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strategies for change 133
violent insurrection and civil war. In Bakunin’s hands this idea of
revolution received its most darkly romantic treatment. Bakunin
defined revolution as a heroic, cathartic act. It was for those with
‘blood in their veins, brains in their heads, energy in their hearts’
and he celebrated the revolution’s ‘spontaneous, uncompromising,
passionate, anarchic and destructive’ character. Bakunin also
embraced the prospect of civil war because it was ‘always favourable
to the awakening of popular initiative’. It ‘shakes the masses out of
their sheepish state … breaks through the brutalizing monotony of
men’s daily existence, and arrests that mechanistic routine which
robs them of creative thought’. 16 Later-nineteenth-century anarchists
tended to write more in expectation of revolution than with
foreboding, but shared Bakunin’s romanticism. In 1882 Reclus
declared that ‘[i]n spirit the revolution is ready; it is already thought
– it is already willed; it only remains to realize it’. 17 And Malatesta
spoke for many others when he argued:
We are revolutionaries because we believe that only the revolution,
the violent revolution, can solve the social question … We believe
furthermore that the revolution is an act of will – the will of individuals
and of the masses; that it needs for its success certain objective
conditions, but that it does not happen of necessity, inevitably,
through the single action of economic and political forces. 18
Propaganda by the deed was not incompatible with propaganda
by the word, but in the minds of its proponents its strength was its
ability to provoke a final, speedy, cataclysmic revolutionary event,
not its power to educate. Many anarchists denounced this vision as
repellent and/or misguided. The tradition extending back to
Proudhon was to consider revolution in pacific terms, as the
triumph of the principle of association and free contract over the
chaos of state control, or the victory of the ego over the social order
that sought to repress it. Notwithstanding Proudhon’s often militant
rhetoric, anarchists in this tradition despaired of Malatesta’s vision
of barricades, mines, bombs and fires. Indeed, the English anarchist
Henry Seymour argued that the rejection of insurrectionary
violence was an ideological test that helped distinguish anarchist
individualism from communist anarchism.
Whilst Proudhonians rejected the idea of insurrection, many
more anarchists were repelled by the terrorism associated with
propaganda by the deed. In the late 1880s and ’90s propaganda by