Firefighters stand outside the Greek
Embassy in Rome, Monday, Dec. 27, 2010. A package bomb was found four
days after similar mail bombs exploded at two other embassies
injuring two people. The device was defused and no one was injured.
A recent spate of letter bombs
dispatched to foreign embassies in Rome, as well as the headquarters
of a far-right Italian political party, focused attention upon a
rogue group of anarchists that claimed responsibility for the
attacks. The Informal Federation of Anarchy says it is a
cobbled-together coalition of anarchist outfits in Italy, and boasts
ties with like-minded groups across the world. Their parcel bombing
campaign follows a similar wave of deliveries sent in November by
Greek anarchists to embassies in Athens. But security experts aren't
wringing their hands over an emerging global threat. One told TIME
that the aborted bombings were simply "something [the
anarchists] have to do from time to time to show that they exist."
Anarchist organizations in Italy and
elsewhere today may be as fringe as analysts say they are, but they
are the heirs of a political credo that deeply impacted the past two
centuries of world history. The term "anarchism" stems from
the ancient Greek anarchos, or "without rulers," and
historians see anarchist strains in everything from the writings of
certain Daoist scholars in pre-modern China to the emancipatory zeal
of early Christianity. But anarchism, as we know it, is a distinctly
modern phenomenon, crystallizing in the wake of the French
Revolution, as more and more people in the industrializing world
chafed both under the yoke of despotic monarchs and the growing power
of capitalist elites. (See the anarchists who claim to be behind thebombs in Rome.)
The man credited as being the first
self-proclaimed anarchist and one of anarchism's most influential
ideologues, Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, famously said in 1849:
"Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and
tyrant, and I declare him my enemy." Contrary to contemporary
notions of anarchists as trouble-making, chaotic nihilists, Proudhon
championed anarchism as the most rational and just means of creating
order in society. Among other things, he advocated what he called
"mutualism," an economic practice that disincentivized
profit — which, according to him, was a destabilizing force — and
argued far ahead of his time for banks with free credit and unions to
protect labor. What cemented Proudhon's anarchism was his vehement
distrust of the state and even electoral politics.
Anarchism's 19th century standard
bearers were a beguiling, motley troop of globe-trotting
intellectuals. Mikhail Bakunin, a larger-than-life Russian known for
his great love of cigars, escaped Siberian exile in 1861 and embarked
on a whirlwind odyssey that took him first east to Japan and then San
Francisco and eventually saw him land in the newly united state of
Italy in 1864. There, he developed his anarchist views, building from
Proudhon's earlier work his own idea of "collectivist
anarchism," where, workers banded together as equals in private
associations and wholly controlled the fruits of their labor.
Bakunin's writings underpinned "anarcho-syndicalism," a
creed that saw anarchist-led labor unions form and fight for greater
freedoms across the western world, from the Ruhr Valley to the Rocky
Mountains. Yet he also presciently warned against Karl Marx's
aspiration for a "dictatorship of the proletariat," writing
in 1868 that "socialism without liberty is slavery and
brutality." (See a video of Ze Frank sounding off aboutsocialism.)
Anarchism's European heyday was in the
late 19th and early 20th century. The events of the short-lived Paris
Commune in 1871 — when France's capital fell briefly under
anarchist-communist rule — fired the anarchist imagination. A
vibrant print culture emerged of pamphlets and newspapers,
distributed widely to a growing working class readership. Labor
strikes in remote dusty valleys rapidly became the talk of capitals
worldwide. At the turn of the century, anarchist European emigres in
New York's Greenwich Village comprised a significant bloc among the
restless American city's literary world. The ideology had profound
mainstream cachet. Perhaps the most luminous anarchist of the time
was Peter Kropotkin, a Russian prince who renounced his hereditary
titles and advanced the notion of "mutual aid," pointing to
evidence in the natural world of species cooperating together without
competition or coercion. Oscar Wilde likened Kropotkin to "Christ...
coming out of Russia."
Yet, anarchism also had a strong
violent streak, with many radicals arguing for direct confrontation
with the oppressive state — what could incite revolution better
than the "propaganda of the deed" itself? An anarchist
assassinated Russia's Czar Alexander II in 1881; in 1901, a
Polish-American anarchist shot U.S. President William McKinley. Not
surprisingly, governments spied and loudly denounced lurking
anarchist threats in all sorts of cases, from the controversial Sacco
and Vanzetti trials in 1920s Massachusetts to unrest in colonial
India.
Anarchism's last great, albeit
fleeting, moment under the sun came at the time of the Spanish Civil
War. For a few years in the 1930s, anarchist collectives thrived in
Catalonia. George Orwell, who threw in his lot with an anarchist
faction, wrote admiringly of his Spanish comrades: the fiercely
egalitarian anarchist militias, said Orwell, "were a sort of
microcosm of a classless society... where hope was more normal than
apathy and cynicism." Of course, as Orwell charts in Homage to
Catalonia, the anarchists' downfall comes not at the hands of Gen.
Franco's fascists, but during an internal putsch among Spain's
Republicans, led by U.S.S.R-backed Communists. An ideology that
loathed hierarchy could never be tolerated by Stalin. (See TIME's1936 report on anarchism in Spain.)
In the decades since, the allure of
anarchism as a viable political system has faded. Its adherents and
symbols — the black flag of anarcho-syndicalists and the "A"
enclosed by a circle — remain. The tradition of "antifa,"
or anti-fascist mobilization and activism popular throughout Europe,
particularly in politically polarized societies like Greece and
Italy, draws on the support of self-proclaimed anarchist groups.
Anarchists have also fueled the "anti-globalization"
movement, a legacy that has twinned the ideology with images of
crunchy protestors hurling stones through Starbucks windows or
chaining themselves to trees.
It's unlikely the 21st century's
anarchists, raging against the collusion of multinationals and the
state, will ever have the same appeal as their predecessors more than
a century before. The U.S. itself had a rich tradition of anarchism,
whose guardian angel was the famed New York writer and activist Emma
Goldman. It can be argued be that the logical heirs to Goldman and
her anti-government fellow travelers are, in some form, today's Tea
Party — only in the past half century has a distinction been made
between the term "libertarian" and "anarchist."
But Sarah Palin probably hasn't read Proudhon or Bakunin; nor did
they likely have someone like her in mind.
(Source)
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