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 |  Subject: On the morality and strategy of using Violence by Wendy McElroy  Thu Feb 05, 2009 3:58 pm | |
| 19th century individualist anarchism on the morality and strategy of using violence
Individualist Anarchism repudiated the use of violence as a strategy to achieve any political or personal end other than self-defense. (1) Indeed, in the mid-nineteenth century, the ideology was criticized as being so peaceful that its communities would be defenseless against aggressors. By the late 1800s, however, the public image of Anarchism had changed drastically. In the decades preceding the Russian Revolution, several Communist Anarchist groups repeatedly committed acts of brutal and almost random violence as a strategy to topple capitalism. These acts, called “propaganda by deed,” were directed against peo-ple who belonged to the capitalist class and included throwing bombs into crowded restaurants on the assumption that only capitalists could afford to eat there.
Violence erupted in America as well. On May 4, 1886, labor protesters and the police clashed in the streets of Chicago dur-ing a meeting whose organizers included Communist Anarchists. The event, known to history as the Haymarket affair or incident, left dead bodies on both sides. Although the eight radicals who were arrested and tried thereafter were demonstrably innocent, the Haymarket affair cemented the connection between Anarchism and violence in the mind of the American public. Anarchists became the enemies of society and of civili-zation. During the Haymarket proceedings, the prosecutor declared: “Law is on trial. Anarchy is on trial. These men have been selected . . . because they are leaders. . . . [C]onvict these men . . . save our institutions, our society.(2)
The radical community reacted with outrage. Yet throughout the arrest and the trial of the Chicago martyrs, and even upon the execution of four defendants and the suicide of one, Benja-min Tucker was reserved in his support of the accused. Tucker wrote: “It is because peaceful agitation and passive resistance are weapons more deadly to tyranny than any others that I uphold them. . . . [b]rute force strengthens tyranny. . . . War and authority are companions; peace and liberty are companions. . . . The Chicago Communists I look upon as brave and earnest men and women. That does not prevent them from being equally mistaken.” (3)
The Haymarket incident was the proximate cause of a deep schism that occurred in America between Individualist Anarchists and Communist Anarchists with whom they had formerly aligned, but it was actually the last of a series of events. The schism was rooted in ideology, specifically in the question of whether force could be employed as a political strategy.
Liberty and Violence as a Strategy
To judge from the first page of the first issue of Liberty on August 6, 1881, Tucker celebrated both violence as a strategy and the people who employed it for political ends. At the head of the middle column, and dominating the text, was a hand-some engraving of the Russian nihilist Sophie Perovskaya—“Liberty’s Martyred Heroine”—who was proclaimed to have been “Hanged April 15, 1881, For Helping to Rid the World of a Tyrant [Czar Alexander II].” Tucker declared the engraving to be “the first authentic likeness published in America of the most famous and heroic of the little Russian band . . . Sophie Perovskaya.” (4) A memorial poem by Joaquin Miller followed.
Three issues later, Tucker continued to praise the Russian nihilists for their violent resistance to tyranny “which the Nihilists alone are prepared to tear out by the roots and bury out of sight forever. Success to the Nihilists!” (5) Nevertheless, on the same page, an article by Tucker entitled “Liberty’s Weapons” began, “Our methods are the methods of peace. Liberty is not the advocate of force.” (6)
Realizing that such a jarring juxtaposition of articles might confuse his readers, or lead them to accuse him of inconsistency, Tucker voiced what he imagined to be their reaction, “And yet Liberty finds words of approval for the . . . tyrant-slayers who in secrecy plot the revenges of fate. Why? Because Liberty is forced to choose between one class that slays to op-press and another that slays to free.” To those who still ex-pressed confu-sion, he urged patience in their “great hurry for a full and systematic explanation of Liberty’s philosophy and pur-poses. . . . Patience, good friends, patience!” (7)
Almost thirty issues later and still without the promised “systematic explanation,” Tucker commented upon the assassination of the French politician Leon Gambetta with the words, “It is a fitting ending to the life of one of the most dangerous characters of Europe, over whose disappearance Liberty, not in a spirit of triumphant revenge, but simply voicing a sincere de-sire for the public welfare, can only rejoice.” (8)
Yet, whenever acts of violence against politicians occurred within the United States, Liberty reacted in a markedly different manner than it did toward similar attacks in Europe. For exam-ple, when President Garfield was assassinated by Charles Guiteau in 1881, Tucker declared, “As to the act committed by Guiteau all sensible men agree. Nothing but its insanity saved it from being dastardly, bloodthirsty, and thoroughly devilish, without reason, proper motive, or excuse.” (9) Tucker’s criticism of the American assassin Guiteau occurred two issues after his idolization of the Russian assassin Sophie Perovskaya. Some two dozen issues thereafter, Tucker expressed joy at the death of the French politician Gambetta, thus eliminating the possibility he had changed his attitude toward violence as a political strategy in the brief interval between praising Perovskaya and repudiating Guiteau.
The explanation of this apparent inconsistency lay in Tucker’s view of violence as a last resort strategy that could be justified only when freedom of speech and freedom of the press had been destroyed, as they had been in Perovskaya’s Russia. As long as radicals in America could speak out and publish, however, they could educate the public toward “the Anarchistic idea” and inspire rebellion.
Although Tucker was acutely aware of the restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of the press within the United States, he insisted that newspapers, “if not allowed to say everything they would like to, are able to say all that is absolutely necessary to say in order to finally achieve their end, the triumph of liberty.” (10) Then, and only then, with the solid foundation of an educated citizenry could an Anarchist society succeed. Until that foundation had been laid, Tucker counseled radicals in America to eschew violence against the State and to prefer peaceful means of agitation. (11)
Liberty’s rejection of tactical violence in the United States was part of a systematic view of strategy. (12) The reasons for this rejection were well expressed in an article entitled “Violence Breeds Violence,” written by Florence Finch Kelly under the ini-tials “F. F. K.” Kelly flatly stated that no “permanent good” could be achieved through the use of violence. She asked every radical to “stop and study well” the effect of State bru-tality upon his own heart. She argued: the violence had not convinced him to accept the State or to embrace it as legitimate. The vio-lence had only hardened his beliefs and angered him to respond in kind. So, too, would a strategy of violence affect the Ameri-can people: the bomb-throwing revolutionary could only “terrify them, and in their terror they can only strike back and hug their beliefs all the closer.” The use of violence would result in “nothing but a brute battle for physical supremacy with a rabid determination on each side to exterminate the other. And it happens that the probabilities of extermination are all on the wrong side.” (13)
By insisting upon peaceful agitation within the United States, the Individualist Anarchists placed themselves at odds with the Communist Anarchists, some of whom, as immigrants, had imported political strategies of violence with them from Russia and Germany. For example, the Communist Anarchist leader Johann Most arrived in New York from Germany in 1882, where he began publication of the German-language paper Die Freiheit, in which he openly called for workers to commit acts of violence against the State.(14) Liberty offered a sense of the urgency with which Most called for insurrection through a translated excerpt from Die Freiheit. Most cried out, “The existing system will be quick-est and most radically overthrown by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion.” (15) Because of his preferred method of explosive “resistance,” the editor of Die Freiheit was nicknamed Dynamost.
With such profound theoretical differences between the traditions of Individualist and Communist Anarchism, it was inevitable that a bitter schism would eventually separate them. Nevertheless, Tucker’s strong links to European Anarchist periodicals and personalities, as well as his championing of Proudhonian economics, had forged a bond that resisted severing. For example, on July 16, 1881, when the moribund International Working People’s Association revived in London, Tucker had been ecstatic. In an article entitled “Vive l’Association Internationale,” Tucker enthused, “To this momentous event, which marks an epoch in the progress of the great labor movement. . . . Liberty, in the present issue, devotes a large portion of her space.” (16)
As the historian Margaret S. Marsh observed in her book Anarchist Women, there had initially been good will and cooperation between the Individualist and Communist Anarchists. “Their conflict . . . came after a brief period of harmony. Tucker and the Individualists had wanted initially to cooperate with the European Anarchist movement. In 1881 the editor of Liberty hailed the creation of the anarchist ‘Black International,’ pro-posing that his paper serve as its English-language organ.” (17)
For a while, Liberty served this function. The November 12, 1881, issue carried a report by J. H. Swain who, as a representa-tive of Individualist Anarchism, had attended a follow-up conference in Chicago, where he was extremely well received even though the majority of attendees were Socialists. A year later, the two factions of Anarchism became bitter enemies.
The schism was sped along not only by theoretical differences but also by three specific events: the second Congress of the International held in 1883; Liberty’s exposé of the “New York firebugs”; and, the Haymarket incident.
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