Behold your future executioners
On and off over the past month I’ve been reading A Girl Among the Anarchists, which is an entertaining book and available online, as well. It’s the fictional memoir of a young woman involved in the anarchist movement in London in the late 19th century. It has some flaws, which are easy enough to discount as artifacts of the time it was produced; some racial stereotypes (jovial Irishmen, oleagenous Jews) which aren’t directly derogratory but somewhat offensive, and a description of somebody as a misogynist as if that were simply an amusing character trait. But those can overlooked easily enough, and what I liked about the book was how similar 19th century anarchism seems to be to the contemporary variant. The anecdotes in the book are amusing and disturbingly familiar: working late writing propaganda; everyone’s excited when the Italians turn up singing their revolutionary songs (although not “Bella Ciao” in 1903, of course); wanted comrades have to be smuggled out of town without alerting the police; etc.
And although the postanarchists will rightly attack this for essentialist individualism, this description is not so far away from network organization (and I’m a big fan of the word “revolutionists”):
Why, the very strength of our party lies in the fact that it has not what you are pleased to call an organisation. Organisations are only a means for intriguers and rogues to climb to power on the shoulders of their fellow-men; and at best only serve to trammel initiative and enterprise. With us every individual enjoys complete liberty of action. This of course does not mean to say that several individuals may not unite to attain some common object, as is shown by our groups which are scattered all over the globe. But each group is autonomous, and within the group each individual is his own law. Such an arrangement, besides being right in principle, offers great practical advantages in our war against society, and renders it impossible for governments to stamp us out. Again, as to our lack of programme, if a clear grasp of principle and of the ultimate aim to be attained is meant, it is wrong to say we have no programme, but, if you mean a set of rules and formulas, why, what are they after all but a means of sterilising ideas? Men and their surroundings are unceasingly undergoing modification and change, and one of the chief defects of all governments and parties hitherto has been that men have had to adapt themselves to their programmes, instead of their programmes to themselves. We make no statement as to specific object: each comrade has his own, and goes for it without considering it necessary to proclaim the fact to the whole world. Now you ask me how you could help this movement or what you could do, and I have no hesitation in saying, much. Every revolution requires revolutionists.
(Regrettably, this line from the character Kosinski also rings true: “I fear he is developing a failing common to many of you English Anarchists; he is becoming something of a crank. He talked to me a lot about vegetarianism and such matters.”)
Reading the book also encouraged me to begin look at the history of British anarchism, and there’s some interesting stuff there. It turns out Lucy Parsons (the Chicago anarchist and author of the memorable exhortation, “now is the time for every dirty lousy tramp to arm himself with a revolver or a knife and lie in wait outside the palaces of the rich and shoot or stab them as they come out”; and of the title of this post) visited London on a number of occassions. Anarchist practice also seems to have involved the creation of spaces for mass confrontation with the forces of law and order, for example:
This East End movement, like Reclaim the Streets a century on, would frequently invade the West End’s spaces of privilege. In London in 1886, the year of the Haymarket events, a warm summer and an economic recession led to many unemployed “roughs” sleeping out in Trafalgar Square and St. James’ Park. “Agitation” among them by members of the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) gained much support and a winter of confrontations between the police and militants ensued. In August and again in October of 1887, the SDF called mass demonstrations in the Square. The October rally, with speeches from SDFers and the raising of a black flag, led to police hostility; when a second procession entered the Square behind a red flag, they were charged by the police with many arrests. As a result, the police banned meetings in the Square. A protest demonstration against this, on November 13 1887, came to be known as Bloody Sunday. Mounted police and soldiers charged the marchers. The following Sunday, there was a disorganized attempt to retake the Square; the police hospitalized many and killed one man. The casualty, a bystander named Alfred Linnel, became a working class martyr; his funeral attracted 200,000 marchers, a sea of red flags, and some green banners of Irish freedom and yellow pennants of the radical clubs. Two weeks later, there was a second death from injuries sustained on Bloody Sunday, that of William Cunner, an unemployed Deptford painter.
Shades of Class War and J18, for those of us whose historical memory only goes back 20 years. That description comes from a very interesting-looking little book (I haven’t read it all yet) called The Urban Pedagogy of Walter Benjamin (available online; part 2; part 3).
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