In response to my recent comparison between modern international terrorism and social banditry, Peter at Vukutu suggested two further historical comparisons to think about: turn of the 20th century anarchism and Catholic recusancy in the 16th and 17th centuries. Knowing next to nothing about the latter, I will have to restrain my comments to the first of these (and offer the warning that this is all pretty much spontaneous writing, and so is undoubtedly liable to inaccuracies).
The anarchist movement of the late nineteenth century emerged primarily in Europe, though it is possible to see intellectual precursors in the Americas (Thoreau, etc.). Inspired by thinkers like Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Peter Kropotkin, most anarchists tended towards a radical distrust of the state (considering it a vehicle for the interests of the ruling classes), hostility towards the private ownership and inheritance of property, and held utopian aspirations to order society in a radically decentralised manner, with the absence of organising hierarchies.
There were, of course, many variants – with some people calling for collective ownership of the means of production and others disagreeing. But all generally shared a belief that direct democracy would have to be fought for in the streets; and most advocated confrontational action through trade unions to assert the autonomy of the labourer in the industrial workplace. As a modification of anarchism focused even more heavily on the unions, anarcho-syndicalist groups sprang up in many developed nations in the late nineteenth century, especially France, Spain, and the United States (the Industrial Workers of the World).
Most of the larger, union-oriented anarcho-syndicalist groups were militant and not afraid of confrontation, but tended to concern themselves with working class uplift, rather than committing acts of violence. The IWW advocated what it called ‘sabotage’ (and its enemies called ‘terrorism’), which meant the destruction of industrial machinery most of the time. However, a smaller number of anarchist advocates – in the United States, the most famous example was Emma Goldman – argued that violent attacks on the ruling elite were not only legitimate, but also essential in developing a revolutionary consciousness amongst the workers. The ‘propaganda of the deed’ would, so to speak, speak a thousand words.
Most of the time, this meant killing the rich and the powerful by gun and by dynamite – a view that did not necessarily differ from the attitudes of some radical republicans at the time. However, over time this initial focus on society’s most powerful people degenerated into fairly arbitrary bombings of symbolically significant locations, which tended to kill innocent people rather than their plutocratic enemies. Self-serving justifications to one side, at root this tactical shift came about because the masses were easier targets than the elites.
In their time, anarchists or anarchist-inspired radicals were involved in assassination of a series of important national leaders, including Umberto I of Italy in 1900, George I of Greece, and President McKinley. In the United States, Alexander Berkman (latterly Emma Goldman’s long term partner) tried and failed to assassinate the millionaire Henry Clay Frick. Meanwhile, anarchists were almost certainly responsible for the abortive wave of parcel bombs dispatched to several dozen houses of important political leaders in the summer of 1919, the event that sparked off the Great Red Scare.
By the 1920s, however, the ineffectiveness of political assassinations as a technique for achieving radical social change had become fairly clear, and anarchism’s appeal waned, especially in the United States and Western Europe. Anarchism retained influence in Spain, where it played an important role in resisting the forces of General Franco during the Civil War of the 1930s, and in Mexico, and elsewhere in Latin America.
So, does the international anarchist movement work as a good comparison for contemporary terrorism, particularly Islamism...? And what useful lessons might be learned?
Firstly, what similarities does anarchism have to contemporary terrorism?
- It advocates murder as a method of political action.
- Carefully-justified theories about tyranny tended over time to degenerate into much vaguer and more aggressive attacks on the symbols of organized society, as it became harder and harder to get access to initial targets.
- Anarchists were a loosely-affiliated group of individuals who shared a particular ideology but were not tightly tied into a rigid organizational bureaucracy. This made the movement as a whole notoriously difficult to eradicate.
- Most anarchists were ‘transnational’ actors, many of them drifted between nations and regions as dispossessed and propertyless individuals, and most considered themselves 'citizens of the world', not containing their aspirations or actions to a single state or national territory.
And what differences are there between anarchism and contemporary terrorism? Well, many, but I think the critical one to stress is the fact that anarchism formed part – a radical, dissenting part, but nevertheless a part – of the humanist tradition of western thinking, whilst modern fundamentalist Islam is essentially anti-humanist, based upon revelation rather than reason as the true source of value and meaning. This may turn out to have significant repercussions in terms of how Islamism responds to the growing crisis it faces, but I personally suspect that there is and has always been much more room for interpretation in Islam than is commonly assumed.
I’ll try and add more to this some other time, but for now let’s focus on the key question: why and how did anarchism decline? There were many factors, but I think three were particularly important:
- State repression. To take the US example, the First World War and post-war scare produced a new activist mentality at the federal level, leading to the arrest and deportation of several leading anarchists (including Goldman and Berkman), and the suppression of anarchist newspapers. At a lower level, police and state authorities made being an anarchist next to impossible through the vigorous application of legal and extralegal punishments (from beating up union organizers and running them out of town, to arresting them for ‘disturbing the peace’ or similar). New laws were passed that allowed for the deportation of people for advocating violence (or sometimes even simply belonging to a revolutionary group) rather than actually having committed a criminal activity. In some cases, this produced a backlash against the state (the cause celebre of two falsely-executed anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, for instance, was a major source of recruitment amongst left-wing groups well into the 1930s and beyond.) However, this backlash did not tend to increase membership in anarchist movements per se, only amongst reformist organizations. (In fact, the Communist Party of the USA was one of the chief beneficiaries of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair.) It appears that, right or wrong, brutal suppression achieved its short term goal here.
- The rise of communism. As an alternative ideology, and one that – after 1917 – could point to Soviet Russia as an example of material success, communism appeared significantly more logical to radicals looking for a philosophy in the interwar years. People who were furious with the system, and who would have joined an anarchist movement in 1900, joined the various international communist parties in the 1920s and 1930s. Anarchism, by contrast, could point to no meaningful successes. Where anarchistic ideas did have some influence – during the Mexican Revolution, for instance – they were largely sidelined when the ultimate solutions were negotiated. In short, anarchism didn’t work.
- It had the rug taken out from underneath it. The immediate response to most anarchist attacks was a strengthening of reactionary sentiment and the clamping down on dissent. But over the course of thirty or forty years – in fact, largely independently of the anarchist movement – many of the ideas that had been important reasons why anarchists first took up their calling, became much more accepted within the mainstream of society. By 1930, you didn’t need to be a radical anarchist to advocate birth control, liberalised divorce practices, social and sexual equality, rights to unionise, and anti-imperialism. In fact, you could say all these things and call yourself a liberal, such was the pace of change in modern society.
Taken together, these three factors made anarchism as a political method extremely costly, yet largely ineffective, and yet paradoxically less necessary as time went on.
This suggests to me that the collapse of Islamism will probably be built upon similar dynamics. I expect a continuation and expansion of the aggressive repression of Islamism by states around the world, and probably a continuation of interdictions, targeted assassinations, and kidnappings of Islamist leaders. Already we are seeing factional disputes emerging within the Islamist world over the efficacy of bombing, especially of bombing ordinary citizens, especially those living in largely Islamic regions like Iraq (Al Qaeda effectively declaring all those who do not agree with their philosophy to be infidels, Islamic in name or not, and often veiling an anti-Shia chauvinism within their arcane theories of jihad). The repression and other responses of modern states have made it far harder to successfully attack powerful symbolic locations or groups, and so Islamists have now turned their attention on ‘soft’ targets – subways, train stations, hotels. These offer the potential for worldwide news headlines, but they fundamentally undermine the liberatory agenda that brought people to the Islamist movement in the first place.
These processes are clearly already in motion, though one would expect them to be accelerated over the next decade. (Remember, by the way, that anarchist assassinations and bombings stretched over a period of more than forty years.) However, so far effort has been overwhelmingly directed towards point one only. We have not seen political developments in the Islamic world that would make it less appealing and less necessary for passionately motivated individuals to turn to violence; nor have we seen the emergence of alternative Islamic movements that seem to offer a more effective route of protest. This would seem to suggest what most of us know instinctively already: that peace in our time requires an opening of political debate, movement towards democracy and pluralistic civil society in all parts of the world, and the development and diversification of Middle Eastern national economies.
But the problem is that the systems of rule in states like Arabia are so ossified that any attempt to reform would run the risk of revolutionary collapse, and so the western powers – petrified – remain stubbornly allied with and supportive of unreconstructed dictators.
Moreover, the Bush Administration was singularly unconcerned with this third component of the matrix. This was because its philosophy was built on the simplistic view that anything other than staunch opposition to all things Al Qaeda called for would be considered ‘giving in to terrorism’. Only drawing lines in the sand and defending allies were considered valid methods of fighting the war on terror (though we have seen some changes in Iraq under Petraeus). So whilst we’ve seen an effective defence of US national territory in the last eight years, Islamists continued to gain recruits in Western Europe and elsewhere, and we have seen more bombings in London, Madrid, and Bombay, to name but the three most horrendous and brutal examples.
Writing this summary, I come to the conclusion that none of these factors alone will be sufficient to eliminate Islamic terrorism; only their combination will do that. Liberals are mistaken if they think the conflict can be won without fighting the enemy; conservatives are mistaken if they think that only fighting will produce victory. Until we combine the war-making components of the fight against Islamism with a vigorous attempt to make their case for membership redundant by pulling the rug out from under them, we won’t see an end to this destructive blight upon our modern society.
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