Chapter 2: What is Individualist Anarchism?

Dean Bookchin posits an eternally recurring “tension” within anarchism between the individual and the social (4). As this is none other than the central conundrum of Western political philosophy, the Dean is neither original nor — more important — has he identified a specifically anarchist tension. He goes on to identify the antitheses within anarchism as “two basically contradictory tendencies: a personalistic commitment to individual autonomy and a collectivist commitment to social freedom” (4). This is the “unbridgeable chasm” his book title refers to.

If the Dean is right — that individual autonomy and social liberation are not just in tension but basically contradictory — then anarchy is impossible, as anti-anarchists have always maintained. Bookchin here rejects out of hand what he used to espouse, “a society that would transcend the historic splits between...individual and society” (1970: 59).

Not all of us share his conservative fatalism. We too have our apprehensions and our times of despair. But to surrender to them entirely (which I condemn nobody for doing, if he’s honest about it) is to renounce any affiliation with anarchism. The Dean won’t fish, neither will he cut bait. He won’t shit, neither will he get off the pot.

Some of those with impeccable, Bookchin-approved credentials, such as Kropotkin, had a more tolerant take on this genuinely tragic dilemma:

Anarchist Communism maintains that most valuable of all conquests — individual liberty — and moreover extends it and gives it a solid basis — economic liberty — without which political liberty is delusive; it does not ask the individual who has rejected god, the universal tyrant, god the king, and god the parliament, to give unto himself a god more terrible than any of the preceding — god the Community, or to abdicate upon its altar his independence, his will, his tastes, and to renew the vow of asceticism which he formerly made before the crucified god. It says to him, on the contrary, “No society is free so long as the individual is not so!” (Kropotkin 1890: 14–15)

Bookchin is the veritable high priest of what Kropotkin calls “god the Community,” “more terrible than any of the preceding,” the most vicious and oppressive god of all.

“Social freedom” is like the “free market” in the sense that the freedom referred to has to be metaphorical. It makes no literal sense to attribute freedom to behavioral interaction systems, even feedback systems, lacking the necessarily individual qualities of consciousness and intention. It’s like saying an anthill or the solar system or a thermostat is free. Free from, and for, what? What else could a society or a market possibly be free of if not autonomous individuals?

If one assigns any value to individual autonomy, logically there are only two possibilities for it to even exist, much less flourish, in society. (Contrary to what the Dean implies [58], not even Max Stirner thought it was possible outside of society [1995: 161, 271–277].) The first is a compromise: liberalism. The individual exchanges part of his precarious natural liberty for society’s protection of the rest of it, and also for the practical opportunities for advancing his interests only opened up in a social state. This was the position of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith and William Blackstone. In the public sphere, freedom means democracy; In the private sphere, it means individual rights.

The second resolution of the quandary, the radical one, is anarchism. Anarchism rejects the dichotomy as false — maybe not false as existing society is constituted, but false in its supposed fatality. In an anarchist society the individual gains freedom, not at the expense of others, but in cooperation with them. A person who believes that this condition — anarchy — is possible and desirable is called an anarchist. A person who thinks it is not possible or not desirable is a statist.

As I shall have no difficulty demonstrating later on, it so happens that the Dean himself is not an anarchist, merely, in his own terminology, a “self-styled anarchist.” But that’s no reason for those of us who (albeit unenthusiastically, if I may speak for myself) are anarchists not to heed his critique. From George Bernard Shaw to Guy Debord, anti-anarchists who took anarchism seriously have often supplied crucial critiques the anarchists were unable or unwilling to construct themselves. Unfortunately, Bookchin’s isn’t one of them.

What is remarkable about Dean Bookchin’s posturing as the Defender of the Faith, aside from the fact that he doesn’t share it, is how many of the Church Fathers (and Mothers) he has excommunicated as “individualists.” Predictably, William Godwin (5), Max Stirner (7, 11) and Benjamin Tucker (8) Bookchin summarily dismisses as individualists, although that hardly does justice to the richness of their insights and their relevance to any anarchism. (Although even Kropotkin acknowledged that Godwin espoused communism in the first edition of Political Justice, only “mitigating” that view in later editions [Kropotkin 1995; 238], and the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker acknowledged that Godwin “was really the founder of the later communist Anarchism” [1947: 7].) 1

But that’s only the beginning of the purge. The Dean condemns even Proudhon as an individualist (5), although he elsewhere pays tribute to “Proudhon’s emphasis on federal-ism [which] still enjoys considerable validity” (Bookchin) 1996: 24). When Bookchin says that something from a classical anarchist still enjoys considerable validity, this is his way of saying that’s whom he filched it from. The federalism of Proudhon’s later years (1979) is virtually identical to Bookchin’s call for a “confederation of decentralized municipalities” (60). Which is tantamount to saying that in the end Proudhon was not an anarchist, as I am not the only one to have noticed (Steven 1984). Indeed, the Dean has come close to admitting it himself (Bookchin 1977: 21).

The Dean now claims that the prominent Spanish anarchist Federica Montseney was a “Stirnerite” [sic] in theory if not in practice (8). In his The Spanish Anarchists she is “one of the FAI’s luminaries” (Bookchin 1977: 243). The FAI was a “vanguard” (the word is Bookchin’s) anarcho-communist secret society (Bookchin 1994: 21–22; cf. Brademas 1953).

Even Emma Goldman is under a cloud. Although she was an avowed anarcho-communist, she also displayed a disqualifying affinity with Nietzsche (8), and she was, after all, “by no means the ablest thinker in the libertarian pantheon” (13). Bookchin has a muscular, masculine disdain for anarchist women such as Emma Goldman, Federica Montseney and L. Susan Brown. Only his innate modesty kept the Dean from naming who is the ablest thinker in the libertarian pantheon, but then again, who, having read him, needs to be told?

Paul Goodman, a “communitarian anarchist” (Stafford 1972: 112), Bookchin calls “an essentially individualistic anarchist” (12), although Goodman was essentially an urban-oriented, humanistic anarcho-collectivist (Goodman & Goodman 1961: ch. 6 & 220; cf. Stafford 1972: 112–113) from whom Bookchin has cribbed many ideas without admitting it. Notice, for instance, the remarkable absence of any inferences to the by then deceased Goodman in Bookchin’s The Limits of the City (1974) or The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (1987), although he did let slip the name in Crisis in Our Cities (Herber 1965: 177) at a time when Goodman was in his prime whereas the future Dean was so far from foreseeing his own celebrity that he wrote under a pseudonym. He’ll soon wish he’d written this trashy had under a pseudonym.

“Individualist” anarchists in the original sense — people like Max Stirner (1995) and John Henry Mackay — were never numerous, as Bookchin observes with too much satisfaction (6–8). And they were always few and far between, strange to say, in decadent, bourgeois North America, supposedly their natural breeding-ground. Stirner did not identify himself as an anarchist, probably because the only (indeed, the very first) “self-styled” anarchist in the 1840s when he was writing was Proudhon, for whom moralism, as Stirner noticed, served as a surrogate for religion (ibid.: 46) — as it does for the Dean. The rather few individuals who at later times considered themselves Stirnerists have, however, usually considered themselves anarchists as well, such as the Italian peasant guerrilla Renzo Novatore (Black & Parfrey 1989: 92–93)

It is worth mentioning — because so many people who toss his name around have never read him — that Stirner had no social or economic program whatsoever. He was no more pro-capitalist than he was pro-communist, although Marxists like Marx, Engels and Bookchin have routinely and mindlessly castigated him as an apologist for capitalism. Stirner was just not operating at that level. He was staking a claim, the most radical claim possible, for the individual as against all the ideologies and abstractions which, purporting to liberates him in general and in the abstract, left the individual as personally, practically subordinate as ever: “In principle... Stirner created a utopistic vision of individuality that marked a new point of departure for the affirmation of personality in an increasingly impersonal world” (Bookchin 1982: 159). From Stirner’s perspective — which on this point is also mine — ideologies like liberalism, humanism, Marxism, syndicalism, and Bookchinism have all too much in common (cf. Black 1994: 221–222).

Nobody the Dean denounces as a “Stirnerite,” not Michael William (50), not Hakim Bey (23) is a Stirnerist if this implies that he affirms amoral egoism and is indifferent to or entirely agnostic about social and economic formations. Both obviously assume as axiomatic the need for a social matrix for individual efflorescence. What distinguishes them, in more than one sense, from the Dean is their appreciation of the epistemic break in bourgeois thought wrought by the likes of Stirner and Nietzsche:

A sense of incompleteness haunts Western philosophy after Hegel’s death and explains much of the work of Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Stirner, Nietzsche, the surrealists and the contemporary existentialists. For the Marxians merely to dismiss this post-Hegelian development as “bourgeois ideology” is to dismiss the problem itself.

You guessed it: Bookchin the Younger again (1971: 276). For Bookchin to dismiss this post-Hegelian development as “bourgeois ideology” is to dismiss the problem itself.

In a more recent, still narrower sense, “individualism” designates those who combine rejection of government with espousal of an absolutely unlimited laissez-faire market system. Such ideologues do exist, but Bookchin never even mentions a contemporary example, although he cannot be unaware of their existence, since he made use of one of their publishers, Free Life Books (Bookchin 1977). Considerable contact with some of them over the years has persuaded me that most anarcho-capitalists are sincere in their anarchism, although I am as certain that anarcho-capitalism is self-contradictory as I am that anarcho-syndicalism is. Unlike the Dean, I’ve on occasion taken the trouble to confute these libertarians (Black 1986:141–148; Black 1992: 43–62). But the point is, nobody the Dean targets in this screed is by any stretch of the imagination (not that he has one) an “individualist” anarchist in the usual contemporary sense of the term. He never even claims that any of them are.

The Dean makes the bizarre allegation that those he calls lifestyle anarchists, decadent successors to the individualist anarchists, claim (the quotation marks are his) their “sovereign rights” (12):

Their ideological pedigree is basically liberal, grounded in the myth of the fully autonomous individual whose claims to self-sovereignty are validated by axiomatic “natural rights,” “intrinsic worth,” or, on a more sophisticated level, an intuited Kantian transcendental ego that is generative of all knowable reality (11).

A digression on the, for lack of a better word, ethics of punctuation marks is in order here. “Quotation marks,” wrote Theodor Adorno,

...are to be rejected as an ironic device. For they exempt the writer from the spirit whose claim is inherent in irony, and they violate the very concept of irony by separating it from the matter at hand and presenting a predetermined judgment on the subject. The abundant ironic quotation marks in Marx and Engels are the shadows that totalitarian methods cast in advance upon their writings, whose intention was the opposite: the seed from which eventually came what Karl Kraus called Moskauderwelsch [Moscow double-talk, from Moskau, Moscow, and Kauderwelsch, gibberish or double-talk]. The indifference to linguistic expression shown in the mechanical delegation of intention to a typographic cliché arouses the suspicion that the very dialectic that constitutes the theory’s content has been brought to a standstill and the object assimilated to it from above, without negotiation. Where there is something which needs to be said, indifference to literary form almost always indicates dogmatization of the content. The blind verdict of quotation marks is its graphic gesture (Adorno 1990: 303).

As a tenured academic, the Dean is presumably aware that in scholarly discourse — and surely his magisterial essay is such — quotation marks identify quotations, yet his 45 footnotes fail to reference any use of these expressions by anybody. That is because no such quotations exist. So-called lifestyle anarchists (meaning: non-Bookchinists) don’t usually think or write that way. They tend not to go in for rights-talk because it is just an ideological, mystifying way of saying what they want, something better said honestly and directly.

By this maladroit misrepresentation, the Dean inadvertently exposes his original misunderstanding of the so-called individualist anarchists. Max Stirner was an amoral egoist or individualist. Godwin and Proudhon were, if they were individualists at all, moralistic individualists preoccupied with what they called justice. Lysander Spooner was an example of a clearly moralistic, natural-rights individualist anarchist. But when the prominent individualist publisher Benjamin Tucker went over to Stirnerist egoism in the late nineteenth century, he split the American individualists. (This, as much as the competition from collectivists credited by Bookchin [6- 7], brought about the decline of the tendency.) Although there were exceptions, the moralistic natural-rights individualists — which were most of them — usually ended up as essentially advocates of pure free-market capitalism. Those attracted to the amoralist, egoist or (if you please) “Stirnerist” position necessarily shared with Stirner a whole-sale rejection of moralism, that being what Stirner, and Nietzsche after him, absolutely exploded as a tenable point of view. But no more than Stirner did they exhibit any interest in laissez-faire (or any) economics. Capitalism, as Max Weber noticed, has its own moralism, often if not always expressed as the “Protestant ethic.” The egoists/amoralists and the free-market natural-rightists parted over precisely this point. The egoist/amoralists have contributed something to the “lifestyle anarchists,” the natural-rightists have not.

For instance, take L. Susan Brown (please! — no, just kidding), who’s attempted, says the Dean, “to articulate and elaborate a basically individualist anarchism, yet retain some filiations with anarcho-communism” (13), In a footnote he’s more candid: “Brown’s hazy commitment to anarcho-communism seems to derive more from her own preference than from her analysis” (62). In other words, maybe she means well but she’s just a ditsy dame, like Emma Goldman. Just believing in anarcho-communism isn’t good enough to acquit you of the charge of individualism. You have to emote a politically correct, anti-individualist “analysis” too. I wonder how many Makhnovists, and how many Spanish rank-and-file insurrectionaries fighting for comunismo libertario would have passed whatever final exam our pedant might assign to them to test their “analysis.” I have a pretty good idea how they would have received such an insolent inquisition. Post-situationist that I am, I am far from sure that “the revolution will not be televised,” but I am quite sure it will not be on the final exam, not if teacher knows what’s good for him. As Marx so truly said, the educator himself needs educating. And as Diogenes said, why not whip the teacher when the student misbehaves?

The Dean has brought “down to date” (as Mark Twain would say) the New England Puritan exercise known as the “relation of faith.” In order to join the Congregational Church, the applicant not only had to affirm each and every tenet of Calvinism, he had to demonstrate that he had gone through a standardized sequence of spiritual experiences. (Alcoholics Anonymous is the only Protestant cult which still imposes this requirement.) Most believers never made it that far. What the Dean means by an inadequate “analysis” is obvious enough: any analysis other than Bookchinism is no analysis at all. The “disdain for theory” he ascribes to “individualist” anarchism (11) is really disdain for, or rather indifference to, his theory. Nowadays, anarcho-communism is Bookchinism or it is nothing — according to Bookchin (60).

Like it or not — personally (and “personalistically”), I like it — there’s an irreducible individualistic dimension to anarchism, even social anarchism, as L. Susan Brown is hardly heretical in pointing out (1993: ch. 1). According to Kropotkin, Anarcho-Communism says that “No society is free so long as the individual is not!” (1890: 15). If it sounds as if anarchism has, as the Dean might say, “filiations” with liberalism, that’s because anarchism does have filiations with liberalism. What else could the Dean possibly mean when he writes that social anarchism is “made of fundamentally different stuff” than lifestyle anarchism, it is “heir to the Enlightenment tradition” (56)? As anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker wrote (and he was only summarizing the obvious):

In modern Anarchism we have the confluence of the two great currents which during and since the French Revolution have found such characteristic expression in the intellectual life of Europe: Socialism and Liberalism....

Anarchism has in common with Liberalism the idea that the happiness and the prosperity of the individual must be the standard in all social matters. And, in common with the great representatives of Liberal thought, it has also the idea of limiting the functions of government to a minimum. Its supporters have followed this thought to its ultimate logical consequences, and wish to eliminate every institution of political power from the life of society (1947: 16, 18–19).

If he hadn’t seen these words before, the Dean would have come across part of these passages as quoted by Brown (1993:110). Naturally he’d rather debunk Brown, an obscure young academic (Jarach 1996), than the illustrious anarchist elder Rocker. Bookchin’s a playground bully who doesn’t mind hitting a girl with glasses, but he’d be off his Rocker to mess with Rudolf.

Nobody chooses his ancestors. Rationally, no one should be ashamed of them. Visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, even unto the fourth generation (Exodus 34:7) — as the Dean is doing, pretty much on schedule — hardly comports with the Enlightenment rationalism he claims as his ancestry (21, 56).

The Left That Was which provided Bookchin’s original politics, Marxism-Leninism, also supplied him with a muscular polemical praxis and a versatile vocabulary of abuse. I’ve already drawn attention to one of these gambits, denigration-by-quotation-marks. Its “filiations” include Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder (1940) and countless texts by Marx and Engels, as Adorno (1990) noticed. John Zerzan, reviewing Bookchin (1987), noted a related way that the Dean abused quotation marks: “Another device is to ignore the real history of urban life, as if illusory; he resorts at times to putting such terms as ‘elected’ representatives, ‘voters’ and ‘taxpayers’ in quotes as though the terms really don’t, somehow, correspond to reality” (Zerzan 1994: 165). As if to confirm that he’s incorrigible, Bookchin refers to this review, not as a review, but as a “review” (59). Bookchin was doing the same thing almost 40 years ago when the first chapter of The Limits of the City (1974: ix) was written: Tenochtitlan was the “capital,” not the capital, of the urban, imperialistic, cannibalistic Aztec empire (ibid.: 7, 9).

Bookchin just doesn’t know when to shut up. Having lambasted individualists as liberals, he turns around and insinuates that they are fascists! Critics of industrial technology (specifically, George Bradford of the Fifth Estate) who argue that it determines, as well as being determined by, social organization are, opines the Dean, “deeply rooted in the conservative German romanticism of the nineteenth century” which “fed into National Socialist ideology, however much the Nazis honored their antitechnological ideology in the breach” (29). This would be a sophisticated version of guilt-by-association if it were sophisticated. The Dean doesn’t bother to even identify these “conservative German” romantics — he hasn’t read them, probably couldn’t even name them — much less substantiate their unlikely influence on contemporary “lifestyle” anarchists. Retro-leftist that he is, Bookchin must suppose that bracketing the hate-words “conservative” and “German” is a one-two punch nobody recovers from. One page later (30), he admits that “there is no evidence that Bradford is familiar with Heidegger or Jünger,” the twentieth-century German intellectuals he j’accuses as carriers of nineteenth-century conservative German romantic ideology.

McCarthyism is the political strategy of guilt by association. If you know a Communist, or if you know someone who knows someone who is a Communist, presumptively you are a Communist and you’ll have to talk your way out of it, preferably by ratting somebody out. The ex-Communist Bookchin has outdone Senator McCarthy. The Senator sought to uncover association as evidence of guilt. The Dean affirms guilt as evidence of association. That’s really all there is to his dirty little diatribe. To be even less fair than Joe McCarthy is quite an accomplishment, what Nietzsche used to call a “downgoing.”

And another thing, nineteenth-century romanticism was neither exclusively conservative nor exclusively German. What about the liberal or radical German romanticism of Beethoven and Büchner and Schiller and Heine? And what about the non-German radical romanticism of Blake and Burns and Byron and Shelley?

The Dean relates that the Nazis honored their romantic, anti-technological ideology “in the breach.” “Honored in the breach” is Bookchin’s poor try at heading off the obvious, and decisive, objection that the Nazis didn’t have an anti-technological ideology. The Autobahn was as much a monument to technology as were its contemporaries the Moscow subway and the New York World’s Fair (which, I suspect, thrilled the 18-year-old Murray Bookchin). So was the V-2. Almost openly erotic references to iron and steel recur with monotonous and pathological frequency in Nazi rhetoric. As John Zerzan remarked in a book the Dean claims to have read (39–42, 62 n. 19);

Behind the rhetoric of National Socialism, unfortunately, was only an acceleration of technique, even into the sphere of genocide as a problem of industrial production. For the Nazis and the gullible, it was, again a question of how technology is understood ideally, not as it really is. In 1940 the General Inspector for the German Road System put it this way: “Concrete and stone are material things. Man gives them form and spirit. National Socialist technology possesses in all material achievement ideal content” (Zerzan 1994: 140).

I’m not one of those who cries out in horror at the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism. But the Dean sees fit to insinuate that even the promiscuously pluralistic Hakim Bey is ideologically akin to Hitler (22), and that the primitivist quest to recover authenticity “has its roots in reactionary romanticism, most recently in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, whose völkisch ‘spiritualism,’ latent in Being and Time, later emerged in his explicitly fascist works” (50). So let’s consider whether Bookchin-vetted classical anarchists are ideologically kosher. Proudhon was notoriously anti- Semitic (Silbener 1948), but since Bookchin dismisses him, however implausibly, as too much the individualist (4–5), let’s set Proudhon aside. Bakunin, the Russian aristocrat who “emphatically prioritized the social over the individual” (5) had a notion what was wrong with his authoritarian rival, Karl Marx. Bakunin considered Marx, “the German scholar, in his threefold capacity as an Hegelian, a Jew, and a German,” to be a “hopeless statist” (1995:142). A Hegelian, a Jew, a sort-of scholar, a Marxist, a hopeless (city-) statist — does this sound like anybody familiar?

The Dean approvingly quotes Lewis Mumford on “the esthetic excellence of the machine form” (32), a phrase which might have been turned by Marinetti or Mussolini or anyone else on the ill-defined frontier between Futurism and Fascism (cf. Moore 1996: 18). In War, the Worlds Only Hygiene, Marinetti elaborated on the Bookchin/Mumford esthetic:

We are developing and proclaiming a great new idea that runs through modern life: the idea of mechanical beauty. We therefore exalt love for the machine, the love we notice flaming on the cheeks of mechanics scorched and smeared with coal. Have you never seen a mechanic lovingly at work on the great powerful body of his locomotive? His is the minute, loving tenderness of a lover caressing his adored woman (Flint 1972: 90).

The Germans conquered Europe with Panzers and Stukas not by blood-and-soil hocus-pocus. Nazi ideology is far tool incoherent to be characterized as either pro- or anti-technological. The Dean in bewailing our “decadent, bourgeoisified era” (1) and our “decadent personalism” (2) is himself echoing Nazi and Stalinist rhetoric, as he surely remembers, and it’s as empty as ever. The point is that the ideology didn’t have to make sense to matter. It was vague and inconsistent so as to appeal to as many people as possible who desperately needed something to believe in, something to free them from freedom, something to command their loyalty. It didn’t have to be the same come-on for everyone. The Nazis, fishers of Menschen, understood that you need different bait to hook different fish, that’s all.

And finally, individualist anarchists are terrorists — or rather, anarchist terrorists are individualists.

The inseparable association of anarchism with terrorism commenced for Americans with a specific event: the Haymarket tragedy in Chicago in 1886. As the police were breaking up a peaceable workers’ rally, someone threw a bomb into their midst, killing or wounding several of them. Eight prominent anarchists involved in the union movement, but indisputably innocent of the bombing, were convicted of murder and four of them hanged (one committed suicide) on the basis of their anarchist agitation and beliefs. If there is one fact about the history of anarchism known to everyone who knows at least one fact about the history of anarchism, it is this: “Thereafter, anarchism, in the public mind, was inseparably linked with terrorism and destruction” (Avrich 1984: 428; cf. Schuster 1932: 166; Woodcock 1962: 464). And the anarchism with which the link was forged was the collectivist anarchism of the Haymarket defendants. That they were, as individuals, innocent is irrelevant to the genesis of the mad-bomber legend. Innocent in act but not necessarily in intention: “One of them, [Louis] Lingg, had the best alibi: he wasn’t there... he was home, making bombs. He was thus convicted of a crime he would have liked to commit” (Black & Parfrey 1989: 67). In contrast, one historian refers to “the peaceful philosophy of Individualist Anarchism” (Schuster 1932: 159).

The anarchists’ terrorist reputation was not, however, entirely fabricated by their enemies (Black 1994: 50–55). In the 1880s, left-wing European anarchists had already begun to preach, and practice, “propaganda by the deed,” such as bombings — “chemistry,” as they sometimes put it — and assassinations. Even the beatific Kropotkin was originally a supporter of “the new tactic” (Bookchin 1977: 115). Some thought it the most effective way to dramatize anarchism and disseminate it to the masses. According to what the Dean calls “the best account of Spanish Anarchism from 1931 to 1936” (Bookchin 1977: 325), “the last decade of the [nineteenth] century was one in which the anarchists really were engaged in the bomb-throwing which is popularly thought to exhaust their range of activities” (Brademas 1953: 9).

These anarchist terrorists were, to apply Bookchin’s terminology anachronistically, usually social anarchists, rarely individualist anarchists. August Vaillant, who bombed the French Chamber of Deputies, was a leftist (Tuchman 1966: 91) and a member of an anarchist group (Bookchin 1977: 114). Of the French bombers of the 1890s, Ravachol alone, so far as anybody knows, was “almost but not quite” a Stirnerist (Tuchman 1964: 79).

The Spanish anarchists whom the Dean esteems above all others (1977, 1994) had perhaps the longest terrorist tradition of all. The index reference to “Terrorism, anarchist” in his history of Spanish anarchism covers dozens of pages (1977: 342). There were sporadic bombings in the 1880s which became chronic, at least in the anarchist stronghold of Barcelona, in the 1890s (Bookchin 1977: ch. 6). 1918–1923, period of violent class struggle in Spain, was the time of the pistoleros — gunmen — a term which applies to both employer-hired goons and anarcho-leftist militants. Among hundreds of others, “a premier, two former civil governors, an Arch-bishop, nearly 300 employers, factory directors, foremen, and police, and many workers and their leaders in the sindicato libre [a company union], fell before the bullets and bombs of Anarchist action groups” (Bookchin 1977: 191).

The pistolero phase subsided as the anarchists, who were getting the worst of the violence anyway, were driven underground by the Primo de Rivera dictatorship at the same time that a measure of prosperity took the edge off the class struggle. But anarcho-terrorism never ceased. During the ‘2Os and ‘3Os, “the FAI’s most well-known militants — Durruti, the Ascaso brothers, Garcia Oliver — included terrorism in their repertory of direct action: ‘Gunplay, especially in “expropriations” and in dealing with recalcitrant employers, police agents, and blacklegs, was not frowned upon’” (Bookchin 1994: 23). Their heists “sustained Ferrer-type schools, Anarchist printing presses, and a large publishing enterprise in Paris which produced the Anarchist Encyclopedia, as well as many books, pamphlets, and periodicals” (Bookchin 1977: 199).

I adduce these facts — and reference most of them, deliberately, to Bookchin — not to condemn or condone what “social anarchists” have sometimes done but to show up the Dean’s duplicity. Terrorism has been, for better or for worse, a recurrent anarchist tactic for more than a century. And the anarcho-terrorists have almost always been “social,” not individualist, anarchists. I’ve had occasion to rebut leftist falsifications to the contrary (Black 1994: 50–55). Bookchin justifies Spanish anarcho-pistolero terrorism as legitimate self-defense (1977: 201–202), an opinion I share, but the fact remains that it was terrorism — in Bookchinese, “social anarchist” terrorism — not the activity of individualist anarchists.