Graham - We do not fear anarchy, we invoke it : the First International and the origins of the anarchist movement

On September 28, 1864, delegates representing European workers met at Saint Martins Hall in London, England, to create the International Workingmens Association (the International or IWMA). Stirring speeches were given regarding the fraternity of peoples and the cause of labour. But, who would have suspected that from this organization would ultimately spring an international anarchist movement? After all, none of the delegates identified themselves as anarchists and there were no recognizably anarchist movements in Europe at the time.

The stated purpose of the organization was not even to create an international revolutionary movement, but to provide support for workers across national boundaries in their struggles against an increasingly international capital. In response to strikes in England and France, capitalists were bringing in lower-paid blacklegs, or scabs, from other countries to replace striking workers, foiling attempts to improve working conditions. Work was also being sent abroad to countries with lower wages and workers who could be more easily exploited.

Yet, by 1872, when the anarchist Michael Bakunin (18141876) and his associate, James Guillaume (18441916), were expelled from the International at the instigation of Karl Marx (18181883), a significant portion of the Internationals constitutive associations had adopted an anarchist stance. Those associations reconstituted the International along antiauthoritarian lines and provided the foundation for an international anarchist movement.

The purpose of this book is to describe how this came about. I do not pretend to present a work of original scholarship. My goal is simply to present a historical narrative, which, unlike other works on the International, focuses on the anarchist currents within the organization and how, from these various currents, an international anarchist movement emerged in the early 1870s. In the process, I will be referring to some original documentation neglected in other works on the subject. My hope is to dispel some common misconceptions and sometimes misrepresentations regarding the ways in which anarchist ideas spread within the International, leading to the creation of avowedly anarchist movements, primarily in France, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, but also in Russia, Germany, and the Americas.

Before the International was founded in 1864, there were people who sometimes identified themselves as anarchists, but it would be difficult to describe them as forming part of an anarchist movement. One of the premises of this book is that anarchism only assumed the status of a genuine movement after people with anarchist sympathies became involved in popular struggles, starting with the struggle of European workers for self-emancipation. Consequently, I distinguish between anarchism as a body of ideas and anarchist movements.

In the first chapter, I survey the various anarchist currents in Europe that predated the International. I do this in order to show that anarchist ideas had already emerged in Europe, particularly during the revolutionary struggles that swept across the continent in 18481849, and to demonstrate what influence, if any, they had on the emergence of anarchist tendencies in the International.

Despite the focus of this book, I do not agree with the view that anarchism can only be conceived as a historically embodied movement or movements having a common genesis in the struggles within the International between the so-called authoritarians (Karl Marx, his allies, and the Blanquists, followers of the French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui) and antiauthoritarians (Bakunin and his associates). Such a genealogical or historicist approach conflates anarchism as a body of ideas with anarchism as a movement. It results not only in a Eurocentric approach to anarchism, but one that excludes from the anarchist pantheon even those European anarchists who were active prior to the founding of the International, such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (18091865) and Joseph Djacque (18211864).

This approach also precludes the possibility of anarchist ideas and movements emerging independently at different times and places in different circumstances. If during an era of social upheaval in China around 300 CE, a Daoist like Bao Jingyan expressed views substantially similar to those expressed 1500 years later by European anarchists during another era of social upheaval, and the latters views are generally accepted as anarchist, then there is no reason why Bao Jingyan cannot be described as an anarchist too.

Bao Jingyans motto was Neither Lord Nor Subject, which is remarkably similar to the nineteenth-century anarchist battle cry, Neither God Nor Master. As with later self-proclaimed anarchists, Bao Jingyan opposed hierarchy and domination, seeing them as the cause of poverty, crime, exploitation, and social conflict; rejected religious beliefs that justified such a state of affairs; looked forward to the revolt of the masses; and advocated a voluntary society without rank or status, and the inequalities of wealth and power that inevitably accompany them. If adherence to such beliefs by a European worker or intellectual in the nineteenth century qualifies them as an anarchist, then so should Bao Jingyan should qualify as well, despite the temporal and geographical distances that separate them.

In order to determine whether someones views, or a movement, can be described as anarchist, an analytical approach is unavoidable. One must come up with some identifying or defining characteristics of anarchist doctrines and movements that distinguish them from other ideas and movements. One cannot simply rely on self-identification. Just because someone claims to be an anarchist does not make it so. By the same token, just because someone never identified him- or herself as an anarchist does not mean that his or her ideas cannot be qualified as anarchist.

Neither can anarchism be reduced to the ideas (and actions) of particular individuals. This sometimes leads to the fallacy that anarchism is whatever particular anarchists say it is, regardless of their personal idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies, and foibles; or, worse, that anarchism is whatever these individuals said and did, before they identified themselves as anarchists (Bakunin) and after they had ceased to do so (Proudhon). If anarchism is nothing but the sum of all the ideas and actions of everyone who ever identified themselves as anarchists, then anarchism would simply be an incoherent mishmash of contradictory ideas and approaches.