Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (88 page)

Anarchism at the turn of the century undoubtedly attracted many bohemian individualists, and for a while it became a broad cultural movement, giving expression to a wide range of social disenchantment and artistic rebellion.
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Jean Grave, amongst others, was suspicious of their importance, and certainly many were more interested in attacking bourgcois convention than in exploring social theory. The writer Laurent Tailhade declared ‘Qu’importe les vagues humanités, pourvu que le geste soit beau?’ (Of what importance are the vague expressions of humanity, as long as the gesture is fine?) – although he might have changed his mind after a bomb exploded in a restaurant where he was eating and he lost an eye.

Maurice Barrès, influenced by Nietzsche, wrote a series of novels called
Le Culte du moi
which expressed an anti-social individualism. In
L’Ennemi des lois
, he depicted the protagonists who became anarchists after studying Saint-Simon, Fourier and Marx but they withdraw to the country to cultivate their refined sensuality and practice universal benevolence. Jean Grave declared that it was an anarchism only appropriate for millionaires who could free themselves from existing laws.

In Switzerland during the First World War a group of artists, pacifists and radicals, including Hugo Ball and Richard Huelsenbeck, met in Zürich and launched the Dada movement, a unique blend of art and anarchy. It claimed to be a total negation of everything that had existed before, but was very much in the tradition of the medieval Heresy of the Free Spirit. The Romanian-born French poet Tristan Tzara explained in his
Notes pour la bourgeoisie
that the
soirées
at the Cabaret Voltaire and Galerie Dada ‘provided the possibility for the spectators to link for themselves suitable associations with the characteristic elements of their own personality’.
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Dada aimed at destroying through art the entire social order and to achieve through art total freedom. Marcel Duchamp was among the leading exponents of Dada in France before leaving for the United States. Many Dadaists became involved in the Berlin rising of 1918, calling for a Dadaist Revolutionary
Central Council on the basis of radical communism and progressive unemployment. Although Tzara became a Stalinist, the Dadaists influenced the Surrealist movement in France which developed in the 1920s, as seen in the characteristic declaration of 1925 ‘Open the Prisons! Disband the Army!’ which asserted ‘Social coercion has had its day. Nothing … can force man to give up freedom.’
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The antics of the artists and writers were a far cry from the struggles of the revolutionary syndicalists who were forging the Conféderation Générale du Travail in France at the turn of the century. Syndicalism not only redirected the impulses of the advocates of ‘propaganda by the deed’ but also took over many of the most positive ideas of anarchism.
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The origins of French syndicalism went as far back as the First International which had adopted the principle that ‘The emancipation of the workers shall be the task of the workers themselves.’ At the fourth congress of the International in Basel in 1869, it had further been argued by the French, Spanish, Swiss, Jurassian and Belgian delegates that the economic associations of the workers should be considered the social nucleus of the coming society. The advocates of this policy were strongly influenced by Bakunin who had asserted:

The organization of the new revolutionary syndicates therefore tried to reflect the organization of the new society; they were based on the principles of federalism and autonomy, recognizing the right of self-determination of each syndicate. Organized from the bottom up, the various committees in the federations acted merely as co-ordinating organs without any executive or bureaucratic power.

What distinguished the French anarcho-syndicalists from other trade unionists was their insistence that the movement should be completely independent of political parties and their refusal to participate in conventional politics. As the anarchist Emile Pouget succinctly put it, ‘The aim of the syndicates is to make war on the bosses and not to bother with the politics.’
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They insisted that the reconstruction of society must be carried out by the economic organization of the workers themselves. Their strategy was one of ‘direct action’ in the form of the boycott, labelling (buying goods from approved employers), sabotage, anti-militarist propaganda, and the strike in all its gradations.
The strike was considered to be the most important tactic, especially the general strike which took on mythic proportions.

As early as 1874 the Jura anarchist Adhémar Schwitzguébel had argued that the general strike would ‘certainly be a revolutionary act capable of bringing about the liquidation of the existing social order’.
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Enthusiasm for the general strike rapidly spread amongst anarchists involved in the labour movement and it was soon considered as the best means of bringing about the collapse of the State and ushering in the new society.

Georges Sorel, inspired by Proudhon and the syndicalists, maintained in his
Reflections on Violence
(1908) that class war invigorates society. He opposed ‘bourgeois force’ with ‘proletarian violence’, arguing that the latter has a purifying effect and enables the people to take possession of themselves. The general strike moreover is of value as a ‘social myth’, an article of faith which inspires the workers in their struggle. For Sorel, social myths are important since they are ‘not descriptions of things, but expression of a determination to act’. Although he later influenced Lenin, Mussolini and Action Française, he did not object to acknowledging himself an anarchist since ‘Parliamentary Socialism professes a contempt for morality’ and the new ethic of the producers.
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In the long run Sorel’s celebration of revolutionary will and proletarian violence had more influence on the Right than the Left. The syndicalist movement certainly did not think that the general strike was a myth, and Sorel had only a slight influence on syndicalist theoreticians. Although he earned a bloodthirsty reputation, he was in fact opposed to industrial sabotage and argued that syndicalist revolution should not be defiled by abominations such as terror which had sullied bourgeois revolutions.

The most constructive phase of anarcho-syndicalism was at the turn of the century when the French trade union movement separated into revolutionary and reformist sections. It found fertile soil in France because of its long revolutionary tradition and because the political leaders had so clearly betrayed the workers in the revolutions of 1789, 1830, and 1848. The general strike became an economic alternative to the barricades.
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Many anarchists such as Fernand Pelloutier and Emile Pouget joined the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and helped develop it in an anarcho-syndicalist direction. In 1895, the CGT declared itself independent of all political parties, and in 1902, it was joined by the Fédération des Bourses du Travail. Pelloutier became the secretary of the later, while Pouget edited the official organ of the CGT,
La Voix du Peuple.
The revolutionary Pouget was sufficiently impatient to maintain that there was a difference between
le droit syndical
and
le droit démocratique
, and that conscious minorities need not wait for majority approval of their action if it be intended to promote the interests of their fellow workers.
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After 1902, the CGT was organized into two federations of the Bourses du Travail (Labour Chambers) and of the Syndicate (syndicates or unions). The federation of Labour Chambers co-ordinated the activities of local syndicates. They had originally been set up to find jobs for workers, but soon became centres of education and discussion for all aspects of working-class life.

The syndicates had been formed in factories and, in some cases, in different branches of industry. Any syndicate, however small, had the right to be represented in the federation by a delegate chosen by itself. The confederal committee of the CGT which consisted of delegates from the labour chambers and the syndicates acted as a co-ordinating body and had no authority. Officers were kept to a minimum to avoid bureaucracy, and were instantly dismissible by the rank and file.
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Each section of the CGT was autonomous but each syndicate was obliged to belong to a local labour chamber or equivalent organization.

The revolutionary influence in the CGT grew to such an extent that its Charter of Amiens in 1906 pledged the organization to class struggle, political neutrality, and the revolutionary general strike. While trying to achieve the immediate improvement in the workers’ conditions, it was committed to

The adversaries of the CGT called it anarchist, but the militant Pierre Monatte claimed that it had no official doctrine and was independent of all political tendencies. Nevertheless, he was ready to admit that syndicalism had recalled anarchism to an awareness of its working-class origins. It was moreover ‘a school of will, of energy, and of fertile thinking’.
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But while the CGT engaged in a series of dramatic strikes, culminating in the campaign for an eight-hour day in 1906, it never attracted more than half of the total number of unionized workers in France and failed to provoke a revolutionary general strike. In the outcome, it tended to be pragmatic, appealing to a diverse work-force and trying to make the existing world more habitable.
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After 1914, the CGT became largely a reformist trade union movement and abandoned its anarcho-syndicalist principles.

The French CGT however left the broad outline of anarcho-syndicalist organization which was copied in most other countries. Workers organized themselves into syndicates according to trade or industry in a given locality.
The syndicates then federated horizontally with other syndicates in the same area (town or rural district) to establish a local federation; and vertically, with other syndicates in the same industry or craft. These federations then united into a confederation to co-ordinate the movement. Taking the CGT as his model, Rudolf Rocker argued that in a revolutionary situation, it would be the task of the Federation of Labour Chambers to take over and administer existing social capital and arrange distribution in each community, while the Federation of Industrial Alliances would organize the total production of the country.
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In practice, anarcho-syndicalism was to flourish most in Latin countries where there was little alternative for the labour movement other than revolutionary struggle.

The broader anarchist movement in France had an uneasy relationship with anarcho-syndicalism. The individualists and bohemians naturally wanted little to do with the unions. Amongst the anarchist communists, Jean Grave and
Les Temps Nouveaux
gave their qualified approval. The purist Sébastien Faure in
Le Libertaire
was at first hostile although he too came to tolerate it. The tension between the anarchists and the syndicalists came to the fore at the International Anarchist Congress held in Amsterdam in 1907. Pierre Monatte criticized the ‘revolutionarism’ of the pure anarchists which had ‘taken superb retreat in the ivory tower of philosophic speculation’.
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Emma Goldman replied that the syndicalists’ principle of majority rule cramped the initiative of the individual: ‘I will only accept anarchist organization on one condition. It is that it should be based on absolute respect for
all
individual initiatives and should not hamper their free play and development.’
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For his part, Malatesta voiced the concern of many anarchist communists that syndicalism had too simple a conception of class struggle and placed too much confidence in the general strike — a ‘pure utopia’ which could degenerate into a ‘general famine’.
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Syndicalism should be considered only as
a
means to anarchy, not
the
sole one.

The French anarchist movement, both its communist and syndicalist wings, reached its peak before the outbreak of the First World War. Faure and the individualist E. Armand remained true to their anti-militarist principles, but most anarchists either joined the army or declared their support for the allies. After the war, the apparent success of the Russian Revolution ensured that communists gained ground in the CGT. Anarcho-syndicalists and communists formed a revolutionary group which split away in 1921 to form the CGT Unitaire, but the communists gained the upper hand in the following year and aligned themselves with Moscow. The anarchists left to form the Comité de Defence Syndicaliste Révolutionnaire which claimed to represent 100,000 workers at the syndicalist IWMA founded in Berlin 1923. It lingered on until 1939 but was never able to make much headway amongst the working class. Outside the syndicalist
movement, a small band of ageing militants kept the anarchist message alive in a few papers with declining readership. Their international connections were maintained by the increasing number of anarchist refugees from the Soviet Union, Italy, Germany and Spain to seek asylum in France.