Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow - Libcom

Introduction 13
in France at the beginning of the 1890s into terrorism and the cult of dynamite,
although care was normally taken to ensure that the victims would be class enemies,
not members of the labouring masses. Anarchist terrorism was snuffed out by
vigorous use of the les lois scélérates, but there were to be many assassinations – and
even more numerous unsuccessful attentats on the lives – of monarchs and statesmen
down to 1914, and anarchists became unfairly (but why not the Narodniks whose
methods they consciously adopted or the Fenians?), though permanently, associated
in the popular mind with bomb attacks, which did actually remain a continual
feature of international, working-class anarchism down to its demise – and beyond,
as a tactic of tiny, otherwise powerless, groups of romantic rebels, such as the Angry
Brigade of the 1970s.
The deaths to be attributed to anarchist terrorists are insignificant when compared
to the slaughter inflicted by the combatant states during the First World War, in
the aftermath of which mass pacifist sentiment began to manifest itself. There had
already been a major libertarian thinker and great creative writer, whose philosophy
of non-resistance repudiated equally all violence and all government. This was, of
course, Leo Tolstoy, who has commonly been treated as a mainstream anarchist
theorist, although this, as a fine article has argued recently, is problematic in that his
philosophy (like Blake’s) replaced all human authority with one absolute authority:
God’s authority. 32 One of the major political strengths of anarchist thought has been
the insistence that means determine ends and that the institutions built to engage in
current social conflict will prefigure the institutions that will exist in a post-revolutionary
order. As the Preamble of the IWW put it, ‘we are forming the structure of
the new society within the shell of the old’. 33 A libertarian, free society will only be
brought into being through the creation of libertarian, free organizations in the hereand-now
that break decisively with the authoritarian order. But what, pacifists ask,
can be more authoritarian and repressive than violence and killing? How can a nonviolent
society be achieved using such means? ‘The more violence, the less revolution,’
Bart de Ligt, one of the most impressive anarchist thinkers of the interwar years,
proclaimed – in Huxley’s translation from the French. 34 Anarcho-pacifism became in
the 1930s an important, although still minority tendency, within anarchism; but after
the Second War World, with the use and deployment of nuclear weapons followed by
mobilization of mass agitation for nuclear disarmament in Britain, anarchism grew in
strength and close to pacifism. The success of Gandhian satyagraha in the attainment
of Indian national independence and of other movements of civil disobedience, such
as the Civil Rights Movement in the American South, provided conclusive testimony
32 Terry Hopton, ‘Tolstoy, God and Anarchism’, Anarchist Studies, VIII (2000), pp. 46–7.
33 Joyce L. Kornbluh (ed.), Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press, 1964), pp. 12–13.
34 Bart. de Ligt, The Conquest of Violence: An Essay on War and Revolution (London: George Routledge,
1937), p. x. Ruth Kinna, Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2005),
chap. 4, discusses usefully anarchism and violence as well as propaganda by the deed.