INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP

Communicating Community: Anarchism and Its Boundaries

Monday, 8th of July 2019, Sala del Torrino (Villa Salviati)

Organizers: Oscar Broughton (Freie Universität Berlin), Pascale Siegrist and Arturo Zoffmann Rodríguez (European University Institute)

This workshop seeks to bring together historians of different subfields – social, political, intellectual and cultural history – working on anarchism. As an attributed label or a self- description, the term “anarchist” has proven extremely powerful. However, its pithiness has also served to obscure its many meanings. Directed against collectivities such as the state or institutionalised religion, anarchism proposed alternative visions of community, up to the complete rejection of the idea of community as such. These visions were all but homogenous – arguably, this openness was also part of anarchy’s appeal.

In this workshop, we want to ask what people were doing when they were picking up the term (or not); how was it used to exclude enemies and to seduce its ideal socio-political base; we want to appreciate how the term became meaningful in different contexts and to explore both its integrative and its exclusionary potential. This implies paying special attention to turning points within larger trajectories such as individual conversions, schisms and conflicts within existing communities and the impact of concrete historical events on the spread of anarchist ideas.

“Communication” here designates the ways in which the belonging to “anarchism” was made explicit, from the construction of lineages of anarchist philosophy, up to mass propaganda and common practices and rituals. While we do not aspire at an overarching theory of anarchism at all times and in all places, our goal is to use historical examples of communicating anarchism and defining its boundaries to tease out its usefulness as an analytical term for historians.

Papers will address the following topics: - Begriffsgeschichten of anarchy and anarchism - The integration of “proto”-anarchists into anarchist theory - Processes of anarchist community-building (and exclusion), the role of social and intellectual networks - Anarchist communication strategies - Collective and individual anarchist identity formation - The setting up of boundaries between anarchism and other forms of socialism and syndicalism, as well as sub-divisions within the movement - The adaption, circulation and usage of the term in the non-Western world - The chronology and longue durée trajectory of anarchism and its changes of meaning

This workshop is kindly sponsored by the Graduate School Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute.

PROGRAMME

9.15 Arrival and Registration

9.30 – 11.00 Welcome and Introduction Oscar Broughton and Pascale Siegrist, European University Institute

Panel 1: Who’s an Anarchist? Contested Figures and the Canon Chair: Shiru Lim o John-Erik Hansson (Université de Cergy-Pontoise): “Was William Godwin an Anarchist?” – Some Genealogical Reflections on a long-standing Question o Tommaso Giordani (Tallinn University): Was Georges Sorel an anarchist? Anti-statism, Marxism, and modes of proletarian violence

11.00 – 11.30 Coffee break

11.30 – 13.00 Panel 2: Beyond Borders, Beyond Politics: Campaigning for Anarchy Chair: Uladimir Valodzin, European University Institute) o Oscar Broughton (Freie Universität Berlin / Humboldt Universität Berlin):“Guilds at home and abroad” - The National Guilds League in the fading era of Transnational Anarcho-Syndicalism o Constance Bantman (University of Surrey): Transpolitical Anarchist Networks: The Example of Jean Grave (1880s-1939)

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch

14.00 – 15.30 Panel 3: Anarchism Between Decentralisation and Globalisation Chair: Ana Maria Spariosu (European University Institute) o Robert Kramm (University of Hong Kong): Anarchist-Communism in Early-Twentieth Century Japan o Pascale Siegrist (European University Institute): Lev Mechnikov’s Global Anarchism

15.30 – 16.00 Coffee break

16.00 – 17.45 Panel 4: Anarchism in one Country? New Perspectives on the Spanish Case Chair: Marius Ostrowski o Arturo Zoffmann Rodríguez (European University Institute):The Shadow of October in the heat of July: The Memory of the Russian Revolution and Spanish Anarchist Identity, 1914-36 o Danny Evans (Liverpool Hope University): The CNT from Anarcho-Bolshevism to Bolshevisation, 1931-1937 o Jessica Thorne (Royal Holloway, University of London): 'Bending the Bars’: Anarchism, Anti- Francoism and the Spring of the New Left, 1950-1975

18.00 – 18.30 Roundup Discussion (Arturo Zoffmann Rodríguez)

20.00 Dinner at San Michele All’Arco Via dell’ Oriuolo, 3/red, 50122 Firenze FI 2

ABSTRACTS

Transpolitical Anarchist Networks: The Example of Jean Grave (1880s-1939) Constance Bantman, University of Surrey, UK

This paper will explore the functioning and impact of transpolitical anarchist networking and campaigning activities in the context of the Third Republic, centring on the remarkable example of Jean Grave, one of the most connected anarchists in France and internationally before 1914. This examination will highlight the integrative power of anarchist networks and campaigns over the course of several decades, through the examples of the protests against anti-anarchist repression during the 1890s and against ‘Spanish atrocities’ in the early 1900s, as well as upon the outbreak of the First World War. These were important moments for the integration and of anarchism into a broad progressive advocacy movement, with strong reputational benefits, which partly counteracted the marginalisation of anarchism in the same period. The paper will seek to define what (self-)perception of anarchism emerged from these campaigning and networking activities.

“Guilds at home and abroad” - The National Guilds League in the fading era of Transnational Anarcho-Syndicalism Oscar Broughton, Freie Universität Berlin

The National Guilds League (NGL) occupies an ambiguous and marginal position in history writing and one largely conceived it in terms of the British nation-state. This paper aims to expand this impression by examining the linkages and broader global contexts which shaped the NGL. In so doing it attempts to reposition the NGL into the larger frame of transnational anarcho-syndicalism which characterised the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Formed in the midst of the First World War the NGL (1915-23) was a composite alliance of activists, historians and trade unionists. Their aim was the furtherance of a new ideology, guild socialism, which had begun to emerge during the prewar years in Britain and would become largely extinct during the interwar period. Strong opponents of the dominant current of parliamentary socialism and the conventional nation- state, the NGL worked to develop an alternative vision for the future transforming and repurposing ideas of industrial democracy and nationalisation, and integrating them with conceptions of workers control and gender equality. These ideas spawned numerous practical experiments across a range of industries in Britain including housing, furniture production, agriculture, mining and postal services, and generated broad interest across the political spectrum. Despite drawing its membership primarily from within the UK and targeting British audiences, the appeal of the NGL was not limited to the UK. A minority of members were drawn from abroad, predominantly from within the British Empire, but also from the Americas, Europe and Asia. These actors were instrumental in the popularisation of guild socialist ideas, via the distribution of NGL publications and the creation of a large network of correspondence network with the NGL. This network precipitated the spread of further publications, the formation of various local supporting organisations, and a shared awareness amongst members and affiliates that the NGL was part of a much larger series of postwar conversations about the nature of socialism, capitalism and democracy.

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The CNT from Anarcho-Bolshevism to Bolshevisation, 1931-1937 Danny Evans, Liverpool Hope University

‘Anarcho-Bolshevik’ was a pejorative term used to describe the insurrectionist current in the CNT. Those who used it during the Second Republic tended to be anarchists keen to distance themselves from the ill- fated uprisings of 1933, and from subsequent attempts – associated chiefly with the Nosotros affinity group – to create a disciplined fighting corps at the heart of the movement. During the Spanish civil war, ‘Bolshevik’ retained its currency as an insult among anarchists, but was used primarily to describe the ways in which the movement’s entanglement with the Republican state had rendered its organisations bureaucratic and hierarchical. This paper will analyse the shifting meaning of ‘Bolshevik’ within the libertarian movement during this period, examine the basis for its use in the context of factional struggles, and what this implied for anarchist organising and the anarchist imaginary during the Republic and civil war.

Was Georges Sorel an anarchist? Anti-statism, Marxism, and modes of proletarian violence Tommaso Giordani, Tallinn University

To what extent is it possible to classify the work of Georges Sorel as belonging to the anarchist tradition? Sorel never claimed the label for himself, and though he was an active intellectual in the 1880s and the 1890s, he seldom commented on the political significance of the anarchist attacks which marked those years in France. However, if we cast aside the accusation of proto-fascism directed at him by an ageing historiographical tradition, he is mostly remembered as the “metaphysician of revolutionary syndicalism”, as Jean Jaurès once sarcastically labelled him: this association with syndicalism is, arguably, where the case for Sorel’s anarchism can be articulated most forcefully. And yet, despite the obvious commonalities, there remain substantial differences between syndicalist and sorelian rationales for proletarian violence. This paper addresses the question of Sorel’s anarchism by exploring different issues in a broadly speaking biographical approach. Firstly, I try to offer an illustration of the content and sources of one of Sorel’s lifelong political motives: anti-statism. Secondly, I briefly examine the evolution of Sorel’s revision of Marxism, highlighting not only the hidden connections to Italian anarchists, but stressing how it amounted essentially to a theory of class subjectivity based on the notion of collective agency. Thirdly and finally, I examine the notion of grève prolétarienne in Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, outlining its rationale as well as its generally overlooked differences with the conception of the general strike articulated by other French syndicalists such as Pelloutier and Pouget.

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“Was William Godwin an Anarchist?” – Some Genealogical Reflections on a long-standing Question John-Erik Hansson, Université Cergy-Pontoise

The question “Was William Godwin an anarchist?” seems to invite either a robust defence of Godwin’s presence in the anarchist ‘canon’, as its first modern exponent or as a form of Enlightenment ‘proto- anarchist’, or a demonstration of Godwin’s belonging to another tradition of (not-so-radical) political thought (e.g. utilitarianism, liberalism, etc.). Rather than doing either of those, I would like in this paper to investigate the question itself. Why have scholars and activists asked: “was William Godwin an anarchist?”? Building on three case studies of Godwin’s reception, I want to show some of the different ways in which Godwin’s perceived anarchism has been used rhetorically for political purposes in the last century or so in Europe and North America. I thus suggest that it is how Godwin can be represented and what he can be made to stand for which also explains his inclusion in the canon of anarchist thinkers. I therefore begin with Kropotkin’s discussion of Godwin and the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in the entry on “Anarchism” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910), considering Kropotkin’s attempts to circulate anarchist ideas in Britain in an intelligible local political idiom, showing how Kropotkin (re)constructs a British tradition of anarchism. I then examine the scholarly-cum-political debate between John P. Clark and Isaac Kramnick, which took place in the American Political Science Review in the mid- 1970s and ended with John Clark’s publication of The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin (1979), showing how identifying Godwin as an anarchist could be mounted as a an attack on or a vindication of anarchism as a whole in a period where Left-wing politics were being reconfigured. Finally, I turn to Godwin’s more recent inclusion in works seeking to popularise anarchism and anarchist (intellectual) history, such as Normand Baillargeon’s L’Ordre Moins le Pouvoir (2001). In so doing, I show how Godwin can be used to reconstruct the intellectual history of anarchism as a primarily and fundamentally rational political philosophy derived from ‘Enlightenment’ thought.

Anarchist-Communism in Early-Twentieth Century Japan Robert Kramm, Society of Fellows in the Humanities, University of Hong Kong

Anarchist-communism has been a thriving force in imperial Japan’s anarchist movement. This paper discusses the rich history of anarchist theory and practice in early twentieth century Japan, emphasizing debates about agrarianism, decentralization, and communal life in Japan’s very diverse anarchist movement. During the 1920s and 1930s, anarchists were among various competing and conflicting groups popularizing agrarianism, which also conservatives, folklorists, and fascists from the other end of the political spectrum fantasized as the last resort to maintain Japanese (agri-)cultural traditions in the wake of global capitalism. Despite sharing the disapproval of increasing industrialization as well as the ideal of the village commune as bulwark against domination and urbanization, anarchists departed from a spiritual and nationalist reading of agrarian countryside lifestyle. They developed revolutionary notions of nature, environment, and thus ultimately human existence that were much more progressive and scientifically argued than their conservative and fascist counterparts. They combined their notions of natural life with a critique against capitalist modes of production, class division, private property, and exploitation, and they placed their criticism in a global, trans-imperial struggle for liberation. In doing so, they simultaneously positioned themselves against established conservative and fascist agrarianism as well as Marxist dogmatism in the socialist movement. And despite their repression by the imperial state, they had offered a radical, universalist yet pragmatic way of being in autarchic farming village communes that corresponded with similar ideas and movements worldwide.

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Lev Mechnikov’s Global Anarchism Pascale Siegrist, European University Institute

The Russian geographer Lev Il'ich Mechnikov (1838 – 1888) is hardly regarded as a canonic figure in the history of anarchist thought. Both author and activist, Mechnikov was a correspondent and comrade-in- arms of better-known personalities in the movement – Bakunin, Reclus, Kropotkin to name just a few – with whose thought he has mostly been associated. In this paper, I want to argue that Mechnikov was more original than is commonly acknowledged. His 1866 article ‘Evolution and Revolution’ anticipated core arguments of Mutual Aid. Before Reclus, his La Civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques (1889) examined the political implications of environmental conditions from an anarchist point of view. If we connect this to his international biography taking him from Russia to the Middle East, to Italy, Japan (resulting in a detailed study of Japanese history and culture) and finally to Switzerland, a different picture emerges: that of a thinker trying to make anarchism a universal philosophy.

'Bending the Bars’: Anarchism, Anti-Francoism and the Spring of the New Left, 1950-1975 Jessica Thorne, Royal Holloway, University of London

In the autumn of 1967, a British iteration of the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC), a model of prisoner support born out of the revolutionary experience in Russia in 1917, was revived and reformed with the explicit purposes of organizing solidarity for anarchist prisoners inside Franco’s Spain. Its activity was divided into two tasks; first to provide material support, in the form of ‘food parcels and medical supplies’, and latterly to aid the Spanish Resistance movement with ‘everything it needs, including ‘print duplicators, typewriters and guns’. Within just months of its creation, Black Cross chapters had also emerged in Ireland, West Germany and Italy. This paper maps the long evolution of the ABC, from its roots in Franco’s prisons to its activation in Britain, and finally, to its diffusion across Europe during the Spring of ‘1968’. It will begin by assessing pre-existing political prisoner cultures during the gris decade of the 1950s and consider how these set in train new frontiers of resistance and political opposition to Franco throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Historians have argued that by this time the (largely) exiled Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) faced existential crisis and decline. Its old vitality in the workplace, once the strongest in Spain, had been lost and ceded to the Partido Comunista de España. This paper argues that the retreat of Spanish anarchism in the workplace, much emphasised in the historiography, neglects the eruption onto the scene of new forms of anarchist resistance to the regime, and the subsequent adoption and ‘domestication’ of this activity by actors external to Spain.

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The shadow of October in the heat of July: the memory of the Russian Revolution and Spanish anarchist identity, 1914-36 Arturo Zoffmann Rodriguez, European University Institute

After General Franco’s coup in July 1936, anti-fascist Spain was gripped with revolutionary fervour. In many areas, in Catalonia above all, the anarchists of the CNT (National Confederation of Labour) and the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation) were in the saddle. In the days that followed the outbreak of the war, Spanish libertarians discussed the possibility of using their considerable armed prowess to dismantle the battered remnants of the Republican state, establish “libertarian communism”, and wage revolutionary war against Franco. The argument was settled after a brief polemic on anarchism and power. Libertarians would not take power, but would share it out instead with other anti-fascist organisations. This momentous decision was driven both by pragmatic fears of isolation and failure and by ideological aversion to authoritarianism and power. In this paper, I historicise the Spanish anarchists’ rejection of power in July 1936. I move away from flat, static “tunnel visions” of the movement, to contend that anarchist ideology and identity were fluid and were conditioned above all by their negative dialogue with their political adversaries. Indeed, Spanish anarchist views on power had changed dramatically in the first decades of the twentieth century: from relative unconcern towards the matter before 1917, to enthusiastic endorsement of authoritarianism under Bolshevik influence in 1917-21, to an abrupt turn against the Soviet Russia in 1922, and a growing identification with traditional Bakuninist anti-authoritarianism, which paved the way for their rejection of power in 1936. I relate these shifts in Spanish anarchist identity to their competition with the reformist Marxists of the Spanish Socialist Party before 1917, with the Spanish Communist Party after 1921, and, after 1930, with various non-Stalinist communist organisations. I will argue the intense hostility to power that characterised anarchists in 1936 was largely shaped by their need to differentiate themselves from a variety of Marxist revolutionary organisations in a context of intense competition for a shared social base.

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