La Internacional Anarquista
Anarchist Internationale
At the time of the labor movement in the 19th and 20th century, Europe was divided into a great number of more or less important ideologies and organisations. Anarchism represented a marginal current among them.
Not all the workingmen of the period from 1871 to 1914 can be distributed among Socialism, Clericalism, and non-political trade-unionism, though a large majority of the whole class and the mass of skilled laborers fit into one or another of these three categories. Yet one more group remains to be mentioned — the disciples of Anarchism.
Modern Anarchism like modern Socialism was a product of the Industrial Revolution: both started as more or less systematized theories on the part of reforming middle-class but from each other the two differed fundamentally in their means of attaining that goal. Socialism would employ a democratic government. Anarchism would employ no compulsory government of any sort.
William Godwin (1756-1836), a shy and retiring ex-parson, who lived in England during the period of the French Revolution, has always been acclaimed as the father of philosophical Anarchism, but his learned work, The Inquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793), was hardly simple enough in argument or style to make a popular appeal to day-laborers.
A far more influential person — the one who coined the word "Anarchist" — was Pierre Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), a French contemporary of Karl Marx. Proudhon in 1840 published his first important book, What is Properly? The audacity of his answer, "Property is Theft," proved to be a spectacular commencement of his revolutionary career. With the proceeds of journalistic hack-writing he managed to keep body and soul together, and all of his spare time he gave to the "cause." In 1846 he published his greatest work, the System of economic contradictions or the Philosophy_of Poverty, a thoroughly Anarchistic work, to which Karl Marx promptly replied with a thoroughly Socialistic criticism, gayly entitled the Poverty of Philosophy. Proudhon took some part in the revolutionary movement of 1848 and served as a member of the Constituent Assembly. Between 1848 and 1850 he started four different newspapers, all of which were in turn suppressed as anarchistic and obnoxious. After the amnesty which Napoleon III granted to political offenders in 1860, Proudhon returned to France and died quietly at Passy in 1865.
Among famous Anarchists, Nietzsche has been reckoned a close disciple of Proudhon; Prince Kropotkin and Enrico Malatesta as "anarchist-communists"; Count Tolstoy as a "Christian Anarchist." Anarchistic doctrines also appear in the literary work of Ibsen, Zola, and Walt Whitman.
As to the employment of violence to work a transformation from capitalistic to anarchistic society — professed Anarchists have tended to separate into two hostile factions. One faction — a small faction, composed mainly of middle-class Radicals, intellectual and philosophical — adhered to Proudhon's preachments of peaceful propaganda.
The other — a growing faction — encouraged the use of terror and violence: a method whose earliest and most militant champion was a Russian revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876). Bakunin came of an aristocratic family in Russia, served in the tsar's army, and studied in Germany, where he accepted the philosophy of Hegel and got into touch with Mikhail young Radicals in Berlin. Journeying to Paris, he Bakunin made the acquaintance of Proudhon and the chief Polish exiles, and began his career as a revolutionary agitator.
It was not long before the irreconcilable differences of Marx and Bakunin became manifest: the former would secure economic reforms through political action and peacefully; the latter would improve the lot of the workingmen through general strikes — "direct action" without reference to government and with the help of terrorism.
The Anarchist International is rooted in the 1st International's (i.e. the International Workingmen's Association) conference at Saint-Imier, in The Swiss Confederation, 15-16 September 1872. At this conference it was decided an anarchist resolution denouncing all forms of political power, i.e. political/administrative and economically broadly defined. Also a solidarity and fellowship pact was decided upon by the delegates.
After the 5th Congress in September 1872, the International Workingmen's Association (IWMA) split, with the expulsion of the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume. The IWMA was dissolved after its 6th Congress.
After Bakunin's death in 1876 workingmen everywhere were far more inclined to join the Socialist parties than to become Anarchists, and for a score of years Anarchism of the Bakunin type was largely limited to secret conspiracies of revolutionaries engaged in terrorism against illiberal governments, such as isolated bomb outrages, and murderous attacks on representatives of royalty or on particularly objectionable capitalists.
The spirit underlying the numerous instances of Anarchistic violence occurring between 1871 and 1914 is clearly indicated in the following passage of the famous Revolutionary Catechism, written by Sergey Genadievich Nechayev, an associate of Bakunin: "The [revolutionary Anarchist] will use every means and every effort to increase and intensify the evils and sorrows, which must at last exhaust the patience of the people and excite them to insurrection en masse. By a popular revolution the [individual Anarchist] does not mean a movement regulated according to the classic patterns of the West, which, always restrained in the face of property and of the traditional social order of so-called civilization and morality, has hitherto been limited merely to exchanging one form of political organization for another, and to the creating of a so-called revolutionary state.
"The only revolution that can do any good to the people is that which utterly annihilates every idea of the State and overthrows all traditions, orders, and classes, as in Russia. With this end in view, the [revolutionary Anarchist] has no intention of imposing upon the people any organization whatever coming from above. The future organization will, without doubt, proceed from the movement and life of the people; but that is the business of future generations. Our task is destruction, terrible, total, inexorable) and universal."
It was not until the 1890s that Anarchism could be said to have made any considerable headway with the work of Revolution, and then not under the formal name of Anarchism, but rather under the more ambiguous designation of "Syndicalism". Starting in France, where Anarchist agitators got control of several trade unions {syndicats, as the French style them), Syndicalism rapidly spread among the laborers, particularly in the unskilled trades, in southern and central Europe, in Great Britain, in Australia, and, as the "Industrial Workers of the World," in the United States.
From usual trade-unionism, Syndicalism differed in that it would organize the workers by whole industries rather than by trades or crafts: thus, all men engaged in railroading, or even in transport work of any sort, would be brought into one mammoth body which could thereby achieve control over the entire industry. From Socialism, Syndicalism differed in the emphasis that it would place upon direct action, that is to say, upon the action which would bring immediate pressure upon the employer and which is opposed to political action or the betterment of conditions through legislative and other governmental intervention.
As "direct action" the Syndicalists would count the general strike and "sabotage," the latter being the destruction or spoiling of materials, the choking of machinery, and other crippling of the industrial processes so as to reduce or destroy the profits of the employer. In aims and tactics the Syndicalists were part and parcel of revolutionary Anarchism. Though in 1914 the number of Syndicalists throughout the world was distinctly inferior to the number of Socialists, they were making serious inroads upon Socialism and were beginning to appear to statesmen, ecclesiastics, and capitalists as enemies infinitely more dangerous than the Socialists.
The International Anarchist Conference, held in Paris on the 15th, 16th and 17th of May 1948, gave a new proof of the continuity of the Anarchist Internationale, which was founded in Amsterdam in 1907. The Conferetice invited all Federations, Groups and isolated comrades and the whole anarchist press to make people realize the practical existence of the Internationale.
After examining the general situation--with an eye to the position of the anarchist organisations and groupings in Europe and in the whole world - the Conference recognised the urgent necessity for an International commission of co-ordination.
The Anarchist International (IFA) was reorganized at a congress in Carrara (Italy) 31.08-05.09.1968. The purpose of the congress was, among other things, to create a world wide anarchist organization as an alternative to "Cohn Bendit et autres gauchistes", also called "the children of Marx". Anarchists were tired of people presenting basically marxist ideas as anarchism. In the following years, several congresses were organized. In 1997 the term Anarchist International (AI) was officially introduced, although mentioned several times before.
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