Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Introduction 9
Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, anthropologist Elie Reclus, and educationalists Louise
Michel, Sébastien Faure and Francisco Ferrer come readily to mind. 23
There can be no doubt that one type of intellectual has been consistently drawn
to anarchism, placing a premium on absolute freedom and non-interference in their
personal and social lives, and belonging, like Read himself, to the artistic and literary
avant-gardes. Significant clusters of anarchist painters and writers existed in pre-1914
Italy, New York before and during the First World War and, most impressive of
all, the France of the 1880s and 1890s, where the Neo-Impressionists – Camille and
Lucien Pissarro, Paul Signac, most probably the enigmatic Georges Seurat – and the
Symbolist writers, including one of the greatest poets, Stéphane Mallarmé, all consisted
of militant anarchists or sympathizers. In Bohemia the fact that Jaroslav Hašek had
been a member of anarchist groups and worked on anarchist journals helps to explain
the subversive genius of The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk; and Franz Kafka
had attended anarchist meetings in Prague, gaining considerable familiarity with anarchist
writers and personalities, and actually mentioning Bakunin and Kropotkin in his
diary. 24 The German actor, Ret Marut, fleeing from Munich in 1919, recreated himself
in Mexico as the still insufficiently appreciated novelist, B. Traven. 25
In Britain anarchism as a social movement never amounted to much, except among
the Yiddish-speaking Jews of East London and – for reasons still to be explained
– on Clydeside where a tenacious libertarian tradition existed in the twentieth
century among Glaswegian workers. 26 It was in countries with despotic or centralizing
States that anarchism flourished: France after the bloody suppression in 1871
of the Commune and the criminalizing of anarchist activity with les lois scélérates of
1893–4; the ramshackle, semi-feudal empires of Russia, where political parties and
trade unions were completely illegal before 1906 and unions only a little less so until
the February Revolution, and Spain, where the CNT was banned between 1923 and
1930; Italy with a heavy-handed new State, attempting to assert itself in the aftermath
23 See ‘Interview’ with Noam Chomsky, in James Peck (ed.), The Chomsky Reader (London:
Serpent’s Tail, 1987), pp. 19–21; Colin Ward and David Goodway, Talking Anarchy (Nottingham:
Five Leaves, 2003), pp. 147–8. Michel’s remarkable school in Fitzroy Square is described by John
Shotton, No Master High or Low: Libertarian Education and Schooling in Britain, 1890–1990 (Bristol:
Libertarian Education, 1993), pp. 33–5.
24 Cecil Parrott, The Bad Bohemian: The Life of Jaroslav Hašek, Creator of the Good Soldier Švejk (London:
Bodley Head, 1978), chaps. 4–6; Michael Löwy, Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought
in Central Europe: A Study in Elective Affinity (London: Athlone Press, 1992), pp. 82–3 et seq.
25 Karl S. Guthke, B. Traven: The Life behind the Legends (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991),
is much the best study. Roy Pateman, The Man Nobody Knows: The Life and Legacy of B. Traven
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005), uncomfortably reopens the issue of Traven’s
identity. See also Hakim Bey, ‘Storm Demon: Who Was B. Traven?’, Drunken Boat (New York),
no. 2 (1994), for the argument that Traven was a ‘great writer’.
26 For the Jewish anarchism of the Arbeter Fraint group, see William J. Fishman, East End Jewish
Radicals, 1875–1914 (London: Duckworth, 1975). The attempted revisionism of Matthew Thomas,
Anarchist Ideas and Counter-Cultures in Britain, 1880–1914: Revolutions in Everyday Life (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005), serially plagiarized though the book is, is unpersuasive.