In the course of the revolutionary outbreaks that spread across Europe in 1848 the Prefect of Police in Paris is said to have remarked of the anarchist Michael Bakunin, ‘What a man! On the first day of the revolution he is a perfect treasure; but on the next day he ought to be shot.’ His observation epitomizes both the role and the ultimate fate of the anarchists and their precursors in a long series of European popular uprisings.

Chroniclers of all political movements invariably discover antecedents from the past, and the anarchists found ancestors in the slave revolts of the Roman Empire and in all subsequent revolutionary upheavals of the downtrodden. They have similarly identified precursors in such risings as the Peasants’ Revolt that began in England in 1391, in the insurrection of the Taborites in Bohemia in 1493 and that of the Anabaptists a century later.

In the English Revolution of the civil war years leading up to 1649, the anarchist element was illustrated by the activities of the Diggers, Ranters, and Levelers, who, having helped to ensure Cromwell’s success, were described by one pamphleteer as ‘Switzerising anarchists’ and were rapidly eliminated once the Protector was securely in power, only to be followed by the eventual return of the monarchy. But the people who dared to remove a king had opened the way to more radical thoughts on the relationship between the individual and the community and between society and the state. The American and French revolutions of the following century brought a message beautifully expressed in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in 1776:

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries by a government which we might expect in a country without a government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence: the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise.

Political ideas crossed the Atlantic almost as rapidly in the 18th century as in the 21st, and the American Revolution made the French Revolution inevitable. Jefferson, Paine, and Franklin had a role in both, while William Godwin in his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice was arguing the anarchist case from first principles. Meanwhile, a series of brave opponents of the new French state, known as the Enragés and gathered around Jacques Roux and Jean Varlet, opposed the new rulers. Varlet, who actually survived the Terror, observed that

Despotism has passed from the palace of kings to the circle of a committee. It is neither the royal robes, nor the scepter, nor the crown, that makes kings hated, but ambition and tyranny. In my country there has been only a change in dress.

Anarchism reappeared in the European revolutions of 1848. In the following year, after the failure of the revolution in Dresden, Bakunin was imprisoned, condemned to death, and after a year handed over to the Austrians, condemned again, but in the next year handed over to the Russians. After six years in the Peter-and-Paul fortress at St Petersburg he was exiled to Siberia, whence he eventually escaped to London by way of Japan, San Francisco, and New York. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Proudhon’s federalist ideas shaped the short-lived Paris Commune and its ‘Manifesto to the French People’ of April 1871, which urged:

The absolute autonomy of the Commune extended to all the localities of France, assuring to each its integral rights and to every Frenchman the full exercise of his aptitudes, as a man, a citizen, and a worker. The autonomy of the Commune will have for its limits only the equal autonomy of all other communities adhering to the contract; their association must assure the liberty of France.

(Needless to say, although the Commune had an admired anarchist heroine, Louise Michel, its Manifesto did not extend these rights to Frenchwomen.)

In the major revolutions of the 20th century there were recognizable anarchist elements, but in each of them the anarchists were victims of the new rulers. In Mexico, Ricardo Flores Magon and his brothers had in 1900 begun publication of an anarcho-syndicalist newspaper Regeneración, building up opposition to the dictator Porfirio Diaz, slipping across the border into California when publication became too difficult. With the fall of Diaz, Magon established contact with the peasant revolutionary Emiliano Zapata in the state of Morales in the South, fighting the efforts of large landowners to annex the land of poor growers. Magon is said to have made Zapata literate through reading and discussing Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. Zapata was ambushed and killed in 1919, while Magon was jailed in the United States and was murdered in Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1923. Ironically, both men are celebrated in the Rotunda of Illustrious Men in Mexico City. The contemporary EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) is Mexico’s modern incarnation of Zapata’s campaign, as is, for example, the MST (Movement of Landless Rural Workers) in Brazil. Both of these are campaigns of dispossessed peasants for communal control of land seized by large-scale cattle-ranching oligarchies.

5. In Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost and, in 2003, poorest state, a Tzotzil Indian woman walks past a notice proclaiming that ‘You are in Zapatista territory. Here the people rule and the government obeys.’

6. Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa riding into Mexico City in 1914, having driven out General Huerta. Zapata himself was ambushed and killed in 1919.

In the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Bolshevik seizure of power was pushed through with anarchist slogans like ‘Bread and Freedom’ and ‘All Power to the Soviets’, which were very far from daily experience in the new regime. The anarchist hero of the revolution was the Ukrainian peasant Nestor Makhno, organizing peasant land seizures and defending them from both the Bolsheviks and the Whites. Returning Russian exiles included Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, deported from the United States, and Kropotkin, who had been obliged to live abroad for 40 years. Kropotkin addressed critical letters to Lenin and wrote a Letter to the Workers of Western Europe describing for them the lessons of the Russian Revolution. His funeral in 1921 was the last occasion when the Russian anarchists were at liberty until the slow releases from Stalin’s prison camps after 1956.

7. The burial of Kropotkin in Moscow in 1921. It is said that the anarchists were released from prison for one day to attend this occasion. The speaker in this picture is Emma Goldman, and below her is Alexander Berkman.

Goldman and Berkman tried to tell the truth about Lenin’s Russia when they left the country, but found that the political Left in the West rejected their message, seeing it as ‘counter-revolutionary’. The same kind of exclusion by the political Left faced continual anarchist attempts to reveal the truth about the Soviet Union, while Stalinist infiltration destroyed the integrity of a long series of workers’ organizations in the West.

Italy’s anarchist tradition began when Bakunin settled there in 1863, recommended to fellow revolutionaries by Garibaldi and Mazzini, whose nationalism he actually opposed in the name of communal autonomy and federalism. To this period of Bakunin’s life belong his polemics against Marx which, accurately and uniquely, foresaw the evolution of Marxist dictatorships in the 20th century. His disciple Errico Malatesta, who died under house arrest in Mussolini’s Italy, initiated streams of anarchist propaganda in Italy and Latin America, which still flow to this day in the form of an impressive spread of publications and campaigns.

In the Far East, the habit of sending young men from affluent families to complete their education in Europe led to a string of revolutionary students bringing back to China from Paris the anarchist message of Kropotkin in his propagandist books The Conquest of Bread, Mutual Aid, and especially Fields, Factories and Workshops. Many of the shifts and turns of Communist Party policy in China in the 1950s and 1960s have recognizable links with Kropotkin’s agenda, although, of course, they were imposed with the utmost indifference to human suffering. The celebrated novelist Pa Chin (Li Pai Kan) saw Emma Goldman as his ‘spiritual mother’ and constructed his pseudonym from one syllable each of the names Bakunin and Kropotkin. Needless to say, he was subjected to ‘reeducation’ several times, and, in 1989, at the age of 84, was arrested because of his support for the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

But the country where anarchism put down its deepest roots was Spain, which in the 1930s had both a mass anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo), and the FAI (Federación Anarquista Iberica), an anarchist body which emerged periodically from an underground existence. The revolution of 19 July 1936 in Spain illustrates another gulf between the anarchist account of events and the way they are perceived and described by more influential voices.

On 18 July 1936, Spain had three Popular Front governments in the course of a single day, debating how to oppose the military revolt from the generals in Morocco, which was moving into mainland Spain, and usually concluding that resistance was futile. Meanwhile in several cities and regions, not only were the weapons of the military garrisons and the civil guards seized, but CNT members took control of factories, transport, and land. The following day marked the beginning, not only of a war against Franco’s insurrection, but of a popular revolution.

8. In 1936 the workers of the CNT/FAI took over Barcelona’s transport system and improved its services for the people.

Franco’s rebellion was aided by weapons, troops, and bomber aircraft from Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany, but the Non-Intervention Agreement upheld by the British and French governments limited the supply of arms for the anti-Fascist forces to those provided (at the cost of Spain’s gold reserves) by the Soviet Union. A further heavy penalty was paid for Soviet support. Stalin’s foreign policy required the repudiation of the Spanish revolution in the interests of the ‘Popular Front’ concept. In the effort to resist growing Soviet influence, anarchist and syndicalist militants actually became ministers both in the Catalan government in Barcelona and in the central government in Madrid.

The war in Spain wound down to its desolate conclusion in April 1939, after immense loss of life. In August that year the non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler was signed, and in September the Second World War began. Franco’s regime in Spain survived until the dictator’s death in 1975. The collapse of opposition brought a relentless campaign of vengeance against those who dared to oppose Franco. There were untold numbers of executions and the prisons were filled. Millions of Spaniards lived out their lives in exile.

9. Threshing the corn on a farm in Aragon, taken over by its workers in 1936.

From the point of view of the anarchists, Spain thus provided terrible ironies. In terms of the collectivization of agriculture and industry, it gave a living and inspiring example of Kropotkin’s theories about the seizure of control by the workers. In those parts of the country that had not been seized by army units supporting Franco there were large-scale seizures of land. Spain was a predominantly agricultural country, in which 67% of the land was owned by 2% of landowners. At the same time many smallholdings were too small to feed a family. Gerald Brenan, in his classic book The Spanish Labyrinth, explained that ‘the only reasonable solution through wide tracts of Spain is a collective one’.

In 1936 it was estimated that in those parts of Spain not overrun by Franco’s troops, about three million men, women, and children were living in collectivized communes. Observers from the time similarly reported on the collectivization of factories in Catalonia and of the reorganization of public services, transport, telephones, gas, and electricity in Barcelona.

10. ‘The Land is Yours: Work It!’, slogan on a train in Catalonia, 1936.

The American philosopher of language Noam Chomsky remembers reading about these achievements as a boy in New York, in the Yiddish-language anarchist journal Fraye Arbeter Shtime. There stayed in his mind a report on a poverty-stricken Spanish town, Membrilla, in whose miserable huts eight thousand people lived, with ‘no newspaper, no cinema, neither a café nor a library’. But the villagers shared food, clothing, and tools, and took in a large number of refugees. ‘It was, however, not a socialization of wealth but of poverty . . . Membrilla is perhaps the poorest village of Spain, but it is the most just.’ Chomsky comments that

An account such as this, with its concern for human relations and the ideal of a just society, must appear very strange to the consciousness of the sophisticated intellectual, and it is therefore treated with scorn, or taken to be naive or primitive or otherwise irrational. Only when such prejudice is abandoned will it be possible for historians to undertake a serious study of the popular movement that transformed Republican Spain in one of the most remarkable social revolutions that history records.

By now the serious studies have been made, and Chomsky has stressed their significance and their lessons for the future, since, as he says,

What attracts me about anarchism personally are the tendencies in it that try to come to grips with the problems of dealing with complex organized industrial societies within a framework of free institutions and structures.

The Spanish experience hardly met the second of his criteria, but the events of 1936 amply justified his comments. These achievements were barely noticed in the news media of Western Europe outside the journals of anarchism and the noncommunist far Left, and when George Orwell, back from Spain, attempted to puncture the conspiracy of silence in his Homage to Catalonia in 1937, his book had sold a mere 300 copies before being remaindered to the anarchist bookshop in 1940. Many decades later, Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom (1995) was rapturously received in Spain for dramatizing a key episode in the civil war, hitherto almost unknown in Spain itself.

Needless to say, in the years of exile, those anarchists who had survived both the war and Franco’s revenge devoted endless debate to the fatal decision of the leaders of the CNT to become part of government in an effort to combat Soviet dominance. Since every variety of anarchism has opposed the structure of politics and the political system, this decision was seen as a compromise that brought no advantage and much discredit. Those anarchists who have explored the issue tend to agree with the comment of the veteran French anarchist Sébastien Faure: ‘I am aware of the fact that it is not always possible to do what one should do; but I know that there are things that on no account can one ever do.’

Meanwhile, decades later, a new series of popular uprisings rediscovered anarchist slogans in heroic defiance of Stalin’s apparently monolithic empire. Suppressed aspirations emerged on the streets of Hungarian and Polish cities in 1956 and on those of Czechoslovakia in 1968. They were harbingers of the subsequent bloodless collapse of the Soviet Union, after decades of appalling suffering for those who, usually inadvertently, failed to please their rulers.

As the regimes of their jailers collapsed around them, there was some comfort for the surviving anarchists, with their black flags of protest against the new capitalism steered into being by their old oppressors. They were still monotonously right and their priorities remained the same.