Aestheticising revolution

I examine anarchist debates in the U.S. concerning revolutionary violence before and after America joined the conflict in April, 1917, the strategies adopted by movement artists to address Statist violence and the cataclysm of war, and critiques of Communist violence during the Russian Revolution. Topics include reporter-artist Robert Minor's war coverage in the mass circulation New York Call newspaper (1915-16); Man Ray's 1914 painting War AD MCMXIV; the print portfolio Seven Ages of Man (1918) by Rockwell Kent; and critiques of war, capitalism and the State in the Blast, Mother Earth, Revolt and other publications. I track the ways in which anarchists, working across different sites of social engagement, condemned war as a Statist institution while promoting revolutionary violence in aesthetic terms as path to anarchism.

‘No man and no penny’: Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, anti-militarism and the opportunities of the First World War1

What can an antimilitarist anarchist do when war breaks out? In 1914 Dutch anarchist F. Domela Nieuwenhuis had a long track-record as an anti-militarist. During the 1870s as a radical liberal he had been inspired by Émile de Laveleye’s transnational solutions to prevent wars, but during the 1880s as a socialist he had learned to value the action of workers themselves. He now favoured the general strike and a general refusal to take up arms. During the 1890s he openly became an anarchist and combined his socialist means with the proposals of De Laveleye. In the international anarchist movement he became the leading expert on anti-militarism. Nevertheless, when war broke out, Domela Nieuwenhuis was empty-handed. His solutions were invalid if they were not reciprocally applied. Because of his anti-German prejudice it took him some time to find a truly internationalist stance. Moreover, the war prevented the re-establishment of the anarchist anti-militarist movement. In the end he hoped that a revolution in Germany would end the war, but when the revolution broke out in Russia he soon came to see that this means hardly could help the anarchist cause.

Saving the future: the roots of Malatesta’s anti-militarism

Is anti-militarism an essential or disposable feature of anarchism? The question can be addressed by examining the controversy over intervention in the First World War, in which Malatesta argued that anarchists were to “stand aside to save at least their principles—which means to save the future.” Tellingly, his arguments were the same by which he supported his anti-parliamentarianism. This shows how foundational those arguments were for his anarchism. They concerned the principle of coherence between ends and means, which in turn proceeded from awareness of the heterogony of ends and its twin sides: the unintended consequences of intentional action and the displacement of goals. Malatesta’s perspective ultimately rested on his methodological individualism, which took the form of voluntarism in the prescriptive domain. Malatesta’s foresight is best appreciated in retrospect, for his seeming defeatist attitude truly saved the future: it allowed anarchism to preserve its aims intact by keeping its means coherent with them.

Introduction

In 1903, as European tensions began to mount, Jean Jaurès, the leader of the French Socialist Party, declared his faith in the possibility of securing a peace that was ‘profound, durable, organised and definitive’. The two ‘great systems of alliances’ which, for now, merely held each other in check, would produce strong and lasting friendships; democracy was extending across the continent and it would not be long before ‘all human groups from Finland to Ireland, from Poland to Alsace’ would discover their ‘moral affinities’ and find ‘reciprocal security’ through disarmament....

At war with empire: the anti-colonial roots of American anarchist debates during the First World War

America’s multi-ethnic anarchist movement had a rich history of supporting anti-imperial struggles and national revolutions. The three positions that anarchists took on the war—antimilitarist neutrality, qualified support for the Allies, or calculated endorsement of a German defeat of Russia—all had their roots in earlier discourses regarding anti-colonial and nationalist causes. They also engaged in a running dialogue with anarchists in Europe such as Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta. Drawing on American anarchist writings in English, Italian, Spanish, and Yiddish, this chapter outlines the earlier positions anarchists took regarding struggles such as Middle Eastern and South Asian independence movements, the Boer War, the Cuban War of Independence and Spanish-American War, and Zionism and Jewish territorialism. It then examines how the different anarchist factions drew on these previous discussions to make anti-imperialist arguments in support of their stances, and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of these arguments.

The French anarchist movement and the First World War

This chapter examines the heated debates within the French anarchist movement after the outbreak of the First World War, leading up to the 1916 Manifesto of the Sixteen and the Russian Revolutions of 1917. It focuses on the movement’s shift from a near-unanimous anti-militarist stance to a more equivocal one, with significant voices being heard in support of interventionism. What were the arguments deployed by the supporters of the Union Sacrée, and how much did they owe to the influence of Peter Kropotkin? Crucially, could the revolutionary project of the anarchists co-exist with participation in the war effort, or did the war in fact expose the growing integration of the working classes into the nation, defusing their revolutionary potential? The chapter then examines how the anarchists’ varied attitudes to the national war effort largely determined their differing responses to the two Russian revolutions of 1917. It concludes that the failure of the movement to prevent the mobilisation of 1914 was a watershed for the French anarchist movement, provoking some profound soul-searching about the state of the movement and, specifically in relation to war, a much less ambitious attitude with regard to anti-militarist positions and tactics.

The Manifesto of the Sixteen: Kropotkin’s rejection of anti-war anarchism and his critique of the politics of peace

Most attention has been paid to anarchist opposition to the First World War. There were, however, anarchists who supported the Entente powers, wished to see Germany defeated, and opposed the anti-war movement. Peter Kropotkin and his French supporters were the most prominent of these. This chapter examines Kropotkin's challenge to the radical orthodoxies of his day and places it in the context of the development of thinking about war and peace in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It engages with the debate between him and his most prominent antagonist, Errico Malatesta, and suggests that Kropotkin's arguments, mainly based on the right to self-defence, his rejection of non-intervention, and his opposition to moral equivalence, were coherent and persuasive then and are still relevant for thinking about war and peace today.

Mutualism in the trenches: anarchism, militarism and the lessons of the First World War

This chapter examines the importance of the memory of the First World War to Herbert Read’s political thought, contextualising this process of memory formation through his interactions with two of the war’s leading literary figures: Richard Aldington and Erich Maria Remarque. Emphasising the importance of the post-war context in cultivating Read’s political reading of his experiences, it shows how the war continued to shape his political thought. Read’s experiences led to an abhorrence of violence and in turn a commitment to pacifism and gradualist tactics. Moreover, his time in the trenches led him to recognise the importance of ‘fidelity’ between members of a group in ensuring survival in times of extreme danger. Shorn of its militarist associations, this idea, Read argued, could helpfully bolster anarchist conceptions of organisation.

Beyond the ‘people’s community’: the anarchist movement from the fin de siècle to the First World War in Germany

This article interrogates the position of the anarchist movement towards state authorities and the mainstream society from fin de siècle to the end of the First World War in Germany. Looking both at its ideological contents and propagandistic means, the article interprets anarchism as a movement beyond the sphere of ‘legitimate politics’. During the late 19th century, the movement was perceived and represented as a both criminal and insane organisation that aimed at political murderer and social upheaval. With the early twentieth century, especially the anti-militarist aspect of the anarchist ideology arose the suspicion of the security organs. With the outbreak of war in August 1914, anarchist press largely fall prey to a rigorous censorship. Under military rule, many activists were imprisoned and others conscribed to the army, leading to the quasi extinction of the movement by the end of the conflict.

The anarchist anti-conscription movement in the USA

This paper explores the activities of The No-Conscription League in the U.S. in order to analyse the conceptual logic and the political strategy of the movement. The grounds of the anarchists’ opposition were not based on pacifism, but on the right to choose what to fight for. Contrary to contemporary images of anarchists as isolated extremists, the anarchists forged an effective coalition with socialists and other progressives. The connected their opposition to militarism and to capitalism with their support for birth control, because all three issues have to do with freedom to control one’s own body. They questioned conscription from the theoretical position of internationalism, as well as appealing to the rights of Americans to protect their liberties. They also critiqued the militarization of American society as a greater danger than those the war was intended to fight.