The Revue International Anarchiste's World Survey (1924–1925)

Abstract

This article focuses on a key moment in anarchist history, a point of reflection following a period of intense action, of hope but ultimately defeat that began with the Russian Revolution and ended with the rise of fascism in Italy and authoritarian dictatorship in Spain. The First World War, with the rise of nationalism, government intervention in the economy, and the rise of democratic socialism had also raised important questions about anarchist tactics and their analysis of contemporary society and the nature of the masses. The “time of critical self-analysis has begun” as early as 1918.1 However, the immediate consequences of the War, the evolution of the Russian Revolution, and the postwar wave of social and labor unrest across Europe and elsewhere, in which anarchists were actively involved, to a large extent postponed debate while further exposing limitations to anarchist tactics and provoking further divisions.By the early 1920s the revolutionary wave was replaced by a conservative backlash and state repression in various countries, which led many anarchists to seek refuge in exile. One focal point for anarchist exiles, and a center for transnational contacts, was France, particularly Paris, in the early 1920s. Anarchists fled north across the border from Italy and Spain, escaping repression and dictatorial government. Other anarchists escaped repression from Eastern Europe and Russia, but such was the number of exiles from the two Mediterranean countries that anarchist groups in exile were established in France by Spanish and Italian exiles, while Italian and Spanish revolutionary syndicalist sections were established within French unions. Exiled anarchists joined together with their French counterparts to create the Ouevre Internationale des Editions Anarchistes (OIEA), to create “a permanent contact” between anarchists of all countries at both local and national level as a first step towards the creation of an Anarchist International.2The OIEA undertook a number of projects, one of which was the publication of the Revue International Anarchiste (RIA), a monthly polyglot journal that was published in Paris from November 1924 to June 1925. The aim of the RIA was to “create and maintain regular moral and material links between the anarchists of the whole world” while at the same time “scrupulously respecting those tendencies particular to each nation.”3 The RIA was a forum for anarchism “in all of its multiple expressions and did not represent any particular tendency,” i.e. communist, syndicalist or individualist.4 The RIA, was a unique experiment in transnational anarchist relations with each edition being seventy-two pages; twenty-four in French (RIAF in the notes), twenty-four in Spanish (RIAS), and twenty-four in Italian (RIAI).5 The initial pages usually focused on policy and tactics, the middle pages on culture (including poems and book reviews) and science, and the a final section consisting of “international reports” with general information on movements in other countries.Following complaints from RIA readers who could only read one language that they were unable to understand two thirds of the publication, the editorial team decided to divide it into three separate magazines. Anarchist journals in France already existed in both French and Italian (La Revue Anarchiste and Iconoclasta), so an agreement was reached to work together and the RIA's Spanish section created a new newspaper, Acción.6 The limit of transnational communication, at least at a linguistic level, had been reached.In its first issue, the RIA launched a “World Survey” on the immediate and future tasks of anarchism. Anarchists from around the world were invited to participate with responses coming from many prominent anarchists of the time, most of them from the three national groups in charge of publications. This article is based predominantly on these responses, although other articles from the RIA are also used to provide greater detail to certain arguments. The survey provides first-hand insight into the views of contemporary anarchists on the future of the movement in light of recent events, and proposals on to how to overcome recent setbacks and failings. Although some responses were published in more than one section, in general, as with other articles, they were specific to each group, which provided a means to compare the views of French, Italian, and Spanish anarchists on how the movement should adapt and evolve.The transnational “turn” has in recent years become the dominant discourse in anarchist history, demonstrating the interrelationship between national movements.7 In this article the intention is not to focus on these links per se, but rather to use a clearly transnational project, the RIA, to provide an analysis of debates that, as with anarchism itself, operated along transnational, international, and national lines.8 The aim is also to see how much the lines among the three are blurred, and whether and to what extent much national experience led to differences in interpretation of anarchism, specifically in relation to tactics.Turcato has argued that anarchists saw their movements as “a single . . . transnational movement that crossed the territorial boundaries” but at the same time “preserved a national identity,” creating a form of “‘cross-nationalism’ which crossed national boundaries and at the same time remained focused on the struggles of national scope.” 9 Writing about the role of London as the “junction of anarchist networks” before the First World War, Turcato concludes that the close contact among anarchists showed “the steady and consistent evolution of competing, cross-national anarchists currents.” He believed that the traditional historiography of the movement, which focuses on the division among competing tendencies—individualism, collectivism, communism and syndicalism—was misleading, because in reality these tendencies could find a way to coexist in what is by definition a diverse group. The main cause of friction was over the question of organization, whether creating formal national organizations benefitted collective action or were the precursors to reformism and hierarchical control. This debate became more relevant in the postwar period when the failure of their actions to bring about revolutionary change forced anarchists to focus on the practical means of achieving it.10The nature of any anarchist organization and anarchists’ relationship with the labor movement in general would be one of the main points of many of the responses to the survey. The survey, like the RIA in general, was open to anarchists of all tendences as well as all countries and therefore provides a comprehensive view of the position of the movement at that time in relation to whether there was a need to revise policies and tactics. Anarchists did not know that this would mark the high-point in their revolutionary history, with the exception of the Spanish revolution of 1936–37, and looked to reappraise, revitalize, and perhaps revise or reaffirm tactics and ideas. The survey presented the forum to do so.Before this article addresses the World Survey's responses, a short summary and analysis of the position of anarchism in France, Italy and Spain is needed to provide a background to the debate. This is because the national and international context of 1924 was not simply completely different from the immediate prewar period, but also from the immediate postwar years of social unrest that came to an end in 1923. It is particularly relevant to see how a debate concerning whether or not there was a need for reviewing and revising anarchism in general and, in particular, its tactics, had evolved before conducting the survey, which, it was hoped, would provide a forum for clarification of where the movement was, where it wanted to go, and how it planned to get there.Even before the First World War began in 1914, anarchism in France had for some time been in decline due to the negative impact of the terrorism associated with the tactics of propaganda of the deed, the growth of reformist socialism, and the increasingly less revolutionary stance adopted by the revolutionary syndicalist Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). By 1914, the CGT appeared to favor evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change and had become entwined in negotiation and subsequently collaboration with the state. The war showed that a large portion of the working class felt a lot closer to the national community than the anarchists wanted to believe, a point amply demonstrated by the CGT leadership's acceptance of the French government's call for a political truce (Union Sacrée).11 Even some prominent anarchists supported an allied victory, which provoked a shocked response from others.At a congress in November 1920, the Union Anarchiste Française (UAF) was created, replacing the Federation Communiste Revolutionnaire Anarchiste, which had been formed in 1913, but had quickly disappeared during the war. The UAF was made up of regional federations that brought the local groups together. It was open to all the main contemporary anarchist tendencies—communist, syndicalist, and individualist—in an attempt to reconcile or synthesize their differences. The first of these, led by Sebastian Faure, seemed to be the most dominant. The splits apparent in Spain and Italy were not as virulent in France due, it would appear, to the relative weakness of the movement as a whole. According to a police report in early 1922, it had 400 members and its newspaper, Libertaire, sold 15,000 copies. A further report in February claims that the movement was in a “sort of depression” and this was evident to both Spanish and Italian exiles.12 For the Italian anarchist Ugo Fedeli (who wrote under name of Hugo Trene), French anarchism was in a “profound and vast crisis,” while Spanish exiles were even less impressed, claiming that French anarchism was little more than “an intellectual exercise” that shied away from reality and that the French anarchists, “except rare and honorable exceptions, were useless both collectively and individually” and “decadent.”13 All in all, the French anarchist movement was in “total disarray,” a situation only made worse by divisions and confusion caused by the rise of Bolshevism, although from late 1920 the UAF was “blatantly and relentlessly hostile” to the Bolsheviks.14Anarchists in Italy had played an active role in the factory occupations of September 1920, and in the factory committees during the strikes of 1919–20, but proved more successful at starting agitation than directing it towards any clear goal.15 Aided by the growing unrest, the anarchist movement grew exponentially: the Unione Comunista Anarchica (UCA) was created in 1919 at a conference in Florence, changing its name to the Unione Anarchica Italiana (UAI) a year later. Open to all tendencies and including the anarchist affinity groups in Italy in 1920, the UAI had 20,000 members, whereas membership of the revolutionary syndicalist Unione Sindacale Italiana (USI) was between 300,000 to 500,000 (up from approximately 100,000 before the War). However, their popularity still lagged far behind the Socialist Party (250,000) and the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro (CGL) with 2 million members.16 The socialists were happy to negotiate and without their support the unrest subsided. By October 1920, with the factories now evacuated, the government moved on the Italian anarchists, arresting the leadership of both the UAI and the USI. Following the rise of fascism, anarchists found it impossible to operate as they were imprisoned, murdered, or forced into exile. Beginning in 1922, leading anarchists began to arrive in France and created a Refugee Committee in Paris.17The main division in the Italian anarchist movement was between the organizationalists and the anti-organizationalists. According to Senta, before the First World War the latter group was probably the largest, although the pro-organizational sector subsequently grew in prominence.18 However, it is also possible that the lines between the two became more blurred during the factory occupations and the social unrest of the period. In fact, these terms can be misleading because the anti-organizationalists were prepared to organize for specific situations and were often highly effective, as numerous journals and newspapers documented, although both groups were predominantly anarcho-communist.19 Rather than the existence of the UAI itself, it was the way it was organized and operated (il Patto di Aleanza) that caused most friction.20 According to Rento Souvarine, the UAI was a “permanent political organization” subordinating “the individual to a single governing center” and “compromised the great natural and free spontaneous energy” of the masses.”21 This appears to have been a more extreme position, however. According to Antonioli, the UAI was based on anti-organizational principles, reflected that “the distance between organizationalists and anti-organizationalists” had been clearly “reduced” following the War.22 The need for some form of national organization was “a common demand,” among all the groups.23 As with the French UAF, the UAI was a synthesis of the different groups. Individual and group freedoms were respected, but the question remained whether this would allow efficient and coordinated action. At its Bologna Congress in 1910, the UAI adopted a general program, most of which had been written by perhaps the most prominent anarchist of the period, Errico Malatesta, twenty years earlier, but was vague on specific tactics.Italian anarchists were split over the position regarding syndicalism: anti-organizationalist anarchists tended to argue that too many anarchists forgot their ideals when they became involved with the day-to-day struggles and negotiations of the labor movement, losing their anarchist identity.24 They distrusted the revolutionary nature of syndicalism, being very aware of the “sad spectacle” of the French CGT.25 There was also division among those who supported anarchist action in the unions. Armando Borghi, national secretary of the USI after the War, argued that all anarchists should join the USI to ensure it maintained its revolutionary ideals, but many preferred action within the much larger CGL as a means of creating a larger and more unified workers’ organization in which anarchists could make their message heard but without taking official positions. The UAI position was neutral on the issue of specifying which union anarchists should join. Anarchists, therefore, could be found in both the CGL and the USI, often simply due to the nature or location of their work.26With the rise of fascism from 1922 onwards, these questions took second place to debates over the use of violence and the need to create alliances with other anti-fascist groups. This only increased the “disunion” evident in Italian anarchist ranks before 1925, when the Fascist regime had placed anarchists at the “margins of society.”27Since its inception, the close association between anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism in Spain had been perhaps the most significant aspect of Spanish anarchism—a source of strength but also of division and confusion. The lines between labor and the anarchist movements were therefore blurred, open to interpretation and hence confusion. In terms of organization, nearly all anarchists accepted the revolutionary syndicalist Confederation National de Trabajo (CNT), founded in Barcelona in 1920, to be their national organization with separate anarchist organizations being run at regional and local levels. What was the need of a national anarchist organization, if prominent anarchists could meet and discuss issues at the regional and national congresses of the CNT? Resistance to the creation of a national organization was therefore not simply due to increasing state repression beginning in 1920, but also, as many anarchists argued, because they already considered the CNT in this way because it had adopted “libertarian communism” (although without defining exactly what the term meant) as its ultimate goal at the Madrid Congress in 1919. This goal and the domination of anarchists within the union itself gave the CNT a clear anarchist leaning, especially from 1916 onwards, and hence from this period it makes more sense to define it as anarcho-, rather than simply revolutionary, syndicalist.28 The role of the labor movement in anarchism was therefore more evident and influential in Italy and France.However, to divide Spanish anarchists between syndicalists and communists is misleading. Influenced by the work of Elorza in the 1970s, Spanish anarchist historiography tried to divide the CNT, and the anarchist movement in general, between syndicalists trying to focus more on economic gains and worker solidarity and radicals attempting to use the unions as a tool for immediate revolutionary policy. In reality, there was a large middle ground between the two positions, which made anarchist action within unions essential, but also accepted a difference between syndicalism and anarchism.29 After all, the CNT had declared that its ultimate goal was the installation of a communist society. Nonetheless, the strike movements of 1916–19 and again in 1923, demonstrated for many that the labor and anarchist movements, although complementary, were not the same and some sort of clarity concerning their specific roles needed to be established. There had been numerous attempts to organize at the local and regional levels, yet these regional bodies often did not enjoy a long life in the years following the creation of the CNT, and again after 1917, but we can see that Spanish anarchists were not opposed to organization at these levels. There was no national organization until the creation of the very loosely organized National Committee for Anarchist Relations in 1923.30In Spain a cost-of-living crisis caused by the War had led to a growth in social unrest that was initiated by a general strike of 1916. The unrest reached its zenith in 1919 with a general strike in Barcelona. During the period the CNT grew, rapidly overtaking the socialist UGT, especially in the industrial regions of Cataluña where membership had grown from 16,000 in 1916 to 715,000 in 1919.31 Thus, the CNT was more successful and indeed more anarchist than the Italian USI. Debate, therefore, was not so much about whether anarchists should act in the unions, but rather how they should act within the unions, bringing ideology or economic needs to the fore. The question of organization was directly related to this. Should anarchists be content with local and regional federations, or should they create a national one as well? And, if so, the problem was the same faced the French and Italian anarchists, which was over the nature of such an organization.The early success of the strike movement was stifled by repression, and debate and divisions grew concerning the role of the CNT: whether it should immediately precipitate a revolution or whether it should, as a prelude to revolutionary action, act as a union making economic demands to benefit and educate the workers in the class struggle. As in Italy, and to a lesser extent in France, this debate was sidetracked by division and confusion caused by Bolshevism. The CNT had officially distanced itself from Moscow at the Zaragoza Conference in 1922 although anarchist condemnation had been growing since late 1919 over state and employer-sponsored repression in Russia.32A French police report concerning exiled Spanish anarchists claimed that in 1922 militants were moving towards the creation of an autonomous federation but were also members of French groups and federations.33 Many Spanish anarchists joined French syndicalist organizations, attended anarchist conferences, and formed affinity groups in the country. By 1924, there was a Spanish Anarchist Relations Committee in France that shared its headquarters with the OIEA.34 By this time the CNT had “ceased to exist as an effective national organization” and the National Anarchist Committee had also been forced into exile in France.35By 1924 Paris was a transnational hub of anarchist activity gathering together anarchists escaping repression not just from Spain and Italy, but also countries such as Russia and Bulgaria who now, the dust having settled after years of social unrest associated with the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, in an atmosphere of relative tranquility although under constant police observation, sought to reassess and perhaps revise their ideas and tactics in light of these recent events. During this period, anarchists lacked “coordination, method, plan and structure,” and were too “eclectic,” and their ideals too confusing for the masses.36 In revolutionary situations, Russia and Italy in particular, anarchists were clearly unprepared and “were not equal to the occasion.”37 After the collapse of the anarchists in Russia, the factory occupation in Italy and the strike movement in Spain, the division in their ranks caused by Bolshevism, and the state reaction, anarchism had “stagnated.” Hence anarchists needed to undertake “a profound and serious revision of our theories if we want to be in harmony with the modern times.”38 It was time to put an end to the “chaotic separation of tactics and doctrine.”39 “A measured study” of the “fundamental problems” of anarchist doctrine was needed.40The “World Survey” launched by the RIA was an attempt to gather these reappraisals, which were mainly from Europe with some coming from other parts of the world. A sharing of experiences and ideas would help fortify the movement, create a unity of direction and clarity, and perhaps be the basis for the creation of an Anarchist International to rival that of the Bolsheviks. Multiple transnational contacts had been made in Paris by anarchists in exile following repression in their own countries, but to spread their ideas beyond France and back to their own nations required a newspaper or bulletin, and the RIA could play that role.41In November 1924, all three versions of the first edition of the RIA carried the “Great World Survey”: a questionnaire concerning the immediate and future tasks of anarchism to which readers were asked to respond. 42 The question was, of course, “vast and complex” and indeed many of the answers were vague or abstract.43 Responses came from anarchists from numerous countries, predominantly France and Italy but also Spain, Argentina, Mexico, Poland, and Russia. These responses came from some of the most prominent figures at the time—especially from France and Italy—such as Sebastian Faure, Luigi Fabbri, Enrique Flores Magón, and Arshinov. The Spanish version prompted the fewest responses, the majority of which were foreign. In fact, only one was Spanish, Abad de Santillan who, although Spanish-born, lived in Argentina for most of his life. He was a member of the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA) and would have an influence on sections of the Spanish movement.44 To try to compensate for the lack of Spanish survey responses, articles that touch on the issues raised in the survey responses by Spanish members of the RIA editorial team, Orobón Fernández, and Eusebio Carbo, both well-known militants of the CNT, were also included in researching this article.Perhaps the most prevalent subject among those that responded was what anarchists needed to do in the prerevolutionary period. According to the Italian Ugo Fedeli (writing under the pseudonym “Hugo Trene”) the Russian Revolution had caused “terrible confusion” and demonstrated “that many of our programmes . . . were full of dangerous simplicities,” whereas during the factory occupations Italian anarchists had shown “a lack of deficient knowledge of economic factors” and therefore “the economic possibilities of their country.” This was, he argued, due to the fact that in the past anarchists had concentrated predominantly on the means of destroying the existing form of society rather than on how to rebuild or replace it, when in reality a revolution “cannot succeed, if it does not have [a society] to replace the old one that is destroyed.” The basis for this new society had to be built in the prerevolutionary period. When the revolution came it would have to be defended both economically and militarily and this would depend on the preparedness of the masses. Anarchists needed to start replacing the defeated society immediately and this would be organized by three groups: anarchist affinity groups, unions, and consumer and production cooperatives needed to be the “cells of the future society.” The affinity groups needed to be linked federally with the other local, regional, national, and international organizations and focus on propaganda and education. A key point was that the supply and distribution of goods would have to be organized from the revolution's first moment and this would be carried out by unions and cooperatives.In unions, therefore, anarchists had to educate workers “in the libertarian nature of their struggle” and not to limit demands to reforms or to blindly follow its leadership. Cooperatives would be responsible for the distribution of goods as well as some elements of production and would also have an important educational function, showing workers how to administer businesses and also how to use profits to create libraries and free schools. The role of the cooperatives was as vital as that of the unions, and so “it will be necessary to infuse the cooperatives with the [anarchist] spirit and conscience that they currently lack.”45Ugo Fedeli's position was similar to that of the French anarchist, Sebastien Faure, whose response to the survey was the most detailed of those received and was published in all three sections. Faure argued for a “moral entente” among anarchist groups, unions, and cooperatives. There must also be clear light among the three movements: “Anarchism, syndicalism and cooperativism must maintain their respective physiognomy and complete independence.” In this way anarchists would not only be able to turn workers away from political planners but also, by uniting the forces of production and consumption, this would have sufficient strength “to overthrow capitalism and the state and stand up to any attempt to restore authoritarian rule.”46A further French survey response from Georges Bastien, a prominent member of the minority revolutionary syndicalist tendency in France, supported Faure and Fedeli's basic point that “a society cannot be improvised,” and also agreed about the importance of unions and cooperatives. In both unions and cooperatives anarchists needed to adopt “a line of behaviour, both for the present and the future.”47 While writing in the French section, the Polish anarchist Isaak Gurfinkiel (writing under the pseudonym “Jean Walecki”), resident in France since April 1923, and secretary of the International Anarchist Committee, mirrored this general point: cooperatives were “essentially libertarian and anti-state” and would be “the base of the future organization . . . of social consumption” with unions and factory committees taking control of production.48The survey responses from the Spanish participants were noticeable for the lack of reference to cooperation, specifically consumer cooperation. Indeed, there were fewer responses to the survey in the Spanish edition than the other two countries and most came from non-Spanish nationals, the most detailed from Faure, Fedeli, and Santillan. In-depth treatment of prerevolutionary economic policy was almost completely lacking from the Spanish texts. Indeed, the potential role and importance of cooperatives, so prevalent in Italian and French responses, was completely absent in the Spanish responses. In fact, the only reference to cooperation in the Spanish section (with the exception of the survey response from Faure and Fedeli) being a rather general article by José Joseph, of whom little is known. This is surprising given that it was to be one of the key aspects of Joan Peiró, the prominent anarchist and former (and future) CNT national secretary, in his 1925 book, Trayectoria de la CNT.49 The book by Peiró focused on the development of the role of cooperatives in both the prerevolutionary and immediate revolutionary periods as well as the need for anarchists to act within the cooperatives. Despite Peiró’s arguments only a small section of the CNT showed any interest in cooperatives until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.50Unions and cooperatives were, therefore, placed at the center of anarchist policies, at least for the French and Italians. Spanish responses focused on the relationship between anarchists and the unions and, for them at least, the concomitant concept of organization. In Spain, the depth of confusion caused by this relationship was reflected in the first two survey responses published in the Spanish edition of the RIA. The first, from the French anarchist, Pierre Beauchet (writing under the name “Pierre Mauldés”) who was on the editorial board of Le Libertaire, argued that to put faith in the revolutionary potential of the unions was “a proposal to suffer the greatest delusions.” The creation of an independent anarchist organization was the “only hope.”51 Whereas in the second response Abad de Santillan, from the Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA), argued in favor of what he called the Anarchist Workers Organization (Movimiento Obrero anarquista [MOA]) which went beyond revolutionary or anarcho-syndicalism, where goals, tactics, and day-to-day policies should be on a clear anarchist basis, i.e., that unions would be run by anarchists along purely anarchist lines.52The MOA would have a significant impact in Spain, although more due to its proponents’ crit