'Rebels Failed'
Gersh, Gabriel
'Rebels Failed' The Anarchists, by James Joll. Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown. 303 pp. $6. Reviewed by Gabriel Gersh "Give flowers to the rebels failed." That line from an Italian anarchist...
...One anarchist remedy was that, once the ideal uncoerced society was established, all men should be forced to marry at puberty and remain faithful for at least ten years...
...Why have the anarchists failed...
...Some of their leaders survive, and perhaps Spanish anarchism survives along with them...
...That line from an Italian anarchist poem is quoted by James Joll near the end of The Anarchists, and it chimes with the elegiac note in this perceptive and fascinating history of anarchist actions and theories...
...The political parties and the police forces had their work made so much easier in opposing them...
...As Joll shows, the tragedy of the anarchists has been not merely the contradiction between their ideals and their advocacy of severity and useless violence, but also the fact that the whole trend of modern state organization toward greater control of the individual has been hopelessly against them...
...More damagingly, with their belief in decentralized autonomous communities they have not proved how they can cope with modern mass production and consumption...
...The author tells the whole story, beginning long before William Godwin and continuing through Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, the Italians, the terrorists (not all true anarchists), the little-known Makhno regime surviving precariously in the chaotic years after 1917 in Russia and the Ukraine, and the heroic months in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil war...
...Throughout all its triumphs and defeats the anarchist movement has been sustained by two principal ideas: that the state exists only to defend property and that man is naturally good...
...They ran into more trouble when they had to cooperate with the Communists...
...But as Joll concludes: "The idea of a 'morality without obligations or sanctions' is as attractive as that of a society without governments or governed...
...His book proves his point...
...Anarchists believe that property is the source of evil, for it has resulted in the state, which is worse...
...The most practical role of the anarchists on the stage of history was in Spain...
...He shows why they have failed to establish a durable society anywhere, and he suggests that their failure does not deprive their philosophy of all merit...
...Unfortunately, historians have neglected anarchism until now...
...Joll makes clear that many of the major anarchists were self-torturing neurotics, except perhaps the gentle Kropotkin, who during his exile in London came to the conclusion that the National Lifeboat Association was a shining example of the success of anarchist principles in action...
...The anarchists' all-or-nothing attitude has also meant that they have been left standing when their rivals in the organized parties and trade unions have won concessions from the state...
...Professor Joll suggests this is because historians are interested only in successful revolutions...
...Having won his freedom, man would recover his natural virtue...
...In the early years of the Bolshevik regime in Russia, possession of an anarchist publication could endanger a man's life...
...Joll's book is not an epitaph on a lost cause, but a sign of a reviving interest in a movement that is still alive, however precariously, and still valuable...
...A kindly young anarchist, who spent his money on bread and books for the poor, murdered President Sadi Carnot of France...
...Consequently, the only way to liberate man is to abolish property and the state in one swoop...
...They were the greatest victims of that war...
...This simple doctrine had a marked appeal in the Nineteenth Century because of the strong reaction to the horrors of industrialization...
...Although much of their effort ended in futility—sometimes farcical, sometimes tragic—"they have provided.a continuous and fundamental criticism of the modern concept of the state...
...The repression the anarchists brought on themselves was fierce...
...They were among the first groups to see the dictatorial dangers inevitable in Marxism, and their criticisms today are as valid against Communism as against capitalism...
...They were the toughest fighters for liberty at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War...
...Even in the United States, where anarchism did not influence the working class, anarchists were at times treated harshly...
...Pierre Proud-hon, the French anarchist, was anti-feminist and anti-homosexual, and the touchstone of his faith was Liberty, Equality—and Severity...
...At present anarchism is supposed to be a dead cause...
...Besides, the anarchist rejection of organization put them at a disadvantage from the start...
...Yet by the end of that century anarchism became synonymous not only with chaos, but also with the worst excesses of revolutionary violence...
...In particular, many anarchists seem to have been worried, in their Puritan hearts, by the reflection that natural man might also be lascivious man...
...Another great tragedy of anarchism was that although it had a noble vision of man, it lost sight of it in gun-smoke...
...In a style that elegantly sustains the broad sweep of his narrative, he shows what anarchists have believed in at different times and places...
...However this may be, the author believes that "the study of failure can often be as instructive and rewarding as the study of success...
...It is the best survey of the subject yet to appear—deeper and more rounded than, for example, George Woodcock's Anarchism published last year...
...Anarchist publications instructed their readers in the uses of terror as well as political theory...
...and, in one form or another, each will have its disciples in every generation...
...They ran into trouble when they tried to conduct the war without discipline, officers, or orders...
Vol. 29 • May 1965 • No. 5
