A New Anarchism Emerges, 1940-1954

Abstract

A New Anarchism Emerges, 1940-1954 Andrew Cornell U.S. historians and political scientists writing in the 1970s explained that anarchism, as an organized political movement, had died on the battlefields of Spain, only to spring up once again, unexpectedly, in the wake of the 1968 uprisings in Paris.1 In a similar vein, Jonathon Purkis and James Bowen have recently suggested that those trying to make sense of contemporary anarchist initiatives would do well to recognize 1968 as the jumping off point for a "paradigm shift" in anarchist politics: "[T]he events in France and beyond seemed to act as a lens for a number of emerging movements which, in addition to existing official anarchist movements, have given anarchism a new lease on life." They suggest that "the logic of many of these discourses only realized their potential in the late 1990s."2 Certainly, to take the case of the United States, anarchism was at a low point—perhaps the lowest since its inception—from the onset of World War II in 1939 until the mid-1960s, if judged by numbers of participants, organizations, and activities. Yet this picture neglects the continuous existence of anarchist periodicals and initiatives across that twenty-five-year period. Although anarchism was a tiny and marginal political current during the 1940s and 1950s, it was not at all static. Rather, anarchists spent these years developing new political analyses, strategies, and aesthetics that fundamentally shaped the forms anarchism took when it again gained [End Page 105] wider currency in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Moreover, 1940s and 1950s anarchism influenced the civil rights movement, the 1960s counterculture, the New Left, and the women's liberation movement in ways that historians have yet to fully understand or acknowledge. During and after World War II, theorists drew on recent developments in social theory to broaden the anarchist critique of power beyond the movement's traditional focus on class oppression. At the same time, they learned new techniques and conceptions of resistance from groups of radical pacifists with whom they collaborated. From this milieu arose a conception of anarchism indebted to Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy that advocated individuals focusing on living their own lives in a fashion that resembled their ideals as closely as possible. These "practical anarchists" sought to prefigure the world they hoped to live in rather than wait until after a revolution that now seemed impossibly far off.3 It was this new style of anarchism—not the classic variety that obtained before the war—that would most directly inform and inspire the movements of the 1960s. As anarchist ideas contributed to mid-century pacifism, the debates of the "New York Intellectuals," and the nascent counterculture, these influences, in turn, shifted anarchism toward a middle-class constituency and promoted personal lifestyle change as a strategic priority. Anarchists The outbreak of World War II delivered a sharp blow to the small anarchist movement left in the United States at the end of the 1930s. Since 1933, the International Group of San Francisco, publishers of the monthly newspaper Man!, had promoted a form of insurrectionary anarchism that eschewed formal organizations and encouraged spontaneous uprisings of the oppressed. In 1939, Man! was forced to cease publication when its editor, Marcus Graham, and publisher, Vincenzo Ferrero, went underground to avoid the jail time and deportation threatened by federal agents as a means of suppressing their outspokenly antiwar paper. The New York City based Vanguard Group, which had advocated a syndicalist strategy of building revolutionary trade unions throughout the decade, also produced the last issue of its journal, Vanguard: A Journal of Libertarian Communism, in 1939.4 The group suffered [End Page 106] from personal feuds, disagreements over how to relate to the coming war, and hearts broken from the defeat of their comrades in the Spanish Civil War. However, beginning in 1934 the Vanguard Group had helped anarchist teenagers in Brooklyn and the Bronx (many of them children of anarchists involved with the Yiddish newspaper Freie Arbeiter Shtimme) launch youth study groups. A number of these Vanguard Juniors would play important roles in sustaining and transforming the anarchist movement in the 1940s. In 1942, Audrey Goodfriend...