Justice, Order and Anarchy:
The International Political Theory Of
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

W. A. L. Prichard

Doctoral Thesis 
Submitted in Partial Fulfilment 
of the Requirements for the
Award of Doctor of Philosophy 
of Loughborough University
3rd April 2008
© by W. A. L. Prichard, 2008 

The Lisbon Earthquake
Voltaire
(1755)
D’inutiles douleurs éternel entretien!
Philosophes trompés qui criez: “Tout est Bien”
Accourez, contemplez ces ruines affereuses,
Ces débris, ces lambeaux, ces cendres malheureuses,
Ces femmes, ces enfants l’un sur l’autre entassés,
Sous ces marbres rompus ces members dispersés;
Direz-vous, C’est l’effet des éternelles lois
Qui d’un Dieu libre et bon nécessitent le choix?
Non, ne présentez plus à mon coeur agité
Ces immuables lois de la necéssité,
Cette chaîne des corps, des esprits, et des mondes
O rêves de savants! O chimères profondes!
Dieu tient en main la chaîne, et n’est point enchaîné;
Par son choix bienfaisant tout est déterminé,
Il est libre, il est juste, il n’est point implacable.
Pourquoi donc suffrons-nous sous un maître équitable? 


The Lisbon Earthquake
Voltaire
(1755)
Useless eternal pains maintenance!
Deceived Philosophers Who Shout: “Everything is Good”
Run, contemplate these hideous ruins,
These debris, these shreds, these unhappy ashes,
These women, these children huddled together,
Under these broken marbles these dispersed members;
You say, It’s the effect of the eternal laws
Who of a free and good God requires choice?
No, no longer present to my restless heart
These immutable laws of necessity,
This chain of bodies, minds, and worlds
O dreams of scholars! O deep dreams!
God holds the chain in his hand, and is not chained;
By his beneficent choice everything is determined,
He is free, he is just, he is not implacable.
Why then will we suffice under a fair master?


Abstract

This thesis provides a contextualised exegesis and re-evaluation of the anarchist PierreJoseph Proudhon’s writings on war and peace. The thesis has two claims to originality.

The first lies in shedding new light on Proudhon’s voluminous writings on international
politics. These texts have been relatively marginalised in the broader secondary literature
on Proudhon’s thinking, and the thesis seeks to correct this important lacuna. 
In International Relations (IR), the academic discipline to which this thesis will make its
most obvious original contribution, Proudhon’s writings on war and peace have been
almost completely ignored. 

By providing an anarchist approach to world politics, the thesis will also contribute to IR’s historiographical and critical theoretical literature. 

The second claim to originality lies in using these writings and the context from which they
emerged to tell a story about the evolution of the nineteenth century, the origins of the
twentieth century and provide possible ways of thinking beyond the twenty first. 

The thesis employs a contextualist methodology that works in four ways.  

First, I have contextualised Proudhon’s thought geo-politically, in relation to the dynamics of the balance of power in nineteenth-century Europe. 

Secondly, I have sought to understand Proudhon’s ideas against the backdrop of the evolution of the French nation state in the mid to late nineteenth century. 

Third, I have shown how Proudhon’s thought emerges out of the dominant intellectual currents of his day – ideas that range from the inspiration for the activism of Fourierist and Saint-Simonian feminists, to the epochal influence of Rousseau and Kant. 

Finally, I argue that Proudhon’s thinking on world politics needs to be understood in relation to the evolution of his own thinking after Napoleon III’s coup d’état of the 2nd of December 1851. 

I will show that Proudhon’s mature anarchism, his mutualist federalism, was an engaged response to each of these social and intellectual contexts. I will argue that his critiques of these processes, and their intellectual champions, have been given an added poignancy given that he campaigned in large part against those very processes that culminated in two world wars.

Keywords: Anarchism, Balance of Power, Federalism, International Relations,
International Political Theory, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Political Theory, Mutualism,
Nineteenth-Century France 

INTRODUCTION (EXCERPT)

IR Theory
Writing in the The Times Literary Supplement, soon after the end of the Second World
War, E. H. Carr claimed that Proudhon was “one of the first crank financial reformers”,
an “isolated eccentric” out of touch with his time.

 Furthermore, he argued, Proudhon’s vision of “a world of independent self-assertive individuals” was doomed to besubsumed by the forces of modern nationalism and his approach was also full of “self -contradictions”.

 For example, Carr casts Proudhon as an individualist and suggests that
this clashes with his theory of federalism. He thought Proudhon something of a
chauvinist, and that this contradicted his critique of everyone else’s nationalism. 
Perhaps most importantly Carr also implied that Proudhon’s two-volume La Guerre et la Paix, the central text of this thesis, could be dismissed “as a passing aberration” or a “confusion of thought”. It was a “panegyric on war” that included a “disconcerting streak of self assertive nationalism”.

 This evaluation doubtless goes some way towards explaining why Carr agreed with J. Selwyn Schapiro that Proudhon was a “progenitor of Hitlerism”.

 This is quite a claim, but Schapiro goes even further than this. He argues that
Proudhon’s followers have in fact mistakenly seen Proudhon as an anarchist; Schapiro
claims he was, in fact, a virulent anti-Semite and a “harbinger of Fascism”,
 an argument that Carr believes he “depicts […] with skill and plausibility.” 

As the thesis will show, both Carr and Schapiro’s accounts of Proudhon’s thought are completely inaccurate.

Hans Morgenthau, the second ‘father’ of IR theory, gives us insight into the prevalence of
two further positions on Proudhon’s thought in the immediate post-war period. The first
is the argument that Proudhon was a liberal individualist and supporter of laissez faire
capitalism. Morgenthau believed that Proudhon, like his contemporaries Cobden and
Bright, was “convinced that the removal of trade barriers was the only condition for the
establishment of permanent harmony among nations, and might even lead to the
disappearance of international politics altogether.” Nineteenth-century nationalism and
power politics sounded the death knell of Cobden and Bright’s liberal internationalism, as
I will discuss in chapters one and two. However, as I will show in chapters one, five and
six, this argument is simply not applicable to Proudhon’s thought.

But perhaps even more important is Morgenthau’s claim that “Proudhon was among the
first to glorify the blessings of science in the international field.” The historical
significance of Proudhon’s thought in this area was subsequently ignored by all who
followed Morgenthau, because for Morgenthau what this actually meant was that
Proudhon was thus guilty of a second naïveté – scientism. Morgenthau’s position on
science in its application to matters of world politics is well known. He argued against
neo-Kantian “scientific utopians” who, he argued, believed that if human behaviour could
be brought into line with universal reason, the harmony that would emerge would be
forceful enough to illustrate the stupidity of the “atavism of power politics”. Proudhon,
it is implied, was one of the first to suggest such nonsense, and Morgenthau directs the
reader to Proudhon’s La Guerre et la Paix in a footnote as evidence of this. Both Carr
and Morgenthau were the fathers of Realism as an approach to international relations, and
their casting of all who came before them as idealists is perhaps the founding myth of
academic IR. For both, neo-Kantian liberalism was the cause of the inter-war crisis and
the failure of IR to establish itself as a coherent discipline. Placing Proudhon in this neoKantian tradition was a discursive strategy that is simply not warranted by the evidence.
As I will show in chapters three and four, by unpacking Proudhon’s critique of Kant,
Morgenthau was also simply wrong.

Carr and Morgenthau cannot be held solely responsible for Proudhon’s absence from the
canon of IR theory, and I have not come across any evidence to suggest that others have
repeated their views in print. Nevertheless, their influence in the formation of IR as a
post-war academic discipline is incontestable,15 and yet it is only very recently that their
ideas have begun to be re-examined. Both Carr and Morgenthau cast nearly all who came
before them as utopians or idealists. The hegemony of realism in post-war debates about
IR theory, particularly its explicit statism, helps explain why Proudhon’s thought might
be seen to be antithetical to a realist-dominated IR. A return to Proudhon’s thought is
perhaps only possible now that this hegemony has begun to be eroded by a plethora of
critical and post-statist approaches to IR theory. I return to this literature below. 

Perhaps the best work to engage with Proudhon’s international thought is Madalene
Amoudruz’ 1945 text Proudhon et l’Europe.
It provides a good historical contextualisation of his thought. Amoudruz shows that what transpired in the totalitarian century after Proudhon’s death was the “inverse” of what he had argued and campaigned for. Nevertheless, Proudhon is deliberately painted as simply an astute journalist with the common sense of the “petit paysanne”. This is unfortunate. What we ultimately take from Amoudruz is that Proudhon’s thought simply does not contain any of the deeper and more penetrating philosophical insights of his more illustrious contemporaries. This lack of intellectual contextualisation, also a flaw in Hoffman’s work, has contributed to the myth of Proudhon’s intellectual and political provincialism, a view reinforced by E. H. Carr who claimed that Amoudruz’ work is indeed “[m]ore judicial” than most. I will rectify this in this thesis by contextualising Proudhon’s thought within the dominant intellectual currents of his day, and by so doing show how deeply involved in these
debates he actually was.

The final work of political and social history to note is Steven Vincent’s Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (1984). This work is excellent.
As the title suggests, Vincent locates Proudhon within the development of the French
republican movement and ties his thought to the work of Rousseau and Montesquieu
amongst others. While generally comprehensive, the work does not engage with
Proudhon’s international political theory or his underlying theory of justice to any
significant degree. For example, there is only one index reference to La Guerre et la
Paix, and Vincent admits that he does not engage with De la Justice, Proudhon’s
unquestioned magnum opus and the inspiration for La Guerre et la Paix, “in any
detail”. Vincent’s aims are more to tie his early life, context and writings to his work on
federalism. This thesis will fill an important gap in between these two periods. 

What is so surprising is that this contemporary move in IR theory is a remarkable and
unconscious repetition of the arguments Proudhon made all those years ago. While
Proudhon’s arguments were made in radically different times, they were made for the
much the same reasons. Proudhon questioned and reformulated the newly devised
sociological positivism of Auguste Comte, the teleological Kantian philosophy of history,
the claims about the immutability of the social order espoused by the religious right, and
the ahistorical nationalist statism of Rousseau. Proudhon also criticised the Jacobin
communism of Louis Blanc, the providentialism of the liberal Saint-Simonian
technocrats, and the capitalist doctrines of laissez-faire. By standing fast to a commitment
to individual and group autonomy, a sociological and moral ontology, anti-dogmatism in
social theory and an openness in historical analysis, he broke decisively with each of
these authors – in particular in relation to their statism – and in so doing devised
anarchism as an alternative political paradigm.

As Alexander Herzen, one of the most prominent Russian revolutionaries of the mid to
late nineteenth century, observed at the time: “Proudhon is the first of a new set of
thinkers. His work marks a transition period, not only in the history of socialism, but also
in the history of French logic.” It will be argued that Proudhon’s thought was arguably
the first comprehensive break from the state-based, materialist and deterministic
paradigm that dominated modern social theory, particularly on the left, within fifty years
of his death. Indeed, it is against this past dominance that contemporary critical theory is
directed. As such, what needs to be explained is less how Proudhon might contribute to
contemporary IR theory but how and why IR theorists like Linklater are making
Proudhonist arguments and calling for a return to his ideas. Of course we cannot
address this issue before we have a full account of Proudhon’s arguments. Careful
research design is thus vital to substantiating the historical, analytical and political claims

this thesis makes. 

Proudhon

Found a couple of good posts on Proudhon. One is Proudhon on government over at CLASSical Liberalism. Where Proudhon denounces representative parliamentary democracy as a sham. Considering the election of King Stephen the Haropcrite this passage seems particularly apt.

"It is completely otherwise in democracy, which according to the authors exists fully only at the moment of elections and for the formation of legislative power. This moment once past, democracy retreats; it withdraws into itself again, and begins its anti-democratic work."

"In fact it is not true, in any democracy, that all citizens participate in the formation of the law; that prerogative is reserved to the representatives."

"It is not true that they deliberate on all public affairs, domestic and foreign; this is the perquisite, not even of the representatives, but of the ministers. Citizens discuss affairs, ministers alone deliberate them."

"...According to democratic theory, the 'People' is incapable of governing itself; democracy, like monarchy, after having posed as its principle the sovereignty of the People, ends with a declaration of the incapacity of the People!"

"This is what is meant by the democrats, who once in the government, dream only of consolidating and strengthening the authority in their hands."

The other is on Anarkismo.net.

Time to abondon our concept of Collectivism for a concept of Mutualism?

Proudhon and the 21st Century

As I have said here before the real nature of Proudhonian anarchism is self government, something embraced by Max Stirner and late Nietzsche. As well as by Kropotkin and Emma Goldman.

In self government, the individual is soverign, and no decision can be made without my input. Any decisions over my life must be done by my consent. It is classical liberalism taken to its logical teleology.

And yet the post-modernists who rant on about the teleology of Marxism as being essentialist, accept this of anarchism. Post Modernism is also a teleology of liberalism.

While Anarchy means No Government we can see that the government it denies is Monarchy and representative democracy, parlimentarianism. Instead Prodhoun saw government, as did Kropotkin, as self organized by individuals as community.

That is in community or workplace councils, with revocable delegates going out ot present positions within a larger federation, and coming back from those federations with proposals for approval.

This particular article on Proudhon in the 21st Century introduces Prodhoun to North American readers who may not have heard of him. I present an exerpt of this very interesting paper. Discuss amongst yourselves. Those who would call themselves Libertarian would do well to read their Prodhoun.

A NOTE TO NORTH AMERICAN READERS

Most people in North America are unaware of Proudhon, but he did have an influence here. The newspaper editors Charles Dana and Horace Greely were sympathetic to his ideas and he influenced the American individualists, most especially Benjamin Tucker, who translated and published some of his most important writings. Proudhon's criticisms of the credit and monetary systems were an influence upon the Greenback Party. His concept of mutual associations and the People's Bank were forerunners of the credit union and cooperative movements.

WHAT DID PROUDHON MEAN BY ANARCHY?

The public thinks anarchy means chaos or terrorism. But many people who claim to be anarchists are also confused as to its meaning. Some think anarchism is a doctrine espousing the right to do what ever you want. Others dream that one day a pure anarchist utopia, a kind of earthly Paradise of peace and freedom will come to be. Neither of these conceptions were Proudhon's. "Anarchy" did not mean a pure or absolute state of freedom, for pure anarchism was an ideal or myth.

[Anarchy] ... the ideal of human government... centuries will pass before that ideal is attained, but our law is to go in that direction, to grow unceasingly nearer to that end, and thus I would uphold the principle of federation.[2]
...it is unlikely that all traces of government or authority will disappear...[3]

Proudhon wanted people to minimalize the role of authority, as part of a process, that may or may not lead to anarchy. The end was not so important as the process itself.

By the word [anarchy] I wanted to indicate the extreme limit of political progress. Anarchy is... a form of government or constitution in which public and private consciousness, formed through the development of science and law, is alone sufficient to maintain order and guarantee all liberties... The institutions of the police, preventative and repressive methods officialdom, taxation etc., are reduced to a minimum... monarchy and intensive centralization disappear, to be replaced by federal institutions and a pattern of life based upon the commune.[4] NB. "Commune" means municipality.

In the real world, all actual political constitutions, agreements and forms of government are a result of compromise and balance. Neither of the two terms, Authority and Liberty can be abolished, the goal of anarchy is merely to limit authority to the maximum.

Since the two principles, Authority and Liberty, which underlie all forms organized society, are on the one hand contrary to each other, in a perpetual state of conflict, and on the other can neither eliminate each other nor be resolved, some kind of compromise between the two is necessary. Whatever the system favored, whether it be monarchical, democratic, communist or anarchist, its length of life will depend to the extent to which it has taken the contrary principle into account.[5]

...that monarchy and democracy, communism and anarchy, all of them unable to realize themselves in the purity of their concepts, are obliged to complement one another by mutual borrowings. There is surely something here to dampen the intolerance of fanatics who cannot listen to a contrary opinion... They should learn, then, poor wretches, that they are themselves necessarily disloyal to their principles, that their political creeds are tissues of inconsistencies... contradiction lies at the root of all programs.[6]

In rejecting absolute anarchy and favoring an open-ended process, Proudhon criticized all forms of absolutism and utopianism. He saw that utopianism is dangerous, and was a product of absolutism - the sort of thought which fails to distinguish between concrete reality and the abstract products of the mind. Anarchist theory should be open-ended, or "loose". No hard-edged determinism or "necessary stages of history" for Proudhon.

...writers have mistakenly introduced a political assumption as false as it is dangerous, in failing to distinguish practice from theory, the real, from the ideal... every real government is necessarily mixed...[7]

...few people defend the present state of affairs, but the distaste for utopias is no less widespread.[8]

Not only was utopia a dangerous myth, the working people were too practical and too intelligent to bother with such pipe dreams.

The people indeed are not at all utopian... they have no faith in the absolute and they reject every apriori system...[9]

There was no easy way out - no Terrestrial Paradise, things might improve, but we still have to work. Such was his hard-headed realism in contrast to all the fancy dreaming and system-mongering of the intellectuals. Poverty, by which he meant lack of luxury, not destitution, was the foundation of the good life.

In rejecting absolutism, Proudhon never waffled on the question of freedom. As opposed to the modern left which pits equality against liberty, and demands the restriction of the latter for the sake of the former, Proudhon was a resolute libertarian:

Lois Blanc has gone so far as to reverse the republican motto. He no longer says Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, he says, Equality, Fraternity,
Liberty!... Equality! I had thought that it was the natural fruit of Liberty, which has no need of theory nor constraint.[10] ...the abolition of taxes, of central authority, with great increase of local power. There lies the way of escape from Jacobinism and Communism.[11]

MUTUALISM

Proudhon proposed mutualism as an alternative both to capitalism and socialism. Mutualism was not a scheme, but was based upon his observation of existing mutual aid societies and co-operatives as formed by the workers of Lyon. But the co-operative association in industry was applicable only under certain conditions - large scale production.

...mutualism intends men to associate only insofar as this is required by the demands of production, the cheapness of goods, the needs of consumption and security of the producers themselves, i.e., in those cases where it is not possible for the public to rely upon private industry... Thus no systematized outlook... party spirit or vain sentimentality unites the persons concerned.[27]

In cases in which production requires great division of labour, it is necessary to form an ASSOCIATION among the workers... because without that they would remain isolated as subordinates and superiors, and there would ensue two industrial castes of masters and wage workers, which is repugnant in a free and democratic society. But where the product can be obtained by the action of an individual or a family... there is no opportunity for association.[28]

Proudhon was in favor of private ownership of small-scale property. He opposed individual ownership of large industries because workers would lose their rights and ownership. Property was essential to building a strong democracy and the only way to do this on the large-scale was through co-operative associations.

Where shall we find a power capable of counter-balancing the... State? There is none other than property... The absolute right of the State is in conflict with the absolute right of the property owner. Property is the greatest revolutionary force which exists.[29]

...the more ground the principles of democracy have gained, the more I have seen the working classes interpret these principles favorably to individual ownership.[30]

[Mutualism] ...will make capital and the State subordinate to labor.[31]

Alienation and exploitation in large-scale industry was to be overcome by the introduction of workers' co-operative associations. These associations were to be run on a democratic basis, otherwise workers would find themselves subordinated just as with capitalist industry. A pragmatist, Proudhon thought all positions should be filled according to suitability and pay was to be graduated according to talent and responsibility.

That every individual in the association... has an undivided share in the company... a right to fill any position according to suitability... all positions are elective, and the by-laws subject to approval of the members. That pay is to be proportional to the nature of the position, the importance of the talents, and the extent of responsibility.[32]

Proudhon was an enemy of state capitalism and state socialism. At the very most, government could institute or aid the development of a new enterprise, but never own or control it.

In a free society, the role of the government is essentially that of legislating, instituting, creating, beginning, establishing, as little as possible should it be executive... The state is not an entrepreneur... Once a beginning has been made, the machinery established, the state withdraws, leaving the execution of the task to local authorities and citizens.[33]

[Coinage] ...it is an industry left to the towns. That there should be an inspector to supervise its manufacture I admit, but the role of the state extends no farther than that.[34]

The following quote is a good summary of Proudhon's economic and political ideas:

All my economic ideas, developed over the last 25 years, can be defined in three words, agro-industrial federation; all my political views... political federation or decentralization, all my hopes for the present and future... progressive federation.[35]


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A History of Class-Struggle Anarchism
A Review of Means and Ends by Zoe Baker

By Tom Wetzel

June 21, 2024

Z Article
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.





Zoe Baker’s book Means and Ends is a comprehensive look at the revolutionary class-struggle anarchist movement as it existed and developed in the period from the International Workingmen’s Association of 1864-78 to the defeat of the anarchist and syndicalist-inspired revolution in Spain in 1939. Although the book is not about the writings of famous anarchist authors, she often uses quotes from people like Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta to illustrate points. The author concedes that she only knows English and thus could not consult writings that have not yet been translated into English. The book does not talk about all the various political tendencies that have used the “anarchist” label but mostly focuses on the main class-struggle oriented tendency which she calls “mass anarchism.” Because the retreat from class is a common feature in the writing of various anarchists since World War 2 — from George Woodcock to Murray Bookchin and contemporary post-modernist anarchists — I have chosen to use “class-struggle anarchism” to refer to the political tendency this book is about.

People in that movement did not use the term mass anarchism which was first coined by Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt in Black Flame. This term makes a certain sense, though, because of the orientation of that movement to mass struggle and building and participating in formally organized, democratic mass organizations such as worker unions, tenant unions, and independent women’s groups.

Origin

Zoe Baker starts out by honing in on the very specific anarchist tendency that her book is about. This political tendency first emerged as an organized political force within the framework of the International Workingmen’s Association (“First International”).

At a congress of the International in 1869, the majority of the delegates voted in favor of ownership of land by the whole society. This viewpoint was called “collectivism.” Among this collectivist majority, a tendency emerged who opposed a strategy oriented to the politics of parliamentary elections and parties and opposed the goal of gaining state power. This tendency often referred to itself by labels such as “federalist” and “revolutionary socialist.” The word libertarian was first used as another name for anarchism by Joseph Dejacque in 1857. Thus “libertarian socialist” or “libertarian communist” were also labels used by this tendency.(p. 24) Many did not call themselves “anarchists” initially because anarchism was identified with Proudhon at that time. This emerging federalist, libertarian socialist tendency had significant disagreements with Proudhon.

From the 1840s on, Proudhon had advocated a strategy called mutualism. This was a gradualist strategy of social change through the building of worker cooperatives, with the aid of loans from a “people’s bank.” Proudhon thought the cooperatives could grow to eventually take over more social functions. Proudhon opposed social ownership of the land, advocating private ownership by those who work the land, such as a peasant farmer. The federalist libertarian socialists did not support Proudhon’s mutualism but “advocated revolutionary…unionism and the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state through an armed insurrection, which would forcefully expropriate the capitalist class.” (p. 24) As Baker points out, the opposition to Proudhon is an example of why the emergent class struggle-oriented federalist socialist or anarchist tendency cannot be defined simply by their proposal for abolition of the state as other socialists also advocated this.

Baker uses the term collectivist in two different ways. She initially defines it as proposing social ownership of the land. Later she talks about an internal disagreement among the class-struggle oriented anarchists between “anarchist collectivists” and “anarchist communists.” Here she is using a distinction explained by Kropotkin in The Conquest of Bread. In Kropotkin’s terminology, “collectivists” were people such as James Quillaume. Nestor Makhno or Ricardo Mella who advocated remuneration for work effort in a libertarian socialist society (p. 90). Workers would be given certificates based on hours worked which they could use to obtain consumer goods. This is similar to Marx’s proposal in A Critique of the Gotha Program. Kropotkin, on the other hand, advocated a proposal of free-to-user provision for all needs — in keeping with the principle, “From each according to ability, to each according to need.” Kropotkin explicitly opposed remuneration for work effort. People advocating Kropotkin’s view were called “communists.” But according to the original definition of “collectivist,” “communists” would also be “collectivists” since they advocated social ownership of the land. In reality, the principle of remuneration for work effort and the principle of free-to-user pubic goods and services are compatible. Indeed, the Spanish CNT “libertarian communist” program of 1936 advocated both.

At the Hague Congress of the First International, a split developed. In the preparations for that congress, the Marxist faction sent out blank delegate mandates to people who did not actually represent sections of the International. Marx and Engels used their spurious majority to expel Bakunin and concentrate authority in the hands of the General Council. Subsequent meetings of the Belgian, Spanish, Italian, British, Dutch, French and Swiss Jura sections of the International repudiated these decisions, Baker informs us. (p. 23) Delegates from the Spanish, French, Italian, American and Swiss Jura sections then met at a congress in St. Imier in September, 1872. This congress then led to a series of congresses of the International through 1878. This series of congresses are sometimes called the “St Imier International.” As Baker points out, this label is anachronistic because the delegates who met at St. Imier did not see themselves as founding a new international, but continuing the international founded in 1864. Nonetheless, the federalist, libertarian socialist tendency was more dominant in the congresses of the St. Imier International. This change represented the real coming together of the class-struggle oriented anarchist tendency. Baker has a quote from Luigi Fabbri (secretary of the Italian Syndicalist Union) in 1922 where he points to the 1872 St. Imier congress as the real beginning of the modern anarchist movement.(p. 26)

How did this tendency acquire the anarchist label? Baker says the libertarian socialists came to be called “anarchists” because that’s what they were called by their enemies. In particular, Marx and Engels tended to confuse the class-struggle oriented federalist socialists with Proudhon.

Baker is quite clear that there is a sharp difference between the class-struggle anarchist movement and other anarchist tendencies such as “individualist anarchists” or anti-organizational “insurrectionary” anarchists. There were at times sharp polemics between the mass anarchists and people who espoused these other varieties of anarchism. However, mass anarchism was often developed by worker autodidacts who could be quite eclectic. For example, Emma Goldman claimed to sympathize with individualist anarchism and even with Nietzsche.

Social Theory: Oppression and Liberty

The class struggle anarchist tendency that Baker is describing did not have a common well-developed social theory — and differed from Marxism in that way. This means that aspects of Marxism were often an influence on anarchist thinking. As Baker points out, American anarchist Albert Parsons read both Marx’s Capital and the Communist Manifesto. Nonetheless, anarchist social theory was more elastic than the Marxism of that era in certain ways. In anarchist social theory various distinct and somewhat autonomous sources of oppression were often identified — such as subordination of workers to employers, the oppression inherent in the state, and the subordination of women in patriarchist society. In particular, the state was seen as a distinct source of oppression. Anarchists did generally adhere to the class theory of the state, as in this passage from Bakunin:

“The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class: the priesthood, the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and finally, after every other class has been exhausted, the bureaucratic class.”

Even so, Baker also notes: “Rather than positing a one-sided perspective in which the modern state was created by capitalism, anarchists held that the modern state and capitalism cocreated one another.”( p. 74) Thus the state has a certain autonomy as a distinct source of oppression. In addition to its role of defending the existing capitalist setup, the state has a top-down hierarchy with the people at the top of the state able to “make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force.”(p. 76)

Rather than reducing oppression to the wage-labor/capital framework, “anarchists understood that humans are oppressed by a myriad of …social structures that must be abolished …[including] racism, patriarchy, homophobia, hierarchically organized religion, and authoritarian modes of education.” (p.78) Although intersectionality is a more recent term, Baker recognizes the intersectional nature of the anarchist conception of class struggle politics. And thus she situates both anarchist feminism and black anarchism as “parts of a more general trend within modern anarchism…to emphasize the manner in which all structures of oppression form an interlocking web.”(pp. 357-358)

The concept of oppression in anarchism is understood in terms of a naturalistic conception of positive freedom as a potential based in human nature. Thus oppression is understood as a feature of structures or practices in society that suppress or trample positive freedom. Freedom, as Baker writes, was “conceptualized [by] anarchists in two main ways: not being subject to domination or having the real possibility to do or to be.” (p. 62). Thus Emma Goldman wrote in 1914 that “true liberty…is not a negative thing of being free from something…Real freedom, true liberty is positive: it is freedom to be, to do; in short, the liberty of actual and active opportunity.”(p. 64)

Thus “anarchists advocated the abolition of capitalism because it is based on the oppression and exploitation of the working class.”(p. 72) In order to gain access to the goods and services they need to survive, workers have to purchase them with money. “Given their social position, they sell their labor to capitalists for a wage.” This means wage labor is not voluntary. In addition, wage labor is based on domination and subordination “as capitalists and landlords have the power to command workers to do as instructed.” (p.72)

Anarchist Vision of a Self-managed Society

The anarchist vision for the kind of libertarian socialist society they proposed falls directly out of this theory of liberty and oppression. The vision proposes a society where self-management is generalized. Baker describes (pp. 83-84) the anarchist vision as consisting of four components:Society as a whole would own the land, raw materials and non-human means of production but “those who occupy or use” the land or other means of production “directly control and self-manage the relevant sphere of production.” Thus the class division would be abolished as there would be no oppressor class set over the workers.
“Workplaces and communities would be self-managed…through general assemblies in which everyone involved has an equal say in collective decisions.”
“Markets and money would be replaced by a system of decentralized planning.”
The capitalist detailed division of labor would be done away with by having “physical labor” and the work of planning and making decisions “shared among the producers. People might “specialize in certain skills…but they would not be limited to one sphere of activity.” This re-organization of the jobs would go hand in hand with a reduced workweek.

I have two caveats here. First, the anarcho-syndicalist unions used not only worker assemblies as part of their goal of worker self-management of the union, but also election of revocable delegates as in shop steward councils and union congresses. This was also held to prefigure the organizational methods for control of industry and social planning, as in the council system described by Abad Diego de Santillan in After the Revolution [1935]. The idea is that these delegate bodies would be grounded in, and controlled by, the base assemblies.

My second caveat is about the proposal for abolition of money. We know that various class struggle anarchists in that era advocated for remuneration of work through some form of certificates that could be used to obtain consumer goods. This is one of the functions of money and assumes a price system. An oral history interview with Saturnino Carod in Blood of Spain illustrates one of the issues here. Carod was a farm labor union leader and a member of the Aragon Regional Committee of the CNT in 1936. In the interview he says he opposed abolition of money because he believed a price system was necessary for social accounting purposes.

Theory of Prefigurative Practice

An essential feature of “mass anarchism” was a theory about the causal connection between the methods of action and organization that are dominant in a period of increasing social conflict and the type of social order that would result from social transformation derived from those practices. Baker calls this the “theory of practice”:

“Anarchism’s commitment to the unity of means and ends was grounded in the theory of practice, which maintained…that as humans engage in activity, they simultaneously transform themselves and the world around them. An anarchist society would be produced over time by people engaging in horizontal systems of association and decision-making and…continuously creating and re-creating both anarchist social relations and themselves as people with the right kinds of capacities, drives and consciousness for an anarchist society.” (p. 118)

In a period where movement-building and social consciousness and working class confidence has developed to the point it becomes possible to change the structures of the dominant institutions — a moment where revolution is “on the agenda” — working people can only ensure that they end up in power in the workplaces and society when the smoke clears if they have a movement they control which drives the changes in society. To the degree that the movement that drives the change is characterized by assembly-based democratic practices and a political commitment to direct rank-and-file power, that politics and those practices then “prefigure” workplace and community self-management in the society that emerges through the action of that movement. Although the term prefigurative was coined in the 1970s by Carl Boggs, who wasn’t an anarchist, Baker insists that this concept was central to anarchist thinking about strategy.

The “theory of practice” was also the reason for anarchist rejection of the politics of parties and elections and rejection of the state socialist idea of gaining state power to build socialism. Baker describes four reasons for the anarchist rejection of an electoralist and parliamentary strategy:“The economic ruling classes would never allow their power and property to be voted away and abolished by peaceful and legal means.” The overthrow of the power of the boss classes could only happen through the building of a powerful working class movement “to forcibly overthrow their oppressors.” (p. 145)
Immediate improvements could be won within capitalism through mass direct action. Direct action included “strikes, rent strikes, combative demonstrations, riots, armed uprisings, prison escapes, industrial sabotage, boycotts, civil disobedience and providing illegal abortions.” (p. 133)

A focus on a strategy of electoral politics would encourage people “to look to politicians…and look to the next election rather than taking direct action themselves.” (p. 146) This would thus fail to develop the traits of class consciousness and confidence which is needed for the process of developing the working class into a revolutionary force.
Bakunin had predicted that people elected to government offices would be transformed by their position, which forces them to become “managers of the bourgeois state and the national economy.” (p148) The history of European socialist parties has shown how the process leads the politicians to moderate their rhetoric and commitments in order to secure middle class votes and stay in office.

If we look at the centrally-planned, state-owned economy built by the Bolsheviks in the course of the Russian revolution, we can see that their emphasis on an activist minority (“vanguard party”) seizing the economy through a hierarchical state bureaucracy prefigured the emergence of a new mode of production in which the party leaders, state-appointed managers, elite planners and top military brass became a new managerial oppressor class, set over the working class. At the time, anarchists tended to use the “state capitalist” label for the new mode of production in Russia, as Baker notes. But I think this was a bit superficial, based on the similarity between the top-down managerial hierarchy and Taylorist practices adopted by the Bolsheviks and capitalist economic management in major capitalist countries. As time would show, the internal dynamics of the USSR’s economy were rather different as it lacked the characteristic capitalist dynamic of constantly seeking ways to reduce labor hours per unit of output, for example.


Syndicalism

Syndicalism was the most important strategy developed by mass anarchists in the period Baker is studying. This was a proposal for methods of action and organization that could ensure worker self-management of unions, develop militancy, and contribute to the development of class consciousness, confidence and broad links of solidarity over time. Thus through a protracted process, the working class could develop a powerful social movement, forming a counter-hegemonic “class front” (to use a more recent term) with the power to potentially overthrow capital and the state. Although class formation is a term of Marxist origin, syndicalism was based on the idea that a more direct actionist, federalist and self-managed form of unionism would be an effective means to further the process of class formation. This process of internal development among working people was implicit in the syndicalist idea of grassroots, self-managed unionism having a dual role — as a means to fight for improvements in the present capitalist framework, as well as preparing a working class movement with the capacity to overthrow capitalism in an “expropriating general strike” where workers build organizations to self-manage the industries.

I have some disagreements with Baker’s discussion of syndicalism. To start with, a problem is the way the French word syndicalisme, the Italian word sindacalismo, and the Spanish and Portuguese word sindicalismo are translated. These words are merely the word for unionism in the respective languages, but the author tends to translate them as syndicalism. This leads to confusion. The word syndicalism in English was coined in the early 1900s to refer to a radical approach to unionism that developed in the years just prior to World War 1, influenced by both anarchist and Marxist worker militants.

The early 1900s were the beginning of the period of collective bargaining in various capitalist countries, and this often led to the emergence of a paid union bureaucracy that gained control through its position in negotiations. To make their job easier they often opposed strikes or other forms of militancy. Baker discusses a case where a mass strike wave developed in the French CGT union in 1919 but had to be organized from below by the rank-and-file due to opposition from the national executive.

Thus anarchist militants in the unions began to work out various organizational tactics to prevent the domination of unions by a paid bureaucracy as a separate layer outside the workplace. The tactics included horizontal federalist organization to keep control in the local grassroots unions, term limits for officers, emphasis on the leadership on the job through shop stewards and delegate systems. These tactics were designed to implement the libertarian conception of worker self-management of the union, and to prevent a bureaucracy from being a roadblock to increased militant action. Thus the word syndicalism by World War 1 came to refer to this libertarian approach to unionism. As Baker documents, many of the ideas characteristic of syndicalism were already advocated by the federalist, libertarian socialist tendency in the First International.

The linguistic confusion about “syndicalism” comes out in Baker’s discussion of what she calls “neutral syndicalism.” This should really be called “neutral unionism.” This refers to the “political neutrality” that was a characteristic of the French CGT in the 1890s to early 1900s under the Amiens charter. As Baker points out, the French CGT had numerous political tendencies among the worker members, including electorally oriented reformist socialists as well as anarchists and various types of radical unionist. The anarchists in the CGT interpreted “political neutrality” differently than the supporters of state socialist parties. For the anarchists, this meant merely independence of political parties. But the anarchist militants pursued all sorts of political struggle by the union, as against militarism. The reformist socialists complained that this violated the agreement to political neutrality.(p. 260) The anarchist militants supported politics by means other than the politics of parties and elections. They weren’t actually apolitical in their approach.

The 1890s idea of “union neutrality” was later dropped as revolutionary syndicalists gained greater influence within a number of mass unions by the time of World War 1. This means that the unions became more explicitly “political” in their militancy and approach to social struggle. This is reflected in this quote Baker uses from Angel Pestaña:

“The evolution of politics following the war has spelt the end of syndical neutrality of the Amiens charter. In the whole world there is not a syndicalist organization existing today that does not practice politics, either directly or as an appendage of a political party.”(p. 275)

As his reference to socialist party-aligned unions suggests, the Spanish phrase organización sindicalista should be translated as “unionist organization,” not “syndicalist organization.”

Baker suggests there are three forms of syndicalism: “neutral syndicalism,” “syndicalism plus”, and anarcho-syndicalism.. “Syndicalism plus” is a term coined more recently by Iain McKay. He is referring to those syndicalists who favor the existence of an ideologically specific anarchist organization as distinct from the union, but as an influence both within the union and in wider society, through things like popular education or “the battle of ideas.” I don’t think this is a “form of syndicalism” but just a view that some anarchist syndicalists hold. In the anarchist movement this viewpoint is called “dual organizationalism.” Dual organizationalists believe there is a positive role for an “organization of tendency,” that is, an explicitly anarchist political organization, in addition to the various mass organizations.

The term anarcho-syndicalism only became a popular way of referring to the libertarian, federalist approach to revolutionary unionism after World War 1. This happened largely because that’s what they were called by the Communists. The period between the Russian revolution and the 1930s were a revolutionary period in working class history as socialist ideas became broadly popular in working classes throughout the world, and various societies experienced mass strike waves, general strikes, civil wars and revolutions. Thus many syndicalist unions in this period became explicit in advocating “libertarian communism” as their goal. I think this reflects the historical moment as well as the pressure from the Communists who competed for worker allegiance with the anarcho-syndicalists.

Baker suggests that “anarcho-syndicalism” should be defined in terms of a union having this explicit revolutionary goal. I disagree with this because the period between the Russian and Spanish revolutions was a revolutionary moment. Thus the adoption of a revolutionary goal by the syndicalist unions at that time reflected a contingent historical situation. I see anarcho-syndicalism as a living movement defined by its strategy, that is, the methods of action and organization it proposes for the labor movement. The Spanish CNT was founded in 1910 with a number of anarchist and syndicalist-influenced independent unions in Spain coming together. As Baker points out, the CNT at that time did not define itself in terms of some anarchist vision for a future society. The union was defined by its approach to practice. The CNT had only 50,000 members initially. But the 1919 Canadiense strike was a transformative moment for the Spanish working class. A small strike at the big electric power utility had been built up into a massive regional general strike in Catalonia — forcing the Spanish government to mandate the eight-hour day for all of Spain. This led to the union mushrooming to 800,000 members. It was at this high point of success — and in the wake of the Russian revolution — that the CNT adopted its commitment to “libertarian communism.”

The Role of the Militant Minority

But anarcho-syndicalism is a living movement, and adapts to changing social circumstances. Looking at building self-managed unions today, I don’t see why this has to be based on some ideological vision of a future society. The idea is to build a self-managed, worker-led movement where workers can develop their social power and solidarity, and thus over time develop a radical goal of social transformation. Baker talks about Malatesta’s disagreement with defining unions in terms of an anarchist goal. He says either this would get in the way of building a majority force or else the commitment would become “mere words on paper ignored by everyone.” I think the presence in a grassroots union of an anarchist “militant minority” — active workers with anarchist ideas — would be more important to preventing bureaucratic degeneration of the union than a paper commitment to building a libertarian socialist society. Baker has a section on the “militant minority” where she writes:

“Mass anarchists believed that it was necessary to participate in social movements as a militant minority in order to ensure that struggles for reforms did not collapse into reformism and, instead, developeda revolutionary mass movement that could launch a large-scale armed insurrection. This means spreading anarchist ideas, acting as key and effective organizers, encouraging…workers to take direct action, and ensuring that formal organizations or informal groups were horizontally structured and made decisions in a manner that prefigured an anarchist society.” (p. 241)

The largest union in Spain today that identifies with the revolutionary legacy of the CNT of the 1930s is the Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT). This union claims to be “anarcho-syndicalist.” As far as I can tell from their website, the CGT does not define this in terms of future social transformation but in terms of their approach to unionism. Thus they claim to be advocates of self-managed (autogestionado), assembly-based (asembleista), class unionism (syndicalismo de clase). Class unionism is a form of unionism that brings workers together in struggle and decision-making across the various economic sectors.

Thus, I think it is a mistake to define anarcho-syndicalism as a form of union committed explicitly to an anarchist social transformation. Among the militants who ascribe to the anarcho-syndicalist strategy, they may see the practices of worker self-management of the union, participation in direct self-activity, and horizontal solidarity as the best way to build a vast working-class movement that prefigures a libertarian socialist society. And it may be that internal discussion of social transformation is going to be needed at some point to prepare the membership for revolutionary tasks. But this is not the same as saying that new self-managed unions built in periods of low-levels of struggle and low levels of class consciousness (like the contemporary era) must have an explicit commitment to an anarchist social transformation from the get-go.

Nonetheless, there was a tendency in revolutionary unionism that did define the union in terms of its anarchist politics. The Workers Federation of the Argentine Region (FORA) sometimes talked about being an “anarchist workers organization.” This ideological unionism is sometimes called forismo. The problem with this view is that it very rapidly led to splits in the labor movement in the South American countries where this practice was attempted. But it would be a mistake to confuse forismo with anarcho-syndicalism in general.

Despite my caveats about Baker’s discussion of syndicalism, I would recommend this book for those interested in learning about the history and character of mass-struggle oriented social anarchism as the book is quite comprehensive in delving into the various ins and outs of social anarchist theory, vision and practice.


Tom Wetzel is the author of Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st Century.


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Is Another Anarchism Possible?
Matthew Wilson -- April 03, 2024

Tom Wetzel
In Deer Hunting With Jesus Joe Bageant says "those who grow up in the lower class in America often end up class conscious for life" and so it has been with me.After leaving high school I worked as a gas station attendant for quite a few years and got let go from that job in one of the first job actions I was involved in. I gradually worked my way through college and in the early '70s was part of an initial group who organized the first teaching assistants' union at UCLA in which I was a shop steward. I had been involved in the anti-war movement in the late '60s and first became involved in socialist politics at that time.After obtaining a PhD at UCLA I was an assistant professor for several years at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee where I taught logic and philosophy and in my spare time helped to produce a quarterly anarcho-syndicalist community newspaper. After I returned to California in the early '80s, I worked for a number of years as a typesetter and was involved in an attempt to unionize a weekly newspaper in San Francisco. For about nine years I was the volunteer editorial coordinator for the anarcho-syndicalist magazine ideas & action and wrote numerous essays for that publication. Since the '80s I've made my living mainly as a hardware and software technical writer in the computer industry. I've occasionally taught logic classes as a part-time adjunct.During the past decade my political activity has mainly been focused on housing, land-use and public transit politics. I did community organizing at the time of the big eviction epidemic in my neighborhood in 1999-2000, working with the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition. Some of us involved in that effort then decided on a strategy of gaining control of land and buildings by helping existing tenants convert their buildings to limited equity housing cooperatives. To do this we built the San Francisco Community Land Trust of which I was president for two years.

Fury of a Rebel Poet: the Anarchism of Joseph Déjacque

by David S. D’Amato

 August 2, 2024

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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.