Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism

P
ETER
M
ARSHALL
is a philosopher, historian, biographer and travel writer. He has written fifteen highly acclaimed books which are being translated into fourteen different languages. They include
William Godwin, Nature’s Web, Riding the Wind, The Philosopher’s Stone
and
Europe’s Lost Civilization.
His circumnavigation of Africa was made into a TV series. His website is
www.petermarshall.net

From the reviews of
Demanding the Impossible
:

“Large, labyrinthine, tentative: for me these are all adjectives of praise when applied to works of history, and
Demanding the Impossible
meets all of them.’

G
EORGE
W
OODCOCK
,
Independent

“I trust that Marshall’s survey of the whole heart-warming, head-challenging subject will have a large circulation … It is a handbook of real history, which should make it more valuable in the long run than all the mighty textbooks on market economics and such-like ephemeral topics.’

M
ICHAEL
F
OOT
,
Evening Standard

“Infectious in its enthusiasm, attractive to read … There is more information about anarchism in this than in any other single volume.’

N
ICOLAS
W
ALTER
,
London Review of Books

“Immense in its scope and meticulous in its detail … It covers every conceivable strand in the libertarian little black book.’

A
RTHUR
N
ESLEN
,
City Limits

“A wide-ranging and warm-hearted survey of anarchist ideas and movements … that avoids the touchy sectarianism that often weakens the anarchist position.’

J
AMES
J
OLL
,
Times Literary Supplement

“There’s no mistaking the fact that
Demanding the Impossible
is timely … a gigantic mural in which every celebrated figure who has ever felt hemmed in by law and government finds a place.’

K
ENNETH
M
INOGUE
,
Sunday Telegraph

“Peter Marshall, clearly a convinced impossibilist, has set himself a sisyphean task. His book is a kind of model of what it talks about — a sphere of near-structureless co-existence, a commune or “phalanstery” for all the friends of libertarianism from Wat Tyler to Walt Whitman to Tristan Tzara.’

L
ORNA
S
AGE
,
Independent on Sunday

“Peter Marshall’s massive but very readable survey … deserves a wide readership.’

A
NTHONY
A
RBLASTER
,
Tribune

“The most compendious, most studied and most enlightening read of anarchist history.’

A
NDREW
D
OBSON
,
Anarchist Studies

“Excellent … a lively and heartening study.’

R
ONALD
S
HEEHAN
,
The Irish Press

“Reading about anarchism is stimulating, funny and sad. What more can you ask of a book?’

I
SABEL
C
OLEGATE
,
The Times

“Interest in anarchy … was reawakened by the publication of Peter Marshall’s massively comprehensive
Demanding the Impossible.’

P
ETER
B
EAUMONT
,
Observer

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

William Godwin

Journey through Tanzania

Into Cuba

Cuba Libre: Breaking the Chains?

William Blake: Visionary Anarchist

Journey through Maldives

Nature’s Web: An Exploration of Ecological Thinking

Around Africa: From the Pillars of Hercules to the Strait of Gibraltar

Celtic Gold: A Voyage around Ireland

Riding the Wind: A New Philosophy for a New Era

The Philosopher’s Stone: A Quest for the Secrets of Alchemy

World Astrology: The Astrologer’s Quest to Understand the Human Character

Europe’s Lost Civilization: Uncovering the Mysteries of the Megaliths

The Theatre of the World: Alchemy, Astrology and Magic in
Renaissance Prague

CONTENTS

 

Acknowledgements

Introduction

P
ART
O
NE
:
Anarchism in Theory

1 The River of Anarchy

2 Society and the State

3 Freedom and Equality

P
ART
T
WO
:
Forerunners of Anarchism

4 Taoism and Buddhism

5 The Greeks

6 Christianity

7 The Middle Ages

8 The English Revolution

9 The French Renaissance and Enlightenment

10 The British Enlightenment

P
ART
T
HREE
:
Great Libertarians

11 French Libertarians

12 German Libertarians

13 British Libertarians

14 American Libertarians

P
ART
F
OUR
:
Classic Anarchist Thinkers

15 William Godwin: The Lover of Order

16 Max Stirner: The Conscious Egoist

17 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: The Philosopher of Poverty

18 Michael Bakunin: The Fanatic of Freedom

19 Peter Kropotkin: The Revolutionary Evolutionist

20 Elisée Reclus: The Geographer of Liberty

21 Errico Malatesta: The Electrician of Revolution

22 Leo Tolstoy: The Count of Peace

23 American Individualists and Communists

24 Emma Goldman: The Most Dangerous Woman

25 German Communists

26 Mohandas Gandhi: The Gentle Revolutionary

P
ART
F
IVE
:
Anarchism in Action

27 France

28 Italy

29 Spain

30 Russia and the Ukraine

31 Northern Europe

32 United States

33 Latin America

34 Asia

P
ART
S
IX
:
Modern Anarchism

35 The New Left and the Counter-culture

36 The New Right and Anarcho-capitalism

37 Modern Libertarians

38 Modern Anarchists

39 Murray Bookchin and the Ecology of Freedom

P
ART
S
EVEN
:
The Legacy of Anarchism

40 Ends and Means

41 The Relevance of Anarchism

E
PILOGUE

Reftrence Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

 

I would like to thank Heiner Becker, John Clark, John Crump, Caroline Cahm, David Goodway, Carl Levy, Geoffrey Ostergaard, Hans Ramaer, and Vernon Richards for commenting on different chapters of this work. Tom Cahill and Graham Kelsey kindly provided me with materials. I am indebted to John Burrow for encouraging, many years ago, my interest in the history of anarchist ideas. I much appreciate the pioneering work in the history of anarchism undertaken by Paul Avrich, Daniel Guérin, James Joll, Jean Maitron, Max Nettlau and George Woodcock, although I do not always share their emphases or interpretations. In preparing the book for publication, the editorial advice of Philip Gwyn Jones has proved unfailingly perceptive and relevant.

My thanks are due to the staff of both the National Library of Wales and the British Library, and to the librarians of Coleg Harlech, the University College of North Wales, and the University of London for facilitating my research.

My children Dylan and Emily have been bemused by my work on something impossibly called ‘anarchism’, but have been an inspiring example of constructive anarchy in action. I am grateful to my mother Vera for first awakening in me a sense of justice and equality. My brother Michael has given his warm support at all times. Above all, I must thank Jenny Zobel for her constant help and encouragement during the composition of this long study; only she knows the depth of my indebtedness. My friends Richard Feesey, Jeremy Gane, Graham Hancock, David Lea, and John Schlapobersky have in their different ways all inspired me to complete my task.

For this new edition, I have added an epilogue bringing anarchism up to date in the twenty-first century and given my own suggestions on the way forward.

I would like to thank John Clark in particular for his very perceptive and detailed comments. Ruth Kinna helped me with some materials. Elizabeth Ashton Hill kindly read the epilogue. My thanks also to Rosalind Porter and Essie Cousins at Harper Perennial and Ramsey Kanaan at PM Press who have brought out this new edition.

I welcome any readers’ comments on my website:

www.petermarshall.net

P
ETER
M
ARSHALL
, Little Oaks, July 2007

INTRODUCTION

 

A
NARCHY
IS
TERROR
, the creed of bomb-throwing desperadoes wishing to pull down civilization. Anarchy is chaos, when law and order collapse and the destructive passions of man run riot. Anarchy is nihilism, the abandonment of all moral values and the twilight of reason. This is the spectre of anarchy that haunts the judge’s bench and the government cabinet. In the popular imagination, in our everyday language, anarchy is associated with destruction and disobedience but also with relaxation and freedom. The anarchist finds good company, it seems, with the vandal, iconoclast, savage, brute, ruffian, hornet, viper, ogre, ghoul, wild beast, fiend, harpy and siren.
¹
He has been immortalized for posterity in Joseph Conrad’s novel
The Secret Agent
(1907) as a fanatic intent on bringing down governments and civilized society.

Not surprisingly, anarchism has had a bad press. It is usual to dismiss its ideal of pure liberty at best as utopian, at worst, as a dangerous chimera. Anarchists are dismissed as subversive madmen, inflexible extremists, dangerous terrorists on the one hand, or as naive dreamers and gentle saints on the other. President Theodore Roosevelt declared at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘Anarchism is a crime against the whole human race and all mankind should band against anarchists.’
²

In fact, only a tiny minority of anarchists have practised terror as a revolutionary strategy, and then chiefly in the 1890s when there was a spate of spectacular bombings and political assassinations during a period of complete despair. Although often associated with violence, historically anarchism has been far less violent than other political creeds, and appears as a feeble youth pushed out of the way by the inarching hordes of fascists and authoritarian communists. It has no monopoly on violence, and compared to nationalists, populists, and monarchists has been comparatively peaceful. Moreover, a tradition which encompasses such thoughtful and peaceable men as Godwin, Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Tolstoy can hardly be dismissed as inherently terroristic and nihilistic. Of the classic anarchist thinkers, only Bakunin celebrated the poetry of destruction in his early work, and that because like many thinkers and artists he felt it was first necessary to destroy the old in order to create the new.

The dominant language and culture in a society tend to reflect the
values and ideas of those in power. Anarchists more than most have been victims of the tyranny of fixed meanings, and have been caught up in what Thomas Paine called the ‘Bastille of the word’. But it is easy to see why rulers should fear anarchy and wish to label anarchists as destructive fanatics for they question the very foundations of their rule. The word ‘anarchy’ comes from the ancient Greek
meaning the condition of being ‘without a leader’ but usually translated and interpreted as ‘without a ruler’. From the beginning, it made sense for rulers to tell their subjects that without their rule there would be tumult and mayhem; as Yeats wrote: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’
³
In the same way, upholders of law argued that a state of ‘lawlessness’ would mean turmoil, licence and violence. Governments with known laws are therefore necessary to maintain order and calm.

But it became increasingly clear to bold and independent reasoners that while States and governments were theoretically intended to prevent injustice, they had in fact only perpetuated oppression and inequality. The State with its coercive apparatus of law, courts, prisons and army came to be seen not as the remedy for but rather the principal cause of social disorder. Such unorthodox thinkers went still further to make the outlandish suggestion that a society without rulers would not fall into a condition of chaotic unruliness, but might produce the most desirable form of ordered human existence.

The ‘state of nature’, or society without government, need not after all be Hobbes’ nightmare of permanent war of all against all, but rather a condition of peaceful and productive living. Indeed, it would seem closer to Locke’s state of nature in which people live together in a state of ‘perfect freedom to order their actions’, within the bounds of the law of nature, and live ‘according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them’.
⁴
Anarchists merely reject Locke’s suggestion that in such a condition the enjoyment of life and property would be necessarily uncertain or inconvenient.

For this reason, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first self-styled anarchist, writing in the nineteenth century, launched the apparent paradox: ‘Anarchy is Order.’ Its revolutionary import has echoed ever since, filling rulers with fear, since they might be made obsolete, and inspiring the dispossessed and the thoughtful with hope, since they can imagine a time when they might be free to govern themselves.

The historic anarchist movement reached its highest point to date in two of the major revolutions of the twentieth century — the Russian and the Spanish. In the Russian Revolution, anarchists tried to give real meaning to the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’, and in many parts, particularly in the Ukraine, they established free communes. But as the Bolsheviks
concentrated their power, the anarchists began to lose ground. Trotsky, as head of the Red Army, crushed the anarchist movement led by Nestor Makhno in the Ukraine, and then put down the last great libertarian uprising of sailors and workers known as the Kronstadt Mutiny in 1921.

By far the greatest anarchist experiment took place in Spain in the 1930s. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, peasants, especially in Andalucía, Aragón and Valencia, set up with fervour a network of collectives in thousands of villages. In Catalunya, the most highly developed industrial part of Spain, anarchists managed the industries through workers’ collectives based on the principles of self-management. George Orwell has left a remarkable account of the revolutionary atmosphere in his
Homage to Catalonia
(1938). But the intervention of fascist Italy and Germany on the side of Franco and his rebels, and the policy of the Soviet Union to funnel its limited supply of arms through the Communists, meant that the experiment was doomed. Communists and anarchists fought each other in Barcelona in 1937, and Franco triumphed soon after. Millions of Spanish anarchists went underground or lost their way.

The Second World War which followed shattered the international anarchist movement, and the most dedicated were reduced to running small magazines and recording past glories. Only Gandhi’s strategy of civil disobedience used to oust the British from India and his vision of a decentralized society based on autonomous villages seemed to show a libertarian glimmer. When George Woodcock wrote his history of anarchism at the beginning of the 1960s, he sadly concluded that the anarchist movement was a lost cause and that the anarchist ideal could principally help us ‘to judge our condition and see our aims’.
⁵
The historian James Joll also struck an elegiac note soon after and announced the failure of anarchism as ‘a serious political and social force’, while the sociologist Irving Horowitz argued that it was ‘foredoomed to failure’.
⁶

Events soon proved them wrong. Anarchism as a volcano of values and ideas was dormant, not extinct. The sixties saw a remarkable revival, although in an unprecedented and more diffuse form. Many of the themes of the New Left — decentralization, workers’ control, participatory democracy — were central anarchist concerns. Thoughtful Marxists like E. P. Thompson began to call themselves ‘libertarian’ socialists in order to distance themselves from the authoritarian tactics of vanguard parties. The growth of the counter-culture, based on individuality, community, and joy, expressed a profound anarchist sensibility, if not a self-conscious knowledge. Once again, it became realistic to demand the impossible.

Tired of the impersonality of monolithic institutions, the hollow trickery of careerist politics, and the grey monotony of work, disaffected middle-class youth raised the black flag of anarchy in London, Paris, Amsterdam,
Berlin, Chicago, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo. In 1968 the student rebellions were of libertarian inspiration. In Paris street posters declared paradoxically ‘Be realistic: Demand the impossible’, ‘It is forbidden to forbid’ and ‘Imagination is seizing power’. The Situationists called for a thorough transformation of everyday life. The Provos and the Kabouters in Holland carried on the tradition of creative confrontation. The spontaneous uprisings and confrontations at this time showed how vulnerable modern centralized States could be.

The historians took note. Daniel Guérin’s lively
L’Anarchisme: de la doctrine à l’action
(1965) both reflected and helped develop the growing libertarian sensibility of the 1960s: it became a best-seller and was translated into many languages. Guérin concluded that it might well be State communism, and not anarchism, which was out of step with the needs of the contemporary world, and felt his prediction fully vindicated by the events of 1968 in Prague and Paris.
⁷
Joll was obliged to acknowledge that anarchism was still a living tradition and not merely of psychological or historical interest.
⁸
Woodcock too confessed that he had been too hasty in pronouncing anarchism to be moribund. Indeed, far from being in its death throes, it had become ‘a phoenix in an awakening desert’.
⁹

The hoped-for transformation of everyday life did not occur in the seventies, but the anarchist influence continued to reveal itself in the many experiments in communal living in Europe and North America which attempted to create free zones within the Corporate State. The movement for workers’ control and self-management echoed the principles of early anarcho-syndicalism. The peace and women’s movements have all been impressed by the anarchist critique of domination and hierarchy, and have adopted to different degrees the anarchist emphasis on direct action and participatory democracy. The Green movement is anarchist in its desire to decentralize the economy and to dissolve personal and political power. Anarchists are influential in the fields of education, trade unions, community planning and culture. The recent trend towards more militarized, centralized and secretive governments has created a counter-movement of people who challenge authority and insist on thinking for themselves.

In the remaining authoritarian socialist regimes, there is a widespread demand for more self-determination and fundamental freedoms. In the independent republics of the former Soviet Union, the role of the State is once again back on the agenda, and young radicals are reading Bakunin and Kropotkin for the first time. Before the tanks rolled in, the student-inspired demonstrations in China in May 1989 showed the creative possibilities of non-violent direct action and led to calls for autonomous unions and self-management on anarchist lines.

In the West, many on the Right have also turned to anarchist thinkers
for inspiration. A new movement in favour of ‘anarcho-eapitalism’ has emerged which would like to deregulate the economy and eradicate governmental interference. Although in practice they did the opposite, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Britain tried ‘to roll back the frontiers of the State’, while in the USA President Ronald Reagan wanted to be remembered principally for getting ‘government off people’s backs’. The Libertarian Party, which pushes these ideas further, became the third largest party in the United States in the 1980s.

It is the express aim of this book to show that there is a profound anarchist tradition which offers many ideas and values that are relevant to contemporary problems and issues. It is not intended, like many studies of anarchism, to be a disguised form of propaganda, attacking Marxist and liberal critics alike, in order simply to establish the historical importance and relevance of anarchism. Nor does it offer, as David Miller’s recent work does, an account of anarchism as an ideology, that is to say, as a comprehensive doctrine expressing the interests of a social group.
¹⁰

Demanding the Impossible
is primarily a critical history of anarchist ideas and movements, tracing their origins and development from ancient civilizations to the present day. It looks at specific thinkers but it does not consider their works merely as self-contained texts. It tries to place the thinkers and their works in their specific historical and personal context as well as in their broader traditions.

Where one begins and who one includes in such a study is of course debatable. It could be argued that a study of anarchism should begin with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first self-styled anarchist, and be confined only to those subsequent thinkers who called themselves anarchists. Such a study would presumably exclude Godwin, who is usually considered the first great anarchist thinker, as well as Tolstoy, who was reluctant to call himself an anarchist because of the word’s violent associations in his day. It would also restrict itself to certain periods of the lives of key individual thinkers: Proudhon, for instance, lapsed from anarchism towards the end of his life, and Bakunin and Kropotkin only took up the anarchist banner in their maturity.