Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (96 page)

At the time, anarchism was making a much greater impact in Austria, Bohemia and Hungary: the radical wing of the Austro-Hungarian labour movement were deeply imbued with anarchist ideas. Joseph Peukert with his paper
Die Zukunft
also exerted an influence alongside Most’s
Freiheit.
The violent confrontations between anarchist and socialist workers and the police reached a climax in January 1884 when a state of siege was declared in Vienna. In the repression which followed, anarchist activists engaged in criminal activities were executed and Peukert left the country. Nevertheless, a few scattered anarchist groups survived in the Austrian Empire. The writers Jaroslav Hašek and Franz Kafka were both exposed to anarchist ideas in the bohemian circles of Prague before the First World War. Kropotkin’s memoirs became one of Kafka’s favourite books.

After 1884, it has been argued that anarchist ideas in Germany virtually vanished.
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But this is too severe a judgement. A group called Die Jungen (The Young Ones) developed about 1889 inside the Social Democratic Party; members included Rudolf Rocker, Bernhard Kampffmeyer (the future founder of the German Garden City movement), and Max Baginski, who eventually became editor of the
Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung
and one of Emma Goldman’s lovers. Their paper
Der Sozialist
turned expressly anarchist after Gustav Landauer became one of its editors.

Syndicalism also gained a foothold when a group calling themselves Localists formed a parallel grouping around 1892 within the Social Democratic trade unions and formed their own federation in 1897 called the Frei Vereinigung Deutscher Gewerkschaften. Before the First World War, they cut their ties with the German Social Democratic Party and rejected parliamentary politics like their French counterparts in the CGT. The federation was renamed the Frei Arbeiter Union at a congress in Dusseldorf in 1919 and became more distinctly anarcho-syndicalist. In the early revolutionary twenties, it grew fast and claimed a membership of 120,000 at the International Syndicalist Congress held in Berlin in 1923; the journal
Der Syndikalist
had for some time between 150,000 and 180,000 subscribers.
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The syndicalist movement began to weaken with the rise to power of the Nazis, and in 1933 it suffered the same fate as other left-wing organizations in Germany.

Apart from the influence of anarchism on the labour movement, Stirrer’s and Nietzsche’s ideas became fashionable in literary and artistic circles in the 1890s. Germany also produced in Gustav Landauer at the turn of the century the most important anarchist thinker in the country after Stirner. After joining the Berlin
Der Sozialist
as one of its editors, he attacked State socialism and called for a renewal of the organic community. He wanted to create, not to destroy — to develop alternative communities alongside or outside the State so that it would become obsolete. In general, he was opposed to indiscriminate violence – ‘every act of force is dictatorship’ – but not to revolution. His revolution was not merely directed to changing social structures but to transforming everyday life itself.

Landauer’s form of anarchism was not very influential at the time, partly because of the ‘literary’ nature of his language. But he was directly involved in one of the most notable episodes in then history of German anarchism during the Weimar Republic. In the Bavarian Revolution of 1918–1919, he became a ‘minister of education’ in the week-long Munich Council Republic which wanted to create a free and independent Bavaria. With the help of the anarchist poet Erich Mühsam, he also tried to organize ‘Revolutionary Workers’ Councils’. But it was crushed by troops sent from Berlin, and in the aftermath Landauer was murdered. Mühsam was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour; though he was released in 1924, he was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp ten years later.

With the rise of Nazism the German anarchist movement was destroyed. The cause however was kept alive by Rudolf Rocker, a bookbinder born in Mainz in South Germany, who went into exile in 1892. At the beginning of 1895, he left for England, where he chose to live amongst the Jewish community in the East End of London and edited the anarchist journal in Yiddish
Arbeter Fraint.
After being interned during the First World War as an enemy alien, he was deported in 1918 back to Germany where he became a leading figure in the German syndicalist movement, and initiated the founding of the syndicalist International (IWMA), which was set up in Berlin in 1922. He expounded the principles of anarcho-syndicalism, took up the cause of the Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Revolution, and in his most important book explored the link between
Nationalism and Culture
(1937). By his principled stand against Nazism, Rocker provided the link between the old anarchist movement in Germany and the new.

After the Second World War, there was a small but ideologically influential anarchist movement. East Germany groaned under a communist dictatorship which allowed no libertarian dissent, but in West Germany, in the early sixties, the New Left took on a libertarian aura. By the late sixties, the West German student movement had entirely rejected the old Marxist myths of class struggle and in Rudi Dutschke found an eloquent exponent
of anti-authoritarian struggle against bureaucracy and the State. In France, the German-born Daniel Cohn-Bendit became a student leader during the 1968 rebellion and took a distinctly anarchistic stand.

Like many German libertarians, Cohn-Bendit later joined the Green movement. Despite the parliamentary success of the German Green Party, there is a deepening rift between the libertarian ‘fundos’ who reject much of parliamentary politics and call for fundamental change and the ‘realists’ who seek political compromise. It is a split which resembles that of the German Social Democratic Party towards the end of the nineteenth century.

While the anarchist movement remains heterogeneous and fragmented, the ideas of anarchism are kept alive in a few journals, including the umbrella
Schmarzer Faden
, the anarcho-syndicalistic
Direkte Aktion
of the Frei Arbeiter Union (FAU), and the pacifist
Graswurzelrevolution.
The FAU was partly reinvigorated by Spanish ‘guest-workers’, but because the German State bars its members from holding jobs in the public sector, its work has mainly been in education and propaganda. The collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 and the subsequent reunification of Germany released a surge of libertarian hopes, but they may well be channelled to capitalist rather than anarchist ends. In the early 1990s, nationalism and authoritarianism were more visible revenants than the inheritors of the German anarchist legacy, although the latter are showing renewed vigour in the new century.

Elsewhere in Northern Europe, anarchism never found fertile ground like it did in the south except in Sweden and Holland. In Sweden, anarchists joined the Social Democratic Party in the 1880s as in Germany but were expelled in 1891. They then worked in the growing labour movement. By 1909, the Swedish anarcho-syndicalists were numerous enough to break away to form their own federation Sveriges Arbetares Central (SAC) on the French CGT pattern. By 1922 it had 32,000 members while its counterpart in Norway — Norsk Syndikalistik Federasjon — had 20,000. But while the Norwegian federation fell away, the SAC has continued with its daily paper as a significant force within the Swedish labour movement and has helped maintain the syndicalist International Working Men’s Association. Although they have accepted a form of collective bargaining, the Swedish syndicalists still keep clear of political activity and defend the local syndicates as the centres of union power.

Holland has developed one of the most original anarchist movements in Europe. In the first International the Dutch delegates supported Bakunin and the anti-authoritarians against Marx and the General Council and went on to affiliate to the Saint-Imier International. In the 1880s a growing Dutch anarchist tendency was felt in the socialist movement led by the ex-pastor Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. Nieuwenhuis helped found the Social Democratic League in 1881 which devoted itself to organizing the trade union movement and to anti-war campaigns. Although Nieuwenhuis was elected to parliament as a socialist in 1888, he rapidly became disillusioned. Before French syndicalism had got underway, he started to call for direct action and the general strike as a means to oppose war and bring about the social revolution. He played an important role in international congresses, and tried to hold together the anarchist and socialist wings of the labour movement.

Nevertheless, Nieuwenhuis openly opposed the reformists at the Zürich Congress in 1893 by arguing that war between the nations should be turned into an international revolutionary struggle between classes with the general strike as the principal weapon. After the congress, he wrote
Socialism in Danger
(1894), categorically rejecting the conquest of political power and stressing that liberty is ‘the faculty of allowing each to express his opinion freely and to live according to that opinion’.
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Nieuwenhuis followed Bakunin in arguing that ‘libertarian socialism’ came from France while ‘authoritarian socialism’ was born in Germany. In 1898 he founded the anarchist paper
De Vrije Socialist
(The Free Socialist) which continues to be published as
De Vrije.

In 1893 a split occurred in the Social Democratic League, with the minority leaving the anarchist majority to form the Social Democratic Party. In the same year the syndicalist Nationaal Arbeids Secretariaat (NAS) was founded. Nieuwenhuis was never an active supporter, but Christaan Cornelissen played a major part in the international syndicalist movement until he supported with Kropotkin the allies at the outbreak of the First World War. At first the NAS led the running in the Dutch labour movement, although it lost most of its membership to the reformist trade unions after the failure of a general strike in 1903. After the First World War it began to expand again, and in 1922 it could boast 22,500 members at the Syndicalist Convention in Berlin which founded the syndicalist International Working Men’s Association. But it was in the process of being taking over by communist sympathizers. When the anarcho-syndicalists split away in the following year to form the Nederlandsch Syndicalistisch Vakverbond they were unable
to maintian their momentum, despite the efforts of Albert de Jong and Bakunin-specialist Arthur Lehning who edited
De Syndicalist.

While anarcho-syndicalism in Holland faltered after the 1903 strike, Dutch anarchist thinkers have been particularly influential this century. After the First World War, Nieuwenhuis’ anti-war propaganda appeared to have influenced a new generation of anarchists, mostly former Christian pacifists. The central figures were Albert de Jong and the ex-pastor Bart de Ligt, who published the monthly
Bevrijding
(Liberation) in the 1920s and 1930s. Other prominent activists were Clara Wichmann, a lawyer who sought to reform the criminal law and abolish prisons, and Kees Boeke, a Christian anarchist who in the late twenties started a free school called De Werkplaats (The Working Place), which still survives and boasts Queen Beatrix as a former pupil.

De Ligt’s essay on war and revolution
The Conquest of Violence
(1937) was widely influential, especially in the English-speaking world. His slogan ‘the greater the violence, the weaker the revolution’ became a rallying-cry for pacifists. He advocated passive resistance, non-cooperation and civil disobedience (including the general strike) against regimes preparing for war and foreign invaders. Modern warfare, de Ligt argued, is total warfare, so that the ‘in every country the political and military directors are absolutely the enemies of the entire population’. In his view barricades are usually raised by those who wish to rule; do away with governments and ‘govern ourselves in reasonable fashion, and all barricades will be superfluous’.
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It was this message which reached a new generation of anarchists in the fifties and sixties. Peter Heintz in
Anarchismus und Gegenwart
(1951) noticed the death of the traditional anarchist movement in Holland, but saw a ‘quiet anarchist revolution’ taking place in society and culture. In the early sixties the monthly
Buiten de Perken
(Beyond the Limits) with an anarcho-syndicalist background began to appear. Nieuwenhuis and de Ligt were rediscovered. Then the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Dada, and the ‘happenings’ of Robert Jaspar Grootveld against consumerism helped trigger off the ‘Provo’ movement.

The Provos set out to provoke the staid burghers of Amsterdam and upholders of the Dutch State. In their journal
Provo
, they announced a series of White Plans to deal with city problems. These included the White Bicycle Plan, which set up a number of white bikes around the city to be used communally; unfortunately, and perhaps predictably, many were stolen. They also mooted the White Chicken Plan (
kip
, or chicken, is slang for policeman); this would have seen policemen dressed in white uniforms and had them distributing contraceptives.
Provo
(which as a monthly reached a circulation of ten thousand) regarded anarchism as the ‘inspirational source of resistance’ and wanted to revive anarchism and to teach it to the
young.
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The happenings and demonstrations of the Provos reached its climax in a violent confrontation with the police during a royal wedding on 10 March 1966.

While the Provos engaged in local elections in 1966 and won one seat on the municipal council of Amsterdam, the ‘death of Provo’ was declared on May 1967. In the light of the growing institutional tendencies in the Provo movement, its funeral was very libertarian. Nevertheless, Provo had proved a catalyst in the quiet revolution. Roel van Duyn, the principal Provo theorist, who took over the seat in Amsterdam municipal council in 1969, and who had written enthusiastically about Kropotkin, then helped launch Kabouter (elf).