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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
To point out that the English are not the French, that we like our
rulers, that the country is not in the state of France at the time of the
Great Revolution, that our contemplated reforms are purely social
& can be carried out by peaceful means, has much the same effect as
has holding out a red rag to a bull. 1
The romantic aspect of anarchism has resonated in literature.
Bomb-throwing assassins, political oppression and the dilemmas of
revolutionary action have been explored with various degrees of
seriousness in G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday,
Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, Henry
James’s Princess Casamassima, Emile Zola’s Germinal and, more
recently, Paul Auster’s Leviathan. Moreover, literary images are
deeply embedded in political analyses. Treatments of Bakunin
invariably build upon a romantic impression. Indeed, his physical
image has become a metaphor for a strain in anarchist thinking.
Alexander Gray’s portrait is exaggerated, but not untypical:
Bakunin was born to become a legend. Rising above his aristocratic
traditions, be became a revolutionary by profession, associating
himself with anything that might be termed an insurrection or
revolt, and ultimately developing an insensate rage for destruction.
Years of imprisonment and years of exile in Siberia ... left him ...
great, bearded, toothless giant, returning like a spectre from the past
to uphold the cause of anarchism ... He remained a chaotic figure –
chaotic in his life, chaotic in this thought, chaotic in his writings –
thoroughly unpractical and destitute of common sense, as becomes
an anarchist, yet with something about him of likeable but rather
spoilt child, mingling the real with the imaginary and playing at
make-believe conspiracies, with all the paraphernalia of codes and
ciphers designed to be used in communication with possibly
non-existent correspondents. 2
The anti-capitalist movement is the most recent repository for this
interpretation of anarchist thought. Whichever forms of protest
anarchists adopt, all factions within the movement are likely to be
tarred with the same broad brush. If they are not all ‘hooligans’, as
Tony Blair argued prior to the July 2001 G8 meeting in Genoa,
they are still part of the ‘travelling circus’ he denounced at the
Gothenburg EU summit the same year.
Anarchist efforts to reject this labelling have not been successful.
And current varieties of anarchism are unlikely to shed the image of