1 Anarchists and the city
Governance, revolution and the imagination
Carl Levy1
Since the emergence of classical anarchism in the mid-nineteenth century, the city and the urban commune have been central to the anarchist imagination and anarchist socio-political action. This chapter presents a synoptic overview of the uses of the city in the anarchistsâ programmes, tactics, strategies and visions. From the Paris Commune of 1871, as the symbol of the revolution, to the role of the anarchists in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. Although I do not discuss the role of the city in anarchist thought and practice after 1945, the message is clear: the city has been central for the transformation of philosophical anarchism into a quotidian, vivid practice from the 1860s to the present day.2
Introduction: anarchism and the city, the context of the argument
Before there was a movement of self-declared anarchists, the first âanarchistsâ were called Mutualists, Federalists and Internationalists. Just as Marxism as an ideology evolved into a corpus of academic and doctrinal statements and programmes, and assumed a public face in the late nineteenth century, so too anarchism, in reaction to Marxism, but also in reaction to events on the ground, became a self-contained identifiable ideology and movement only in the 1880s and 1890s.3 For the advocates of anarchism, decentralised power structures in towns and cities were used to galvanise the imagination and the movements for the final goals of a stateless and anti-authoritarian world.
The study of the relationship of the anarchists to the city is useful in two regards. It helps to bridge the gaps and the controversies over the periodisation of anarchism (as a formal ideology) and its precursors, namely pre-anarchism, classical anarchism (1860s to 1945), and new and post-âanarchismsâ (1945 to the present): thus for example PĂ«tr Kropotkin invoked aspects of the late medieval European city-state as a model for his modern anarchist city of 1900 and Colin Ward invoked libertarian solutions for the London of the 1960s and 1970s by invoking Kropotkin.4 This anarchist/city optic also is useful in the vexed discussion of whether or not anarchism was just another European provincial or Orientalist ideology, which accompanied the steamship, the telegraph, the missionary and the machine gun. To what extent did the arrival of anarchism and syndicalism in Latin America, China, Japan or India feed off indigenous forms of thought and action and to what extent, as has been shown recently in the case of Japan, where Russian Populist progenitors were inspired by non-Western models of cooperation in civil society, did non-European forms of libertarian anarchists inspire European anarchists and anarchism?5 How can we imagine Classical Anarchism without taking into account the vibrant movements of Argentina, Cuba or Mexico?6 One way to address these issues is through examining movements found in the liminal cities of the Global South during the era of High Imperialism (1880â1920), thus for example, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Havana or Beirut as well as the liminal cities of the Imperial overlords from San Francisco to London to New York to Barcelona.7 Not only does the study of the theme of anarchism and the city challenge the accepted chronology, it can also serve as a methodological tool, which grounds the recent interest in transnational, cosmopolitan and network approaches in a solid, day to day reality of the urban milieu, which can be grasped by the historian and also by social and political scientists who study the dissemination and mutation of political ideologies and political practices.8
Unlike other political movements, the study of anarchism relies upon ground-level social history to understand its nuances and continuities because long-term forms of organisation can be elusive or short-lived. Thus, to quote, Tom Goyens, in his suitably entitled monograph (Beer and Revolution) a study of the German anarchists in New York City from 1880 to 1914, that particular centre of conviviality, the beer hall.9
A social and cultural history of German anarchists in the greater New York area must take into account the geography of the movement, its physical connection to the urban landscape. This movement was not merely an intellectual phenomenon, or some elusive threat â the ghost of anarchy â in the minds of respectable citizens. It consisted of men, women and children of exiled and immigrated families, of impetuous activists who were part of the citizenry of New York.
Anarchism became flesh and punched over its weight, through global syndicalism, in counter-institutions such as free schools and social centres, and in the tissues of diasporic and immigrant communities, such as the Italian colony of London (1870â1914), studied by Pietro Di Paola10 or the contemporaneous French colony, brought to life by Constance Bantman.11 Studying the role of the city, I think, is a red thread, which joins together syndicalism, conviviality and educational institutions. But let me add a disclaimer. I am not arguing that other approaches are not important: the studies of rural movements of the Zapatistas of the Mexican Revolution or the movement of the Maknovscina in rural Ukraine during the Russian Civil War (1918â1921),12 or even the ground-breaking and delightful work of the anthropologist James Scott, who identified a zone of anarchist-like structures and behaviours in upland South-East Asia (Zomia)13 in the early modern and the initial part of the modern eras, and the works on pirate confederacies and maroon settlements in the Americas, are all significant to our understandings of anarchism.14 But in this chapter, I will show that the urban optic has its utility.
The Commune of Paris 1871 and its repercussions
The Commune of Paris of 1871 lasted just 72 days but it became the focus for the imaginations of Karl Marx, Michael Bakunin, Vladimir Lenin, William Morris, PĂ«tr Kropotkin, Louise Michel and ĂlisĂ©e Reclus. The city of Paris was abandoned by the provisional government after the defeat by the Prussians, and the radicals of Paris, stirred by the denizens of the popular and working-class clubs, which had flourished since the late 1860s during the liberalisation of politics in the waning days of rule of Louis Napoleon, took control. The politics and policies of the Commune were marked by improvisation but the central themes were clear: the Universal Republic, a France of decentralized political units and a Paris ruled in turn by its arrondissements (the Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements). Public policies announced the institutions of free secular education for all children: a polytechnic education, which combined manual and intellectual training, but also a system of crĂšches for younger children. The renter would win out over the landlord. Women were noticeably present in this polity, with the Womenâs Union the largest and most effective institution of the Commune. As Kristin Ross notes, artists were a predominant force in the Commune â the painter Courbet was joined by a legion of decorative artists and the practitioners of woodworking and shoemaking. Art was to be universal and not imprisoned in the Salon. The anarchist Reclus proclaimed that aesthetic concerns were also concerns of the democratic polity, and thus heralded the birth of a communal luxury based on the âprinciples of association and cooperationâ.15 But the Commune was a balance between reformists and revolutionaries, it even contracted a loan from the Rothschilds and reassured lenders that debts would be repaid and it never seized the funds of the Bank of France. But it also outlawed night work in bakeries and created worker controlled munition shops to arm the National Guard.
The lessons from the Commune were varied. For Lenin, the Commune-State needed a vanguard party to protect it from counter-revolution, while, it is argued by Ross and others that in his last decade of his life, Marx used the example of the Commune of Paris to soften his hostilities to communal socialism of the agrarian Populists of Russia. For the anarchists in the late nineteenth century, the Commune of Paris was the turning point for the formation of their ideology and a counterpoint to authoritarian Marxism. Indeed Bakuninâs collectivist anarchism was crystallised here: it was the transformation of the Universal Republic into a quest for the realisation of internationalist federalism. But although the Commune was celebrated and grieved by the anarchists in the late nineteenth century, it was not beyond their criticism.16 Thus Errico Malatesta thought its social policies had been too restricted and timid, that it was evolving disturbingly towards representative rather than direct democracy, and that the more dictatorial Jacobins and Blanquists had become too powerful in the Committee of Safety.17 William Morris and PĂ«tr Kropotkin would join the imagery of the Commune with a critical reinterpretation of modernity and particularly the growth of great capitalist conurbations such as London.18 In Morrisâs News from Nowhere the insurgents of the English Revolution echo the levelling of the Napoleonic Victory Column in the Place VendĂŽme by the Communards by turning Trafalgar Square into an orchard.19
But Morris had little time for the industrial city as such, whereas Kropotkin combined the praise for anachronisms â the so-called primitive forms of democracy and adaptive cooperation, the mutual aid carried out by peasants, farmers, and the First Nations of the harsh landscapes of Siberia and the freeholders of Iceland (this of course shared with Morris) with an appreciation of the modern city. But the most recent and more modern might not necessarily be more evolved and better than past models of governance. For Kropotkin there were two roads in the history of Europe: the road traversed which embraced the communal liberties of the city states and the urban guilds of late medieval Europe, that is in the era previous to the rise of the Absolutist State, and a Roman imperial road which led to his troubled present-day of militarist imperial states of Europe, with their centralizing monster capital cities.20 But the other road from the city-state demonstrated Kropotkinâs creative use of the anachronism, and his approach was different from Morrisâs or the Russian Populistsâ, who were partial to the smaller settlement of the mir. For Kropotkin the decentralised city, based on the high technology of his day â electricity â would humanise modernity, by the interweavi...
