Anarchist Thought

The Origins: The Industrial Revolution of the Nineteenth Century

The most profound revolution of modern times, carried out in Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, is almost unnoticed by historians. The French Revolution cleared its path, and the political upheavals that for the most part occurred during the period between 1800 and 1850 contributed to hastening it. The significance of the historic development of that period can be clearly seen: a new mode of production was established equipped with a new technique. In truth, the Industrial Revolution under the First Empire began with the first steam machinery. The locomotive dates from 1830. Looms, which appeared at the beginning of the century, had already led to the formation of an industrial proletariat in centers like Lyon. In a few decades the bourgeoisie, armed with machinery, transformed—often literally—the surface of the globe. Factories were added to manufactories, changing the physiognomy of cities, giving rise to unprecedented growth. Railroads and steamboats modified the notions of time and space that had remained stable since antiquity. With brutal clarity we can see the outlines of new social classes and the bitter struggles that break out between them. The “live working or die fighting” of the Canutes of Lyon signified the appearance of the Fourth Estate, born of despair. Less than twenty years later two young thinkers, known to just a few circles of revolutionaries, would affirm, as Sieyès had for the bourgeoisie in the past, that being nothing the proletariat must be everything, for such is the meaning of the Communist Manifesto that Karl Marx and Engels completed in 1847 in Paris and Brussels in wretched hotel rooms.

Europe prepared for the storm of 1848. This world, rich in experience, quietly and violently molded by the consequences of the bourgeois revolution (1789–93 through 1800 …) in its political status, radically changed by machinery and the modifications in social structure it accelerates, lived on the conflict of ideas that make one think of the combat of Titans. Germany, Italy, Central Europe, cut up into semifeudal states, had only just entered the path of national unity, as a result of which social aspirations became complicated by Young Italian, Young German, and Young Czech idealism. Russia, which had entered European life during the wars of the First Empire, which brought Alexander I and his Cossacks to Paris, remained an absolute monarchy founded on serfdom. England, on the other hand, where the Industrial Revolution had reached its highest point, was a crowned republic, in which bourgeois millionaires had no less sovereignty than the landlords. In France the traditions of 1789–93 continued to motivate the movements that made that country the laboratory of revolutions. The complexity, the dynamism, and the varied aspects of this time must be taken into account so we can see in it the birth of ours.

Karl Marx and Engels, having come to Paris from Germany, sought to realize the synthesis of German philosophy, the revolutionary experience of France, and the industrial progress of England. In doing so they laid the foundations for scientific socialism. In order to do so they had to refute the individualist assertions of another Young Hegelian, Max Stirner, the author of The Ego and His Own, which was a well-reasoned treatise on anarchist individualism. With all his physical frailty, no one better then Max Stirner, who lived and died in obscurity in the Prussian countryside, cultivating his field, alone and misunderstood, even by his wife, and who depicted the Unique becoming conscious of himself in order to resist the social machine. It was in opposing Stirner’s ideas that his work helped Marx and Engels, who criticized him in The German Ideology by posing the problem of social man. In Paris they met two other founders of anarchism, Proudhon and Bakunin. We can thus see, and this is no real surprise, that the creators of all of revolutionary thought matured in the same combats, were formed by the same sometimes contradictory hopes, rubbed shoulders, understood, esteemed, and enlightened each other before going their separate ways; each obeying his internal law—the reflection of other, more general laws—in order to carry out his own mission.

At this time on ideas became fixed. Stirner’s individualist doctrine, if it has few followers, eighty years later doesn’t seem susceptible to revision or amending: in the abstract, it is definitive. The doctrine of the Communist Manifesto remains today the basis of socialism. Anarchism’s gestation period would be longer, since it only reached its contemporary formulation considerably later with Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, and Malatesta, after 1870 and the end of Bakuninism properly speaking. But the essential lines were laid out by the mid-nineteenth century. How can we not see, in this excerpt from a letter from Proudhon to Karl Marx, dated Lyon, May 17, 1846, one of the first affirmations of the anarchist spirit on the march to socialism:

If you’d like, let us seek together the laws of society, the ways these laws are realized, and the progress that allows us to discover them. But for God’s sake, after having demolished all dogmatisms a priori, let us not think in our turn of indoctrinating the people. Let’s not fall into the tradition of your compatriot Martin Luther, who, after having overturned Catholic theology, with the use of excommunications and anathemas founded a Protestant theology. Germany has spent three centuries doing nothing but destroying Luther’s replastering; let’s not set humankind another task through new bungling. With all my heart I applaud your idea of one day examining all opinions. Let’s carry out a good and honest polemic. Let’s give the world an example of a scholarly and far-sighted tolerance, but because we are at the head of the movement let’s not make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance; let’s not set ourselves up as the apostles of a new religion, even if it’s a religion of logic and reason. Let us welcome and encourage all protests; let us condemn all exclusions, all mysticisms. We must never look upon a questions as settled, and when we have used our final argument let us start over if necessary, with eloquence and irony. Under these conditions I will enter your association with pleasure; if not, no.

Proudhon, Bakunin, and Marx

Proudhon’s What Is Property? dates from 1840; The Philosophy of Poverty from 1846 (Marx will respond to it with his Poverty of Philosophy). With the legalistic but also the practical spirit of the French small artisan, Proudhon defines property as theft, notes in the clearest tones the antagonism between owners and exploited wage earners and deduces from this the need for a social revolution, but immediately seeks refuge in mutualism. Marx would say of him that “the petit bourgeois is a living contradiction,” and Blanqui that “Proudhon is only socialist because the illegitimacy of interest.” Kropotkin would justify him in these terms: “What did he seek in his mutualist system if not to render capital less offensive despite the maintaining of private property, which he despised with all his heart but considered necessary as a guarantee for the individual against the state.” “The revolution that remains to be made,” wrote Proudhon, “consists in substituting the economic or industrial regime for the governmental, feudal, and military regime.” Most of the arguments that fed the polemic between Marx and Proudhon can still be found in the current arsenal of Marxists and anarchists. The anarchists’ aversion for political action, seen as superfluous compared to economic action, the only one of any value, dates from Proudhon. Like many of today’s syndicalists, who started out as anarchists and revolutionaries before settling into reformism, Proudhon, in the system he lays out, arrives at a number of reforms aimed at protecting the individual producer that are deduced, not from the study of social development, but from abstract principles based on feelings and morality. Despite himself, this leads the great revolutionary moralist to become a conservative despite himself. “After having shaken up the social system and proclaimed the imminence of the revolution, he ended by safeguarding the current mechanism in a more or less attenuated form. If because of his critique he is classed among the socialists, he remains a petit-bourgeois conservative in the realm of practice.” The father of anarchism is also that of reformism.

At the very beginning of his career, Marx refuted Stirner and fought against Proudhon. During the final years of his life he made use of them within the First International to combat Bakunin, another incarnation, one totally indomitable, of the anarchist spirit. Of the minor Russian nobility, an officer in the army of Czar Nicholas I, sustained by despotism to the point that he could only live for the revolution; a combatant in 1848 in Dresden and Prague; chained to the wall of his cell in Olmütz; turned over to the Czar and imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress and Schlüsselbourg, while he was there wrote a Confession addressed to Nicholas I full of prophetic passages; deported to Siberia, from which he escaped; resuming again throughout the West, his life of a revolutionary; disciple and translator of Marx; irreconcilable adversary of Marx; founder of a secret International within the First International; rejected, bitterly fought against, sometimes defamed; in his final years a rioter in Lyon and a conspirator in Bologna, he would only renounce action in the final moments of his life, as he was dying. He changed often, though with a powerful fidelity to himself. This is his definition of anarchy, as he gave it in God and the State: “We reject all forms of legislation, all forms of authority and every privileged, licensed, official, and legal influence, even if it issues from universal suffrage, convinced that it can only be turned to the profit of the dominant and exploiting minority against the interests of the immense enslaved majority.”

Let us quote here his little-known opinions concerning Marx and Proudhon. Bakunin writes to Marx in December 1868: “My dear friend. I understand now more than ever that you are right to follow the great path of economic revolution and to urge us to take it as well, detesting those who lose their way in the side street of sometimes nationalist, sometimes political escapades. I am now doing what you have done for the past twenty years … My fatherland is henceforth the International, of which you are one of the founders. And so, my dear friend, I am your disciple and proud to be so.”

Franz Mehring, in his biography of Marx, quotes the following texts of Bakunin:

Marx is a serious and profound economic thinker. His immense superiority over Proudhon comes from the fact that he is authentically materialist. Proudhon, despite all his efforts to free himself from the traditions of classical idealism nevertheless remained throughout his life an impenitent idealist falling first under the influence of the Bible and then of Roman law, as I told him six months before his death. And he was always a metaphysician to the tips of his toes. …Marx, as a thinker, is on the right path. He established—and this is his essential thesis—that the religious, political, and juridical phenomena of history are not the causes but the consequences of economic development. …On the other hand, Proudhon understood and had a better feeling for freedom than did Marx. When he wasn’t allowing himself to be seduced by theories and fantasies Proudhon had the instincts of a true revolutionary. He adored Satan and preached anarchy. It is quite possible that Marx will manage to raise himself to a system of freedom more reasonable than that of Proudhon, but he doesn’t have the spontaneous power of the latter.

Bakunin was himself sometimes called the incarnation of Satan by his contemporaries. Through all the dissensions, the intrigues, the polemics and maneuvers where no one came off looking good, and which led the International to its destruction, a bit before and a bit after the defeat of the Paris Commune anarchist ideas and sentiments were clarified. Bakunin’s influence carried the day over Marx in Spain, Italy, Russia, the Swiss Romande, and partially in Belgium.

To Marx’s “authoritarian socialism” Bakunin, with his secret organizations, opposed his “antiauthoritarian socialism,” which lays the groundwork for an immediate and direct social revolution. “We refuse to associate ourselves with any political movement that does not have as its immediate and direct goal the total emancipation of the workers.” This is also the quarrel between revolutionary romanticism and the nascent workers’ movement. While Marx and Engels sought to build a vast international organization of the workers, called upon to progress step-by-step and finally become the most effective instrument of the class struggle, to intervene in political life, and finally to move with irresistible force toward the conquest of power, instituting the dictatorship of the proletariat (a dictatorship against the defeated owning classes and, its other face, broad democracy for the workers), the Bakuninists intended to provoke in the short term the subversion of capitalism from the simple unleashing of popular forces. They believed both in the revolutionary spontaneity of the backward, i.e., unorganized, masses, and the energetic action of minorities. They condemned political action, whose deceit they denounce, by opposing insurrectionary action to it. They denounce as an evil equal to capital the state and the principle of authority from which it proceeds. To state centralization Bakunin opposed federalism (not without centralizing their own organization). Finally, Bakunin, who seems to have never truly understood Marx, in certain regards was unable to shake specifically Russian ideas concerning the role of the underworld in the coming revolution of the underworld, the déclassés, of outlaws and bandits. He attributes a useful and important function to them. In fact, in vast, peasant Russia banditry was often a sporadic form of revolutionary protest against despotism. And the déclassés, nobles, and petits-bourgeois that had gone over to the people’s cause began to form a revolutionary intelligentsia. Marx, on the contrary, learning from the experience of the industrial countries, knew that the lumpenproletariat, the subproletariat in rags that constituted the rabble of the big cities, far from being by nature a revolutionary factor, is infinitely corruptible and unstable, i.e., inclined to serve reaction. He based his hopes on the organized working classes and not on the unleashing of the mob. In The State and Anarchy Bakunin was indignant that the “peasant population which … doesn’t enjoy the sympathy of the Marxists and finds itself at the lowest level of culture,” according to Marx’s schema of revolution would “probably [be] governed by the proletariat of the cities and factories.” In absolutist and semifeudal Russia the poorest peasantry is, in fact a factor for revolution, one whose capacities Bakunin overestimates. And since there was hardly a proletariat, we can understand the anarchist’s error. Marx, on the other hand, commenting on these lines, rightly observes that in Western Europe the small-holding peasantry “causes every workers’ revolution to fail, as they’ve done to the present day in France,” and will in the future impose government policy on it. “Bakunin would like,” he notes, “for the European social revolution, based on capitalist production, to be accomplished at the level of the agriculture of the pastoral Russian and Slavic people.”

It should be noted that Bakuninist anarchism only took root in agricultural countries, where there was no real proletariat: Russia, Spain, and Italy. He was equally influential at a few points where, having ideas similar to those of the libertarian and mutualist ideas of Proudhon, it became the ideology of small-scale artisans in Paris, the Swiss Romande, and in Belgium. As soon as industrial development became more marked in these countries anarchism surrendered its preeminence in the revolutionary movement to Marxist workers’ socialism.

Kropotkin, Reclus, Malatesta

Bakunin died in 1876. The three heads that would rethink the problem anew are already ready to assume his succession. Prince Peter Kropotkin, officer, traveler, and geographer connected with Russian revolutionary circles, fell under the Bakuninist influence, and studied Fourier, Saint-Simon and Chernyshevsky. He escaped from the Peter and Paul Fortress to which, under the police state of the Russian Empire, any disinterested ideas inevitably lead. Élisée Reclus, a young scientist with a passion for knowledge about the earth, passed through the battalions of the Commune, saw Duval executed, and marched, a dusty-faced prisoner, along the road to Versailles. Errico Malatesta was an Italian worker. With them anarchist communism at the end of the century achieves an astounding intellectual clarity, a shining moral height. The workers’ movement was weighed down with scoria and stuck in the mud in a capitalist society in a period of expansion. Vast union organizations and powerful mass parties, of which German Social Democracy is the best example, in reality became part of a regime they claimed to combat. Socialism became bourgeois, even in its ideas, which deliberately suppressed Marx’s revolutionary predictions. It installed itself in capitalist prosperity during the blessed era when the dividing up of the world—that is, the countries that produce primary matter and markets—not having been completed, commerce and finance could believe that they were destined for endless progress. The working-class aristocracies and the political and union bureaucracies set the tone for working-class demands that were either toned down or reduced to a purely verbal revolutionism. It was a time of nothing but opportunism, parliamentarism, reformism, Bernstein’s revision of socialism, Millerand’s ministerialism, and political schemes. Jaurès’s generous intelligence didn’t prevent him from accepting the presence in Waldeck-Rousseau’s cabinet of the socialist Millerand alongside the executioner of the Commune, General Marquis de Gallifet. Doctrinal intransigence, when it manifests itself in a Kautsky or a Guesde, isn’t able to swim against the current; it remains theoretical. And even more, off-putting, for the profound life manqué has its formulas. Moreover, these abstract formulations are repellent, since they are completely out of touch with the profundity of life. Imagine how this state of affairs would affect personal life: that counts more than is people usually think. The militant has given way to the functionary and the political man, and the political man is often nothing but a politician. This socialism that has lost its revolutionary soul—more than once having sold it for a plate of lentils served on a butter plate—can it satisfy the all of the working class?

The proletariat is made up of strata of poorly paid workers, manual laborers and socially deprived professions (on this subject there will even be outlined a theory of major and minor professions), immigrants come from industrially backward nations, the déclassés, and cultured artisans threatened with proletarianization. In short, many worried and dissatisfied people for whom there is no capitalist prosperity and who, as a result of this, must still confront, in all its harshness, the problem of revolution and, along with that, that of the life of revolutionaries. Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus, Malatesta (and soon Jean Grave, Sébastien Faure, Luigi Fabbri, and Max Nettlau) provide them with a virile ideology, whose unquestionable merit is that of being inseparable from personal life. Anarchism is as much as a doctrine of social emancipation, a rule of conduct. We see in this a profoundly healthy reaction to the corruption of socialism at the end of the nineteenth century.

No more than it can be considered in itself, detached from its social content, can an ideology be separated from its moral content, from what we would today call its mystique. The theory of communist anarchism, though Kropotkin and Reclus showed great care in tying it to science, proceeds less from knowledge, from the scientific spirit, than from an idealistic aspiration. It’s a utopianism armed with knowledge, and of a knowledge of the mechanism of the modern world much less objective, less scientific than that of Marxism. It is also an optimism of desperate déclassés, as was attested to by the bombs of Émile Henry and Ravachol.

From the observing of social iniquity and the movement toward collective forms of property, Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread, Words of a Rebel) deduced the need for revolution. The latter must be made against capital and the state; the society of tomorrow will be communist and federalist, a federation of free communes made up of multiple associations of free workers. In Mutual Aid, one of his most remarkable books, Kropotkin strives to demonstrate that throughout time solidarity was the basis of social life. The communes of the belles époques of the Middle Ages, which had no need of a state, appeared to him to prefigure the future communes of a decentralized, stateless society. How should one work for the revolution? Anarchist communism rejected political action and only after years of internal struggles would it accept union activity. More than to social classes, it appeals to men of good will, to the conscience more than to the economic interests of the masses. Living in accordance with their ideal of free and disinterested men, the anarchists will awaken the masses’ spirit of revolt and solidarity and will give rise in them to a new consciousness, will unleash their creative forces, and the revolution will occur the day the masses will have understood …

Idealism

Their writings produce a strange impression of naïve intelligence, moral energy, faith, and, it must be said, blindness.

In order to resolve the social problem for the benefit of all there is only one means: revolutionarily expel the government; revolutionarily expropriate the owners of social wealth; place everything at the disposal of all and see to it that all forces, all capacities, all good the will existing among men act to meet the needs of all (Malatesta, Anarchy).

I didn’t arbitrarily cut up a text; there is no context. Affirmations of this kind are scattered throughout anarchist publications. As for how this is to be accomplished, there’s not a word of explanation. Let’s take a look at the Anarchist Encyclopedia, published in Paris a few years ago.

On the first page:

Well-being for all!

Freedom for all!

Nothing through constraint, everything through free agreement!

This the ideal of the anarchists; there is no other that is more precise, more humane, more elevated!

Sébastien Faure’s sociology proceeds from the following observations:

1. The individual seeks happiness

2. Society’s goal is to obtain it for him.

3. The best form of society is that which is closest to this goal.

From this is deduced, through the simplest mechanism of logical reasoning, the doctrine of universal harmony. Grotius, Mably, Helvetius, Diderot, Morelly, Stuart Mill, Bentham, and Buchner are quoted, and it ends with Benoît Malon: “The happiness of the greatest number through science, justice, goodness, and moral improvement: No more vast or humane ethical purpose can be found.”

No doubt, no doubt, one would be tempted to object, if we weren’t disarmed by this passion for the public good, determined to draw from within itself an entire edifice of reasoning behind which reality would disappear; but again, how should we go about this?

Sébastien Faure’s conclusion has a prophetic tone and nothing more:

Absolutely everywhere the spirit of revolt is replacing the spirit of submission. The vivifying and pure breath of freedom has arisen; it is on the march and nothing will stop it. The moment approaches when, violent, impetuous, and terrible, it will blow like a hurricane and will carry away all authoritarian institutions like wisps of straw. This is the way evolution occurs. And it guides humanity toward anarchy.

The old militant wrote these lines at the end of a long life of combat, at a moment when totalitarian regimes were imposing themselves through both counterrevolution and socialist revolution; where it was no longer a question of economic plans, of guided economies, of democratic dictatorship and authoritarian democracy.

In fact as in theory, the anarchist is anti-religious, anti-capitalist (capitalism is the current historic phase of property), and anti-statist. It carries out a triple combat against authority; it spares blows against neither the state, nor property, nor religion. It want to suppress all three of them. We want to abolish not only all forms of authority, but we also want to destroy them all simultaneously, and we proclaim that this total and simultaneous destruction is indispensable.

From a scientific point of view this doctrine of agitation is a clear regression from the optimistic syntheses of Kropotkin and Élisée Reclus, which arrive at an ethics and a libertarian socialism founded on the knowledge of historic evolution. (Philosophical optimism, moreover, has no need for justification; it is an essential idea and well rooted in us.) We are witnessing a decline in anarchism which, since the World War, has not produced a single ideologue comparable to those of the older generation. The celebrated militants of today—Rudolf Rocker, Emma Goldman, Luigi Bertoni, Sébastien Faure, E. Armand, Max Nettlau, Voline, Vladimir Barnach, and Aron Baron—are men of the prewar period. Men of action have gone over to syndicalism.

Christian Anarchism, Individualism

Two particular forms of anarchist thought merit study, Christian anarchism and Individualism, which have a point in common: “Salvation lies within you.” Tolstoy sometimes called himself a “Christian anarchist.” The spirit of revolt against all injustice sometimes affirms itself as the nonviolent resistance to evil. All that’s needed is a propitious social environment, like that of Russian or Dutch religious sects.

In the past I lived through the experience of French individualist anarchism, one similar to other analogous movements, notably in the United States where Italians, studying Stirner, quoting Ibsen, inspired by Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker and Émile Armand, published a grand paper with the proud title Nihil. Allow me to quote here a few notes I published on this subject in Esprit:

Anarchism swept us away completely because it both demanded everything of us and offered us everything. There was no remotest corner of life that it failed to illumine; at least so it seemed to us. A man could be a Catholic, a Protestant, a Liberal, a Radical, a Socialist, even a syndicalist, without in any way changing his own life, and therefore life in general. It was enough for him, after all, to read the appropriate newspaper; or, if he was strict, to frequent the café associated with whatever tendency claimed his allegiance. Shot through with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words (which, in truth, is demanded by all forms of idealism, but which they all forget as they become complacent). That is why we adopted what was (at that moment) the extremest variety, which by vigorous dialectic had succeeded, through the logic of its revolutionism, in discarding the necessity for revolution. To a certain extent we were impelled in that direction by our disgust with a certain type of rather mellow, academic anarchism, whose Pope was Jean Grave in Les Temps Nouveaux. Individualism had just been armed by our hero Albert Libertad …

His teaching, which we adopted almost wholesale, was: “Don’t wait for the revolution. Those who promise revolution are frauds just like the others. Make your own revolution, by being free men and living in comradeship.” Obviously I am simplifying, but the idea itself had a beautiful simplicity. Its absolute commandment and rule of life was: “Let the old world go to blazes.” From this position there were naturally many deviations. Some inferred that one should “live according to Reason and Science,” and their impoverished worship of science, which invoked the mechanistic biology of Félix le Dantec, led them on to all sorts of tomfoolery, such as a saltless, vegetarian diet and fruitarianism and also, in certain cases, to tragic ends. We saw young vegetarians involved in pointless struggles against the whole of society. Others decided, “Let’s be outsiders. The only place for us is the fringe of society.” They did not stop to think that society has no fringe, that no one is ever outside it, even in the depth of dungeons, and that their “conscious egoism,” sharing the life of the defeated, linked up from below with the most brutal bourgeois individualism.

Finally, others, including myself, sought to harness together personal transformation and revolutionary action, in accordance with the motto of Élisée Reclus: “As long as social injustice lasts we shall remain in a state of permanent revolution.” (I am quoting this from memory.) Libertarian individualism gave us a hold over the most intense reality: ourselves. Be yourself. Only, it developed in another “city without escape”—Paris, an immense jungle where all relationships were dominated by a primitive individualism, dangerous in a different way from ours, that of a positively Darwinian struggle for existence. Having bid farewell to the humiliations of poverty, we found ourselves once again up against them. To be yourself would have been a precious commandment and perhaps a lofty achievement, if only it had been possible. It would only have begun to be possible once the most pressing needs of man, those that identify him more closely with the brutes than with his fellow humans, were satisfied. We had to win our food, lodging, and clothing by main force; and after that, to find time to read and think. The problem of the penniless youngster, uprooted or (as we used to say) “foaming at the bit” through irresistible idealism, confronted us in a form that was practically insoluble. Many comrades were soon to slide into what was called “illegalism,” a way of life not so much on the fringe of society as on the fringe of morality “We refuse to be either exploiters or exploited,” they declared, without perceiving that they were continuing to be both these and, what is more, becoming hunted men. When they knew that the game was up they chose to kill themselves rather than go to jail.

One of them, who never went out without his Browning revolver, told me, “Prison isn’t worth living for! Six bullets for the sleuthhounds and the seventh for me! You know, I’m lighthearted.” A light heart is a heavy burden. the principle of self-preservation that is in us all found its consequence, within the social jungle, in a battle of One against All.[68]

The social roots of this ideology of young people who’ve lost all hope can be seen. Some individualists died on the gallows, others in the penal colonies; some preferred to be killed while resisting the police, finding a final satisfaction in delivering the final combat against society on their own. They were made of the stuff of true revolutionaries, but that suffocation era was one of calm saturated with the electricity of the prewar period.

Anarchist thought is connected to bourgeois philosophy through the individualist error. We find two opposing sources in it: proletarian idealism leading to libertarian socialism, and absolute individualism pushing to its ultimate consequences the Social Darwinism of capitalist competition. We can clearly see its connection with the “laissez-faire, laissez-passer,” the antistatism, and the individualism of liberal economists, as well as with the Positivist philosophy of a Herbert Spencer (The Individual against the State). Bourgeois society lives on individualism until the moment when its disproportionately developed production mechanism ceases to be governable by individuals, trusts and cartels having killed free competition and the class struggle having put property in question. It is then that the masses are discovered, that the need is seen for a better organization of industry, viewed as a whole through central planning. The very notion of the individual or, more accurately, of the person is modified. Man appears to us more social than ever: shaped, enriched or impoverished, diminished or enlarged by his condition; unstable, complex, and even contradictory, for what was called his Self is above all the point of intersection of a multitude of lines of influence. Our notion of the individual is not weakened by this but renewed, placed again in its context. But the individualist anarchism of Émile Armand, behind the times by at least a quarter of a century, still proceeds from affirmations like this one:

Despite all abstractions, all secular and religious entities, all herd ideals, at the base of all collectivities, societies, associations, and agglomerations; of all ethnic, territorial, moral and religious totalities is found the person-unit, the individual-cell. Without the latter the former would not exist…. It is obvious that the individual existed before groups. Society is the product of individual additions.

Nothing is less obvious than the preexistence of the individual in relation to the group: at the very least it is necessary that the family precede it. And we know that the family is gradually freeing itself from the primitive community. Everything leads us to believe that the animal species from which the human species was born were sociable. Society clearly preceded humanity; in any case it preceded the person and the very idea of the individual, just as being necessarily precedes consciousness, just as knowledge grows out of ignorance, and the completed work from the draft.

The individualist anarchism of today, living on outdated ideas, has renounced any revolutionary ambition, a resignation in which we can recognize an admission of weakness. This tendency confines itself to the organization of “outsiders” by paying close attention to the relations between the sexes.

The Test of Revolutions: Bakunin the Professional Revolutionary

Is it proper to judge a doctrine of total revolution by the test of revolution? Bakunin, for whom “the creative spirit is also a creative spirit,” had brutally clear ideas about revolutionary practice. The Russian soil inspired an energy in him that nothing could diminish. With him we are far from the vague humanitarian and subversive rhetoric of the recent Encyclopédie Anarchiste. (On the other hand, we find something of him in the biography of Durruti.) Bakunin was motivated by the inextinguishable need to transform the world. No effective weapon was inadmissible. An antiauthoritarian, he had a passion for organization. Against and despite Marx, well before Lenin he worked relentlessly at constructing a vast organization of professional revolutionaries in the strict sense of the term: devoted, disciplined, obedient to the “invisible dictator,” himself, in order to unleash the tempest. In the First International he invented infiltration, and this was the drama of his International Alliance of Social Democracy—backed up by a secret society—which was to play a decisive role in the collapse of the International (1872).

In studying him one is struck by the continuity of his thought and action. What revolution was he preparing the instrument for at the end of his life? For the one he conceived in 1848. Brupbacher sums up his ideas at that moment:

For Bohemia he proposed a radical and decisive revolt which, even defeated, would have overturned everything. All the nobles would be driven out, all the ecclesiastics, and all the feudal lords; all domains would have been confiscated and on one hand they would have been divided among the poor peasants, and on the other hand used to cover the costs of the revolution. All the castles were to be destroyed, all the tribunals suppressed, all trials suspended, all mortgages and debts below 1,000 guldens canceled. Such a revolution would have rendered any attempt at restoration impossible, even if it were attempted by victorious reaction, and would also have served as an example to German revolutionaries. Bohemia was to be transformed into a revolutionary camp from which would set out the offensive unleashed by the revolution in all countries….

In Prague they would have created a revolutionary government with unlimited dictatorial powers and assisted by a small number of specialists. Clubs, newspapers, and demonstrations would have been prohibited and revolutionary youth sent into the countryside to carry out agitation and create a military and revolutionary organization. All the unemployed were to be armed and enlisted in a “red” army commanded by former Polish and Austrian officers and noncommissioned officers.

In the “confession” he addressed from the fortress of Schlüsselbourg to Czar Nicholas I, signed “the repentant sinner,” (a few years later he would tell friends in London “I had to free myself from the claws of the bear”) he painted a portrait of the future Russian Revolution where all that is missing are the words “dictatorship of the proletariat.” He wrote:

More than elsewhere, I think that in Russia a strong dictatorial power will be necessary, a power that will be exclusively concerned with the elevation and education of the masses. A power free in its leanings and spirit, but free of parliamentary forms; publishing books with free content but without freedom of the press; an authority surrounded by supporters, enlightened by their counsels, and strengthened by their free collaboration, but which is limited by nothing and no one.

We find even here a clear prefiguration of the theory of the withering away of the state that Lenin would formulate in 1917:

I said that the difference between this dictatorship and monarchical power will consist solely in that the former, in keeping with the spirit of its principles, must aim to render its own existence superfluous, for it will have no other goal than the freedom, independence, and increased maturity of the people.

The Bakuninists in the Spanish Revolution of 1873–74

In Spain in 1873 the Bakuninists passed through a test of fire. Unfortunately, as usually occurs, the disciples weren’t the equal of their master, paralyzed by their own slogans. King Amadeo fled and the Carlist insurrection broke out in the Basque region. In most cities spontaneous uprisings assured the intransigent republicans and the Bakuninists an easy victory. Seville, Cordoba, Grenada, Malaga, Cadiz, Alcoy, Valencia, Murcia, and Cartagena declared themselves free communes. The Commune of Cartagena, or “sovereign canton,” was to resist for more than five months, from late July 1873 until January 11, 1874. The revolutionary cantons were put down one after the other. Engels provided an analysis, perhaps partizan, but in any case convincing, of the causes of this defeat that would lead to a monarchic restoration. The Alliancistas—members of Bakunin’s Democratic Alliance—rejected political action, abstaining from participation in elections to the Constituent Assembly, “in this way contributing to ensuring that it was almost exclusively bourgeois republicans who were elected.” “As soon as events place the proletariat in the front ranks,” Engels remarks, “abstention becomes an act of foolishness and the active intervention of the working class an unquestionable necessity.” This was not the only act of foolishness. At the height of the struggle the Bakuninists of Barcelona, still averse to the political struggle, called on the workers only for a general strike: they didn’t want to seize power. (Victory would have been more or less assured by Barcelona’s support, but Barcelona didn’t budge.) And Solidaridad Revolucionario wrote: “The revolution is on the public squares.”

A skirmish forced the Bakuninists to seize power in the manufacturing city of Alcoy. They created a Committee of Public Safety, though their delegates at the Congress of Saint-Imier had decided shortly before this that, “any organization of a so-called provisional or revolutionary political power can only be a new form of deceit and would be as dangerous for the proletariat as the existing governments.”

Heavily handicapped by their doctrine, what could they do? They did nothing. Bakunin had just declared himself for partizan warfare against military centralization (Lettres à un français, 1870). Each commune fought for itself. The gendarmerie—the Guardia Civil—was able to defeat them one by one. Andalucía was put down in a fortnight. Valencia resisted for two weeks. In all of this the division between Internacionalistas (Marxists) and Alliancistas (Bakuninists, the more numerous) played as baleful a role as the verbal intransigence of the republicans. Engels concluded, “The Bakuninists of Spain clearly showed us how not to make a revolution.”

The Russian Revolution

The anarchist influence was often great in Russia at the beginning of the revolution, but events inexorably posed the sole capital question, one for which the anarchists have no response: that of power. The Czar abdicated in the face of the working class and the insurgent garrison of Petrograd. Who does power belong to? A Provisional (bourgeois) government is created alongside the workers’ soviet. There are two powers. After the July riots Lenin, hidden in a shepherd’s hut in Finland, addresses the problem of problems by writing The State and Revolution. The anarchist objections concern him every bit as much as the habitual authoritarianism of socialism. These are two fatal shoals. Lenin intends to render justice to the anarchists, formerly treated as bandits by Plekhanov and many other mandarins of international reformism. “Marxism degraded by the opportunists” understands nothing of the problem of the state. Nor does anarchism:

On these two questions of concrete policy: must the old state machine be demolished and what should it be replaced with, anarchism has brought nothing even a little satisfying…. We do not after all differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the instruments, resources, and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the abolition of classes. Marx chooses the sharpest and clearest way of stating his case against the anarchists: After overthrowing the yoke of the capitalists, should the workers “lay down their arms,” or use them against the capitalists in order to crush their resistance? But what is the systematic use of arms by one class against another if not a “transient form” of state? the state?

For “revolution is the most authoritarian thing there is” (Engels). We know Lenin’s solution: demolish the old state machine from top to bottom and immediately construct on the rubble a power—a state—radically different and new, one like there’s never been, one that the Paris Commune of 1871 seemed to prefigure. A Commune-state with no caste of functionaries, without a police and army distinct from the nation, where the workers would exercise direct power through their local, federated councils. A state consequently decentralized and at the same time equipped with an active central mechanism. A democratic and libertarian state working to prepare its own absorption into the collectivity of labor, but exercising against the expropriated classes a veritable dictatorship in the interests of the proletariat. Lenin wasn’t a utopian forging theories: he was inspired by what actually existed in order to draw the largest party toward what should be. This new state already existed alongside, beneath the old one, formed everywhere by the soviets. All that was needed was to consecrate it through the thrust of the final insurrection. All power to the soviets! If the libertarians were to join in with this movement wouldn’t they be enormously useful tomorrow, when it will be necessary to protect society from bureaucratic sclerosis? But on the eve of the insurrection of November 7, 1917, the anarchists, whose Goloss Truda (The Voice of Labor, antisyndicalist organ) was the most widely distributed paper, remained faithful to their negative credo. Five days before the street battles they wrote: “We don’t believe in the possibility of accomplishing the social revolution by political methods … by the seizing of power.”

But what then is to be done? What is to be done? They say, in the same article, that it is necessary to “open new horizons to the masses, to humanity that are creators of the revolution.”

Yes, but how? And in the first place, what are they themselves going to do, the Bolshevik insurrection being ready? The syndicalist anarchist group declared that it was adopting a “negative attitude” toward the political action being prepared, but is determined, “If the action of the masses is unleashed, to participate in it with the greatest energy.”

At that moment the anarchist solutions, based on the “creative labor of the masses” of the moment, were worth nothing, but their revolutionary spirit didn’t allow them to completely abdicate. They grudgingly followed the movement.

One of the most serious of them relates in these terms his impressions of the evening of the proletarian revolution:

Around 11:00 p.m.… I found myself on one of the streets of Petrograd. It was dark and peaceful. In the distance sporadic gunfire could be heard. Suddenly, an armored vehicle sped past me. From within the vehicle a hand threw out a large packet of sheets of paper, which flew off in all directions. I bent down and picked one up. It was an appeal from the new government to the workers and peasants announcing the fall of Kerensky and, on the bottom, the list of the new government of “people’s commissars,” Lenin at its head. A complex feeling of sadness, of anger, of disgust and, at the same time, a kind of ironic satisfaction took hold of me. “These imbeciles, if they’re not simply demagogic impostors,” I thought. “They must think that they’re carrying out a social revolution like this! Well, they’ll see, and the masses are going to learn a good lesson.”

“According to the anarchist thesis,” Voline continues, “it was the working masses themselves who must by their broad and powerful action set themselves to solving the reconstructive problems of the social revolution.”

All socialists are in agreement with this thesis, which is nothing but the paraphrase of their common slogan: the emancipation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves. But when is able to only formulate this general affirmation in a country that has been turned completely topsy-turvy, then one has reduced oneself to impotence. It’s not enough to have needs and aspirations to transform society: one must have knowledge, clear ideas, the capacity to organize and sacrifice. Did the Russian masses as a whole have a sufficient degree of revolutionary consciousness and capacity? Anarchist theory, depending strictly on the spontaneity of the masses, would have been correct in a country so advanced that before even abolishing private ownership of the means of production the workers would have been penetrated with a socialist mentality and equipped with an education rendering them capable of administering production. But this was far from the case in Russia. The masses knew what they didn’t want: despotism and exploitation. In broad terms they knew what they wanted: peace, land, bread, and freedom. But all the revolutionary parties combined (and there were no unions of any influence under the ancien régime), bringing together the most conscious, the most devoted, the most educated sectors of the population, formed only a tiny percentage. If we grant them a half a million members and sympathizers—of unequal value, for these parties grew vertiginously in a few months—represented an activist minority of about 0.3 percent. Without the Bolshevik organization it is extremely likely that the feeble revolutionary spontaneity of the masses would have been promptly repressed by another social minority, that of the counterrevolution led by the generals. The dictatorship of the proletariat saved Russia from a military dictatorship.

One would seek in vain in the abundant anarchist literature of the period for a single practical proposal. There are nothing there but lyrical affirmations and idealistic demands. How to ensure the functioning of the transport system, make sure the bakeries function, repress the officers’ conspiracies? It was necessary to act immediately. A few anarchists, soon condemned by most of their comrades, entered the soviets, where their taste for freedom could be so useful. Most just pouted. When the peace of Brest-Litovsk had to be signed because the front had disintegrated, because the Czar’s peasant army no longer wanted to fight (here the spontaneity of the masses manifested itself with abundant clarity), because they had attempted the experiment called for by Trotsky of “neither peace nor war” and seen the Austro-Germans advance wherever they pleased without encountering any resistance, the anarcho-syndicalists of Petrograd—the Goloss Truda, with Voline—refused to recognize the odious treaty and preached partizan warfare. They even carried it out in the marshes of the west, abandoning their newspaper and their influence in the capital. They based all their hope on “the revolutionary spirit, the light of the world.” The phrase is lovely. Except the revolutionary spirit, not being disincarnate, is nourished with bread and can’t make war without artillery.

In their daily paper Anarchy, the Moscow anarchists, led by the Gordin brothers, professed an exclusively humanitarian faith. They had hundreds if not thousands of armed Black Guards who had clubs at their disposal that were veritable citadels. Organized in several groups without common discipline, in their press they denounced the actions of their irresponsible members, without succeeding in putting a halt to them. They declared themselves in principle “against the Soviets, being against all states,” but in reality formed a small state within the state, turbulent and too well armed. They were disarmed by force, almost without combat, on the night of August 11–12, 1918, by order of Trotsky and Dzerzhinsky. The Black Guards disappeared; the press and the groups vegetated.

Nestor Makhno

Russian anarchism nevertheless demonstrated amazing vitality, but only far from the great industrial centers, particularly in the agricultural regions of Ukraine. It was there, between the Don and the Dnieper, in Gulai-Pole that in the summer of 1918 a former anarchist prisoner, Nestor Makhno formed one of the countless bands of insurgent peasants who carried out partizan warfare against the Austro-Germans. The entire Ukraine had risen up; the demobilization provided them with an abundance of arms, it had its wheat to defend and its freedom to conquer. Makhno also fought against the National Directorate of Symon Petliura. Defending the independence of the peasants he would soon fight against the Reds, that is, against the centralized power of the Soviets. Defending the revolution he relentlessly harassed the Whites, commanded by Denikin and then Wrangel. It must be said that his Black Army rendered the Russian Revolution inestimable service. In 1919, while General Denikin, who had taken Orel, threatened Tula, the arsenal of the republic and the final stop before Moscow, Makhno cut his communications, disorganized his rear and caused his collapse. In 1919, while Frunze, Tukhashevsky, and Blucher seized Perekop, the key to the Crimea, and defeated Baron Wrangel, Semen Karetnik and Marchenko, Makhno’s lieutenants, (Makhno remaining in Gulai-Pole, for he was rightly wary) forced the straits of Sivach over the ice, drove toward White Crimea and entered Simferopol.

The epic of the Ukrainian anarchist peasants was long, chaotic, and strewn with acts of heroism, excesses, crimes and outbursts of enthusiasm: it was magnificent and tragic. Nestor Makhno showed himself to be one of the most remarkable popular figures of the Russian Revolution: chief of the people of the land; organizer of a unique army; an anarchist though tremendously disciplined; in a way a dictator, but denouncing authority as the worst of evils; the creator of a bold strategy that allowed him to defeat one after the other the old, experienced generals who had been students at the old war colleges, as well as the young Red generals; and creator of a new technique of partizan warfare where the horse team, either cabriolet or cart—the tatchanka of the Russian countryside—bearing a machine gun, was one of the instruments. The anarchist confederation The Tocsin (Nabat), with Voline, Archinov, Aaron Baron and Rybine (Zonov) gave the movement its ideological impetus.

Makhno’s Black Army was often accused of anti-Semitism. There were anti-Semitic excesses carried out by all parties in Ukraine, but not where the Blacks were truly masters of their movements, as Soviet authors were forced to recognize. In communist publications they denounced this as a movement of well-off peasants. This is not true. Conscientious research carried out under the egis of the Historical Commission of the Communist Party of the USSR established that poor and middle peasants formed the majority of Makhno’s troops. People reproached this movement for its disordered character and its excesses; it was characterized as “banditry.” The same reproaches should just as correctly be addressed to all the movements that fought over Ukraine: not a single one was free of excesses.

It was a perfectly viable movement for peasant autonomy. The Bolshevik government committed the serious error of defeating it by resorting to betrayal. It’s only fair to note that the psychological hostility was merciless on both sides. The Blacks considered the “dictatorship of the commissars” a new form of autocracy and dreamed of unleashing a Third Revolution against it, that of the anarchist people. The Reds considered the anarchist and anarchist-tending partizans as a source of disorganization within the socialist state aimed at serving the petit bourgeois—principally rural—counterrevolution. There were countless wrongs on both sides. Makhno rallied to the Reds against the Whites, was declared an outlaw, and then was recognized again by the Soviet power. The greatest wrongs, in any case, must be recognized as belonging to the strongest. And they were already on the slippery slope to an authoritarian state.

In a recent document Trotsky relates that he and Lenin thought of granting the anarchists an autonomous territory. The anarchist peasants of Gulai-Pole had the right to this equitable solution. They were promised it, but events took a different turn.

In the summer of 1920 the White Army of Baron Wrangel carried out a victorious offensive in the south of Ukraine. A delegation of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party offered to unite with Makhno against the common enemy. The accord was signed October 15, 1920. All the anarchists imprisoned on Soviet territory, “except those who fought the Soviet power, weapons in hands” were to be freed. They were assured full freedom of propaganda. The partizan army was incorporated into the Red forces while maintaining its own formation. For the Reds it was signed by Frunze, the commandant of the Southern Front and the members of the Revolutionary Councils of the front, Bela Kun, and Goussev. For the Blacks, Korilenko and Popov.

The united operations brought about a rapid victory over Wrangel. Makhno’s people then understood that the accord would not last long. As soon as they learned in Gulai-Pole that Karetnik and his partizans in Crimea were marching on Simferopol, Gregor Vassilevski, a collaborator of Makhno’s, shouted: “That’s the end of the treaty! I guarantee the Bolsheviks are going to attack us in one week.”

In fact, the anarchists, who had recently been released from prison and were preparing a congress in accordance with the agreement signed with Frunze, were suddenly arrested in November all across Russia. The Blacks, attacked in Crimea by the Reds, defended themselves. A few hundred of them, led by Marchenko, succeeded in breaking thorough the circle of fire and joined Makhno. “The leader of the partizan army, Karetnik, was invited by the Soviet command to go to Gulai-Pole and was treacherously arrested along the way. Gavrilenko, the head of the general staff on campaign, several members of the general staff and unit commanders were invited to a conference and arrested. All were executed.”

On November 26 in Gulai-Pole, Nestor Makhno, with about 2,500 men, both cavalry and infantry, was surrounded by Red troops greatly outnumbering his own. The Soviet newspapers published an order from Frunze calling on him to join the Red Army and accusing him of rebellion, banditry, and connivance with Wrangel. Finally, Frunze’s declared him an outlaw. Makhno succeeded in breaking through the Red lines and made a fighting retreat to the Dnieper. A division of Budenny’s cavalry joined him. His leg broken, he commanded the troops while stretched out in a wagon. His peasants fought to the cry of “Live free or die fighting!” In the villages they distributed tracts on “the free Soviets.” Hunted down by the Reds, fighting every day, the Blacks grew exhausted.

In a letter, Makhno describes the final moments of the struggle:

What to do? I couldn’t hold myself in the saddle or sit in the carriage, and a hundred meters behind me I saw indescribable cavalry fights. The men were being killed just so they could save me. The enemy was five or six times stronger than us. The five machine gunners, commanded by Micha of the village of Chernigovka, near Berdiansk, came up to me and said, “Batko, the cause of our peasant organization needs you. We’re going to be killed, but we’ll save you and those alongside you. Don’t forget to tell this to our families.” Several of them embraced me and I never saw them again. Leva Zinkovski carried me in his arms and laid me down in a peasant cart. I heard the crackling of the machine gun and the explosion of bombs. The machine gunners covered our retreat. We went about four kilometers and crossed a river. The machine gunners were killed.

Harassed by Budenny’s cavalry, Makhno crossed the Dniester in August 1921 and sought refuge in Romania. After being imprisoned in Romania and Poland he was granted asylum in France, where he died in Paris, having spent his years there as a factory worker.

Who is responsible for the strangling of a profoundly revolutionary peasant movement that the central power had recently recognized in the Politburo of Lenin and Trotsky? The Soviet government of Ukraine, headed by Rakovsky? Frunze’s army, where Bela Kun, known for his deceptiveness, could be found? All of them, probably, in measures that it would be good to know. But it was mainly due to the spirit of intolerance that increasingly gripped the Bolshevik Party from 1919; to the monopoly of power, the ideological monopoly, the dictatorship of the leaders of the party, already tending to substitute themselves for that of the soviets and even the party. Whatever the case, this perfidy was an enormous error mistake. From then on a chasm was dug between anarchists and Bolsheviks that would not be easy to fill. The synthesis of Marxism and libertarian socialism, so necessary and which could be so fertile, was rendered impossible for the indefinite future.

Anarchist Altruism

In reality, the rational value of a doctrine is not key to its effectiveness. Even today irrational doctrines that are hardly able to stand up to criticism have played a decisive role in history. Anarchism, despite the conscientious labors of Kropotkin and Reclus, who in any case were not far from Marxist socialism, puts forth a set of utopian and idealistic ideas that can be linked to the spirit of small-scale production that preceded modern large-scale industry. Buried deep beneath these ideas are affective and instinctive complexes that are the outgrowth of our historic past. The spirit of freedom, with all it implies of dignity, generosity, moral grandeur, and stimulus to action, constitutes anarchism’s true value. This is far more important than the shaky and naively smug ideas of an unscientific school of thought.

Unlike the upholders of other ideologies—a few forms of religious thought and the ardent forms of communism excepted—the anarchists seek to live in accordance with their ideas. Anarchism remains, even in its most absolute negations, a lived morality. I knew young individualist illegalists, who confessed to having no conscious scruples, who in an act of solidarity allowed themselves to be killed in order not to abandon their pals. At the other pole of anarchism old Kropotkin ended his long life outside Moscow writing his Ethics. He asked at the very beginning of his revolutionary career: “Fighting for truth, for equality with the people: what in life is more beautiful?” The moral sources of Marxist revolutionary thought are in no way different. Compare Kropotkin’s words to these lines from Trotsky: “Under fate’s implacable blows I would be as happy as I was during the best days of my youth if I contributed to the triumph of the truth. For humanity’s greatest happiness is not in the exploitation of the present day, but in the preparation of the future” (L. Trotsky in Stalin’s Crimes). The anarchist ethic places its accent on the revolt of the individual; the Marxists ethic subordinates itself to the fulfillment of historical necessity. The former arrives at a kind of Personalism; the latter at a revolutionary technique.

The inner faith of anarchist rebels resembles the classic forms of altruism, but at the point of combat. And since it proceeds from moral and psychological complexes that wind tight all the springs of being, it has no difficulty in pushing itself as far as it can possibly go, rising above both defeat and personal misfortune. Let us excerpt a page from Élisée Reclus and a few lines from Vanzetti:

I recall as if I were still living it a touching moment of my life when the profound joy of having acted in accordance with my heart and my ideas was mixed with the bitterness of defeat. It was twenty years ago. The Paris Commune was at war with the troops of Versailles and my battalion had been taken prisoner on the plateau of Chatillon. It was morning and a cordon of soldiers surrounded us, while mocking officers strutted before us. Several of them insulted us. One of them, who later became one of the most elegant pastors of the Assembly perorated on the folly of the Parisians, but we had other things to think about than listening to him. The officer I found most striking was a man of sober speech and a harsh gaze and the face of an ascetic; probably a country squire raised by the Jesuits. He slowly walked along the steep edge of the plateau, standing out in black like an evil shadow against the luminous backdrop of Paris. The sun’s rays, just rising, spread in a layer of gold over the houses and domes. Never had the beautiful city, the city of resolutions appeared more beautiful to me! “You see your Paris!” the sinister man said, pointing his weapon at the dazzling tableau. “Well, not one stone of it will be left standing on another.”

Vanzetti, sentenced along with Sacco to the electric chair, on April 9, 1927, responded to Judge Thayer:

If it had not been for this thing, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, justice, for man’s understanding of man, as now we do by accident. Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all! That last moment belong to us—that agony is our triumph.

This moral strength, whose social sources are profound, is not diminished by the intrinsic weakness of anarchist ideology. It offers little room for doctrinal criticism. It simply is. If, having learned from all we are living through the libertarian socialism it animates would be strong enough to assimilate the gains of scientific socialism, this synthesis would guarantee revolutionaries an incomparable effectiveness.

(La Crapouillot, January 1938)

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