1939–1945

During the Second World War, liberals and social-democrats (together with the Communists, once the Nazi-Soviet Pact was broken by Hitler) pushed the idea of a ‘holy war’ against fascism, since the enemy happened to be fascist, and tried to bestow a democratic aura on the Allies. After a time, Allied propagandists themselves began to use some of the anti-fascist cliches, though with diplomatic caution until the powers concerned were actually in the war. Soon there grew up the popular myth that the only reason we went to war with Germany was because it was ‘Nazi’.

Two major developments took place in the anarchist movement in Europe. The Spanish Anarchists, exiled in France and treated as second-class citizens or as prisoners of war by the French Republic, were the first to take up arms after the French defeat, as a resistance movement against fascism. This movement of revolutionary defeatism spread over the Pyrenees into Spain, as an urban guerrilla movement linking up with people like Capdevila and Massana who had been operating in the mountains as rural guerrillas without a break since the victory of Franco in 1939.

The other development was in Britain, where the anarchists took advantage of the remaining freedom of expression in a country where the working class was able to resist internal suppression, to attack imperialism in every way possible, a struggle which spread even inside the armed forces.

Both these movements reached their zenith and disappeared.

The failure of the soldiers’ councils to link up with workers’ councils in postwar Britain, and the resultant euphoria of a Labor Government with full power, meant the loss of any revolutionary impetus. Those attracted to the idea of anarchism, particularly within the armed forces, as a prospective force in the supposedly forthcoming postwar revolution, drifted away. But the anti-war attitude of the British anarchist movement had also meant that many of purely pacifist persuasion had been attracted to the libertarian camp, and this had the effect of diluting the class struggle, or rather the libertarian participation in it, and opened the way to the liberalism of the New Left.

In Spain, more particularly among the Spanish exiles, the libertarian movement was stuck with the position of the thirties. The exiled bureaucrats were entrenched in Toulouse, and found it easier to sit back and complain that the Allies had not sent their armies into Spain to achieve the revolution for them, than to associate with the guerrilla forces that had never laid down their arms. Unwilling to involve themselves in any action that would compromise their settled existence in France, or the legality of their Organization, they created a wedge between what passed off as the CNT in exile, and the newly emerged postwar Resistance against Franco which much more truly represented the CNT. No longer could the ‘exile’ leaders judge this as part of the revolutionary struggle; they could only view matter from a social democratic standpoint and echo stale war-time propaganda.

Thus the anarchist movement emerged from World War II lumbered on the one hand with the dead wood of social- democratic pseudo-libertarianism still parading the theory of the ‘just’ war (as exemplified by the National Committee of the CNT in Toulouse) and this was well matched internationally by some other entrenched movements too lazy to move over to social democracy, which retained of anarchism only the label, but monopolized international connections in Europe; and on the other hand with the liberal-pacifist cult and the idealization of nonviolence as action in itself which later came, through America, to influence a whole range of new cults throughout the world in which the criterion was neither freedom nor resistance nor class struggle but solely the degree of absence of violence.

This substituted the idea of ‘personal liberation’ under the State for that of a free society, a purely liberal idea, and there were not so many differences between these two ‘darker sides’ of anarchism than appeared at first sight.

In many countries in Europe, therefore, Anarchism became once more a matter of small groups, some fighting on desperately as they did in Spain, some still retaining labor connections, as in Sweden, as well as of isolated individuals everywhere who carried on, against overwhelming odds, identified by small papers or bulletins or regular meetings, and trying to re-integrate into a new struggle.