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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
ways of using these forms of protest in mass anti-globalization
actions, moving away from the notion of strategic change to one of
tactical reform.
Anarchist strategies of change have been the cause of serious dispute
in the anarchist movement. Anarchist violence and, in particular,
the relationship between anarchism and terrorism has been a subject
of intense debate and remains one of the most important cleavages
dividing anarchists. This issue is examined at the end of the chapter.
emancipation from oppression by the oppressed
The idea that oppression can be overcome only by the action of the
oppressed is not a specifically anarchist principle. Yet in the late
nineteenth century anarchists put their stamp on the idea by
saddling it to a principle of direct or economic action. In this period
direct action was contrasted with the rejection of (i) electoral
strategies designed to sweep socialist parties to legislative power and
(ii) vanguardism, the doctrine of revolutionary elitism linked to
Lenin and Bolshevism.
Proudhon had floated the idea that ‘the proletariat must emancipate
itself without the help of the government’ as early as 1848
(though in the same year he also successfully stood for election to
the French Constituent Assembly). The principle was enshrined in
the preamble to the statutes of the IWMA and was supported by a
broad range of socialist opinion. It became a bone of contention
only in the early 1870s, at the point when the International disintegrated.
Then, laying the foundations of what became the division of
socialists into anarchist and non-anarchist groups, Bakunin identified
himself with the policy of the IWMA in an effort to discredit
Marx. Marx, he argued, did not support emancipation by the action
of the workers themselves – on the contrary, he believed that ‘the
conquest of political power’ was ‘the first task of the proletariat’. 1 In
Bakunin’s mind, these two ideas were incompatible. Others shared
his view. In 1872, at a meeting in St Imier, Switzerland, antiauthoritarians
reinforced Bakunin’s policy distinction by voicing
their disapproval with Marx’s decision of 1871 to support the formation
of working-class political parties. They argued that a uniform
policy of revolution – that is, of political conquest – must not be
imposed on the workers; that liberation could be won only by the
spontaneous action of the workers; and that revolutionary action