They Cannot Be Dismissed

...Joil appears to have approached his subject originally with the intent of writing an elegy...

...Controlling only part of Republican Spain, they were forced to work with their traditional enemies in the working-class movement, the Socialists and the Communists...

...When that happened anarchism, as a mass political movement, died...

...When one remembers the somewhat cavalier way in which Joll dealt with anarchists in his earlier book, The Second International, it is pleasing to find that his more direct study of them results in a fair and remarkably understanding book...

...His attention is directed principally toward the leading theoreticians- Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin-and toward those periods of intense libertarian activity -the lurid era of propaganda by deed, the rise of syndicalism in France, the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War-when anarchists sought to put their theories into practice on a mass scale...

...Joll has not aimed at a comprehensive history of either anarchist thought or anarchist action...

...Most destructive, because they involved a progressive dilution of all that distinguished the anarchists from their rivals, were the successive compromises which they had to make in order to retain at least some portion of their original gains...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Writer and Politics," "Anarchism," and a forthcoming history of the modern French novel Twenty-nine years ago, on that hot July day when the followers of the Coniederacion Nacional del Trabajo stormed the barracks of Barcelona, it seemed as though, after so many failures, the anarchist movement had at last reached its apotheosis...

...but long before Franco's victory the anarchist dream had revealed itself to be a nightmare of contradictions...

...the strength and the moral vigor of the anarchists declined until their formations in Barcelona, which had fought bitterly against the Communists in May 1937, put up no resistance at all when General Yague entered the city in the spring of 1939...

...the Communists, as always, proved far more adept than the anarchists at both intrigue and organization...

...Like all puntans, they have succeeded in making us just a little uneasy about the kind of life we lead...

...The anarchists, he recognizes, have maintained a consistent criticism of existing social and moral preconceptions, they "have set an example and issued a challenge...

...They accepted the transformation of their military columns into disciplined army units...

...we never enter the minds of those who inhabit the revolutionary lunatic fringe which he portrays...

...Max Nomad, an ex-anarchist who has published, among many other useful works, two astringent volumes on celebrated revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries (Rebels and Renegades and Apostles of Revolution), now writes, in his 80s, a volume of very brief studies, Dreamers, Dynamiters and Demagogues...

...In consequence, he presents very capably the claim of the anarchists to greater consideration, not only as colorful characters in history, but also as social and moral critics whose voices should not go unheard...

...It is a rather sad procession that he summons before us out of his memory, of ruthless terrorists, simple crooks, baby-faced informers and pathetic sentimentalists...

...Joll is concerned, as his title suggests, more with anarchists than with anarchism...

...These compromises were of no avail...

...Engaged in a civil struggle which Germany and Russia turned into a rehearsal for total war, the anarchists found that their insurrectionary military formations were illfitted for lengthy hostilities...

...They are all embalmed in memory, but few are brought back to life...

...his The Anarchists presents, not new facts, but new interpretations...

...and perhaps, after all, the terrorists were right, and only a bomb on a larger scale than any they ever envisaged could prepare the way for the true social revolution...

...In The Anarchists, James Joil has written a serious, unpartisan study of the psychology and the political functioning of anarchism...

...What Joll gives us is good, but he does not always give us enough...

...In the end he sees anarchism, rightly, as a doctrine unsuited either to the political climate of the mid20th century or to the elaborate administrative superstructures which centralized industrial societies have to maintain...

...Unfortunately, his view is always critical and external...

...Their leaders even committed the cardinal anarchist sin of becoming ministers in a republican government...

...This leads us into the remoter byways of anarchism at the tum of the century, when Nomad himself was active in that pullulating world of minor conspiracy which formed the bas fonds to Kropotkin's idealism and Malatesta's dedication...

...It sets out to establish the means by which the anarchist temperament, that extraordinary blend of pure rationalism and wholly irrational millenarian enthusiasm, manifests itself in thought and practice...

...Yet one cannot, merely because the anarchist record has been since Godwin one of unfulfilled ideals and since Bakunin one of unsuccessful revolutionary attempts, dismiss so varied and long-lasting a movement as lacking in historical meaning, or as without lessons for today...

...The idea of a 'morality without obligation or sanctions' is as attractive as that of a society without government or governed...

...in the end he has stayed to tell us news of the phoenix...

...They slowly abandoned workers' control of the factories they had seized...

...In his book we are able to listen to the voices or look into the minds of many people who were famous in their day, as thinkers or saints, leaders or assassins...

...Nomad's intention-to provide "psychological and sociologic case histories"- was perhaps a good one...

...He writes with a grace and a power of organizing often intractable material that commands our attention, but, equally important, he never seeks to display his wit at the expense of his subject, as some past writers on anarchism have done...

...Catalonia lay completely under anarchist control, the peasants were setting up libertarian communes throughout Andalusia, and Companys, head of the local Catalan government, received like triumphant heroes the anarchist leaders, headed by the grim terrorist Durutti and the veteran organizer of insurrections, Garcia Oliver...

...He records, without mockery, the vagaries of anarchist behavior and the eccentricities of anarchist expression, and gives respect where it is due...

...and, in one form or another, each will have its disciples in every generation...

...He is careful to include enough lesser material to preserve the smoothness of his narrative and enough curiosities to maintain our interest, but there are some major omissions which detract from the completeness of his book as a study of the anarchist temperament...

...There is almost nothing, for example, on Tolstoy, and too little on anarchist pacifism in general...

...Yet he sees virtues in anarchism which lie outside its naive utopian visions...

...Just as Marxian Socialists have so far failed to control the element of authority, so the anarchists failed to evolve an effective non-authoritarian organization for a modern society...

...Finally, Joll sees the anarchist attitude, distinct from any particular movements that express it, as the manifestation of certain enduring elements in man's nature...

...He takes us down the main ways of anarchism...

...Perhaps," he remarks, "the anarchist revolution could only take place after the total disruption of the means of government, communication, production and exchange by, say, a nuclear war...

...In less than three years Catalonia was in the hands of Franco...

...It is easy to detect, in this situation, the flaw of anarchism as a practical revolutionary movement...