Anarchism and eugenics

An unlikely convergence, 1890-1940

Richard Cleminson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526124463
• eBook ISBN: 9781526124494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

At the heart of this book is what would appear to be a striking and fundamental paradox: the espousal of a 'scientific' doctrine that sought to eliminate 'dysgenics' and champion the 'fit' as a means of 'race' survival by a political and social movement that ostensibly believed in the destruction of the state and the removal of all hierarchical relationships. What explains this reception of eugenics by anarchism? How was eugenics mobilised by anarchists as part of their struggle against capitalism and the state? What were the consequences of this overlap for both anarchism and eugenics as transnational movements?

1

The ‘paradox’ of anarchism and eugenics

Introduction

In 1933, the anarcho-pacifist Romanian intellectual Eugen Relgis explored the conundrum of humanitarianism as applied to eugenics in the Valencia-based anarchist cultural review Estudios.¹ Could there be, the author asked, a community of interests or any compatibility between the philosophical and ethical concept of humanitarianism and the new science of eugenics? Relgis, active in the anti-war movement and a supporter of the Spanish Republic, certainly thought so. Nevertheless, his attempt to articulate a politics and ethics of humanitarianism in the context of the rise of racism and fascism did not impede him from advocating various authoritarian eugenic measures, including sterilization, as a means of eliminating the ‘degenerate’. What was it that drove Relgis to air such ideas in an explicitly anarchist review?

It might be thought that Relgis’s essay, or at least certain ideas within it, would have quietly disappeared or fallen into contempt once the atrocities of the Nazi regime were known. This, however, was not to be so. As part of the endeavour to keep anarchism’s historical impact and relevance alive, the exiled Spanish libertarian movement continued to reissue popular titles from the 1930s, refusing to allow changed circumstances to silence its message. At the geographical and perhaps ideological heart of this movement in Toulouse, France, Ediciones Universo republished Relgis’s essay unaltered in 1950.² The fact that Ediciones Universo reprinted his work may well suggest a certain degree of ideological stagnation within the movement. It confirms, in addition, that despite some uncomfortable sections in Relgis’s account, eugenic ideas were evidently still attractive, or at least thought to be relevant, in the decade immediately after the Second World War.

This book attempts to explain and account for what would appear at first sight to be a striking and fundamental paradox: a number of deep connections between two powerful transnational currents; on the one hand, a socio-political movement – anarchism, and on the other, a biological-scientific credo – eugenics. If, following William Van Orman Quine, a ‘conclusion that at first seems absurd, but that has an argument to sustain it’ is a paradox, it becomes an intellectual phenomenon that demands explanation.³ If the ‘argument’, so to speak, is the traceable de facto historical reception of eugenic ideas within the different local varieties of anarchism in Argentina, England, France, Spain and Portugal covered in this book, the contradictions and incompatibilities between the two fields may not be quite as definitive as one may think.⁴ The central question posed, therefore, becomes: how was it possible for a political and social movement that ostensibly believed in the destruction of the state and the removal of all hierarchical relationships to espouse a ‘scientific’ doctrine that sought to eliminate ‘dysgenics’ and champion the ‘fit’ as a means of ‘race’ survival?

Throughout this book, a thematic and transnational approach will explore the interconnections, sometimes strong, at other times weak and superficial, between anarchist movements and eugenics.⁵ It will become clear that different strands of anarchism, whether individualist or syndicalist, reacted in different ways to a cluster of concerns present in eugenic movements, such as population degeneration, the birth control question, maternal and infant care and the thorny issue of the sterilization of the ‘unfit’. In exploring these questions, the narrative will uncover the biological, political and scientific foundations upon which eugenics could grow within anarchism as a theory and practice. It will also, conversely, seek to advance an explanation for the lack of uptake of, or outright opposition to, eugenics within ‘national’ and regional varieties of anarchism within the five countries studied here.

The period examined in this book corresponds to the years of maximum strength of both anarchism and eugenics. The last ten years of the nineteenth century represent the dissemination of eugenic ideas from their development in England in the 1880s and their intersection and interaction with different varieties of hereditarian thought, emerging doctrines such as birth control, so-called neo-Malthusianism, and concerns about the ‘quality’ of the population.⁶ The 1890s also saw the consolidation of anarchism under various guises, whether individualist, collectivist or communist, across the continents. The late 1930s, on the other hand, represent a decisive decline in the fortunes of eugenics, or at least the beginning of its re-evaluation and reconfiguration, as it was steadily called into question by the developments of the decade and undertakings ‘in the name of eugenics’, in particular by Nazi Germany. The year 1940, or rather 1939, also represents the destruction of one of the world’s strongest anarchist movements, the Spanish, as the revolutionary gains of the 1930s fell victim to the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship of General Franco. Elsewhere, statist socialist and communist movements, whether operating openly or clandestinely as part of the resistance movement, fared better than and displaced libertarian ideas, at least for a time.

Following on from the central issue outlined previously, a number of further questions are posed. What was it within the dynamics of both anarchism and eugenics that permitted such a conversation to take place? What might this show for a deeper understanding of the relations between science, society and political ideologies? Where did anarchism accommodate itself within the changing and tumultuous field that was international eugenics between the First International Eugenics Congress in London in May 1912 and the conference of the International Latin Eugenics Federation held in Paris in August 1937? Did ‘anarchist eugenics’⁷ differ significantly from other expressions of this technocratic and generally top-down biopolitical intervention in populations?

Some brief examples drawn from the five countries considered in this book will illustrate the kinds of interactions, and the implications to be read from them, which are suggested by these questions. All eugenics movements held in common the need to adopt some set of scientific, evolutionary or hereditarian theories that would permit them to explain racial decline and that would harbour the possibility of racial regeneration. French science provided much of the framework for the understanding of heredity in the Iberian Peninsula both within the nascent hygienic and eugenics movements and within anarchism, where more environmentally oriented theories were predominant. This allowed for connections to emerge, for example, between the obstetrician Adolphe Pinard’s notions of ‘puericulture’, or child-centred medicine, and anarchist Paul Robin’s dictum ‘bonne naissance, bonne éducation, bonne organisation sociale’ (good birth, good education, good social organization).⁸ Such ideas, not eugenic in themselves but close in their concepts, were in turn propagated by the Barcelona-based journal Salud y Fuerza (1904–1914), published by the Spanish section of the International League for Human Regeneration, established by Robin.⁹ Argentinian anarchism, although at a much later date, was receptive to and was an ‘exporter’ to Spain of ideas related to eugenics. The contributions of the socialist Dr Juan Lazarte on population issues and social hygiene are a case in point.¹⁰ England provided some of the nineteenth-century interpretations of society, politics and biology that were incorporated into Spanish anarchist circles, not least in respect of Darwinian and Spencerian thought.¹¹ Such ideas were also present in French anarchist individualist and in Portuguese anarchist publications.¹² The work of Peter Kropotkin, his theory of mutual aid as a factor of evolution and his opposition to eugenics constituted international phenomena that overflowed the ‘national’ boundaries of anarchism and permeated the transnational eugenic movement itself.¹³ In Portugal, it was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who provided early interpretations of heredity in the medical field and it was these ideas that broadly guided Portuguese anarchists’ understandings of the relationship between heredity and environment and concepts such as the ‘struggle for existence’.¹⁴

The set of responses to such issues from within anarchism was, perhaps unsurprisingly for a heterogeneous movement, diverse and varied. In Spain, anarchists such as Lluís Bulffi published Salud y Fuerza, where not only could ideas on population control and the question of population ‘quality’ surface, but the means of guaranteeing and promoting such quality – eugenics – could also be aired. The anarchist medical doctor Isaac Puente could posit a ‘race of the poor’ and encourage parents to have fewer children or to abstain from reproduction in the case of those with tuberculosis or venereal disease while at the same time arguing for education programmes on sexual and reproductive health.¹⁵ In French milieus, through a programme of sex education, women and men were schooled on the methods of avoiding the mass reproduction of diseased children and the importance of proper hygiene and nutrition.¹⁶ In the 1920s and 1930s in the same country, women were encouraged to take complete control of their sexual lives and reproduce only if they wished.¹⁷ The Spanish anarchist Félix Martí Ibáñez declared in 1937 that abortion was a eugenic tool that empowered the revolutionary proletariat;¹⁸ not long afterwards, an unknown writer in the anarchist women’s review Mujeres Libres argued that medicine itself had caused degeneration in humanity by conserving ‘tainted, weak and inferior types’ in the species.¹⁹ It is these alluring but sometimes uncomfortable dynamics, their presence and absence, their tardy or rapid acceptance, which this book will reveal.

Historiographical points of departure

The history of eugenics movements has been transformed over the last thirty years and, in particular, over the last decade in respect of the countries studied, the kinds of movements analysed and the scientific and social influences that drove them.²⁰ While a full account of these developments will not be given here,²¹ it is useful to point to some of the interpretive issues that have been raised by them. In the introduction to a collection of studies on eugenics in 2009, Lesley Hall raised a number of questions which were at the time ‘largely unasked’ and which today continue to be pressing, that is, what precisely eugenics was and what people understood by it in particular historical contexts. A monolithic interpretation whereby eugenics was about eliminating the unfit or is reducible to a quality/quantity debate is no longer tenable. Such considerations tend ‘to occlude vast differences of meaning accorded to [eugenics] by different cultures, by different individuals and different movements’.²² Rather than necessarily providing a direct route to the extermination camps and the Holocaust, eugenics in the early twentieth century was often bundled up with a wide-ranging programme of preventive medicine, state welfare programmes and exhortations for responsible citizenship.²³ This is not to excuse or minimize the significance of what was done in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The ‘paradox’ of anarchism and eugenics
• 2 Science, revolution and progress: the constitutive terrain of anarchist eugenics
• 3 Early discourse on eugenics within transnational anarchism, 1890–1920
• 4 From neo-Malthusianism to eugenics as a ‘revolutionary conquest’, 1920–1937
• Conclusion: Anarchism, governmentality, eugenics
• Bibliography
• Index