Strategy (51 page)

This notion of the “propaganda of the deed” reflected Bakunin's growing impatience with theory and a conviction that only dramatic action could
penetrate the dim consciousness of the befuddled masses. Here the aim was to show how the peasants could be rid of their shackles. If only they could see the vulnerability of the existing order, their best instincts would kick in and the uprising would follow. Because the sort of deeds chosen by anarchists to stir up the masses often involved assassination, Bakunin came to be viewed as the intellectual father of radical terrorism. A key part of Marx's indictment against Bakunin was his association with Sergei Nechayev. Bitter, ascetic, and militant, Nechayev took nihilism to destructive extremes, claiming the right and obligation to do anything in the name of the cause (a conclusion he did not solely reserve for revolutionary business). On meeting Bakunin in Switzerland in late 1868, he claimed to have escaped from prison and to represent a Russian revolutionary committee. This led Bakunin to proclaim him a member of the Russian Section of the World Revolutionary Alliance (number 2771).
²⁹

The next few months were disastrous for Bakunin. Later he rejected Nechayev's brutal philosophy. Despite allegations to the contrary, he probably did not coauthor some of Nechayev's starker publications, which celebrated the role of “poison, the knife, the noose” and spoke of the purifying effects of “fire and sword.” The “massacre of personages in high places,” Nechayev claimed, would create a panic among the ruling classes. The more the mighty were shown to be vulnerable the more others would be emboldened, leading eventually to a general revolution. Nechayev's most notorious publication was the
Catechism of a Revolutionary
, which opened: “The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion; the revolution.”
³⁰
It was the revolution alone which distinguished between good and evil. In the end Bakunin, beguiled by a young man whose energy and militancy offered hope for the future, did not break with Nechayev because of his philosophy but because of an abuse of hospitality. Nechayev took off with his money, issued gruesome threats to a publisher on his behalf, attempted to seduce Herzen's daughter, and murdered a fellow student to protect his own reputation.

Bakunin died in 1875, exhausted and disillusioned, his revolutionary energy sapped and his dreams dashed. Though he left behind substantial movements in Italy and Spain, as well as Russia, the immediate legacy lay in the pursuit of the “propaganda of the deed.” This focus on deeds as a spur to revolt demoted words, and resulted in even less attention being paid to the arts of persuasion. For example, the Italian Errico Malatesta, who discovered the writings of Bakunin in 1871, was explaining five years later how “the
revolution consists more in deeds than in words … each time a spontaneous movement of the people erupts … It is the duty of every revolutionary socialist to declare his solidarity with the movement in the making.” Although Malatesta later argued against anarchist terror, at the time the language was forceful. A “river of blood” separated the movement from the future as they sought to destroy all existing institutions.
³¹
Having urged an insurrectional approach on the Anarchist International, he then went off to make his propaganda through deeds, turning up in villages in Campania with an armed band, burning tax registers, and declaring the end of the monarchy. Malatesta and his followers were soon arrested. Yet Malatesta was noted for his analytical and debating skills, evident when it came to influencing juries in political trials. A police informer described him as seeking to “persuade with calm, and never with violent language.” He deliberately avoided “the pseudoscientific phraseology, violent and paradoxical turns of phrase or verbal abuse that were the stock-in-trade of so many of his fellow anarchists and socialists.”
³²

Thereafter he moved around Europe as well as Argentina, Egypt, and the United States, fomenting rebellion where he could and debating the character of the good society and how to overthrow the old order without using power or creating a new power in its place. Later in his long life he deplored indiscriminate terror, insisting that only justifiable violence would support liberation. “One thing is certain,” he wrote in 1894, “that with a number of blows of the knife a society like bourgeois society cannot be overthrown, being built, as it is on an enormous mass of private interests and prejudices and sustained, more than it is by force of arms, by the inertia of the masses and their habits of submission.”
³³

The heated language of revolution, however, never encouraged a sense of limitation when it came to force. The International Anarchist Congress, held in London in 1881, urged exploring all means for the “annihilation of all rulers, ministers of state, nobility, the clergy, the most prominent capitalists, and other exploiters,” with special attention to be paid to the study of chemistry and the preparation of explosives. The German anarchist Johann Most argued in the spirit of the Jacobins for the extermination of the possessing classes. In his pamphlet entitled “The Science of Revolutionary Warfare: a manual of instruction in the use and preparation of Nitro-Glycerine, Dynamite, Gun Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc, etc.,” he wrote: “In giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe, science has done its best work. A pound of this stuff beats a bushel of ballots all hollow.” Assassinations became regular. Starting with Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the assassins took out a French president, a Spanish prime minister, an Italian king, and a U.S. president (McKinley), failing with the German
kaiser. The murder of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in August 1914 provided the trigger for the First World War. An association between anarchism and terror was established and endures to this day, despite the best efforts of its adherents to stress its gentler and more humane aspects.

The novelist Joseph Conrad wrote perceptively about the anarchists and the circles in which they operated. In his note to
Under Western Eyes
, he commented on how the “ferocity and imbecility” of autocratic rule provoked the “no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institution.”
³⁴
His most famous characterization of the futile revolutionaries of his time was in
The Secret Agent
, published in 1907. The most notorious character was the bomb-maker known as the Professor (in fact a reject technician from a chemistry department) who lusted after the perfect detonator. By wiring himself up to explode, the Professor concluded that he had rendered himself untouchable by the police. Yet behind his “sinister loneliness” was a “haunting fear” that the people were too feeble to overthrow the established order. He was frustrated by the “resisting power of numbers, the unattackable stolidity of a great multitude.” He bemoaned the fact that the “social spirit of this people is wrapped up in scrupulous prejudices, and that is fatal to our work.” To break the “worship of legality,” he sought to trigger repression.

The most sinister figure in the book agreed. This was not an anarchist, but Vladimir, from an unnamed embassy clearly meant to be Russia's. To Vladimir, England was a weak link in the fight against terror. “This country,” he complained, “is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty.” What was needed, he concluded, was a “jolly good scare” for which this was the “psychological moment.” What would be the best sort of scare? Attempts on monarchs or presidents were no longer so sensational while attacks on churches, restaurants, and theaters could easily be explained away. He wanted “an act of destructive ferocity so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable; in fact, mad? Madness alone is truly terrifying.” And so by this reasoning he identified his target as “the first meridian.” The hapless Adolf Verloc was told to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The book was based on a real incident of 1894, in which the building was not touched but the bomber was blown to pieces. Conrad described this episode as “a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought.” In his book neither the Professor nor Vladimir are able to trigger the repression they sought and the story becomes one of individual tragedy.
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Anarchism was not solely about individual terror. Notably, a genuinely popular mass movement was developed in Spain during the first decades of the twentieth century. Anarchism was a formidable presence on the Left in Spain, more so than communism. It came in a variety of forms, including strong syndicalist tendencies among the workforce. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) was formed in 1911 and a decade later it had over a million members. It shunned politics and committed itself to direct action in the economic sphere, denouncing all forms of power. Politics was never far away, however. There was sufficient organization to have all members agreeing that after appropriate branch discussion they were bound by the majority view. Unsurprisingly for a movement of such a size, it soon had an extremist wing, ready to engage in violent insurrection, and a moderate wing, prepared to do deals with employers and the state. In the early 1930s, the extremists, having organized themselves into an effective Bakunin-type conspiracy within the CNT, supplanted the moderates. This was a time of growing social unrest, and the movement began to face real choices. The consequences of their actions were evident and not merely theoretical.

Having abstained in the 1933 election, and let in a right-wing government, many members voted in 1936 in support of the leftist Popular front. Then came General Franco's coup against the Republic. The resistance was led by the CNT, with its members to the fore in running areas on collectivist principles controlled by the Republic. The harsh realities of power began to intrude. The first choice was whether to dissolve the local government in Catalonia and set up what would be in effect an anarchist dictatorship or work with the sort of institutions they had always denounced. The leadership chose collaboration. As Franco's forces gained ground, the CNT leadership accepted the need for a united front with the socialists and was soon requiring its members to follow a party line. On entering government, the CNT paper observed that because anarchists were now ministers, the state was no longer oppressive. There was conscription and demands for strict military discipline, while the social experiments (some of which had been successful) were halted. In practice, an army composed of militias, each with their own political sponsor, was always likely to lead to factional in-fighting. As the more disciplined force, and with the Republic increasingly reliant upon Soviet support, communists soon dominated the officer corps.
³⁶
Eventually the communists, with Soviet backing, turned on the anarchists and a civil war within the civil war began. To anarchism's association with terror, the experience of Spain added an association with futility and ineffectuality.

Anarchists might see with great clarity the temptations and perversions of power, as well as its incompatibility with their ideal society, but they were unable to demonstrate how to function effectively without it. When an opportunity came to exert influence over human affairs, they either had to forget their past strictures against accepting positions of power or let others who were less squeamish about power take their chance. The anarchists understood how the means employed shaped the ends achieved, but by ruling out all effective means as potentially corrupting, they were left waiting for the people to take an initiative that they could support. There was, as Carl Levy has noted, something paradoxical about this reluctance to take power because the anarchists, more than most, “relied on its leaders (local, national and international) to help preserve institutional continuity.”
³⁷
But leaders who had to pretend that they were not leading could not provide strategic direction. Indeed, a refusal to address directly the possibilities of power precluded the possibility of a serious strategy leaving them only the role of angry critics. The question of leadership thereafter continued to divide the Left, with two extremes on offer. On the one hand were the purists who dared do little more than nudge the masses in the right direction; at the other extreme were those who put themselves firmly in the vanguard of change and insisted that there was no other way forward than the one which they set.

The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past
.

—Frederic Engels,
1895

E
NGELS'S LAST PUBLISHED
work, which appeared a few months before his death in 1895, is sometimes known as his “testament.” That was not how he viewed it, but it was nonetheless a reflective piece, using the republication of Marx's 1850
Class Struggles in France
to comment on the changing fortunes of the working-class movement during the second half of the century. The political significance of the piece was that it was used by the leadership of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) to justify the parliamentary strategy they had been following, with some success, and to warn against violent revolution. Because of Engels's singular authority, those who continued to yearn for a more militant approach to revolution found it troubling. They could argue, with some justice, that Engels had been put under pressure by the SPD hierarchy to tone down his language because a new antisubversion law was under consideration. Yet despite insisting that he was not ruling out force, and that the more optimistic aspects of his analysis only truly applied to Germany, he acknowledged that his views on socialist strategy had changed significantly since 1848. Then revolution was seen as a “great decisive battle,” that once commenced would continue, no doubt
at length and with many vicissitudes until it concluded with the “final victory of the proletariat.” Almost fifty years on, however, a street-fighting insurrectionary victory over a regular army could only be envisaged as a rare exception.