Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Introduction 7
movement in their native Russia as late as the Revolution of 1905. Here then we have
the four major nations – France, Spain, Italy, Russia – and their attendant cultural
systems that contributed to anarchism as a mass force in the labour movements of
Europe and the Americas from the 1860s until the First World War. For anarchism
was also strong in the United States – not among native-born Americans, but within
the immigrant communities, above all the Germans, Russians, Russian Jews and
Italians – and in Latin America, whence it was in part carried by Spanish and Italian
militants and immigrants, notably in Mexico – where it was an influential current in
the Revolution of 1910–20 – Cuba, Brazil and Argentina. 17 Significant movements
and traditions also existed in the Netherlands, Germany and Portugal, as well as East
Asia, in Japan and China. 18 Other important anarchist thinkers, in addition to those
already named, were the Italian Errico Malatesta, in exile for most of his adult life,
and the excitingly original German, Gustav Landauer, murdered in 1919 during the
suppression of the Bavarian Republic.
Anarchist communism was partially displaced as the dominant tendency within
anarchism with the formation of the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail) in
1895 and the rapid radiating out of syndicalism from France. According to Sorel,
‘Historians will one day see in this entry of the anarchists into the [unions] one of
the greatest events that has been produced in our time…’ 19 In the USA revolutionary
syndicalism took the form of the industrial unionism of the IWW (Industrial
Workers of the World); elsewhere syndicalism attained mass followings in France,
Italy, Argentina and Spain, where the mighty CNT (Confederación Nacional del
Trabajo) was set up in 1910. It was the CNT which was responsible for the amalgam
of ‘anarcho-syndicalism’, combining syndicalist preoccupation with the workplace,
daily industrial conflict and the revolutionary general strike with the traditional
anarchist belief in the need for an ultimate armed insurrection. 20
These decades of the heyday of international anarchism – already weakened by the
war itself – came substantially to an end as a consequence of the Russian Revolution.
17 See especially: John M. Hart, Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931 (Austin,
TX: University of Texas Press, 1987 edn); Frank Fernández, Cuban Anarchism: The History of
a Movement (Tucson, AZ: Sharp Press, 2001); John W.F. Dulles, Anarchists and Communists in
Brazil, 1900–1935 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1973); Eduardo Colombo, ‘Anarchism
in Argentina and Uruguay’, in Apter and Joll. A good continental overview may be obtained from
Victor Alba, Politics and the Labour Movement in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1968), chap. 4.
18 For China, Zarrow and Arif Dirlik, Anarchism and the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1991), are recommended.
19 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (New York: Collier Books, 1961), p. 56.
20 An excellent survey is provided by Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe (eds.), International
Syndicalism: An International Perspective (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990). See also Marcel van der
Linden, ‘Second Thoughts on Revolutionary Syndicalism’, Labour History Review, LXII (1998),
pp. 182–96. For anarcho–syndicalism there is the very important article by J. Romero Maura, ‘The
Spanish Case’, in Apter and Joll, pp. 71–2.