CHAPTER XVI. The International Anarchist Defense Committee

Parisian Anarchists first campaigned to save Sacco and Vanzetti through the International Anarchist Defense Committee (IADC) and latter through the Freedom for Sacco and Vanzetti Committee. This permitted the IADC to retain a broader focus. There was an unmistakable need for the IADC, given the oppression of anarchists in Russia under the Bolsheviks, in Italy under Mussolini, and in Spain under Primo de Rivera.

They defended Sacco and Vanzetti as victims of North American capitalism imprisoned because of their revolutionary activism among Italian exiles in the United States. Of course the American legal system tried to conceal its function as a tool of the ruling class and thus obscured the social and political content of the trial; it charged the Italian anarchists with armed robbery as a way to deceive American and world opinion. The goal of Paris’s Freedom for Sacco and Vanzetti Committee was to expose that deceit. The AnarchoCommunist Union (ACU) sponsored the group and two of ACU militants, Louis Lecoin and Severino Ferrandel, led it.

The Ascaso, Durruti, and Jover affair required a new initiative from the ACU and thus it created the Durruti-Ascaso-Jover Asylum Support Committee. Like Sacco and Vanzetti, the three Spaniards were charged with a common crime. Should the ACU defend the “illegalist” anarchists? They debated the question and ultimately took a much clearer stance than Argentina’s La Protesta. On April 2, 1926, the ACU publicized its views on “illegalism”:

Meeting on March 28, 1926, the International Anarchist Defense Committee, which is an extension of the ACU, declares its position on the core issue in the articles on “illegalism” recently published in Le Libertaire. We declare that “illegalism” is not synonymous with anarchism. Anarchism and illegalism represent two completely distinct systems of ideas and action. Only anarchism’s detractors would try to confuse the two, although their insidious purposes are easy to discern.

An illegalist act is not an anarchist act in itself: someone who is totally ignorant of and even antagonistic to our ideas can carry it out. Even if an anarchist or someone with anarchist sympathies commits it, the “illegalist” act does not immediately become an anarchist act because of the circumstances that provoke it, the spirit that animates it, or even how its proceeds are expended.

The International Anarchist Defense Committee states that the practice of “illegalism” has not materially contributed to the spread of anarchist ideas in France, except in a very weak measure. It has been exceedingly detrimental to our idea and, as a whole, more damaging than beneficial to the expansion and diffusion of anarchism.

Far from encouraging our comrades to become “illegalists,” the IADC calls their attention, particularly the youth’s attention, to the material and moral consequences implied by “illegalism:”

1. Those who refuse to work for a boss and try to support themselves through “illegalism” almost always pay with prison, deportation, or violent death as a result. Indeed, from an individual point of view, instead of enabling the individual to “live his life,” “illegalism” almost always leads him to sacrifice it.

2. Also, the “illegalist,” even the so-called anarchist “illegalist,” almost always slips down the slippery slope toward the adoption of bourgeois ways and slowly becomes an exploiter and parasite.

3. The comrade who supports himself through “illegalism” is forced to give up active propaganda and separate himself from all productive work, depreciating it and being disgusted by it, in such a way that he lives—because he doesn’t produce anything himself—by exploiting the work of others. Of course this is the “classical” form of capitalism.

We have clearly explained our position on “illegalism” in this statement, but also feel the need, and thus the obligation, to add that we do not condemn “illegalism” absolutely and without exception:

1. On the one hand, we are sympathetic to workers who, being reduced to the insufficient salaries they receive, break the law (there is no point in getting into details, since this is a matter for each individual, but this is caused by the need to survive, to feed one’s family, and perhaps also to support anarchist propaganda).

2. On the other hand, we approve of the “illegalism” practiced by certain individuals who selflessly carry out their acts for the purposes of propaganda. These men rob banks, transport companies, large industrial and commercial firms, and the very rich (for example, Pini, Duval, Ravachol, and many of our foreign comrades, particularly Spaniards, Italians, and Russians.) After committing what we call individual expropriation (a prelude to collective expropriation) they dedicate the benefits of their acts to propaganda, instead of keeping it for themselves and becoming parasites.

In conclusion, as members of ACU’s International Anarchist Defense Committee, and always faithful to the precedents set by other comrades, we declare that when Le Libertaire speaks of “honesty” and “work,” it does not invest those terms with the significance attributed to them by the bourgeois spirit and official morality.

We will not exalt those that the official morality and bourgeois mentality deem “honest workers;” those filled with the respect for property and who submissively and passively accept the conditions imposed upon them. Those workers are not anarchists, but totally the opposite, given their obedience to the rules of conduct that bourgeois morality assigns to the world of work. Anarchists oppose that type of “honesty,” which represents nothing but submission to the social iniquity forced upon the productive class. Anarchists advocate, encourage, and dutifully practice a different type of honesty. It is one that inspires the revolutionary passion among the workers, who will explode one day and usher in the Social Revolution. The working man will be liberated and, on the basis of free accord, will create a society made up of free individuals, equal and fraternal, in which “illegalism” will no longer exist because, with the state and capital abolished, there will be no more laws.[175]

The following individuals signed this resolution: Sebastián Faure, Duquelzar (Northern Federation), Le Meillour, Pedro Odeon, Louis Lecoin, L. Oreal, Marchal, Champrenoft, Jeanne Gavard, J. Giradin, Even, G. Bastien, Chazoff, Bouche, Broussel, F. Maldes, Darras, Lacroix, Delecourt, and Lily Ferré.

The above statement makes it clear what French anarchists meant when they said that Sacco and Vanzetti were “innocent,” just as Lecoin’s insistence on Durruti, Ascaso, and Jover’s “innocence” will also be clear. Unlike La Protesta, Le Libertaire did not appeal to bourgeois concepts of “honesty” but rather insisted on the right and obligation to revolt.

Lecoin commented on the origin of the campaign for the Spaniards:

I came home one evening in October 1926 and found a telegram urgently requesting my presence at the office of the Anarcho-Communist Union. A number of militants were already there when I arrived: Sebastián Faure, Ferrandel, and others. All were visibly shaken. Sacco and Vanzetti were in danger of being electrocuted. A telegram came from America asking us to go into action immediately.

What were we going to do? What could we try that we hadn’t tried already? A comrade proposed that we prepare to bury them honorably and avenge them.

“What I know,” I replied, “is that they still aren’t dead. And, since they’re alive, we should focus on practical measures that might save them. Until now, and for the last five years, we’ve only convinced those who could be convinced that they’re innocent. We’ve built a revolutionary campaign around those two names, instead of fighting to rescue them. Why don’t the liberal bourgeoisie, the CGT, and the Socialist Party join us in demanding freedom for Sacco and Vanzetti?

“What stops that from happening?” they asked me.

“Nothing, of course, except for our own clumsiness. We must reach out to the stragglers, knocking on their doors. It’s not about organizing an anarchist campaign, but about getting these two anarchists out of the electric chair.... That’s it and nothing more. And our role is to convince absolutely everyone that they have to take a stand.”

If nothing else, at least I convinced my comrades, who entrusted me with making all the necessary contacts, and gave me carte blanche to start a broad campaign in the name of the Sacco-Vanzetti Committee. Ferrandel, a big fellow, with a delicious southern accent, took me aside and said:

“It’s also essential that you take charge of Ascaso, Durruti, and Jover’s defense.”[176]