Chapter 1 : 1900–1939

1900–1939

Once again in history Anarchism is singled out by every reactionary force as its main enemy. World Governments, moving closer together against the common threat of the common people, fear a socialism unfettered by government ties, a class struggle without the limitations imposed by the parliamentary game, a working class without a leadership that aims at imposing authority either by a new dictatorship or by bourgeois parliamentarianism.

Before the First World War the main impetus to social revolution came from the anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist movements. However, following the defeat of the Russian Revolution with the triumph of authoritarian communism, world capitalism tended to concentrate its energies on destroying this apparent danger to its continued existence, thus giving the impression that the libertarian movement and its ideas were superfluous, or, at best, a side issue to the main struggle, so far as the organized working class was concerned. Only in a minority of countries did anarchism take the lead, elsewhere the very idea of freedom went into decline.

Capitalism, using the dictatorial methods of state communism wherever necessary, forced a situation where the apparent alternatives seemed to be (state) communism or fascism.

This did not prevent the anarchist movement from maintaining the intensity of the class struggle throughout the 1920s. It was the anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain (the CNT) which carried the whole weight of labor organization throughout the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (when the socialist leaders took office in order to try to boost the socialist UGT union at its expense) and during the equally perfidious republic which followed. In Italy, individual and collective libertarian attacks against Mussolini and his regime formed the main anti-fascist resistance. In France, anarchists fought a losing battle to keep the unions to their original syndicalist basis, while in the USA the IWW as the legatee to all that was libertarian and syndicalist in both the European and American traditions, fought a valiant battle against reaction. In the Argentine and Uruguay there were murderous assaults against the anarchist movement which fought on to maintain working class solidarity against the selfishness of the ruling class. In China, where the communist party sold out the proletarian revolution to follow the successful bourgeois revolutionists under Chiang Kai Shek, anarchists continued the struggle for workers’ councils on the same lines as those of the first German revolution in 1918 and the factory occupations in Italy. In Russia, the struggle was passing from the battlefields and the factories into the prison camps. In Britain, anarchists were prominent in the shop stewards’ movement and especially the unemployed workers’ movement.

All this maintained a movement that had reached a high point of international struggle before the first world war; but it was nevertheless true that the whole trend of the post-world war I era appeared to be ‘communism v. fascism’. As fascism triumphed in the ‘have not’ imperialist countries most threatened by state communism, it steadily began to menace the ‘have’ imperialist countries stable enough to resist that pressure, and so the situation of ‘democracy v. fascism’ developed. The ruling-class throughout the world had threatened to take away democratic liberties and substitute fascism if their domination was threatened, but gradually fascism became associated with the aggressive ‘have not’ imperialism against the defensive empires. It began to seem to many that there was some identity of interests between capitalist and worker; and with the defense of the Soviet Union in mind, the Communist Party began to reiterate this theme incessantly.

This period ended with the Spanish Civil War. There it was the anarcho-syndicalist movement which responded initially to the military coup d’etat which aimed at ‘restoring law and order’ by opposing to it the organized force, and the spontaneous action, of the working people.

Against the rebel Army of their own country they responded with the greatest weapon in their armory, social revolution. The combined force of feudalism and fascism hit back with the greatest force at their disposal—genocide. Because of the treachery of the Republic, which declined to defend itself and would not arm the working people who alone could prevent its overthrow, the rising of the Army, though checked, became a war. Faced with the reactionary elements within the Spanish Government (aided by the Communist Party and its foreign backers) the libertarian movement felt inclined to compromise in its social revolution by waging the civil war instead; soon it was too late to alter course, for the enemy was too vicious and to falter meant to die. But without doubt the libertarian movement was also betrayed by a leadership which maneuvered its way to positions of authority and power under cover of the war.

In the absence of party discipline, anathema to the anarchist movement, it was possible for the ‘well known’ to rise to a leadership which sought participation in the Government on the grounds that only in this way could the civil war be fought. Thus the libertarian movement came to adopt at second hand the slogans and to some extent the mentality of the Popular Front in regard to ‘democracy v. fascism’. At the outset it fought against fascism under social-revolutionary colors; it went down to its defeat under false democratic-capitalist ones.

Meanwhile, every single anarchist endeavor throughout Europe was concentrated on the Spanish struggle to the sacrifice of everything else. The Spanish Anarchists rejected the idea of an International Brigade (other than for refugees with nowhere else to go). They did not want to ‘depopulate’ the anarchist movement abroad. Every struggle that went on was to help the struggle in Spain and this altered the entire character of the militant anarchist movement throughout Europe.