Anarchism in the United States began in the
mid-19th century and started to grow in influence
as it entered the American labor movements,
growing an anarcho-communist current as well
as gaining notoriety for violent propaganda
by the deed and campaigning for diverse social
reforms in the early 20th century. In the
post-World War II era, anarchism regained
influence through new developments such as
anarcho-pacifism, anarcho-capitalism, the
American New Left and the counterculture of
the 1960s. In contemporary times, anarchism
in the United States influenced and became
influenced and renewed by developments both
inside and outside the worldwide anarchist
movement such as platformism, insurrectionary
anarchism, the new social movements (anarcha-feminism,
queer anarchism and green anarchism) and the
alterglobalization movements.
== Early American anarchism ==
For American anarchist historian Eunice Minette
Schuster, American individualist anarchism
"stresses the isolation of the individual—his
right to his own tools, his mind, his body,
and to the products of his labor. To the artist
who embraces this philosophy it is 'aesthetic'
anarchism, to the reformer, ethical anarchism,
to the independent mechanic, economic anarchism.
The former is concerned with philosophy, the
latter with practical demonstration. The economic
anarchist is concerned with constructing a
society on the basis of anarchism. Economically
he sees no harm whatever in the private possession
of what the individual produces by his own
labor, but only so much and no more. The aesthetic
and ethical type found expression in the transcendentalism,
humanitarianism, and romanticism of the first
part of the nineteenth century, the economic
type in the pioneer life of the West during
the same period, but more favorably after
the Civil War".It is for this reason that
it has been suggested that in order to understand
American individualist anarchism one must
take into account "the social context of their
ideas, namely the transformation of America
from a pre-capitalist to a capitalist society
... the non-capitalist nature of the early
U.S. can be seen from the early dominance
of self-employment (artisan and peasant production).
At the beginning of the 19th century, around
80% of the working (non-slave) male population
were self-employed. The great majority of
Americans during this time were farmers working
their own land, primarily for their own needs"
and so "individualist anarchism is clearly
a form of artisanal socialism ... while communist
anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are forms
of industrial (or proletarian) socialism".Historian
Wendy McElroy reports that American individualist
anarchism received an important influence
of three European thinkers: "One of the most
important of these influences was the French
political philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
whose words "Liberty is not the Daughter But
the Mother of Order" appeared as a motto on
Liberty's masthead" (influential individualist
anarchist publication of Benjamin Tucker).
"Another major foreign influence was the german
philosopher Max Stirner". "The third foreign
thinker with great impact was the British
philosopher Herbert Spencer". Other influences
to consider include William Godwin's "anarchism
(which) exerted an ideological influence on
some of this, but more so the socialism of
Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.
After success of his British venture, Owen
himself established a cooperative community
within the United States at New Harmony, Indiana
during 1825. One member of this commune was
Josiah Warren (1798–1874), considered to
be the first individualist anarchist. After
New Harmony failed Warren shifted his ideological
loyalties from socialism to anarchism (which
was no great leap, given that Owen's socialism
had been predicated on Godwin's anarchism)".
Warren is widely regarded as the first American
anarchist and the four-page weekly paper he
edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist,
was the first anarchist periodical published,
an enterprise for which he built his own printing
press, cast his own type and made his own
printing plates. Warren was a follower of
Owen and joined Owen's community at New Harmony.
Warren termed the phrase "Cost the limit of
price", with "cost" here referring not to
monetary price paid but the labor one exerted
to produce an item. Therefore, "[h]e proposed
a system to pay people with certificates indicating
how many hours of work they did. They could
exchange the notes at local time stores for
goods that took the same amount of time to
produce". He put his theories to the test
by establishing an experimental "labor for
labor store" called the Cincinnati Time Store,
where trade was facilitated by notes backed
by a promise to perform labor. The store proved
successful and operated for three years after
which it was closed so that Warren could pursue
establishing colonies based on mutualism.
These included "Utopia" and "Modern Times".
Warren said that Stephen Pearl Andrews' The
Science of Society, published in 1852, was
the most lucid and complete exposition of
Warren's own theories. Catalan historian Xavier
Diez report that the intentional communal
experiments pioneered by Warren were influential
in European individualist anarchists of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries such as
Emile Armand and the intentional communities
started by them.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an important
early influence in individualist anarchist
thought in the United States and Europe. Thoreau
was an American author, poet, naturalist,
tax resister, development critic, surveyor,
historian, philosopher and leading transcendentalist.
Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government)
is an essay by Thoreau that was first published
in 1849. It argues that people should not
permit governments to overrule or atrophy
their consciences, and that people have a
duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to
enable the government to make them the agents
of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part
by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican–American
War. It would influence Mohandas Gandhi, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Martin Buber and Leo Tolstoy
through its advocacy of nonviolent resistance.
It is also the main precedent for anarcho-pacifism.
Anarchism started to have an ecological view
mainly in the writings of American individualist
anarchist and transcendentalist Thoreau. In
his book Walden, he advocates simple living
and self-sufficiency among natural surroundings
in resistance to the advancement of industrial
civilization: "Many have seen in Thoreau one
of the precursors of ecologism and anarcho-primitivism
represented today in John Zerzan. For George
Woodcock this attitude can be also motivated
by certain idea of resistance to progress
and of rejection of the growing materialism
which is the nature of American society in
the mid-19th century". Zerzan himself included
the text "Excursions" (1863) by Thoreau in
his edited compilation of anti-civilization
writings called Against Civilization: Readings
and Reflections from 1999. Walden made Thoreau
influential in the European individualist
anarchist green current of anarcho-naturism.
For American anarchist historian Eunice Minette
Schuster, "[i]t is apparent ... that Proudhonian
Anarchism was to be found in the United States
at least as early as 1848 and that it was
not conscious of its affinity to the Individualist
Anarchism of Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl
Andrews ... William B. Greene presented this
Proudhonian Mutualism in its purest and most
systematic form". William Batchelder Greene
(1819–1878) was a 19th-century mutualist
individualist anarchist, Unitarian minister,
soldier and promotor of free banking in the
United States. Greene is best known for the
works Mutual Banking (1850), which proposed
an interest-free banking system; and Transcendentalism,
a critique of the New England philosophical
school.
After 1850, he became active in labor reform
and was elected vice president of the New
England Labor Reform League, the majority
of the members holding to Proudhon's scheme
of mutual banking, and in 1869 president of
the Massachusetts Labor Union. He then published
Socialistic, Mutualistic, and Financial Fragments
(1875). He saw mutualism as the synthesis
of "liberty and order". His "associationism
... is checked by individualism ..."Mind your
own business," "Judge not that ye be not judged."
Over matters which are purely personal, as
for example, moral conduct, the individual
is sovereign, as well as over that which he
himself produces. For this reason he demands
"mutuality" in marriage—the equal right
of a woman to her own personal freedom and
property".Stephen Pearl Andrews was an individualist
anarchist and close associate of Josiah Warren.
Andrews was formerly associated with the Fourierist
movement, but converted to radical individualism
after becoming acquainted with the work of
Warren. Like Warren, he held the principle
of "individual sovereignty" as being of paramount
importance. Contemporary American anarchist
Hakim Bey reports that "Steven Pearl Andrews
... was not a fourierist, but he lived through
the brief craze for phalansteries in America
and adopted a lot of fourierist principles
and practices ... a maker of worlds out of
words. He syncretized abolitionism, Free Love,
spiritual universalism, Warren, and Fourier
into a grand utopian scheme he called the
Universal Pantarchy ... He was instrumental
in founding several "intentional communities,"
including the "Brownstone Utopia" on 14th
Street in New York and "Modern Times" in Brentwood,
Long Island. The latter became as famous as
the best-known fourierist communes (Brook
Farm in Massachusetts and the North American
Phalanx in New Jersey) — in fact, Modern
Times became downright notorious for "Free
Love" and finally foundered under a wave of
scandalous publicity. Andrews (and Victoria
Woodhull) were members of the infamous Section
12 of the 1st International, expelled by Marx
for its anarchist, feminist, and spiritualist
tendencies".
== 19th century American individualist anarchism
==
An important current within American individualist
anarchism was Free love. Free love advocates
sometimes traced their roots back to Josiah
Warren and to experimental communities, and
viewed sexual freedom as a clear, direct expression
of an individual's self-ownership. Free love
particularly stressed women's rights since
most sexual laws discriminated against women:
for example, marriage laws and anti-birth
control measures. The most important American
free love journal was Lucifer the Lightbearer
(1883–1907) edited by Moses Harman and Lois
Waisbrooker but also there existed Ezra Heywood
and Angela Heywood's The Word (1872–1890,
1892–1893). M. E. Lazarus was an important
American individualist anarchist who promoted
free love. Hutchins Hapgood was a U.S. journalist,
author, individualist anarchist/philosophical
anarchist who was well known within the Bohemian
environment of around the start of 20th-century
New York City. He advocated free love and
committed adultery frequently. Hapgood was
a follower of the German philosophers Max
Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche. The mission
of Lucifer the Lightbearer was, according
to Harman, "to help woman to break the chains
that for ages have bound her to the rack of
man-made law, spiritual, economic, industrial,
social and especially sexual, believing that
until woman is roused to a sense of her own
responsibility on all lines of human endeavor,
and especially on lines of her special field,
that of reproduction of the race, there will
be little if any real advancement toward a
higher and truer civilization." The name was
chosen because "Lucifer, the ancient name
of the Morning Star, now called Venus, seems
to us unsurpassed as a cognomen for a journal
whose mission is to bring light to the dwellers
in darkness." In February 1887, the editors
and publishers of Lucifer were arrested after
the journal ran afoul of the Comstock Act
for the publication of a letter condemning
forced sex within marriage, which the author
identified as rape. The Comstock Act specifically
prohibited the public, printed discussion
of any topics that were considered "obscene,
lewd, or lascivious," and discussing rape,
although a criminal matter, was deemed obscene.
A Topeka district attorney eventually handed
down 216 indictments. In February 1890, Harman,
now the sole producer of Lucifer, was again
arrested on charges resulting from a similar
article written by a New York physician. As
a result of the original charges, Harman would
spend large portions of the next six years
in prison. In 1896, Lucifer was moved to Chicago;
however, legal harassment continued. The United
States Postal Service seized and destroyed
numerous issues of the journal and, in May
1905, Harman was again arrested and convicted
for the distribution of two articles - "The
Fatherhood Question" and "More Thoughts on
Sexology" by Sara Crist Campbell. Sentenced
to a year of hard labor, the 75-year-old editor's
health deteriorated greatly. After 24 years
in production, Lucifer ceased publication
in 1907 and became the more scholarly American
Journal of Eugenics.They also had many opponents,
and Moses Harman spent two years in jail after
a court determined that a journal he published
was "obscene" under the notorious Comstock
Law. In particular, the court objected to
three letters to the editor, one of which
described the plight of a woman who had been
raped by her husband, tearing stitches from
a recent operation after a difficult childbirth
and causing severe hemorrhaging. The letter
lamented the woman's lack of legal recourse.
Ezra Heywood, who had already been prosecuted
under the Comstock Law for a pamphlet attacking
marriage, reprinted the letter in solidarity
with Harman and was also arrested and sentenced
to two years in prison.
Heywood's philosophy was instrumental in furthering
individualist anarchist ideas through his
extensive pamphleteering and reprinting of
works of Josiah Warren, author of True Civilization
(1869), and William B. Greene. In 1872, at
a convention of the New England Labor Reform
League in Boston, Heywood introduced Greene
and Warren to eventual Liberty publisher Benjamin
Tucker. Heywood saw what he believed to be
a disproportionate concentration of capital
in the hands of a few as the result of a selective
extension of government-backed privileges
to certain individuals and organizations.
The Word was an individualist anarchist free
love magazine edited by Ezra Heywood and Angela
Heywood, issued first from Princeton, Massachusetts
and then from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The
Word was subtitled "A Monthly Journal of Reform,"
and it included contributions from Josiah
Warren, Benjamin Tucker, and J.K. Ingalls.
Initially, The Word presented free love as
a minor theme which was expressed within a
labor reform format. But the publication later
evolved into an explicitly free love periodical.
At some point Tucker became an important contributor
but later became dissatisfied with the journal's
focus on free love since he desired a concentration
on economics. In contrast, Tucker's relationship
with Heywood grew more distant. Yet, when
Heywood was imprisoned for his pro-birth control
stand from August to December 1878 under the
Comstock laws, Tucker abandoned the Radical
Review in order to assume editorship of Heywood's
The Word. After Heywood's release from prison,
The Word openly became a free love journal;
it flouted the law by printing birth control
material and openly discussing sexual matters.
Tucker's disapproval of this policy stemmed
from his conviction that "Liberty, to be effective,
must find its first application in the realm
of economics".M. E. Lazarus (1822 – 1895
or 1896) was an American individualist anarchist
from Guntersville, Alabama. He is the author
of several essays and anarchist pamphlettes
including Land Tenure: Anarchist View (1889).
A famous quote from Lazarus is "Every vote
for a governing office is an instrument for
enslaving me." Lazarus was also an intellectual
contributor to Fourierism and the Free Love
movement of the 1850s, a social reform group
that called for, in its extreme form, the
abolition of institutionalized marriage.
Freethought as a philosophical position and
as activism was important in North American
individualist anarchism. In the United States
"freethought was a basically anti-Christian,
anti-clerical movement, whose purpose was
to make the individual politically and spiritually
free to decide for himself on religious matters.
A number of contributors to Liberty were prominent
figures in both freethought and anarchism.
The individualist anarchist George MacDonald
was a co-editor of Freethought and, for a
time, The Truth Seeker. E.C. Walker was co-editor
of the free-thought/free love journal Lucifer,
the Light-Bearer". "Many of the anarchists
were ardent freethinkers; reprints from freethought
papers such as Lucifer, the Light-Bearer,
Freethought and The Truth Seeker appeared
in Liberty ... The church was viewed as a
common ally of the state and as a repressive
force in and of itself".Voltairine de Cleyre
was an American anarchist writer and feminist.
She was a prolific writer and speaker, opposing
the state, marriage, and the domination of
religion in sexuality and women's lives. She
began her activist career in the freethought
movement. De Cleyre was initially drawn to
individualist anarchism but evolved through
mutualism to an "anarchism without adjectives."
She believed that any system was acceptable
as long as it did not involve force. However,
according to anarchist author Iain McKay,
she embraced the ideals of stateless communism.
In her 1895 lecture entitled Sex Slavery,
de Cleyre condemns ideals of beauty that encourage
women to distort their bodies and child socialization
practices that create unnatural gender roles.
The title of the essay refers not to traffic
in women for purposes of prostitution, although
that is also mentioned, but rather to marriage
laws that allow men to rape their wives without
consequences. Such laws make "every married
woman what she is, a bonded slave, who takes
her master's name, her master's bread, her
master's commands, and serves her master's
passions."
Individualist anarchism found in the United
States an important space of discussion and
development within what is known as "Boston
anarchists." Even among the 19th-century American
individualists, there was not a monolithic
doctrine, as they disagreed amongst each other
on various issues including intellectual property
rights and possession versus property in land.
A major schism occurred later in the 19th
century when Tucker and some others abandoned
their traditional support of natural rights
– as espoused by Lysander Spooner – and
converted to an "egoism" modeled upon Stirner's
philosophy. Lysander Spooner, besides his
individualist anarchist activism, was also
an important anti-slavery activist and became
a member of the First International. Some
"Boston anarchists", including Benjamin Tucker,
identified themselves as socialists, which
in the 19th century was often used in the
sense of a commitment to improving conditions
of the working class (i.e. "the labor problem").
The "Boston Anarchists" such as Tucker and
his followers are considered socialists to
this day due to their opposition to usury.
By around the start of the 20th century, the
heyday of individualist anarchism had passed.
Liberty was a 19th-century anarchist periodical
published in the United States by Benjamin
Tucker, from August 1881 to April 1908. The
periodical was instrumental in developing
and formalizing the individualist anarchist
philosophy through publishing essays and serving
as a format for debate. Contributors included
Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Auberon
Herbert, Dyer Lum, Joshua K. Ingalls, John
Henry Mackay, Victor Yarros, Wordsworth Donisthorpe,
James L. Walker, J. William Lloyd, Florence
Finch Kelly, Voltairine de Cleyre, Steven
T. Byington, John Beverley Robinson, Jo Labadie,
Lillian Harman, and Henry Appleton. Included
in its masthead is a quote from Pierre Proudhon
saying that liberty is "Not the Daughter But
the Mother of Order."
Some of the American individualist anarchists
later in this era, such as Benjamin Tucker,
abandoned natural rights positions and converted
to Max Stirner's Egoist anarchism. Rejecting
the idea of moral rights, Tucker said that
there were only two rights, "the right of
might" and "the right of contract." He also
said, after converting to Egoist individualism,
"In times past ... it was my habit to talk
glibly of the right of man to land. It was
a bad habit, and I long ago sloughed it off
... Man's only right to land is his might
over it." In adopting Stirnerite egoism (1886),
Tucker rejected natural rights which had long
been considered the foundation of libertarianism.
This rejection galvanized the movement into
fierce debates, with the natural rights proponents
accusing the egoists of destroying libertarianism
itself. So bitter was the conflict that a
number of natural rights proponents withdrew
from the pages of Liberty in protest even
though they had hitherto been among its frequent
contributors. Thereafter, Liberty championed
egoism although its general content did not
change significantly." Several publications
"were undoubtedly influenced by Liberty's
presentation of egoism. They included: I published
by C.L. Swartz, edited by W.E. Gordak and
J.William Lloyd (all associates of Liberty);
The Ego and The Egoist, both of which were
edited by Edward H. Fulton. Among the egoist
papers that Tucker followed were the German
Der Eigene, edited by Adolf Brand, and The
Eagle and The Serpent, issued from London.
The latter, the most prominent English-language
egoist journal, was published from 1898 to
1900 with the subtitle 'A Journal of Egoistic
Philosophy and Sociology'". Among those American
anarchists who adhered to egoism include Benjamin
Tucker, John Beverley Robinson, Steven T.
Byington, Hutchins Hapgood, James L. Walker,
Victor Yarros and Edward H. Fulton. Robinson
wrote an essay called "Egoism" in which he
states that "Modern egoism, as propounded
by Stirner and Nietzsche, and expounded by
Ibsen, Shaw and others, is all these; but
it is more. It is the realization by the individual
that they are an individual; that, as far
as they are concerned, they are the only individual."
Steven T. Byington was a one-time proponent
of Georgism who later converted to egoist
stirnerist positions after associating with
Benjamin Tucker. He is known for translating
two important anarchist works into English
from German: Max Stirner's The Ego and Its
Own and Paul Eltzbacher's Anarchism: Exponents
of the Anarchist Philosophy (also published
by Dover with the title The Great Anarchists:
Ideas and Teachings of Seven Major Thinkers).
James L. Walker (sometimes known by the pen
name "Tak Kak") was one of the main contributors
to Benjamin Tucker's Liberty. He published
his major philosophical work called Philosophy
of Egoism in the May 1890 to September 1891
in issues of the publication Egoism.
== Early American anarcho-communism ==
By the 1880s anarcho-communism was already
present in the United States as can be seen
in the publication of the journal Freedom:
A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly
by Lucy Parsons and Lizzy Holmes. Lucy Parsons
debated in her time in the US with fellow
anarcha-communist Emma Goldman over issues
of free love and feminism. Described by the
Chicago Police Department as "more dangerous
than a thousand rioters" in the 1920s, Parsons
and her husband had become highly effective
anarchist organizers primarily involved in
the labor movement in the late 19th century,
but also participating in revolutionary activism
on behalf of political prisoners, people of
color, the homeless and women. She began writing
for The Socialist and The Alarm, the journal
of the International Working People's Association
(IWPA) that she and Parsons, among others,
founded in 1883. In 1886 her husband, who
had been heavily involved in campaigning for
the eight-hour day, was arrested, tried and
executed on November 11, 1887, by the state
of Illinois on charges that he had conspired
in the Haymarket Riot — an event which was
widely regarded as a political frame-up and
which marked the beginning of May Day labor
rallies in protest.Another anarcho-communist
journal later appeared in the US called The
Firebrand. Most anarchist publications in
the US were in Yiddish, German, or Russian,
but Free Society was published in English,
permitting the dissemination of anarchist
communist thought to English-speaking populations
in the US. Around that time these American
anarcho-communist sectors entered in debate
with the individualist anarchist group around
Benjamin Tucker. Encouraged by news of labor
struggles and industrial disputes in the United
States, the German anarchist Johann Most emigrated
to the USA upon his release from prison in
1882. He promptly began agitating in his adopted
land among other German émigrés. Among his
associates was August Spies, one of the anarchists
hanged for conspiracy in the Haymarket Square
bombing, whose desk police found to contain
an 1884 letter from Most promising a shipment
of "medicine," his code word for dynamite.
Most was famous for stating the concept of
the propaganda of the deed (Attentat): "The
existing system will be quickest and most
radically overthrown by the annihilation of
its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the
enemies of the people must be set in motion."
Most is best known for a pamphlet published
in 1885: The Science of Revolutionary Warfare,
a how-to manual on the subject of bomb-making
which earned the author the moniker "Dynamost."
He acquired his knowledge of explosives while
working at an explosives plant in New Jersey.
A gifted orator, Most propagated these ideas
throughout Marxist and anarchist circles in
the United States and attracted many adherents,
most notably Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
In February 1888 Berkman left for the United
States from his native Russia. Soon after
his arrival in New York City, Berkman became
an anarchist through his involvement with
groups that had formed to campaign to free
the men convicted of the 1886 Haymarket bombing.
He, as well as Goldman, soon came under the
influence of Johann Most, the best-known anarchist
in the United States, and an advocate of propaganda
of the deed—attentat, or violence carried
out to encourage the masses to revolt. Berkman
became a typesetter for Most's newspaper Freiheit.
Inspired by Most's theories of Attentat, Goldman
and Berkman, enraged by the deaths of workers
during the Homestead strike, put words into
action with Berkman's attempted assassination
of Homestead factory manager Henry Clay Frick
in 1892. Berkman and Goldman were soon disillusioned
as Most became one of Berkman's most outspoken
critics. In Freiheit, Most attacked both Goldman
and Berkman, implying Berkman's act was designed
to arouse sympathy for Frick. Goldman's biographer
Alice Wexler suggests that Most's criticisms
may have been inspired by jealousy of Berkman.
Goldman was enraged, and demanded that Most
prove his insinuations. When he refused to
respond, she confronted him at next lecture.
After he refused to speak to her, she lashed
him across the face with a horsewhip, broke
the whip over her knee, then threw the pieces
at him. She later regretted her assault, confiding
to a friend, "At the age of twenty-three,
one does not reason."
Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her
political activism, writing, and speeches.
She played a pivotal role in the development
of anarchist political philosophy in North
America and Europe in the first half of the
20th century. Born in Kovno in the Russian
Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman
emigrated to the U.S. in 1885 and lived in
New York City, where she joined the burgeoning
anarchist movement in 1889. Attracted to anarchism
after the Haymarket affair, Goldman became
a writer and a renowned lecturer on anarchist
philosophy, women's rights, and social issues,
attracting crowds of thousands. She and anarchist
writer Alexander Berkman, her lover and lifelong
friend, planned to assassinate industrialist
and financier Henry Clay Frick as an act of
propaganda of the deed. Although Frick survived
the attempt on his life, Berkman was sentenced
to twenty-two years in prison. Goldman was
imprisoned several times in the years that
followed, for "inciting to riot" and illegally
distributing information about birth control.
In 1906, Goldman founded the anarchist journal
Mother Earth. In 1917, Goldman and Berkman
were sentenced to two years in jail for conspiring
to "induce persons not to register" for the
newly instated draft. After their release
from prison, they were arrested—along with
hundreds of others—and deported to Russia.
Initially supportive of that country's Bolshevik
revolution, Goldman quickly voiced her opposition
to the Soviet use of violence and the repression
of independent voices. In 1923, she wrote
a book about her experiences, My Disillusionment
in Russia. While living in England, Canada,
and France, she wrote an autobiography called
Living My Life. After the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War, she traveled to Spain to
support the anarchist revolution there. She
died in Toronto on May 14, 1940, aged 70.
During her life, Goldman was lionized as a
free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and
denounced by critics as an advocate of politically
motivated murder and violent revolution. Her
writing and lectures spanned a wide variety
of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom
of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage,
free love, and homosexuality. Although she
distanced herself from first-wave feminism
and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she
developed new ways of incorporating gender
politics into anarchism. After decades of
obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived
in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist
scholars rekindled popular interest in her
life.
== American anarchism and the labor movement
==
The anti-authoritarian sections of the First
International were the precursors of the anarcho-syndicalists,
seeking to "replace the privilege and authority
of the State" with the "free and spontaneous
organization of labor."After embracing anarchism
Albert Parsons, husband of Lucy Parsons, turned
his activity to the growing movement to establish
the 8-hour day. In January 1880, the Eight-Hour
League of Chicago sent Parsons to a national
conference in Washington, DC, a gathering
which launched a national lobbying movement
aimed at coordinating efforts of labor organizations
to win and enforce the 8-hour workday. In
the fall of 1884, Parsons launched a weekly
anarchist newspaper in Chicago, The Alarm.
The first issue was dated October 4, 1884,
and was produced in a press run of 15,000
copies. The publication was a 4-page broadsheet
with a cover price of 5 cents. The Alarm listed
the IWPA as its publisher and touted itself
as "A Socialistic Weekly" on its page 2 masthead.
On May 1, 1886, Parsons, with his wife Lucy
and their two children, led 80,000 people
down Michigan Avenue, in what is regarded
as the first-ever May Day Parade, in support
of the eight-hour work day. Over the next
few days 340,000 laborers joined the strike.
Parsons, amidst the May Day Strike, found
himself called to Cincinnati, where 300,000
workers had struck that Saturday afternoon.
On that Sunday he addressed the rally in Cincinnati
of the news from the "storm center" of the
strike and participated in a second huge parade,
led by 200 members of The Cincinnati Rifle
Union, with certainty that victory was at
hand. In 1886, the Federation of Organized
Trades and Labor Unions (FOTLU) of the United
States and Canada unanimously set 1 May 1886,
as the date by which the eight-hour work day
would become standard. In response, unions
across the United States prepared a general
strike in support of the event. On 3 May,
in Chicago, a fight broke out when strikebreakers
attempted to cross the picket line, and two
workers died when police opened fire upon
the crowd. The next day, 4 May, anarchists
staged a rally at Chicago's Haymarket Square.
A bomb was thrown by an unknown party near
the conclusion of the rally, killing an officer.
In the ensuing panic, police opened fire on
the crowd and each other. Seven police officers
and at least four workers were killed. Eight
anarchists directly and indirectly related
to the organisers of the rally were arrested
and charged with the murder of the deceased
officer. The men became international political
celebrities among the labor movement. Four
of the men were executed and a fifth committed
suicide prior to his own execution. The incident
became known as the Haymarket affair, and
was a setback for the labor movement and the
struggle for the eight-hour day. In 1890 a
second attempt, this time international in
scope, to organise for the eight-hour day
was made. The event also had the secondary
purpose of memorializing workers killed as
a result of the Haymarket affair. Although
it had initially been conceived as a once-off
event, by the following year the celebration
of International Workers' Day on May Day had
become firmly established as an international
worker's holiday. Albert Parsons is best remembered
as one of four Chicago radical leaders convicted
of conspiracy and hanged following a bomb
attack on police remembered as the Haymarket
affair. Emma Goldman, the activist and political
theorist, was attracted to anarchism after
reading about the incident and the executions,
which she later described as "the events that
had inspired my spiritual birth and growth."
She considered the Haymarket martyrs to be
"the most decisive influence in my existence".
Her associate, Alexander Berkman also described
the Haymarket anarchists as "a potent and
vital inspiration." Others whose commitment
to anarchism crystallized as a result of the
Haymarket affair included Voltairine de Cleyre
and "Big Bill" Haywood, a founding member
of the Industrial Workers of the World. Goldman
wrote to historian, Max Nettlau, that the
Haymarket affair had awakened the social consciousness
of "hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people".
Two individualist anarchists who wrote in
Benjamin Tucker's Liberty were also important
labor organizers of the time. Jo Labadie was
an American labor organizer, individualist
anarchist, social activist, printer, publisher,
essayist, and poet. Without the oppression
of the state, Labadie believed, humans would
choose to harmonize with "the great natural
laws ... without robbing [their] fellows through
interest, profit, rent and taxes." However,
he supported community cooperation, as he
supported community control of water utilities,
streets, and railroads. Although he did not
support the militant anarchism of the Haymarket
anarchists, he fought for the clemency of
the accused because he did not believe they
were the perpetrators. In 1888, Labadie organized
the Michigan Federation of Labor, became its
first president, and forged an alliance with
Samuel Gompers. Dyer Lum was a 19th-century
American individualist anarchist labor activist
and poet. A leading anarcho-syndicalist and
a prominent left-wing intellectual of the
1880s, he is remembered as the lover and mentor
of early anarcha-feminist Voltairine de Cleyre.
Lum was a prolific writer who wrote a number
of key anarchist texts, and contributed to
publications including Mother Earth, Twentieth
Century, Liberty (Benjamin Tucker's individualist
anarchist journal), The Alarm (the journal
of the IWPA) and The Open Court among others.
He developed a "mutualist" theory of unions
and as such was active within the Knights
of Labor and later promoted anti-political
strategies in the American Federation of Labor
(AFL). Frustration with abolitionism, spiritualism,
and labor reform caused Lum to embrace anarchism
and radicalize workers, as he came to believe
that revolution would inevitably involve a
violent struggle between the working class
and the employing class. Convinced of the
necessity of violence to enact social change
he volunteered to fight in the American Civil
War, hoping thereby to bring about the end
of slavery. The Freie Arbeiter Stimme was
the longest-running anarchist periodical in
the Yiddish language, founded initially as
an American counterpart to Rudolf Rocker's
London-based Arbeter Fraynd (Workers' Friend).
Publication began in 1890 and continued under
the editorial of Saul Yanovsky until 1923.
Contributors have included David Edelstadt,
Emma Goldman, Abba Gordin, Rudolf Rocker,
Moishe Shtarkman, and Saul Yanovsky. The paper
was also known for publishing poetry by Di
Yunge, Yiddish poets of the 1910s and 1920s.The
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was
founded in Chicago in June 1905 at a convention
of two hundred socialists, anarchists, and
radical trade unionists from all over the
United States (mainly the Western Federation
of Miners) who were opposed to the policies
of the AFL.
== The Red Scare, propaganda by the deed and
the World Wars period ==
Italian anti-organizationalist individualist
anarchism was brought to the United States
by Italian born individualists such as Giuseppe
Ciancabilla and others who advocated for violent
propaganda by the deed there. Anarchist historian
George Woodcock reports the incident in which
the important Italian social anarchist Errico
Malatesta became involved "in a dispute with
the individualist anarchists of Paterson,
who insisted that anarchism implied no organization
at all, and that every man must act solely
on his impulses. At last, in one noisy debate,
the individual impulse of a certain Ciancabilla
directed him to shoot Malatesta, who was badly
wounded but obstinately refused to name his
assailant." Some anarchists, such as Johann
Most, were already advocated publicizing violent
acts of retaliation against counter-revolutionaries
because "we preach not only action in and
for itself, but also action as propaganda."
By the 1880s, people inside and outside the
anarchist movement began to use the slogan,
"propaganda of the deed" to refer to individual
bombings, regicides, and tyrannicides. From
1905 onwards, the Russian counterparts of
these anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists
become partisans of economic terrorism and
illegal 'expropriations'." Illegalism as a
practice emerged and within it "The acts of
the anarchist bombers and assassins ("propaganda
by the deed") and the anarchist burglars ("individual
reappropriation") expressed their desperation
and their personal, violent rejection of an
intolerable society. Moreover, they were clearly
meant to be exemplary invitations to revolt.".On
September 6, 1901, the American anarchist
Leon Czolgosz went armed with a .32 caliber
Iver Johnson "Safety Automatic" revolver he
had purchased four days earlier and assassinated
the President of the United States William
McKinley. Czolgosz was convicted on September
24, 1901 after the jury deliberated for only
one hour. On September 26, the jury unanimously
recommended the death penalty and Czolgosz
was electrocuted by three jolts, each of 1800
volts, in Auburn Prison on October 29, 1901,
just 45 days after his victim's death. Emma
Goldman was arrested on suspicion of being
involved in the assassination, but was released,
due to insufficient evidence. She later incurred
a great deal of negative publicity when she
published "The Tragedy at Buffalo". In the
article, she compared Czolgosz to Marcus Junius
Brutus, the killer of Julius Caesar, and called
McKinley the "president of the money kings
and trust magnates." Other anarchists and
radicals were unwilling to support Goldman's
effort to aid Czolgosz, believing that he
had harmed the movement.Luigi Galleani was
an Italian anarchist active in the United
States from 1901 to 1919, viewed by historians
as an anarcho-communist and an insurrectionary
anarchist. He is best known for his enthusiastic
advocacy of "propaganda of the deed", i.e.
the use of violence to eliminate "tyrants"
and "oppressors" and to act as a catalyst
to the overthrow of existing government institutions.
From 1914 to 1932, Galleani's followers in
the United States (known as Galleanists),
carried out a series of bombings and assassination
attempts against institutions and persons
they viewed as class enemies. After Galleani
was deported from the United States to Italy
in June 1919, his followers are alleged to
have executed the Wall Street bombing of 1920,
which resulted in the deaths of 38 people.
Galleani held forth at local anarchist meetings,
assailed "timid" socialists, gave fire-breathing
speeches, and continued to write essays and
polemical treatises.The foremost proponent
of "propaganda by the deed" in the United
States, Galleani was the founder and editor
of the anarchist newsletter Cronaca Sovversiva
(Subversive Chronicle), which he published
and mailed from offices in Barre. Galleani
published the anarchist newsletter for fifteen
years until the United States government closed
it down under the Sedition Act of 1918. Galleani
attracted numerous radical friends and followers
known as "Galleanists", including Frank Abarno,
Gabriella Segata Antolini, Pietro Angelo,
Luigi Bacchetti, Mario Buda also known as
"Mike Boda", Carmine Carbone, Andrea Ciofalo,
Ferrucio Coacci, Emilio Coda, Alfredo Conti,
Nestor Dondoglioalso known as "Jean Crones",
Roberto Elia, Luigi Falzini, Frank Mandese,
Riccardo Orciani, Nicola Recchi, Giuseppe
Sberna, Andrea Salsedo, Raffaele Schiavina,
Carlo Valdinoci, and, most notably, Nicola
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti.
Sacco and Vanzetti were suspected anarchists
who were convicted of murdering two men during
the armed robbery of a shoe factory in South
Braintree, Massachusetts in 1920. After a
controversial trial and a series of appeals,
the two Italian immigrants were executed on
August 23, 1927. Since their deaths, critical
opinion has overwhelmingly felt that the two
men were convicted largely on their anarchist
political beliefs and unjustly executed. In
1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis
issued a proclamation that Sacco and Vanzetti
had been unfairly tried and convicted and
that "any disgrace should be forever removed
from their names." Many famous socialists
and intellectuals campaigned for a retrial
without success. John Dos Passos came to Boston
to cover the case as a journalist, stayed
to author a pamphlet called Facing the Chair,
and was arrested in a demonstration on August
10, 1927, along with Dorothy Parker. After
being arrested while picketing the State House,
Edna St. Vincent Millay pleaded her case to
the governor in person and then wrote an appeal:
"I cry to you with a million voices: answer
our doubt ... There is need in Massachusetts
of a great man tonight." Others who wrote
to Fuller or signed petitions included Albert
Einstein, George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells.
The president of the American Federation of
Labor cited "the long period of time intervening
between the commission of the crime and the
final decision of the Court" as well as "the
mental and physical anguish which Sacco and
Vanzetti must have undergone during the past
seven years" in a telegram to the governor.
In August 1927, the IWW called for a three-day
nationwide walkout to protest the pending
executions. The most notable response came
in the Walsenburg coal district of Colorado,
where 1,132 out of 1,167 miners participated,
which led directly to the Colorado coal strike
of 1927. Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni,
one of the most vocal supporters of Sacco
and Vanzetti in Argentina, bombed the American
embassy in Buenos Aires a few hours after
Sacco and Vanzetti were condemned to death.
A few days after the executions, Sacco's widow
thanked Di Giovanni by letter for his support
and added that the director of the tobacco
firm Combinados had offered to produce a cigarette
brand named "Sacco & Vanzetti". On November
26, 1927, Di Giovanni and others bombed a
Combinados tobacco shop.The Modern Schools,
also called Ferrer Schools, were U.S. schools
established in the early 20th century that
were modeled after the Escuela Moderna of
Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, the Catalan educator
and anarchist. They were an important part
of the anarchist, free schooling, socialist,
and labor movements in the U.S., intended
to educate the working-classes from a secular,
class-conscious perspective. The Modern Schools
imparted day-time academic classes for children,
and night-time continuing-education lectures
for adults. The first, and most notable, of
the Modern Schools was founded in New York
City, in 1911, two years after Francesc Ferrer
i Guàrdia's execution for sedition in monarchist
Spain on 18 October 1909. Commonly called
the Ferrer Center, it was founded by notable
anarchists — including Leonard Abbott, Alexander
Berkman, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Emma Goldman
— first meeting on St. Mark's Place, in
Manhattan's Lower East Side, but twice moved
elsewhere, first within lower Manhattan, then
to Harlem. Besides Berkman and Goldman, the
Ferrer Center faculty included the Ashcan
School painters Robert Henri and George Bellows,
and its guest lecturers included writers and
political activists such as Margaret Sanger,
Jack London, and Upton Sinclair. Student Magda
Schoenwetter, recalled that the school used
Montessori methods and equipment, and emphasized
academic freedom rather than fixed subjects,
such as spelling and arithmetic. The Modern
School magazine originally began as a newsletter
for parents, when the school was in New York
City, printed with the manual printing press
used in teaching printing as a profession.
After moving to the Stelton Colony, New Jersey,
the magazine's content expanded to poetry,
prose, art, and libertarian education articles;
the cover emblem and interior graphics were
designed by Rockwell Kent. Acknowledging the
urban danger to their school, the organizers
bought 68 acres (275,000 m²) in Piscataway
Township, New Jersey, and moved there in 1914,
becoming the center of the Stelton Colony.
Moreover, beyond New York City, the Ferrer
Colony and Modern School was founded (ca.
1910–1915) as a Modern School-based community,
that endured some forty years. In 1933, James
and Nellie Dick, who earlier had been principals
of the Stelton Modern School, founded the
Modern School in Lakewood, New Jersey, which
survived the original Modern School, the Ferrer
Center, becoming the final surviving such
school, lasting until 1958.
Ross Winn was an American anarchist writer
and publisher from Texas who was mostly active
within the Southern United States. Ross Winn
was born in Dallas, Texas in 1871. Winn wrote
articles for The Firebrand, a short-lived,
but renowned weekly out of Portland, Oregon;
The Rebel, an anarchist journal published
in Boston; and Emma Goldman's Mother Earth.
Winn began his first paper, known as Co-operative
Commonwealth. He then edited and published
Coming Era for a brief time in 1898 and then
Winn's Freelance in 1899. In 1902, he announced
a new paper called Winn's Firebrand. In 1901,
Winn met Emma Goldman in Chicago, and found
in her a lasting ally. As she wrote in his
obituary, Emma "was deeply impressed with
his fervor and complete abandonment to the
cause, so unlike most American revolutionists,
who love their ease and comfort too well to
risk them for their ideals." Winn kept up
a correspondence with Goldman throughout his
life, as he did with other prominent anarchist
writers at the time. Joseph Labadie, a prominent
writer and organizer in Michigan, was another
friend to Winn, and contributed several pieces
to Winn's Firebrand in its later years. Enrico
Arrigoni (pseudonym: Frank Brand) was an Italian
American individualist anarchist Lathe operator,
house painter, bricklayer, dramatist and political
activist influenced by the work of Max Stirner.
In the 1910s he started becoming involved
in anarchist and anti-war activism around
Milan. From the 1910s until the 1920s he participated
in anarchist activities and popular uprisings
in various countries including Switzerland,
Germany, Hungary, Argentina and Cuba. He lived
from the 1920s onwards in New York City and
there he edited the individualist anarchist
eclectic journal Eresia in 1928. He also wrote
for other American anarchist publications
such as L' Adunata dei refrattari, Cultura
Obrera, Controcorrente and Intessa Libertaria.
During the Spanish Civil War, he went to fight
with the anarchists but was imprisoned and
was helped on his release by Emma Goldman.
Afterwards Arrigoni became a longtime member
of the Libertarian Book Club in New York City.
Vanguard: A Libertarian Communist Journal
was a monthly anarchist political and theoretical
journal, based in New York City, published
between April 1932 and July 1939, and edited
by Samuel Weiner, among others. Vanguard began
as a project of the Vanguard Group, composed
of members of the editorial collective of
the Road to Freedom newspaper, as well as
members of the Friends of Freedom group. Its
initial subtitle was "An Anarchist Youth Publication",
but changed to "A Libertarian Communist Journal
" after Issue 1. Within several issues Vanguard
would become a central sounding board for
the international anarchist movement, including
reports of developments during the Spanish
Revolution as well as movement reports by
Augustin Souchy and Emma Goldman.Other tendencies
were also present within American anarchist
circles. As such American anarcho-syndicalist
Sam Dolgoff shows some of the criticism that
some people on other anarchist currents at
the time had. "Speaking of life at the Stelton
Colony of New York in the 1930s, noted with
disdain that it, "like other colonies, was
infested by vegetarians, naturists, nudists,
and other cultists, who sidetracked true anarchist
goals." One resident "always went barefoot,
ate raw food, mostly nuts and raisins, and
refused to use a tractor, being opposed to
machinery, and he didn't want to abuse horses,
so he dug the earth himself." Such self-proclaimed
anarchists were in reality "ox-cart anarchists,"
Dolgoff said, "who opposed organization and
wanted to return to a simpler life." In an
interview with Paul Avrich before his death,
Dolgoff also grumbled, "I am sick and tired
of these half-assed artists and poets who
object to organization and want only to play
with their belly buttons"".
Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer
and J. Edgar Hoover, head of the U.S. Department
of Justice's General Intelligence Division,
were intent on using the Anarchist Exclusion
Act of 1918 to deport any non-citizens they
could identify as advocates of anarchy or
revolution. "Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman,"
Hoover wrote while they were in prison, "are,
beyond doubt, two of the most dangerous anarchists
in this country and return to the community
will result in undue harm." At her deportation
hearing on October 27, she refused to answer
questions about her beliefs on the grounds
that her American citizenship invalidated
any attempt to deport her under the Anarchist
Exclusion Act, which could be enforced only
against non-citizens of the U.S. She presented
a written statement instead: "Today so-called
aliens are deported. Tomorrow native Americans
will be banished. Already some patrioteers
are suggesting that native American sons to
whom democracy is a sacred ideal should be
exiled." The Labor Department included Goldman
and Berkman among 249 aliens it deported en
masse, mostly people with only vague associations
with radical groups who had been swept up
in government raids in November.Goldman and
Berkman traveled around Russia during the
time of the Russian civil War after the Russian
revolution and they found repression, mismanagement,
and corruption instead of the equality and
worker empowerment they had dreamed of. They
met with Vladimir Lenin, who assured them
that government suppression of press liberties
was justified. He told them: "There can be
no free speech in a revolutionary period."
Berkman was more willing to forgive the government's
actions in the name of "historical necessity",
but he eventually joined Goldman in opposing
the Soviet state's authority. After a short
trip to Stockholm, they moved to Berlin for
several years; during this time she agreed
to write a series of articles about her time
in Russia for Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper,
the New York World. These were later collected
and published in book form as My Disillusionment
in Russia (1923) and My Further Disillusionment
in Russia (1924). The titles of these books
were added by the publishers to be scintillating
and Goldman protested, albeit in vain. In
July 1936, the Spanish Civil War started after
an attempted coup d'état by parts of the
Spanish Army against the government of the
Second Spanish Republic. At the same time,
the Spanish anarchists, fighting against the
Nationalist forces, started an anarchist revolution.
Goldman was invited to Barcelona and in an
instant, as she wrote to her niece, "the crushing
weight that was pressing down on my heart
since Sasha's death left me as by magic".
She was welcomed by the Confederación Nacional
del Trabajo (CNT) and Federación Anarquista
Ibérica (FAI) organizations, and for the
first time in her life lived in a community
run by and for anarchists, according to true
anarchist principles. "In all my life", she
wrote later, "I have not met with such warm
hospitality, comradeship and solidarity."
After touring a series of collectives in the
province of Huesca, she told a group of workers:
"Your revolution will destroy forever [the
notion] that anarchism stands for chaos."
She began editing the weekly CNT-FAI Information
Bulletin and responded to English-language
mail.
== The post-World War II period ==
An American anarcho-pacifist current developed
in this period as well as a related Christian
anarchist one. For Andrew Cornell "Many young
anarchists of this period departed from previous
generations both by embracing pacifism and
by devoting more energy to promoting avant-garde
culture, preparing the ground for the Beat
Generation in the process. The editors of
the anarchist journal Retort, for instance,
produced a volume of writings by WWII draft
resistors imprisoned at Danbury, Connecticut,
while regularly publishing the poetry and
prose of writers such as Kenneth Rexroth and
Norman Mailer. From the 1940s to the 1960s,
then, the radical pacifist movement in the
United States harbored both social democrats
and anarchists, at a time when the anarchist
movement itself seemed on its last legs."
As such anarchism influenced writers associated
with the Beat Generation such as Allen Ginsberg
and Gary Snyder.Anarcho-pacifism is a tendency
within the anarchist movement which rejects
the use of violence in the struggle for social
change. The main early influences were the
thought of Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy
while later the ideas of Mohandas Gandhi gained
importance. It developed "mostly in Holland,
Britain, and the United States, before and
during the Second World War. Dorothy Day,
(1897–1980) was an American journalist,
social activist and devout Catholic convert;
she advocated the Catholic economic theory
of distributism. She was also considered to
be an anarchist, and did not hesitate to use
the term. In the 1930s, Day worked closely
with fellow activist Peter Maurin to establish
the Catholic Worker movement, a nonviolent,
pacifist movement that continues to combine
direct aid for the poor and homeless with
nonviolent direct action on their behalf.
The cause for Day's canonization is open in
the Catholic Church. Ammon Hennacy (1893 –1970)
was an American pacifist, Christian anarchist,
vegetarian, social activist, member of the
Catholic Worker Movement and a Wobbly. He
established the "Joe Hill House of Hospitality"
in Salt Lake City, Utah and practiced tax
resistance.
Anarchism continued to influence important
American literary and intellectual personalities
of the time, such as Paul Goodman, Dwight
Macdonald, Allen Ginsberg, Leopold Kohr, Judith
Malina, Julian Beck and John Cage. Paul Goodman
was an American sociologist, poet, writer,
anarchist, and public intellectual. Goodman
is now mainly remembered as the author of
Growing Up Absurd (1960) and an activist on
the pacifist Left in the 1960s and an inspiration
to that era's student movement. He is less
remembered as a co-founder of Gestalt Therapy
in the 1940s and '50s. In the mid-1940s, together
with C. Wright Mills, he contributed to politics,
the journal edited during the 1940s by Dwight
Macdonald. In 1947, he published two books,
Kafka's Prayer and Communitas, a classic study
of urban design coauthored with his brother
Percival Goodman.
Anarchism proved to be influential also in
the early environmentalist movement in the
United States. Leopold Kohr (1909–1994)
was an economist, jurist and political scientist
known both for his opposition to the "cult
of bigness" in social organization and as
one of those who inspired the Small is Beautiful
movement, mainly through his most influential
work The Breakdown of Nations. Kohr was an
important inspiration to the Green, bioregional,
Fourth World, decentralist, and anarchist
movements, Kohr contributed often to John
Papworth's "journal for the Fourth World",
Resurgence. One of Kohr's students was economist
E. F. Schumacher, another prominent influence
on these movements, whose best-selling book
Small Is Beautiful took its title from one
of Kohr's core principles. Similarly, his
ideas inspired Kirkpatrick Sale's books Human
Scale (1980) and Dwellers in the Land: The
Bioregional Vision (1985). In 1958, Murray
Bookchin defined himself as an anarchist,
seeing parallels between anarchism and ecology.
His first book, Our Synthetic Environment,
was published under the pseudonym Lewis Herber
in 1962, a few months before Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring. The book described a broad
range of environmental ills but received little
attention because of its political radicalism.
His groundbreaking essay "Ecology and Revolutionary
Thought" introduced ecology as a concept in
radical politics. In 1968 he founded another
group that published the influential Anarchos
magazine, which published that and other innovative
essays on post-scarcity and on ecological
technologies such as solar and wind energy,
and on decentralization and miniaturization.
Lecturing throughout the United States, he
helped popularize the concept of ecology to
the counterculture. Post-Scarcity Anarchism
is a collection of essays written by Murray
Bookchin and first published in 1971 by Ramparts
Press. It outlines the possible form anarchism
might take under conditions of post-scarcity.
It is one of Bookchin's major works, and its
radical thesis provoked controversy for being
utopian and messianic in its faith in the
liberatory potential of technology. Bookchin
argues that post-industrial societies are
also post-scarcity societies, and can thus
imagine "the fulfillment of the social and
cultural potentialities latent in a technology
of abundance". The self-administration of
society is now made possible by technological
advancement and, when technology is used in
an ecologically sensitive manner, the revolutionary
potential of society will be much changed.
In 1982, his book The Ecology of Freedom had
a profound impact on the emerging ecology
movement, both in the United States and abroad.
He was a principal figure in the Burlington
Greens in 1986 to 1990, an ecology group that
ran candidates for city council on a program
to create neighborhood democracy. In From
Urbanization to Cities (originally published
in 1987 as The Rise of Urbanization and the
Decline of Citizenship), Bookchin traced the
democratic traditions that influenced his
political philosophy and defined the implementation
of the libertarian municipalism concept. A
few years later The Politics of Social Ecology,
written by his partner of 20 years, Janet
Biehl, briefly summarized these ideas.
The Libertarian League was founded in New
York City in 1954 as a political organization
building on the Libertarian Book Club. Members
included Sam Dolgoff, Russell Blackwell, Dave
Van Ronk, Enrico Arrigoni and Murray Bookchin.
Its central principle, stated in its journal
Views and Comments, was "equal freedom for
all in a free socialist society". Branches
of the League opened in a number of other
American cities, including Detroit and San
Francisco. It was dissolved at the end of
the 1960s. Sam Dolgoff (1902–1990) was a
Russian American anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist.
After being expelled from the Young People's
Socialist League, Dolgoff joined the Industrial
Workers of the World in the 1922 and remained
an active member his entire life, playing
an active role in the anarchist movement for
much of the century. He was a co-founder of
the Libertarian Labor Review magazine, which
was later renamed Anarcho-Syndicalist Review.
In the 1930s, he was a member of the editorial
board of Spanish Revolution, a monthly American
publication reporting on the largest Spanish
labor organization taking part in the Spanish
Civil War. Among his books were Bakunin on
Anarchy, The Anarchist Collectives: Workers'
Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution,
1936–1939, and The Cuban Revolution (Black
Rose Books, 1976), a denunciation of Cuban
life under Fidel Castro."Anarchism was influential
in the counterculture of the 1960s and anarchists
actively participated in the late sixties
students and workers revolts. The New Left
in the United States also included anarchist,
countercultural and hippie-related radical
groups such as the Yippies who were led by
Abbie Hoffman and Black Mask/Up Against the
Wall Motherfuckers. For David Graeber: "As
SDS splintered into squabbling Maoist factions,
groups like the Diggers and Yippies (founded
in '68) took the first option. Many were explicitly
anarchist, and certainly, the late '60s turn
towards the creation of autonomous collectives
and institution building was squarely within
the anarchist tradition, while the emphasis
on free love, psychedelic drugs, and the creation
of alternative forms of pleasure was squarely
in the bohemian tradition with which Euro-American
anarchism has always been at least tangentially
aligned." By late 1966, the Diggers opened
free stores which simply gave away their stock,
provided free food, distributed free drugs,
gave away money, organized free music concerts,
and performed works of political art. The
Diggers took their name from the original
English Diggers led by Gerrard Winstanley
and sought to create a mini-society free of
money and capitalism. On the other hand, the
Yippies employed theatrical gestures, such
as advancing a pig ("Pigasus the Immortal")
as a candidate for President in 1968, to mock
the social status quo. They have been described
as a highly theatrical, anti-authoritarian
and anarchist youth movement of "symbolic
politics". Since they were well known for
street theater and politically themed pranks,
many of the "old school" political left either
ignored or denounced them. According to ABC
News, "The group was known for street theater
pranks and was once referred to as the 'Groucho
Marxists'." By the 1960s, Christian anarchist
Dorothy Day earned the praise of counterculture
leaders such as Abbie Hoffman, who characterized
her as the first hippie, a description of
which Day approved.Another influential personality
within American anarchism was Noam Chomsky.
Chomsky described himself as an anarcho-syndicalist.
He is a member of the Campaign for Peace and
Democracy and the Industrial Workers of the
World international union. Since the 1960s,
he has become known more widely as a political
dissident, an anarchist, and a libertarian
socialist intellectual. After the publication
of his first books on linguistics, Chomsky
became a prominent critic of the Vietnam War,
and since then has continued to publish books
of political criticism. He has become well
known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy,
state capitalism and the mainstream news media.
His media criticism has included Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman,
an analysis articulating the propaganda model
theory for examining the media.
== The late 20th century and contemporary
times ==
Andrew Cornell reports that "Sam Dolgoff and
others worked to revitalize the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), alongside new
syndicalist formations like the Chicago-based
Resurgence group and Boston's Root & Branch;
Bookchin's Anarchos collective deepened the
theoretical links between ecological and anarchist
thought; the Fifth Estate drew heavily on
French ultra-leftist thinking and began pursuing
a critique of technology by decade's end.
Meanwhile, the Social Revolutionary Anarchist
Federation connected individuals and circles
across the country through a mimeographed
monthly discussion bulletin. Just as influential
to the anarchist milieu that has taken shape
in the decades which have followed, however,
were the efforts of the Movement for a New
Society (MNS), a national network of feminist
radical pacifist collectives that existed
from 1971 to 1988." David Graeber reports
that in the late 1970s in the northeast "The
main inspiration for anti-nuclear activists—at
least the main organizational inspiration—came
from a group called the Movement for a New
Society (MNS), based in Philadelphia. MNS
was spearheaded by a gay rights activist named
George Lakey, who—like several other members
of the group—was both an anarchist, and
a Quaker ... Many of what have now become
standard features of formal consensus process—the
principle that the facilitator should never
act as an interested party in the debate,
for example, or the idea of the "block"—were
first disseminated by MNS trainings in Philadelphia
and Boston." For Andrew Cornell "MNS popularized
consensus decision-making, introduced the
spokescouncil method of organization to activists
in the United States, and was a leading advocate
of a variety of practices—communal living,
unlearning oppressive behavior, creating co-operatively
owned businesses—that are now often subsumed
under the rubric of "prefigurative politics."Fredy
Perlman (1934–1985) was a Czech-born, naturalized
American author, publisher, and militant.
His most popular work, the book Against His-Story,
Against Leviathan!, details the rise of state
domination with a retelling of history through
the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan. The
book remains a major source of inspiration
for anti-civilization perspectives in contemporary
anarchism, most notably on the thought of
philosopher John Zerzan. Zerzan is an American
anarchist and primitivist philosopher and
author. His five major books are Elements
of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive and Other
Essays (1994), Running on Emptiness (2002),
Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections
(2005) and Twilight of the Machines (2008).
Zerzan was one of the editors of Green Anarchy,
a controversial journal of anarcho-primitivist
and insurrectionary anarchist thought. He
is also the host of Anarchy Radio in Eugene
on the University of Oregon's radio station
KWVA. He has also served as a contributing
editor at Anarchy Magazine and has been published
in magazines such as AdBusters.
The Match! is an atheist/anarchist journal
published in Tucson, Arizona since 1969. The
Match! is edited, published, and printed by
Fred Woodworth. The Match! is published irregularly;
new issues usually appear once or twice per
year. Over 100 issues have been published
to date. Green Anarchy was a magazine published
by a collective located in Eugene, Oregon.
It had a circulation of 8,000, partly in prisons,
the prison subscribers given free copies of
each issue as stated in the magazine. Author
John Zerzan was one of the publication's editors.
Fifth Estate is a US periodical based in Detroit
established in 1965, but with remote staff
members across North America. Its editorial
collective sometimes has divergent views on
the topics the magazine addresses but generally
shares anarchist, anti-authoritarian outlook
and a non-dogmatic, action-oriented approach
to change. The title implies that the periodical
is an alternative to the fourth estate (traditional
print journalism). Fifth Estate is frequently
cited as the longest running English language
anarchist publication in North America, although
this is sometimes disputed since it became
only explicitly anti-authoritarian in 1975
after ten years of publishing as part of the
1960s Underground Press movement. Anarchy:
A Journal of Desire Armed is a North American
anarchist magazine, and was one of the most
popular anarchist publications in North America
in the 1980s and 1990s. Its influences could
be described as a range of post-left anarchism
and various strains of insurrectionary anarchism
and sometimes primitivism. It was founded
by members of the Columbia Anarchist League
of Columbia, Missouri, and continued to be
published there for nearly fifteen years,
eventually under the sole editorial control
of Jason McQuinn (who initially used the pseudonym
"Lev Chernyi"), before briefly moving to New
York City in 1995 to be published by members
of the Autonomedia collective. The demise
of independent distributor Fine Print nearly
killed the magazine, necessitating its return
to the Columbia collective after just two
issues. It remained in Columbia from 1997
to 2006. As of 2006 it is published bi-annually
by a group based in Berkeley, California.
The magazine is noted for spearheading the
Post-left anarchy critique ("beyond the confines
of ideology"), as articulated by such writers
as Hakim Bey, Lawrence Jarach, John Zerzan,
Bob Black, and Wolfi Landstreicher (formerly
Feral Faun/Feral Ranter among other noms de
plume).
Anarchists became more visible in the 1980s,
as a result of publishing, protests and conventions.
In 1980, the First International Symposium
on Anarchism was held in Portland, Oregon.
In 1986, the Haymarket Remembered conference
was held in Chicago, to observe the centennial
of the infamous Haymarket Riot. This conference
was followed by annual, continental conventions
in Minneapolis (1987), Toronto (1988), and
San Francisco (1989). Recently there has been
a resurgence in anarchist ideals in the United
States. In the 1980s anarchism became linked
with squats/social centers like C-Squat and
ABC No Rio both in New York City. The Institute
for Anarchist Studies is a non-profit organization
founded by Chuck W. Morse following the anarchist-communist
school of thought, in 1996 to assist anarchist
writers and further develop the theoretical
aspects of the anarchist movement. In 1984
Workers Solidarity Alliance was founded as
an anarcho-syndicalist political organization
which published Ideas and Action and was at
one time affiliated to the International Workers
Association (IWA-AIT), an international federation
of anarcho-syndicalist unions and groups.In
the late 1980s, Love and Rage started as a
newspaper and in 1991 expanded into a continental
federation. It brought new ideas to the movement's
mainstream, such as white privilege, and new
people, including anti-imperialists and former
members of the Trotskyist Revolutionary Socialist
League. It collapsed in 1998 amid disagreements
about the organization's racial justice tenets
and the viability of anarchism. Love and Rage
involved hundreds of activists across the
country at its peak and included a section
based in Mexico City, Amor Y Rabia, which
published a newspaper of the same name. Contemporary
anarchism, with its shift in focus from class-based
oppression to all forms of oppression, began
to address race-based oppression in earnest
in the 1990s with Black anarchists Lorenzo
Ervin and Kuwasi Balagoon, the journal Race
Traitor, and movement-building organizations
including Love and Rage, Anarchist People
of Color, Black Autonomy, and Bring the Ruckus.In
the mid-1990s an insurrectionary anarchist
tendency also emerged in the United States
mainly absorbing southern European influences.
CrimethInc., is a decentralized anarchist
collective of autonomous cells. CrimethInc.
emerged during this period initially as the
hardcore punk zine Inside Front, and began
operating as a collective in 1996. It has
since published widely read articles and zines
for the anarchist movement and distributed
posters and books of its own publication.
CrimethInc. cells have published books, released
records and organized national campaigns against
globalization and representative democracy
in favor of radical community organizing.
American anarchists increasingly became noticeable
at protests, especially through a tactic known
as the Black bloc. U.S. anarchists became
more prominent as a result of the anti-WTO
protests in Seattle. Common Struggle – Libertarian
Communist Federation or Lucha Común – Federación
Comunista Libertaria (formerly the North Eastern
Federation of Anarchist Communists (NEFAC)
or the Fédération des Communistes Libertaires
du Nord-Est) was a platformist/anarchist communist
organization based in the northeast region
of the United States. NEFAC was officially
launched at a congress held in Boston, Massachusetts
over the weekend of April 7–9, 2000, following
months of discussion between former Atlantic
Anarchist Circle affiliates and ex-Love and
Rage members in the United States and ex-members
of the Demanarchie newspaper collective in
Quebec City. Founded as a bi-lingual French
and English-speaking federation with member
and supporter groups in the northeast of the
United States, southern Ontario and the Quebec
province, the organization later split up
in 2008. The Québécoise membership reformed
as the Union Communiste Libertaire (UCL) and
the U.S. membership retained the name NEFAC,
before changing its name to Common Struggle
in 2011 before merging into Black Rose Anarchist
Federation. Former members based in Toronto
went on to help found an Ontario-based platformist
organization known as Common Cause.In the
wake of Hurricane Katrina, anarchist activists
were visible as founding members of the Common
Ground Collective. Anarchists also had an
early role in the Occupy movement. In November
2011, Rolling Stone magazine credited American
anarchist and scholar David Graeber with giving
the Occupy Wall Street movement its theme:
"We are the 99 percent". Rolling Stone reported
that Graeber helped create the first New York
City General Assembly, with only 60 participants,
on August 2, 2011. He spent the next six weeks
involved with the burgeoning movement, including
facilitating general assemblies, attending
working group meetings, and organizing legal
and medical training and classes on nonviolent
resistance. Following the Occupy Wall Street
movement, author Mark Bray wrote Translating
Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street,
which gave a first hand account of anarchist
involvement.In the period before and after
the Occupy movement several new organizations
and efforts became active. A series invitational
conferences called the Class Struggle Anarchist
Conference, initiated by Workers Solidarity
Alliance and joined by others, aimed to bring
together a number of local and regional based
anarchist organizations. The conference was
first held in New York City in 2008 and brought
together 100s of activists and subsequent
conference were held in Detroit in 2009, Seattle
in 2010 and Buffalo in 2012. One group that
was founded during this period was May First
Anarchist Alliance in 2011 with members in
Michigan and Minnesota which defines itself
as having a working class orientation and
promoting a non-doctrinaire anarchism. Another
group founded during this period is Black
Rose Anarchist Federation (BRRN) in 2013 which
combined a number of local and regional group
including Common Struggle (formerly known
as the Northeastern Federation of Anarchist
Communists or NEFAC), Four Star Anarchist
Organization in Chicago, Miami Autonomy and
Solidarity, Rochester Red and Black, and Wild
Rose Collective based in Iowa City. Some individual
members of the Workers Solidarity Alliance
joined the new group but the organization
voted to remain separate. The group has a
variety of influences, most notably Anarchist-Communism,
Anarcho-Syndicalism, Especifismo, and Platformism.
Early activity of the group was coordinating
the "Struggling to Win: Anarchists Building
Popular Power In Chile" tour in 2014 of two
anarchist organizers from Chile which had
events in over 20 cities. In 2016 the organization
published the online booklet Black Anarchism:
A Reader. In May 2017, a member published
an op-ed in The Oregonian responding to police
repression of the Portland International Workers
Day march and was also featured in a Vice
News segment looking at left-wing Antifa protests
in Portland.
== See also ==
American Left
Anarcho-capitalism
Green Mountain Anarchist Collective
History of the socialist movement in the United
States
== References ==
== Bibliography ==
== Further reading. ==
== External links ==
"Anarchism in the United States". Spunk Library.
Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed.
Black Rose Anarchist Federation (BRRN).
Common Ground Collective.
First of May Anarchist Alliance.
Institute for Anarchist Studies.
Workers Solidarity Alliance.
