They once were rebels

Ranters, Diggers & mystics who challenged church authority

by Bill Weinberg

Fifth Estate # 415, Summer 2024

a review of
Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century by Raoul Vaneigem, translation by Bill Brown. ERIS, 2023

While evangelical Protestantism has for generations overwhelmingly been a force of deep reaction in this country and is poised, if Donald Trump regains the White House this November, to instate a situation such as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (and its screen and TV adaptations).

This potential recently made a media splash when Trump posted to his Truth Social platform an ultra-creepy video entitled “God Made Trump,” portraying a personification of him as Redeemer and Avenger sent by the Almighty. Ralph Reed, founder of the Christian Coalition, is hawking his new book, For God and Country:: The Christian Case For Trump.

Under a restored Trump regime, evangelical Protestantism could play the same role that reactionary Catholicism did in the clerical-fascist regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain, Ante Pavelic in Croatia and, to an extent, Benito Mussolini in Italy, in which the state and the ultimate leader are sanctified, labor suppressed, harsh and repressive interpretation of Christian morality made law, and enemies of the state eliminated.

A contemporary example of such a clerical-fascist regime is Putin’s Russia, in which rights for women and sexual non-conformists are being rapidly repealed, even very indirect expressions of disagreement with the regime are severely punished, with the Russian Orthodox Church of Patriarch Kirill, a key propaganda pillar of the aggressive war in Ukraine. The church promotes a narrative of protecting Russian traditional values against Western liberal assault, and is in explicit alliance with the evangelical right in the U.S., despite the denominational gulf.

However, beside the usual role of Christianity functioning as a handmaiden of repressive state authority, heresies have emerged under its rule that have a long history of birthing rebellious groups. They are chronicled by Situationist Raoul Vaneigem in this comprehensive account of rebels, ranters, and millenarians.

In Resistance to Christianity, he traces a chronology from the heresies of the ancient and medieval periods, especially those in the Gnostic tradition that rejected the Church and worldly authority as inherently corrupt, through the millenarian movements that ultimately prefigured the Protestant Reformation, a heresy that succeeded.

A key episode was the German Peasants’ War of 1524, which had a spiritual and millennial aspect in the person of the revolutionary priest Thomas Müntzer. He was a contemporary of Martin Luther, who disavowed Müntzer as being far too radical with his call for expropriation of the aristocracy by the commoners. The peasant army flew a rainbow flag as a symbol of solidarity and hope, but were ultimately defeated by armed forces of the lords.

This spirit was also present in the revolutionary movements of the English Civil War of the 1640s. This period famously saw the Diggers, who in 1649 at St George’s Hill pulled off what the historian George Woodcock called the world’s first anarchist direct action, reclaiming land from the aristocracy for their collective farms, with a vision of the earth as a “common treasury for all.” The Ranters of the same period were fiery mystical anarchists who rejected all worldly authority and Christian morality.

Both the Puritans and the Quakers also came out of this ferment, and have had a significant influence on our side of the Atlantic. The Quakers were deeply involved in slavery abolitionism, aiding escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad, and in later struggles for social justice, especially war resistance based on their pacifism.

The more militant abolitionism of the armed insurrectionist John Brown in the 1850s, of Harpers Ferry and Bleeding Kansas fame, was steeped in Puritan millenarianism. And, there is a stamp of this a century later in the Baptist and pacifist Martin Luther King, Jr., seen in his famous invocation of the Old Testament: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

So, how did this trajectory warp into its opposite?

A turning point can be seen in the late 19th century with the rise of Biblical literalism in reaction to the rise of science, characterized by the application of a strict literal interpretation to scripture.

In the 1890s, the fundamentalist and populist politician William Jennings Bryan was a fighter for small farmers and laborers who sought to abolish the gold standard in the interest of working people. But he was on the wrong side in the 1925 Scopes trial, opposing the teaching of evolution in the schools. Battles still going on today a century later strongly echo such religiously-inspired themes.

The 1920s saw the formal, doctrinal establishment of fundamentalism. But the critical turning point was the weaponizing of the abortion issue by the Republican Party after the 1973 Roe v Wade decision. This culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, concomitant with the founding of the Moral Majority, comprised of conservative Christian political action committees.

This sealed the pact between the GOP and Protestant fundamentalism, with the fundis abandoning any remnant of economic populism to close ranks with neoliberalism and Reaganomics as the price for mainstreaming of their cultural-conservative agenda.

The surviving millenarian stamp in this new ultra-reactionary and Biblical-literalist form is particularly ominous. In the Book of Revelations, with which evangelicals are so obsessed, the foretold Apocalypse for John the Revelator, writing in the first century CE, was the fall of Rome. Jumping forward a millennium and a half to the English Civil War era, the prophecy was reconceived as overthrow of the aristocracy and lords of property, exemplified by the execution of the king.

For contemporary evangelicals and fundamentalists, the Apocalypse can be seen as a literal rain of fire and brimstone which state rulers now have the power to bring about through modern military weapons technology. The notion of believers in an imminent and literal Apocalypse getting anywhere near the U.S. nuclear arsenal is terrifying.

Despite his supposed love affair with Putin, the blustering, erratic Trump taking power in what is, after Ukraine and Gaza, a world at war, holds unprecedented risk of escalation to the unthinkable despite those sectors of the left who view Trump as the less dangerous candidate because he would be less likely to get into a war with Russia.

Vaneigem’s title, Resistance to Christianity, is in some ways more relevant and in other ways less than the author himself anticipated when he first wrote the book in 1994. Vaneigem ends his story with the 1789 French Revolution, saying that it brought about the “fall of god”—after which liberatory movements no longer had to resort to the vocabulary and iconography of religion. In an afterword for the new English edition, Vaneigem doesn’t really rethink that, seeing the world as moving “beyond religion.” This is, especially at this moment, entirely too optimistic.

On the other hand, secularism isn’t sufficient to resist the MAGA variant of clerical fascism on its own. Resistance is going to have to come, in part at least, from within elements of Christianity, and others who view the struggle in spiritual rather than rationalist terms.

Hopefully, the contradiction will be too blatant for some of those rallying around the obviously irreligious Trump in the name of religion. Some lonely figures have indeed broken ranks, such as Russell Moore, once a top official in the Southern Baptist Convention and now author of Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call For Evangelical America, warning that evangelism is becoming the antithesis of everything it supposedly stands for by embracing MAGA.

There are also pastors in the Black church who are keeping the MLK tradition alive, such as Rev. William Barber in North Carolina, who led the Moral Mondays campaign in that state against the overturn of civil rights protections and imposition of restrictions on abortion rights. And, there are Christians who are risking their freedom to assist desperate migrants in the southern borderlands. These are a reminder that there are other currents in the Christian tradition, broadly defined, than its most reactionary exponents now preparing a bid for total power.

The history chronicled in Vaneigem’s book, as obscure as much of it may seem for contemporary readers, is well worth grappling with at this moment.

Bill Weinberg rants weekly on his podcast CounterVortex.

 

“What Did You Learn in School Today?”

And, Was Ms Brown Fired?

by Gary Olson / August 13th, 2024

circa 1830: A slave auction in America. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

Through the centuries, the Republic that eventuated in North America has maintained a maximum of chutzpah and minimum of awareness in forging a creation myth that sees slavery and dispossession not as foundational but as inimical to the nation now known as the United States. But, of course, to confront the ugly reality would induce sleeplessness interrupted by haunted dreams, so far this unsteadiness has prevailed.
— Dr. Gerald Horne¹

When an origin story is considered sacrosanct, any challenge to it is sacrilege.
— Prof. Abby Reisman²

In most areas of the United States, school will be starting up in a few weeks. This reminds me of the song “What Did You Learn in School Today?” which was written by Tom Paxton and then recorded and released by Pete Seeger in 1963. Paxton’s lyrics mock the misinformation and lies provided by the public school system. This prompted me to wonder what would happen if today’s school children returned home from school and responded to Paxton’s question.

You’ll need to imagine that their teacher, (let’s call her, Ms Brown) is able to recast what follows in age appropriate language, a skill that lies far beyond my limited capacity and that he adopted a creative, critical thinking approach and not rote learning. Finally, how the precocious student conveys this information to parents might take the form of a jumbled response but we can hope the essential information is intact.

Okay. How about something along the following lines: “What did you learn in school today?” We discussed the America Revolution in 1776 and Ms Brown said that when she was in school, she was taught that the American Revolution was about besieged colonists courageously standing up against British tyranny and it was all about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. She said the textbook authors characterized it as a glorious confirmation of American exceptionalism.

One of countless celebratory examples that she was taught was from Joseph J. Ellis, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783 (New York: Liveright 2021). According to Ellis and other myth-making historians, the greatest activity of this “Revolutionary generation” was their devotion to popular sovereignty and their “common sense of purpose.”³

Ms Brown said that she later learned that this devotion excluded the majority of people in the new nation and that slavery existed in all 13 British colonies and had begun at least in 1619. And Africans weren’t the only ones aware of specious reasoning in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Hutchinson, the last colonial governor of Massachusetts, queried that if the rights were “absolutely inalienable” how could the delegates deprive so many Africans of “their right to liberty?”⁴ And this apparently included George Washington’s order for the genocidal attack on the Haudenosaunee nation in upstate New York where more than 40 villages were burned to the ground and all crops and winter provisions destroyed. Those not killed or captured fled to Canada. This event was, in truth, an example of the Founder’s “common purpose.”

We learned that in 1700, roughly 75 percent of land in colonial New York state was owned by only 12 individuals. In Virginia, 1.7 million acres was held by seven individuals.⁵ In 1760, less than five hundred men in just five colonies controlled most of the shipping, banking, mining and manufacturing on the eastern seaboard and in1767 the richest 10 percent of Boston’s taxpayers had 66 percent of Boston’s taxable income while some 30 percent had no property at all.⁶ Ms Brown said that fifty-six of these propertied men later signed the Declaration of Independence.⁷

Many of the Founders were not only slave holders but obsessive land speculators This included George Washington who began acquiring land in 1752, while still a teenager. He eventually owned more than 70,000 acres in what became seven states and the District of Colombia. Ms Brown smiled and said, “I cannot tell a lie. George Washington became the richest person in America.” We also learned that even before King George III issued his Proclamation forbidding settlements from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi, individuals and colonial land speculators were staking claims to millions of acres of and were eager to push forward into Indigenous land. Ms. Brown said that we must consider the possibility that Native dispossession and exclusion played a key role in creating the country through speculative capitalism.⁸ The patriotic fantasy or fig leaf for all of this was that America was destined by God to expand democracy and the Protestant ethos to the native inhabitants.

Ms Brown said we should always look for other sources of information and rely on evidence. She learned from her own reading — outside of school — that there’s an entirely different view of the so-called Revolutionary War of 1776 and that it was actually part of a “counter-revolution,” a conservative movement that the “Founding Fathers” — Britain’s “revolting spawn” — fought to oust London. When the colonial elites broke with the Mother Country, the world’s first-ever apartheid state came into being.⁹ We learned that in the 1770s, the British Parliament was moving toward abolition and in 1773 there was the famous Somerset case in Britain in which Lord Mansfield banned slavery — calling it “odious” —within the country but not yet in the colonies. There was a real fear that Britain would soon cease to support slavery in the thirteen colonies. Simultaneously, Alexander Hamilton, another Founding Father, bought and sold slaves for his wife’s family, owned slaves himself and called Indigenous people “savages.”

More specifically, Ms Brown told us that “…In November 1775, Lord Dunsmore in Virginia issued his famous — or infamous, in the view of the settlers — edict offering to free and arm Africans to squash an anti-colonial revolt, he entered a pre-existing maelstrom of insecurity about the fate of slavery and London’s intentions. And by speaking so bluntly, Dunsmore converted the moderates into radicals.” Indeed, another expert on the Colonial period says that Dunsmore’s edict “did more than any another measure to spur uncommitted white Americans into the camp of rebellion.”¹⁰ Our teacher said that many more Africans — some estimates run as high as 100,000 — allied with the Red Coats rather than with their masters. Of course there were risks for the Africans because if the Revolution succeeded they would be considered traitors and punished as such. It was a terrifying choice and their fears were justified because after the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War, tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people were returned to enslavement.

We learned that in 1787, after the war, James Madison made sure that the Constitution guaranteed that the government would, in his words, “protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” He was firmly against agrarian reform of any sort and opposed to anything akin to actual functioning democracy. Why? Because the majority — the poor and landless — might use the political power they were granted to force a redistribution of wealth.

We learned that the British were jeopardizing numerous fortunes, not only based on slavery, but the slave trade. So, the war was necessary to protect the freedom of a small white elite to maintain slavery and further, not have any interference as they went ahead with dispossessing and exterminating indigenous people. In short, British colonialism was replaced with U.S. capitalist state colonialism.¹¹

Ms Brown said there was evidence strongly suggesting that the American Revolution was, in the words of historian William Hoagland, “The first chapter in an inter-imperial war between Great Britain and its dissident elite in North America.” We learned that the Euro-American elite ‘patriots” had only contempt and fear of actual democracy which they termed “The tyranny of the majority.” One historian pointed out that “The American state, even in its earliest incarnation was more concerned with limiting popular democracy than securing and expanding it.”¹² He told us that the Declaration’s phrase “Life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” was changed in the Constitution to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property.”

In support of this revisionist history, Ms Brown shared a few excerpts from Howard Zinn’s magisterial book, A People’s History of the United States, in which he cogently explains that over a relatively short period, the colonial elite were able to:

… take over land, profits and power from the British empire. In the process they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new privileged leadership. When we look at the American Revolution in that way it was a work of genius.

The Declaration of Independence was a wonderfully useful device because the language of liberty and equality could unite just enough whites to fight for the Revolution, without ending either slavery or inequality.

…the rebellion against British rule allowed a certain group of the colonial elite to replace those loyal to England, give some benefits to small holders and leave poor white working people and tenant farmers in very much the same situation.¹³

Finally, we considered that in 1776, nascent capitalists pulled off the ultimate coup and succeeded in “convincing the deluded and otherwise naive (to this very day) that this naked grab for land, slaves and power was somehow a great leap forward for humanity.”¹⁴

Just before the bell rang, one kid in my class asked the teacher, “If what we’ve previously been taught about the American Revolution may not be true what else may not be true?” Ms Brown said that was a good question and we’d talk about it next week and also do some role playing.

ENDNOTES:

• 1
  Gerald Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in the Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018) p.191. Dr. Horne is a national treasure and I concur with those who’ve described him as the preeminent radical historian of our era. I suspect this accounts for why so few people know of his indispensable work.
• 2
  Abby Reisman, “America as it actually was: Symposium confronts American myth, complexities of teaching 1777 in light of 1619. Penn GSE News, April 1 2022.
• 3
  Book Browse, “An Interview with Joseph J. Ellis.”
• 4
  Comment, in Woody Holton, ed. Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era: A Brief History With Documents, (Boston: Bedford, 2009) 6-7 in Horne, p.238. Here it should be noted that the Reconstruction period of 1865-1877 was the sole attempt to realize interracial democracy — what W.E.B. Du Bois termed “abolition democracy — and with it, the potential for economic democracy. The best account of Reconstruction’s remarkable achievements and its ultimate defeat at the hands of racial terrorism and the withdrawal of Federal support is Manisha Sinha’s new book, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic (New York: Norton, 2024). Sinha is the Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut.
• 5
  Michael Parenti, Democracy for the Few. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2011), p.5
• 6
  Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States. (New York: Harpers, 2008, 2011).
• 7
  Parenti, p.11.
• 8
  For more on this topic, see, Michael A. Blackman, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023); Colin Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); “The Founders and the Pursuit of Land,” The Lehrman Institute.
• 9
  Gerald Horne, The Counter Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. (New York: New York University Press, 2014), p.222 and 224. This section relies on Horne’s thoroughly documented Chapter Nine “Abolition in London” with its 147 footnotes.
• 10
  Ibid, p.224.
• 11
  For a semi-autobiographical piece on U.S. capitalist state colonialism toward Native-Americans, see, Gary OIson, “Decolonizing Our Minds, Including My Own, About U.S. Capitalist State Settler Colonialism,” Left Turn, Vol 3, No. 2, Fall 2021.
• 12
  William Hoagland, “Not Our Independence Day,” Interviewed by Jonah Waters, Jacobin, 07/04/2006.
• 13
  All quotations from Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States.
• 14
  William Pettigrew, “Commercialization,” in Joseph C. Miller, ed., <em>The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History</em>, 111-116 at 115.

TwitterRedditEmail

Gary Olson is Professor Emeritus at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA. Contact: garyleeolson416@gmail.com. Per usual, thanks to Kathleen Kelly, my in-house ed. Read other articles by Gary.

Fury of a Rebel Poet: the Anarchism of Joseph Déjacque

by David S. D’Amato

 August 2, 2024

Facebook

TwitterReddit

The French firebrand Joseph Déjacque lived a short life defined by a wild and beautiful struggle against authority, a life of intense passion for freedom and genuine class war. Unlike many of the seminal figures of the anarchist movement, Déjacque was truly of the working class. Born in 1821, he was raised in Paris by a single mother, who had become a widow when he was very young, and he worked full time from the age of 12. His trade was house painting and wallpaper hanging, but as we shall see, he was an able polemicist and poet; his words were a shot of adrenaline to radicals and a thunderstrike against the ruling classes of his day.

His work was very explicitly neither academic nor literary; it was, as he put it, “the cry of a rebel slave” and “social poet.” Even within a philosophical tradition defined by its resistance to fixed ways of thinking, Déjacque stands apart as an outsider, a radical amongst radicals, “unencumbered by orthodoxy or infantile presuppositions.” His style is deliberately provocative and irreverent, and his prose carries a sense of physical energy, drama, even danger. He joined the navy in 1841, a young man hoping to escape the drudgery of labor and perhaps seeking danger, but he returned to Paris two years later to resume the work he had known before and take up the cause of revolutionary agitation.

While he was, as an anarchist, opposed to the coercive violence and domination of the state, he did not shrink from violence in theory or practice, believing that the victims of state oppression and capitalist exploitation were naturally entitled to fight back and foment revolution. According to the eminent scholar of anarchism George Woodcock, “Déjacque’s advocacy of violence was so extreme as to embarrass even the anarchists in a later generation,” prompting Jean Grave to remove several passages “that might have been interpreted as incitements to criminal acts” from his reprint of Déjacque’s The Humanisphere. Yet he was not totally optimistic that the condition of decentralized, stateless communism he envisioned could be established through revolutionary means in the short term.^[1] He thus outlined an intermediate state of small communes governed by universal and direct democracy, which would gradually give way to the abolition of government, true anarchy, and full communism.^[2] This vision of the path to the abolition of the state and the rule of capitalists perhaps undermines the notion that there has been any neat split in the anarchist movement between gradualists and revolutionists, demonstrating that in the ideas of many early anarchist theoreticians, these strategies coexisted.

Déjacque came of age during a time of profound social and political change in France. Napoleon died in exile the year he was born, and the July Revolution took place when he was a young boy. As a man in his twenties, he became an active participant in the legendary upswell of revolutions in 1848, fighting on the barricades during the June Days uprising of workers in Paris. Demonstrating the always unrivaled power of ordinary working people, the French masses toppled France’s monarchy in a matter of days, King Louis Philippe, “the Citizen King,” fleeing to England to cower and hide. Within months, France would have a new constitution, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew would be elected France’s first president. In 1851, for the publication of The Lazarenes, Social Fables and Poems, Déjacque was tried on charges of “inciting to the misfortune of the Republic government, inciting to hatred among citizens and apologetics for deeds identified as criminal under the law.” For telling the truth, he was convicted, handed a fine of 2,000 francs, and sentenced to two years in prison. Déjacque’s honest assessments were an embarrassment to a French ruling class obsessed with maintaining credibility and control at a time of social awakening and political change. He never served this sentence, having already escaped France, first to England and then to the United States.^[3]

When he arrived in the United States, Déjacque spent a brief period in New York, organizing, writing and speaking there before moving to New Orleans. An active abolitionist who spoke out and agitated against slavery, particularly during this time in New Orleans, Déjacque called for the Northern proletariat to unite in solidarity with the slaves of the South in social insurrection against the master class. Damning society’s property-owning class as “thieves,” “lazy-bones,” and “vampires,” he saw what few of our “intellectuals” today have the clear-sightedness see or the courage to admit, that the reign of capital is a barbarity protected by force of law in violation of justice. In an article in The Libertarian, Déjacque praises John Brown, the abolitionist hero of Bleeding Kansas and Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today West Virginia), martyred that year for his fight against the evils of slavery. “The masters,” he wrote in 1861 shortly before the end of The Libertarian’s run, “should be expropriated in the cause of public morality for crimes against humanity.”

In one of the most interesting episodes of his life for students of anarchist history, Déjacque criticized Pierre-Joseph Proudhon for his sexism and misogyny. In an 1857 letter, he attacks Proudhon for adopting “the privileged man’s point of view of social progress,” arguing that men and women are fundamentally equal and that Proudhon’s acceptance of patriarchy was incompatible with libertarianism. Déjacque dismisses Proudhon as a liberal, not a true libertarian. He writes, “You cry against the great barons of capital, and you would rebuild a proud barony of man on vassal-woman.” Déjacque urges Proudhon^[4], “Do not describe yourself as an anarchist” until you are prepared to “speak out against man’s exploitation of woman.”^[5] He would not permit his anarchism to be tainted by misogyny or patriarchy, just as he didn’t want it corrupted by practical politics or capitalist social and economic relations.

Between the two, Déjacque was the truer to anarchism’s core values and spirit, and in confronting Proudhon’s sexism he provides a fine summary of the anarchist’s general worldview, writing,

For me, humanity is humanity: I do not establish hierarchic distinctions between the sexes and races, between men and women, between blacks and whites. The difference in sexual organism is no more than the difference in skin color as a sign of superiority or inferiority.

Here, in his remonstrative letter to Proudhon, Déjacque anticipates later anarchists who seek to generalize their anti-authoritarian critiques of capitalism and the state to other forms of domination and oppression like sexism and racism. He understood the connection between these overlapping instances of oppression at a time when even the most radical voices clung to old hatreds and prejudices; he thus gives us an anarchism that is at once consistent and set against dogmatism. As the anarchist historian, translator and publisher Shawn P. Wilbur observes, “Déjacque is notable for using the conventional anarchist vocabulary much more than most of his contemporaries.” He seems to predict much of the style and language that would become standard in the movement in the decades that followed his death—indeed, as Zoe Baker observes, his work “was not widely known among anarchists until the 1890s.”^[6] At that point, upon the rediscovery of Déjacque unique contributions, it became clear to many of the movement’s historians and leading lights that he had been a bellwether and a visionary.

The influence of the visionary utopian socialist Charles Fourier is clearly evidenced in Déjacque’s thought. As Patrick Samzun writes, “Fourier’s harmonious world of passional attraction was reshaped across the Atlantic by a revolutionary proletarian.”^[7] Déjacque sees himself as radicalizing Fourier’s thought, stripping it of the content imbued by Fourier’s “commercial education, bourgeois tradition, some prejudices in favor of authoritarian and servitude which made him deviate from absolute liberty and equality.” While clearly influenced by Proudhon, he also departs explicitly from Proudhon’s emphasis on mutual exchange, looking forward to “the absolute overthrow of commerce.” Déjacque nonetheless shares much of Proudhon’s emphasis on the decentralized, federated system of autonomous communities that has become characteristic of classical anarchism. He calls for “universal individualism,” seeing “natural government” as “the government of individuals by individuals,” but accepts only full communism on the basis of “attraction and solidarity” as the proper instantiation of this arch-individualism.

These ideas are front and center in Déjacque’s mature thought. After returning to New York from New Orleans, he set about to publish a journal of communist anarchism, which would become the home of some of the most radical ideas of the nineteenth century—indeed, of the modern age. He chose to call the paper The Libertarian (in the original French, Le Libertaire), and it is noteworthy as one of the first anarchist publications ever, in either Europe or the United States. Following Déjacque and the advent of The Libertarian, the term itself becomes something close to a synonym of anarchist, signifying a decentralist opposition to all relationships of inequality and power, regardless of whether they manifest in the political, economic, or social realm. Robert Graham, the noted expert on the history of anarchism, observes that Déjacque was “probably the first person to use the term ‘libertarian’ as a synonym for ‘anarchist,’”^[8] and that “[h]e may also have been the first person to describe anarchist alternatives to other political perspectives as ‘anarchism.’” While The Libertarian was short-lived, running from 1858 to 1861, it continues to be a source of ideas and inspiration within the anarchist movement; owing to the fact that it was a Francophone journal published in America, it has by and large remained in regrettable obscurity, though this presents an opportunity for curious radicals to discover some of anarchism’s boldest challenges to authoritarianism.^[9] The paper also saw the first publication of Déjacque’s book The Humanisphere, which was serialized within its pages, beginning in the first year of its run. The book is presented as a warning, a forecast of the coming revenge of a proletarian class that has awakened and reorganized society on a cooperative basis.

Déjacque had very little use for superstitions of any kind; he challenged, without exception, the most important and powerful social institutions of his time—and history has tended overwhelmingly to vindicate those challenges. God was, to him, a poison to human beings, a “a mix of nicotine and arsenic,” concocted by some people to control and dominate other people. He follows Proudhon in regarding God (and religion generally) as a profound evil standing in the way of a more just and free world for the vast majority of actual people. Very much in the vein of other classical-era anarchists, Déjacque writes, “Religious faith submerged consciences, brought devastation in minds and hearts. All the robberies of force were legitimated by the ruse.” In his Essay on Religion, published in 1861, he says that religion has been the “consecration of every inertism in humanity and universality, the petrification of the past, its permanent  immobilization.” He argues that religion, like politics, needs a revolution, and that this requires the destruction of God and all authority here on earth.

By the spring of 1861, it was time for Déjacque to return to France. It is not completely clear what became of Déjacque after his return, and there has been some disagreement about the date and circumstances of his death. His career as a writer and publisher is even more remarkable when we consider that his formal education had concluded before he was a teenager. His perspective is the raw and unvarnished one of the laboring intellectual, sharpened by the experience of working and sharing ideas and encouragement with other workers. What he lacked in formal education, he more than made up for in his natural intellectual power and his ability to see through the dissimulations of the rich and powerful. He was the nightmare of the ruling class come to life.

Over the past several decades, the influence of anarchist communism on Marxism has been clear, with ecological and decentralist currents gaining ground on the more statist and authoritarian varieties that dominated the previous century. While it is difficult to say just how much of this influence can be attributed to any one figure within the history of anarchism, what is perhaps more clear is that history has vindicated a vision of communism more closely aligned with Déjacque’s radically libertarian one. In a 2012 paper, the Brazilian geographer Marcelo Lopes de Souza wrote, “[W]e—contemporary Marxists and libertarians—have inherited animosities and bad feelings that are no longer suitable or justifiable.” He notes that these categories of identity are historical contingencies rather than “immutable entities,” with popular usage changing over time. He also points out that anarchists such as Élisée Reclus regarded state socialists as “brothers,” appreciating the groups’ common goal of a society without the systematized exploitation of working people and the vast inequality and social breakdown that accompany that exploitation.

Whatever the extent of his influence, Déjacque’s thought remains a potent and relevant challenge to the twin monstrosities of our age, the authoritarian state and destructive, exploitative capitalism. His real-life struggles against social, political, and economic forms of domination anticipate and provide inspiration for today’s antifascists and black blocs around the world. He impels all anti-authoritarians toward active rebellion and direct action, railing against our meek resignation and acceptance of electoralism and neutered political participation. Throughout his body of work, there is a clear sense of urgency and responsibility, an insistence on acknowledging a haunting truth: the rulers rule because we allow them to. If we want freedom, we have to take it.

Notes.

^[1] Zoe Baker, Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in the United States and Europe (AK Press 2023), page 71.

^[2] Id.

^[3] Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism (Freedom Press 1996), page 75.

^[4] In a footnote to his history of the American individualist anarchists, James J. Martin notes that while Max Nettlau believed Déjacque “arrived at his anarchist beliefs independently of Proudhon,” Ernst Viktor Zenker saw him as at first a Proudhonian.

^[5] Robert Graham, ed., Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to 1939) (Black Rose Books 2005), page 71.

^[6] Zoe Baker, Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in the United States and Europe (AK Press 2023). Baker goes on: “This can be seen in the fact that Max Nettlau’s first article on Déjacque was only published in 1890 in the German anarchist paper Freiheit. Jean Grave’s republication of Déjacque’s book L’Humanisphère did not occur until 1899. In 1910, Kropotkin referred to this text as having been only “lately discovered and reprinted.”

^[7] Patrick Samzun, “Between Wrath and Harmony: A Biolyrical Journey Through L’Humanisphère, Joseph Déjacque’s ‘Anarchic Utopia’ (1857),” Utopian Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2016), page 93.

^[8] As Matthew Crossin explains, “Classic libertarians contend that the right-wing appropriation [of libertarian] is actually authoritarian, given its support for the inherently hierarchical and exploitative social relations produced by capitalism.”

^[9] Janine C. Hartman and Mark A. Lause, eds., In the Sphere of Humanity: Joseph Déjacque, Slavery, and the Struggle for Freedom (University of Cincinnati Libraries 2012), page 26.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.