)
March 20 | Michael Schmidt in Toronto
University of Toronto, 3-5PM
Bahen Centre, Room 1220
40 St. George Street
(Co-sponsored by the Pan African Solidarity Network and the Work and Labour Studies Programme, York University.)
PLUS! I almost forgot … the folks at Common Cause have made a promotional web video for Michael’s tour, making Black Flame the first book (I think) to have it’s own promo video. How cool is that? Stay tuned for more exciting forays into the world of 21st century technology … and enjoy the video!
Cindy Milstein’s new book, Anarchism and Its Aspirations, has been printed and is on its way to our warehouse. It’ll be available at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair this weekend (where Cindy will be giving two talks).
For those of you who can’t make the bookfair, you can order it now (at a 25% discount!).
Wherever you are, here’s a taste of what’s in store: two brief excerpts lifted from the book’s title essay. Enjoy!
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The aim of anarchism is to stimulate forces that propel society in a libertarian direction.
—Sam Dolgoff, The Relevance of Anarchism to Modern Society, 1970
Classical anarchism’s aims were no bulwark against the brutal transformations that swept the globe with the rise of actually existing communism and fascism. Historical forces drove society in a murderous direction. Anarchism did not disappear during this time. Yet its ranks were decimated. Touchstone figures were killed, including Gustav Landauer by protofascists following the Bavarian Revolution in 1919 and Erich Mühsam by Nazis in the Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934. Others died in prison, like Ricardo Flores Magón in 1922, and some committed suicide, such as Alexander Berkman in 1936. Anarchists were increasingly isolated. Kropotkin’s death in 1921 marked the last mass gathering of anarchists—for his funeral procession, and then only with Vladimir Lenin’s permission—in Russia until 1987. Thousands of anarchists worldwide were incarcerated, exiled, or slaughtered. They were victims of repressions like the Red Scare in the United States and purges of radical opposition by numerous Communist parties. As a result, anarchism became far less vibrant, a ghost of itself. This made it difficult for people to discover the politics, further reducing the number of anarchists and anarchistic efforts. It was as if the antiauthoritarian Left skipped a generation or two.
At the same time, the world itself was transformed—but in a polar opposite way from anything that anarchists had advocated. Fascism, Bolshevism, and Maoism; the rise of the United States as a world superpower; the birth of multinational financial institutions along with the “advancement” of capitalism; the cold war with its nuclear threat: these and other emergent phenomena dramatically expanded the forms of domination that any liberatory politics needed to address. Attempts to rebuild anarchism were slow going, but never truly disappeared. In the postwar era, through the 1960s and beyond, anarchism struggled to tailor itself for the late twentieth century. It gained insight from other overlapping or like-minded movements, such as radical feminism and queer liberation, or the Autonomen in Germany and Zapatistas in Mexico. It inspired, both explicitly and in less obvious ways, everything from the playful urban politics of Amsterdam’s Provos to new forms of radical ecology like the antinuclear movement and Earth First! to the British poll tax rebellion.28 While anarchism seemed behind the curve on some issues—the collapse of Communism and the subsequent rise of unipolar neoliberalism, for instance—it continued to grow and develop.
By the close of the twentieth century, the “battle of Seattle” in 1999 was, for anarchism, just one manifestation of a whole chain of reinventions within its own tradition.29 Often seen as the birth of a “new” anarchism, the now-famous role of anarchists in Seattle’s mass mobilization against—and successful shutdown of—the World Trade Organization meetings was more a marker of something that had already occurred: a modern anarchism had developed in a direct, however hidden or circuitous, line from its “classical” past. What Seattle did do, though, was spotlight this reinvigorated anarchism, whether via images of “black bloc” anarchists throwing bricks through Starbucks windows, or explanations of how the affinity group and spokescouncil model worked in practice.30 Mostly, it gave visibility and voice to anarchism in general, helping it recapture the political imagination, in league with a host of other “movements from below” around the world.
The modernization of anarchism is also marked by what at times seems an almost dizzying array of different emphases. This increasing multiplicity is frequently a healthy development, challenging anarchism to remain germane to today’s world, and draw its reconstructive visions from potentialities within the present. Yet anarchism is not immune from the increasing fragmentation and immediacy, among other conditions, that characterize much of contemporary capitalist society. It is just as damaged by the phenomena it decries. Even as anarchists advocate a community of communities, they are, like most people today, alienated from any sense of place and hence each other. Nonetheless, there remains a profound sense of recognition between anarchists, based on a shared set of distinct values, which in turn structure their lives and projects. So let’s return to this amorphous entity called anarchism, in order to add flesh to what still may feel like a vague definition by exploring the constellation of sensibilities that describes all anarchists.
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A Revolutionary Stance
First and foremost, anarchism is a revolutionary political philosophy. That is, anarchism is thoroughly radical in the true sense of the word: to get at the root or origin of phenomena, and from there to make dramatic changes in the existing conditions. Anarchism aspires to fundamentally transform society, toward expansive notions of individual and social freedom. Much of the time, in practice, this means engaging in various “reforms” or improvements, but ones that at the same time attempt to explicitly articulate a revolutionary politics. This reform-pointing-to-revolution is certainly hard to navigate, much less implement. Debates within anarchism relating to strategies and tactics hinge on this question, and rightly so, since capitalism, in particular, has an astonishing knack for recuperating anything that seems to stand in its way.
Despite the difficulties, anarchists never advocate a purely reformist attitude. They try their best never to participate in reform as an end in itself, or to bring about improvements that also make the present social order look attractive. Their efforts to move from “here” to “there” intentionally highlight how current social arrangements cannot, by their own raison d’être, meet everyone’s needs and desires. Anarchists do not “rest content with the ideal of a future society without overlordship,” as anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker put it long ago; they simultaneously direct their organizing efforts at, for one, “restricting the activities of the state and blocking its influence in every department of social life wherever they see an opportunity.”31 Anarchism is not satisfied with remaining on the surface, merely tinkering to make a damaged world a little less damaging. It is a thoroughgoing critique aimed at a thoroughgoing reimagining and restructuring of society. It views this as essential if everyone is to be free, and if humanity is to harmonize itself with the nonhuman world.
As mentioned earlier, anarchism from the start focused on what appeared as the two biggest stumbling blocks to a libertarian society: capitalism and the state. This pair, sadly, are still the predominant forms of social immiseration and control. Capitalism and statecraft loom large in terms of naturalizing—and thereby being at the root of—this immiseration and control. Their separate yet often-interrelated internal logics consolidate power monopolies for a few, always at the expense of the many. This demands that each system must both continually expand and mask its dominion. To survive, they have to make it seem normal that most people are materially impoverished and disenfranchised as economic actors, and socially impoverished and disenfranchised as political actors. They have to restructure social relations in their own image—as unthinkingly assumed ways of being and acting. The world that most of humanity produces is, as a result, denied to the vast majority, and a relative handful get to make binding decisions over all of life. Anarchism is therefore staunchly anticapitalist and antistatist, which ensures that it is a revolutionary politics, since battling such primary systems necessarily means getting to the root of them. Moving beyond capitalism and states would entail nothing less than turning the world upside down, breaking up all monopolies, and reconstituting everything in common—from institutions to ethics to everyday life.
So, for example, whereas many in the global and now climate justice movements focus on corporations as key, anarchists see these entities as only one piece of capitalism, and a piece that if removed, wouldn’t destroy capitalism—bad as corporations may be. One can have capitalism without corporations. Capitalism’s essence—ensuring that society is forged around compulsory social relations along with inequities in power and material conditions—would remain in place. And given capitalism’s grow-or-die logic, small-scale capitalism would by definition unfold into a larger scale again. Or as contemporary networked and informational capitalistic structures indicate, allegedly localized capitalism can be a way to hide an increasing concentration of social control and injustice. Capitalism itself, in its totality, and because it strives toward totality, is the root problem. Anarchists, then, look to wholly undo the hegemony of capitalist economic structures and values, or the many components that mark capitalism as a system—from corporations, banks, and private property, to profit, bosses, and wage labor, to alienation and commodification.
Notes
28. A sampler of some histories of these movements includes Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Andy Cornell, “Anarchism and the Movement for a New Society: Direct Action and Prefigurative Community in the 1970s and 1980s,” Perspectives (2009), available at http://anarchiststudies.org/node/292; Tommi Avicolli Mecca, ed., Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 2009); George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006); Ziga Vodovnik, ed., YA BASTA! Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising: Writings of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004); Richard Kempton, Provo: Amsterdam’s Anarchist Revolt (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2007); Barbara Epstein, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 1980s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Earth First! Journal, available at http://www.earthfirstjournal.org; Danny Burns, Poll Tax Rebellion (Scotland: AK Press, 1992).
29. While there are numerous books, articles, films, and news accounts about this mobilization, many written soon after Seattle 1999, the most recent one is David Solnit and Rebecca Solnit, The Battle of the Story of the “Battle of Seattle” (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), timed for the tenth anniversary.
Hi folks,
Two members of the Void Network from Greece and one US comrade were in the bay area recently, where they gave a series of kick-ass talks. The occasion for their visit (and their extensive US tour) was the publication of 
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