Background

What was the “Idea,” as it was destined to be called, that Guiseppi Fanelli brought to Madrid and Barcelona? Why did it sink such deep and lasting roots in Spain?

Few visions of a free society have been more grossly misrepresented than Anarchism. Strictly speaking,, anarchy means without authority, rulerless—hence, a stateless society based on selfadministration. In the popular mind, the word is invariably equated with chaos, disorder, and terrorist bombings. This could not be more incorrect. Violence and terror are not intrinsic features of Anarchism. There are some Anarchists who have turned to terrorist actions, just as there are others who object to the use of violence as a matter of principle.

Unlike Marxism, with its founders, distinct body of texts,and clearly definable ideology, anarchistic ideals are difficult to fix into a hard and fast credo. Anarchism is a great libidinal movement of humanity to shake off the repressive apparatus created by hierarchical society. It originates in the age-old drive of the oppressed to assert the spirit of freedom, equality, and spontaneity over values and institutions based on authority. This accounts for the enormous antiquity of anarchistic visions, their irrepressibility and continual reemergence in history, particularly in periods of social transition and revolution. The multitude of creeds that surface from this great movement of the social depths are essentially concrete adaptations to a given historical period of more diffuse underlying sentiments, not of eternally fixed doctrines. Just as the values and institutions of hierarchy have changed over the ages, so too have the anarchic creeds that attempted to dislodge them.

In antiquity, these creeds were articulated by a number of highly sophisticated philosophers, but all the theories were pale reflections of mass upheavals that began with the breakup of the village economy and culminated in millenarian Christianity. Indeed, for centuries, the church fathers were to be occupied with mass heresies that emphasized freedom, equality, and at times, a wild hedonism. The slaves and poor who flocked to Christianity saw the second coming of Christ as a time when “a grain of wheat would bear ten thousand ears,” when hunger, illness, coercion, and hierarchy would be banished forever from the earth.

These heresies, which had never ceased to percolate through medieval society, boiled up toward its end in great peasant movements and wildly ecstatic visions of freedom and equality. Some of the medival anarchistic sects were astonishingly modern and affirmed a freedom “so reckless and unqualified,” writes Norman Cohn, “that it amounted to a total denial of every kind of restraint.” (The specific heresy to which Cohn refers here is the Free Spirit, a hedonistic sect which spread throughout southern Germany during the fourteenth ^ century.) “These people,” Cohn emphasizes “could be regarded as remote precursors of Bakunin and Nietzsche—or rather of that Bohemian intelligentsia which during the last half-century has been living from ideas once expressed by Bakunin and Nietzsche in their wilder moments.”

More typical, however, were the revolutionary peasant movements of the late Middle Ages which demanded village autonomy, the preservation of the communal lands, and in some cases, outright communism. Although these movements reached their apogee in the Reformation, they never disappeared completely; indeed, as late as the twentieth century, Ukranian peasant militias, led by Nestor Makhno, were to fight White Guards and Bolsheviks alike in the Russian Civil War under Anarchist black flags inscribed with the traditional demand of “Liberty and Land.”

Anarchistic theories found entirely new forms as revolutionary passions began to surge up in the towns and cities. The word “Anarchist” was first used widely as an epithet against the Enrages, the street orators of Paris, during the Great French Revolution. Although the Enrages did not make demands that would be regarded today as a basic departure from radical democratism, the use of the epithet was not entirely unjustified. The fiery nature of their oratory, their egalitarianism, their appeals to direct action, and their implacable hatred of the upper classes, menaced the new hierarchy of wealth and privilege reared by the revolution. They were crushed by Robespierre shortly before his downfall, but one of the most able Enrages, Jean Varlet, who managed to escape the guillotine, was to draw the ultimate conclusion from his experiences. “For any reasonable being,” he wrote years afterwards, “Government and Revolution are incompatible....”

The plebian Anarchism of the towns directed its energies against disparities in wealth, but like the peasant Anarchism of the countryside, its social outlook was diffuse and inchoate. With the emergence of the nineteenth century, these diffuse sentiments and ideas of the past were solidified by the new spirit of scientific rationalism that swept Europe. And for the first time, systematic works on Anarchist theory began to appear.

Perhaps the first man to call himself publicly an “Anarchist” and to present his ideas in a methodical manner was Pierre Joseph Proudhon, whose writings were to exercise a great deal of influence in the Latin countries. Proudhon’s use of the word “Anarchist” to designate his views must be taken with reservations. Personally, he was an industrious man with fixed habits and a strong taste for the quietude and pleasantries of domestic life. He was raised in a small town and trained as a printer. The views of this paterfamilias were often limited by the social barriers of a craftsman and provincial, despite his long stays in Paris and other large cities.

This is clearly evident in his writings and correspondence. Proudhon envisions a free society as one in which small craftsmen, peasants, and collectively owned industrial enterprises negotiate and contract with each other to satisfy their material needs. Exploitation is brought to an end, and people simply claim the rewards of their labor, freely working and exchanging their produce without any compulsion to compete or seek profit. Although these views involve a break with capitalism, by no means can they be regarded as communist ideas, a body of views emphasizing publicly owned property and a goal in which human needs are satisfied without regard to the contribution of each individual’s labor.

Despite the considerable influence Spanish Anarchists have attributed to Proudhon, his mutualist views were the target of many attacks by the early Spanish labor movement. The cooperativist movement, perhaps more authentically Proudhonian than Anarchist, raised many obstacles to the revolutionary trajectory of the Spanish Anarchist movement. As “cooperativists,” the mutualists were to seek a peaceful and piecemeal erosion of capitalism. The Anarchists, in turn, were to stress the need for militant struggle, general strike, and insurrection.

Nevertheless, Proudhon, more than any writer in his day, was responsible for the popularity of federalism in the Socialist and Anarchist movements of the last century. In his vision of a federal society, the different municipalities join together into local and regional federations, delegating little if any power to a central government. They deal with common administrative problems and try to adjudicate their differences in an amicable manner. Proudhon, in fact, sees no need for a centralized administration and at times seems to be calling for the total abolition of the state.

Although his style is vigorous and often ringing, Proudhon’s temperament, methods, and his emphasis on contractual relations can hardly be called revolutionary, much less anarchistic. Nevertheless, his theories were to have enormous influence in France and on the Iberian Peninsula.

Mutualism and Proudhon’s ideas became firmly rooted in Spam through the work of a young Catalan, Francisco Pi y Margall. In 1854 Pi published Reaction y Revolution, a work that was to exercise a profound influence on radical thought in Spain. Pi had been a bank clerk in Madrid who, in his spare hours, combined occasional ventures into journalism with the authoring of several books on art. Although he was not an Anarchist and was never to become one, his book contains thrusts against centralized authority and power that could have easily come from Bakunin’s pen. “Every man who has power over another,” writes the young Catalan, “is a tyrant.” Further: “I shall divide and subdivide power; I shall make it changeable and go on destroying it.” The similarity between these statements and Proudhon’s views has led some writers to regard Pi as a disciple of the Frenchman. Actually, it was Hegel who initially exercised the greatest influence on Pi’s thought in the early 1850s. The Hegelian notion of lawful social development and “unity in variety” were the guiding concepts in Pi’s early federalist ideas. It was not until later that the Catalan turned increasingly to Proudhon and shed many of his Hegelian ideas. Although keenly sympathetic to the wretchedness of Spain’s poor, Pi shunned the use of revolutionary violence. Their living conditions, he argued, could best be improved by reformistic and gradualistic measures.

The book caused a great stir among the Spanish radical intelligentsia. To many, Federalism seemed like the ideal solution to Spain’s mounting social problems. The men whom Fanelli addressed in Madrid and Barcelona were largely Federalists, as were most of the Republicans in the two cities. Federalist ideas had become so widespread in Spain, in fact, that its supporters were to provide the most important intellectual recruits to the Anarchist movement.

Mutualism became the dominant social philosophy both of the radical Spanish Republicans of the 1860s and of the Parisian Communards of 1871. But it was largely due to the work of a famous revolutionary exile—the “Garibaldi of Socialism,” as Gerald Brenan calls him—that the collectivist and Federalist elements in Proudhon’s theories were given a revolutionary thrust—and were carried into Spain as a fiery anarchistic ideal.

Mikhail Bakunin

The man who was most successful in providing the vast plebian elements of Spanish Anarchism with a coherent body of ideas was neither a Spaniard nor a plebian, but a Russian aristocrat, Mikhail Bakunin. Although a century has passed since his death, he remains one of the most controversial, little known, and maligned figures in the history of the nineteenth-century revolutionary movements. He enjoys none of the posthumous honors that are heaped on Marx. To this day, nearly all accounts of his life and ideas by non-Anarchist writers are streaked with malice and hostility. His name still conjures up images of violence, rapine, terrorism, and flaming rebellion. In an age that has made the cooptation of dead revolutionaries into a fine art, Bakunin enjoys the unique distinction of being the most denigrated revolutionary of his time.

That the mere appearance of Bakunin would have evoked a sense af menace is attested by every description his contemporaries hand down to us. All portray him in massive strokes: an immensely tall, heavy man (Marx described him as a “bullock”), with a tousled, leonine mane, shaggy eyebrows, a broad forehead, and a heavily bearded face with thick Slavic features. These gargantuan traits were matched by an ebullient personality and an extraordinary amount of energy. The urbane Russian exile, Alexander Herzen, leaves us with a priceless description of the time when Bakunin, already approaching fifty, stayed at his home in London. Bakunin, he tells us,

argued, preached, gave orders, shouted, decided, arranged, organized, exhorted, the whole day, the whole night, the whole twenty-four hours on end. In the brief moments which remained, he would throw himself down on his desk, sweep a small space clear of tobacco ash, and begin to write five, ten, fifteen letters to Semipalatinsk and Arad, to Belgrade, Moldavia, and White Russia. In the middle of a letter he would throw down his pen in order to refute some reactionary Dalmatian; then, without finishing his speech, he would seize his pen and go on writing.... His activity, his appetite, like all his other characteristics—even his gigantic size and continual sweat — were of superhuman proportions....

This was written after the weary, politically disillusioned Herzen had parted company with the exuberant revolutionary. Nevertheless the description gives us an image of the sheer elemental force that emanated from Bakunin, qualities which were to carry him through trials that would have easily crushed ordinary men. Bakunin’s forcefulness, overbearing as it was to Herzen, was softened by a natural simplicity and an absence of pretension and malice which verged on childlike innocence. Like so many Russian exiles at the time, Bakunin was kindly and generous to a fault. There were some who exploited these traits for dubious ends, but there were others (among them, young Italian, Spanish, and Russian revolutionaries) who, strongly attracted by the warmth of his personality, were to turn to him for moral inspiration throughout his life.

He was born in May 1814, in Premukhina, a moderately large estate 150 miles northwest of Moscow. A nobleman whose mother was connected by lineage to the ruling circles of Russia, Bakunin abandoned a distasteful military career and the prospect of genteel stagnation on his family estate for a life of wandering and revolutionary activity in Europe. The year 1848 found him in Paris, later in Prague, and finally in Dresden, where he literally journeyed from one insurrection to another in his appetite for action. From May 1849 he was bandied about from one prison to another—Saxon, Austrian, and Russian—before escaping from Siberia to arrive in London in 1863.

Up to the 1860s Bakunin had essentially been a revolutionary activist, loosely adhering to the radical democratic and nationalist views of the day. It was in London, and especially during a long stay in Italy, that he began to formulate his Anarchist views. In the thirteen years of life remaining before him, he never ceased to be the barricade fighter of 1848 and was involved repeatedly in revolutionary plots, but it was also in this period that he developed the most mature of his theoretical ideas.

Bakunin’s Anarchism converges toward a single point: unrestricted freedom. He brooks no compromise with this goal, and it permeates all of his mature writings. “I have in mind the only liberty worthy of that name,” he writes,

liberty consisting in the full development of all the material, intellectual, and moral powers latent in every man; a liberty which does not recognize any other restrictions but those which are traced by the laws of our nature, which, properly speaking, is tantamount to saying that there are no restrictions at all, since these laws are not imposed upon us by some outside legislator standing above us or alongside us. These laws are immanent, inherent in us; they constitute the very basis of our being, material as well as intellectual and moral; and instead of finding in them a limit to our liberty we should regard them as its effective reason.

The “immanent” and “inherent” laws that form the basis of human nature, however, do not lead to a rabid individualism that sees social life as a restriction; Bakunin emphatically denies that individuals can live as asocial “egos.” People want to be free in order to fulfill themselves, he argues, and to fulfill themselves they must live with others in communities. If these communities are not distorted by property, exploitation, and authority, they tend to approach a cooperative and humanistic equilibrium out of sheer common interest.

Bakunin’s criticism of capitalism leans heavily on the writings of Marx. He never ceased to praise Marx for his theoretical contributions to revolutionary theory, even during their bitter conflicts within the International. The basic disagreement between Marx and Bakunin centers around the social role of the state and the effects of centralism on society and on revolutionary organizations. Although Marx shared the Anarchist vision of a stateless society—the “ultimate goal” of Marxian communism,in fact, is a form of anarchy—he regards the historical role of the state as “progressive” and sees centralization as an advance over localism and regionalism. Bakunin emphatically disagrees with this viewpoint. The state, he admits, may be “historically necessary” in the sense that its development was unavoidable during Ijumanity’s emergence from barbarism, but it is an “historically necessary evil, as necessary in the past as its complete extinction will be necessary sooner or later, just as necessary as primitive bestiality and theological divagations were necessary in the past.”

The point is that Bakunin, in contrast to Marx, continually emphasizes the negative aspects of the state:

Even when it commands the good, it makes this valueless by commanding it; for every command slaps liberty in the face; as soon as this good is commanded, it is transformed into an evil in the eyes of true (that is, human, by no means divine) morality, of the dignity of man, of liberty....

This intensely moral judgment plays an important role in Bakunin’s outlook, indeed, in Anarchism generally. Human beings, to Bakunin, are not “instruments” of an abstraction called “history”; they are ends in themselves, for which there are no abstract substitutes. If people begin to conceive themselves as “instruments” of any kind, they may well become a means rather than an end, and modify the course of events in such a way that they never achieve freedom. In erroneously prejudging themselves and their “function,” they may ignore opportunities that cou\d lead directly to liberation or that could create favorable social conditions for freedom later.

With this existential emphasis, Bakunin departs radically from Marxism, which continually stresses the economic preconditions for freedom and often smuggles in intensely authoritarian methods and institutions for advancing economic development. Bakunin does not ignore the important role of technology in ripening the conditions for freedom, but he feels that we cannot §aye in advance when these conditions are ripe or not. Hence we must continually strive for complete freedom lest we miss opportunities to achieve it or, at least, prepare the conditions for its achievement.

These seemingly abstract theoretical differences between Marx and Bakunin lead to opposing conclusions of a very concrete and practical nature. For Marx, whose concept of freedom is vitiated by preconditions and abstractions, the immediate goal of revolution is to seize political power and replace the bourgeois state by a highly centralized “proletarian” dictatorship. The proletariat must thus organize a mass centralized political party and use every means, including parliamentary and electoral methods, to enlarge its control over society. For Bakunin, on the other hand, the immediate goal of revolution is to extend the individual’s control over his or her own life; hence revolution must be directed not toward the “seizure of power” but its dissolution. A revolutionary group that turns into a political party, structuring itself along hierarchical lines and participating in elections, Bakunin warns, will eventually abandon its revolutionary goals. It will become denatured by the needs of political life and finally become’coopted by the very society it seeks to overthrow.

From the outset, then, the revolution must destroy the state apparatus: the police, the army, the bureaucracy. If violence is necessary, it must be exercised by the armed revolutionary people, organized in popular militias. The revolutionary movement, in turn, must try to reflect the society it is trying to create. If the movement is to avoid turning into an end in itself, into another state, complete conformity must exist between its means and ends, between form and content. Writing bn the structure of the International, Bakunin insists that it

must differ essentially from state organization. Just as much as the state is authoritarian, artificial, and violent, alien, and hostile to the natural development of the people’s interests and instincts, so must the organization of the International be free and natural, conforming in every respect to those interests and instincts.

Accordingly, in the last years of the International, Bakunin was to oppose Marx’s efforts to centralize the movement and invest virtually commanding powers in its General Council.[3]

Bakunin places strong emphasis on the role of spontaneity in the revolution and in revolutionary activity. If people are to achieve freedom, if they are to be revolutionized by the revolution, they must make the revolution themselves, not under the tutelage of an allknowing political party. Bakunin also recognizes, however, that a revolutionary movement is needed to catalyze revolutionary possibilities into realities, to foster a revolutionary development by means of propaganda, ideas, and programs. The revolutionary movement, he believes, should be organized in small groups of dedicated “brothers” (the word recurs often in his discussion of organization) who single-mindedly pursue the task of fomenting revolution. His emphasis on smallness is motivated partly by the need for secrecy that existed in the southern European countries of his day, partly also by his desire to foster intimacy within the revolutionary movement.

For Bakunin, a revolutionary organization is a community of personally involved brothers and sisters, not an apparatus based on bureaucracy, hierarchy, and programmatic agreement. More so than any of the great revolutionaries of his day, Bakunin sought a concordance between the life-style and goals of the revolutionary movement. He was unique in his appreciation of revolution as a festival. Recalling his experiences in Paris, shortly after the 1848 revolution, he writes:

I breathed through all my senses and through all my pores the intoxication of the revolutionary atmosphere. It was a festival without beginning nor end; I saw everyone and I saw no one, for each individual was lost in the same innumerable and wandering crowd; I spoke to everyone without remembering either my own words or those of others, for my attention was absorbed by new events and objects and by unexpected news.

Bakunin’s emphasis on conspiracy and secrecy can be understood only against the social background of Italy, Spain, and Russia—the three countries in Europe where conspiracy and secrecy were matters of sheer survival. In contrast to Marx, who greatly admired the well-disciplined, centralized German proletariat, Bakunin placed his greatest hopes for social revolution on the Latin countries. He foresaw the danger of the embourgeoisement of the industrial proletariat and warned of its consequences. Following a predisposition to mistrust stable, complacent, institutionalized classes in society, Bakunin turned increasingly to decomposing, precapitalist classes of the kind that prevailed in Russia and southern Europe: landless peasants, workers with no stake in society, artisans faced by ruin, footloose declasse intellectuals and students. Marx regarded the formation of a stable industrial working class as a precondition for social revolution. Bakunin, however, saw in this process the ruin of all hopes for a genuinely revolutionary movement—and in this respect he proved deeply prophetic.

Bakunin was not a communist. He may have recognized that economic development in his day did not admit of the communist precept, “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.” In any case he accepted Proudhon’s notion that the satisfaction of material needs would have to be tied to the labor contributed by each individual. Bakunin also closely followed Proudhon’s federalist approach to social organization. But in contrast to the French mutualist, he regarded the collective, and not the independent artisan, as the basic social unit. He was sharply critical of Proudhonian mutualists

who conceive society as the result of the free contract of individuals absolutely independent of one another and entering into mutual relations only because of the convention drawn up among them. As if these men had dropped from the skies, bringing with them speech, will, original thought, and as if they were alien to anything of the earth, that is, anything having social origins.

In time this view acquired the name “Collectivist Anarchism” to distinguish it both from Proudhonian mutualism and, later, from the “Anarchist Communism” propounded by Peter Kropotkin. (For a discussion of Kropotkin’s Communist views, see pp. 115–116 below.) A mere sketch of Bakunin’s theories does not capture the flavor of his writings, the animating spirit that catapulted his personality into the foreground of nineteenth-century radical history. Although a deeply humane and kindly man (indeed because of his intrinsic humanity and kindness) Bakunin did not shrink from violence. He faced the problem with disarming candor and refused to dilute the need for violence—and the reality of the violence which the ruling classes practiced daily in their relations with the oppressed—with a hypocritical-stance of moral outrage. “The urge to destroy,” he wrote as a young man, “is also a creative urge.” His writings exude a sense of violent rebellion against authority, of unrestrained anger against injustice, of fiery militancy on behalf of the exploited and oppressed. There can be little question that he lived this spirit with consistency and great personal daring.

Beneath the surface of Bakunin’s theories lies the more basic revolt of the community principle against the state principle, of the social principle against the political principle. Bakuninism, in this respect, can be traced back to those subterranean currents in humanity that have tried at all times to restore community as the structural unit of social life. Bakunin deeply admired the traditional collectivistic aspects of the Russian village, not out of any atavistic illusions about the past, but because he wished to see industrial society pervaded by its atmosphere of mutual aid and solidarity. Like virtually all the intellectuals of his day, he acknowledged the importance of science as a means of promoting eventual human betterment; hence the embattled atheism and anticlericalism that pervades all his writings. By the same token, he demanded that the scientific and technological resources of society be mobilized in support of social cooperation, freedom, and community, instead of being abused for profit, competitive advantage, and war. In this respect, Mikhail Bakunin was not behind his times, but a century or more ahead of them.

To the young revolutionary Spaniards of the 1860s, to the militant workers of Barcelona and the restive land laborers of Andalusia, the ideas propounded by Bakunin seemed to crystallize all their vague feelings and thoughts into an inspired vision of truth. He provided them with a coherent body of ideas that answered admirably to their needs: a vigorous federalism revolutionary in its methods, and a radical collectivism rooted in local initiative and decentralist social forms. Even his militant atheism seemed to satisfy the strong wave of anticlerical feeling that was surging through Spain. The prospect of participating in the work of the International held the promise of linking their destinies to a worldwide cause of historic dimensipns. Finally, Spain had been prepared for Bakunin’s theories not only socially, but als^intellectually. If Bakuninist Anarchism was new to Fanelli’s audience, somfe of its elements, such as federalism, were familiar topics of discussion in Madrid and Barcelona.

No less important than Bakunin’s federalist ideas were his atheistic views and his attacks on clericalism. We shall see that the Spanish church had become the strongest single prop of absolutism and reaction in the early nineteenth century, later rallying around the Carlist line (the reactionary pretenders to the Spanish throne) and the most conservative trends in political life. The collusion between the Catholic hierarchy and the Spanish ruling classes had completely “undermined the prestige of fhe clergy among the working classes,” writes Elena de La Souchere, “and brought about a de-Christianization of the masses which is in fact the essential phenomenon of the history of Spain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Spanish bourgeoisie had constructed a perfect city from which the plebians, kept beyond the walls, enveloped the clergy in the hate they bore the institutions and castes which were admitted to that closed city.”

Accordingly, as early as 1835, anger against Carlist atrocities in the north had led to church burnings in many large towns of Spain. The monks were detested as parasites and the higher echelons of the hierarchy were seen as simply the clerical equivalents of wealthy secular landowners and bourgeois. They were hated all the more fervently because of their religious pretensions and their invocations of humility and the virtues of poverty.

Bakunin’s emphasis on collectivism, so much stronger than Proudhon’s, had a particularly wide appeal to the dispossessed rural classes. It conformed admirably to their sense of the patria chica, the autonomous village world that had been deserted by the ruling classes for a comfortable life in the larger provincial cities.

Similarly, the Robin Hood mentality that permeates so much of Bakunin’s thought and, in its own way, forms a conspicuous trait of his own life, doubtless had a strong appeal in areas like Andalusia where the peasantry had come to venerate the social bandit as an avenger of injustice. In this land of the “permanent guerrilla”—a figure that reaches as far back as the Moorish invasion—the lonely band, striking a blow for freedom, had become especially dear to the rural poor and nourished a multitude of local myths and legends.

Finally, Bakunin’s appeal to direct action found a wealth of precedents in village and urban uprisings. Lacking even a modicum of protection by the law, the Spanish people increasingly relied on their own action for the redress of grievances. We shall see that the use of the ballot in Spain was to become meaningless, even after universal suffrage had been introduced. In many Spanish villages, local political bosses, the caciques (generally, landowners, but often lawyers and priests) held absolute control over political life. Using their economic power and, where necessary, outright coercion, the caciques appointed all the local officials of their districts and “delivered the vote” to political parties of their choice. This scandalous system of undisguised political manipulation, combined with the repeated coups d’etat—the notorious pronunciamientos—of Spanish military officers, created an atmosphere of widespread cynicism toward electoral activity. The Spanish people did not have to be convinced by a Russian aristocrat that the state was the private domain of the ruling classes; their education came directly from the arrogant land magnates and bourgeoisie of their own country.

Thus, the fact that Guiseppi Fanelli could have scored an immediate triumph in Madrid may have been unique, but it need hardly seem too surprising. The views he brought with him did not require elaborate theoretical explanation. It sufficed for his audience to grasp mere shreds of Bakunin’s ideas to feel a living affinity between their social problems in Spain and the passionate ideas of the Russian exile in Geneva.