Cenocracy.org: Anarchism Supplement 2
Anarchism Supplement
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The following is the rest of the Britannica article on Anarchism whose initial comments were used for the page entitled Anarchism and other Bad Words". It is offered as a supplement for those readers interested in the topic of anarchism as an alternative form of Social Reformist thinking.



Anarchism in China

Shortly after 1900, as part of the reforms that followed the unsuccessful Boxer Rebellion, the Ch'ing Dynasty began to send many young Chinese to study abroad, especially in France, Japan, and the United States. In these places and elsewhere, Chinese students established nationalist and revolutionary organizations dedicated to overthrowing the imperial regime. Two of the most important of these groups—the World Association, founded in Paris in 1906, and the Society for the Study of Socialism, founded in Tokyo in 1907—adopted explicitly anarchist programs.

Between 1907 and 1910 the World Association published a journal, The New Century, that was a major source of information in Chinese on anarchist theory and the European anarchist movement. The journal promoted an individualistic and "futuristic" anarchism and was among the first Chinese-language publications to openly attack native traditions, in particular Confucianism. The Society for the Study of Socialism, on the other hand, favoured an anti-modern anarchism influenced by the pacifist radicalism of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and it stressed the affinity between anarchism and philosophical currents in the Chinese past, especially Taoism. Through its publications, Natural Justice and Balance, the Society advocated Kropotkin's programs for combining agriculture with industry and mental with manual labour, ideas that were to have a lasting influence on Chinese radicalism.

Significant anarchist activity in China itself did not begin until after the Chinese Revolution (1911-12). Chinese anarchists educated in Paris (the so-called "Paris anarchists") returned to Beijing and immediately became involved in the reform of education and culture. Convinced of the need for social revolution, the Paris anarchists argued in favour of Western science against religion and superstition, called for the emancipation of women and youth, rejected the traditional family and the Confucian values on which it was based, and organized experimental work-study communities as alternatives to traditional forms of family and working life. These ideas and practices were extremely influential in the New Culture movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s. Led by the generation of intellectuals sent to study abroad, the movement was critical of all aspects of traditional Chinese culture and ethics and called for sweeping reforms in existing political and social institutions.

Anarchists were also active in South China. In Canton, a native school of anarchism emerged around the charismatic revolutionary Liu Shifu, better known by his adopted name Shifu. In 1912 Shifu founded the Cock-Crow Society, whose journal, People's Voice, was the leading organ of Chinese anarchism in the 1910s. Although not a particularly original thinker, Shifu was a skilled expositor of anarchist doctrine. His polemical exchanges with the socialist leader Jiang Khangu helped to popularize anarchism as a "pure socialism" and to distinguish it from other currents in socialist thought.

Anarchism in Vietnam and Korea

Anarchist ideas entered Vietnam through the activities of the early Vietnamese nationalist leader Phan Boi Chau. Phan, who led the struggle against French colonial rule during the first two decades of the 20th century, was introduced to anarchism by Chinese intellectuals in Tokyo in 1905-09. Although Phan was not an anarchist himself, his thinking reflected certain distinctly anarchist themes, notably anti-imperialism and "direct action." After the Chinese Revolution in 1911, Phan moved to South China, where he joined a number of organizations that espoused or were influenced by anarchism, including the Worldwide League for Humanity. He also received advice and financial support from Shifu. In 1912, with Shifu's help, he founded the League of the Restoration of Vietnam and the League for the Prosperity of China and Asia, which aimed to build links between revolutionary movements in China and those in colonized countries such as Vietnam, Burma (Myanmar), India, and Korea.

In the early 1920s Korean radicals established anarchist societies in Tokyo and in various locations in China. Like their counterparts in Vietnam, they were drawn to anarchism mostly for its anti-imperialism and its emphasis on direct action, which offered a justification for violent resistance to the Japanese colonial government. For leaders such as Shin Chaoe-ho, anarchism was an attractive democratic alternative to Bolshevik communism, which by this time was threatening to take control of the radical movement in Korea.

Decline of anarchism in East Asia

By the early 1920s anarchism in most parts of East Asia had entered a decline from which it would not recover. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Bolshevik communists in Japan, China, Vietnam, and Korea established their own revolutionary societies, which were eventually transformed into clandestine political parties, and began to compete with anarchists for influence in the labour movements. Faced with the Bolsheviks' superior organizational abilities and the financial support they received from the newly constituted Soviet Union, the anarchists could offer only weak resistance and were soon eclipsed. By 1927, Chinese anarchists were devoting most of their energies to this losing struggle, sometimes in collusion with reactionary elements in the loosely structured Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). In Japan anarchist activity enjoyed a brief resurgence in the mid-1920s under Hatta Shuzo, who formulated a doctrine of "pure" anarchism in opposition to Marxist influences. A period of conflict between such pure and Marxist-oriented anarchists ended in the early 1930s, when all forms of radicalism were crushed by the military government.

Although politically irrelevant after the early 1920s, anarchists in China continued to work toward social revolution in education and culture. The author Ba Jin wrote novels and short stories on anarchist themes that were widely popular in China in the 1930s and '40s, and Ba was elected to important literary and cultural organizations after the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War (1945-49). In 1927, a group of Paris anarchists helped to establish a short-lived Labour University in Shanghai, which put into practice the anarchist belief in combining mental and manual labour. This belief lingered long after the anarchist movement itself was gone, influencing debates on economic policy in the communist government in the decades after 1949.


Arif Dirlik Ed.


Anarchism in the arts

The central ideals of anarchism—freedom, equality, and mutual aid-have inspired writers and artists throughout history. When anarchism became an organized movement in the mid-19th century, its adherents hailed an impressive number of renowned literary and artistic figures as precursors and allies. In an influential essay, "Anarchism in Literature" (published posthumously in 1914), the American anarchist poet Voltairine de Cleyre identified anarchist sensibilities in writers and philosophers as diverse as François Rabelais, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Émile Zola in France; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman in the United States; Friedrich Nietzsche in Germany; and Leo Tolstoy in Russia.

Many of the central figures of early 20th-century anarchism were passionately interested in the arts. Several of them wrote extensively on artistic themes, including Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Gustav Landauer, and Camillo Berneri. Most anarchist periodicals published original poetry and art, and many of them made culture and the arts their primary focus. The most widely circulated English-language anarchist magazine of the 1960s, Anarchy, devoted entire issues to poetry, science fiction, blues, theatre, and film.

From the time of Proudhon through the 1950s, most anarchists favoured a propagandistic style of art that treated themes of social protest, and they generally avoided art that was self-consciously abstract, inward looking, fantastic, or nihilistic, as was much of Modernist art during this period. Nevertheless, many Modernist artists participated in anarchist groups or aided anarchist causes. Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, for example, published two political cartoons by the American painter and photographer Man Ray, though it did not publish any of his post-Cubist or Dadaist art.

Poetry and prose

Anarchist presses published an enormous quantity of verse—indeed, before 1960 they published more poetry than all other forms of creative writing put together. Among the finest poets of anarchism was Voltairine de Cleyre, whom Emma Goldman considered the "most gifted and brilliant anarchist woman America ever produced." Although the anarchist themes of de Cleyre's work were typical of her generation—tributes to revolutionary martyrs, hymns to anarchist anniversaries, and songs of workers rising against tyranny—her powerful imagery and passionate lyricism distinguished her from all her contemporaries. Other notable American poets of anarchy in the 1910s and '20s were Irish-born Lola Ridge; Japanese-born Sadakichi Hartmann, reputed to be the first writer of haiku in English; IWW organizer Covington Hall; and IWW songwriter and humorist T-Bone Slim (Matt Valentine Huhta), who was renowned for his anarchist aphorisms ("Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack").

Sicilian-American Surrealist poet Philip Lamantia belonged to an Italian-language anarchist group in San Francisco in the 1940s and later became a leading member of the Beat movement. Kenneth Rexroth, mentor to many Beats, identified himself as an anarchist from his involvement in the 1920s in Chicago's Dil Pickle Club, a popular forum for lectures and debates on revolutionary topics. Other anarchist-oriented Beat poets included Diane di Prima and Gary Snyder, whose manifesto "Buddhist Anarchism" (1961) proved to be one of that decade's most influential anarchist writings. The humorous Abomunist Manifesto (1959), by African American Beat poet Bob Kaufman, also had a markedly anarchist flavour. (According to Kaufman, "Abomunists vote against everyone by not voting for anyone.") Both the Journal and Kaufman's Manifesto were published by City Lights press, founded with the City Lights bookshop in San Francisco in the early 1950s by the poet and anarchist sympathizer Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Major anarchist poets writing in other languages included Pietro Gori in Italian; Ernst Toller and the Scottish-born John Henry Mackay in German; the Jewish worker-poet David Edelstadt in Yiddish; and Laurent Tailhade in French. Poetic anarchy was also the hallmark of French Surrealist poets such as Benjamin Péret, who fought in an anarchist brigade in the Spanish Civil War.

Anarchism's creative writers also produced significant works of fiction. Under the influence of Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888), the best-selling socialist utopian novel by the American writer Edward Bellamy, many anarchists devised utopias of their own—notably Lois Waisbrooker, whose A Sex Revolution (1892) blended anarchism and feminism, and J. William Lloyd, whose The Natural Man: A Romance of the Golden Age (1902) prefigured the counterculture of the 1960s. Largely owing to criticism by Kropotkin and other anarchists, Bellamy's Equality (1897), the sequel to Looking Backward, contained almost none of the earlier story's statist elements.

The mysterious German-language writer known as B. Traven, author of The Cotton Pickers (1926) and many other novels, may well be the most widely read anarchist storyteller of the 20th century. His tales excoriate statist intrusions upon individual existence, from passports and other bureaucratic paperwork to mass mobilization for war. The Good Soldier Schweik (1920-23), by the Czech author Jaroslav Hašek, is a hilarious satire of military life and bureaucracy and a classic of world literature, as is The Family (1931), by the Chinese anarchist Ba Jin.

Basic anarchist ideas, such as mistrust of state power, also have appeared in works by more mainstream American authors, such as Nelson Algren (who described himself as "basically against government"), Joseph Heller, Ursula Le Guin, and Edward Abbey, whose comic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) inspired Earth First!, the anarchist-oriented environmental movement.

Theatre, film, and music

Emma Goldman's The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914) popularized the work of Henrik Ibsen and other European playwrights for American readers and helped to inspire the experimental little theatre movement in the United States. The Studio Players, an anarchist theatre company led by Lillian Udell, performed worker-oriented plays at the Radical Bookshop in Chicago throughout the 1920s. More avant-garde was The Living Theatre, founded in New York City in 1947 by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, which spearheaded a resurgence of anarchist theatre in the 1960s. Anarchist street theatre, replete with costumes, giant puppets, and dramatic stunts, became a mainstay of large protest demonstrations, such as those against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in 1999.

An anarchist sensibility, characterized by ridicule of politicians, police, landlords, and other figures of authority, was evident early on in film in the work of Georges Méliès in France and in many American silent comedies of the 1910s and '20s, such as Cops, by Buster Keaton. More explicitly revolutionary were The Golden Age (1930), by the Surrealist Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel—which provoked a riot and was promptly banned—and works by the French director Jean Vigo, especially Zero for Conduct (1933). In the 1930s and '40s the film comedies of the French poet and screenwriter Jacques Pr&eacture;vert ridiculed all authoritarian values. In the 1950s and '60s the Greek filmmaker Adonis Kyrou, a collaborator on the Paris anarchist newspaper Libertaire, evoked the misery of war. Argentine-born Nelly Kaplan's A Very Curious Girl (1969 (1969)—which Pablo Picasso described as "insolence considered as one of the fine arts"—and Néa (1976) are classics of feminist anarchism.

Anarchists also made music. In the 1910s and '20s Rudolf von Liebich, music director of the Dil Pickle Club, composed songs and other music for the IWW. Avant-garde composer John Cage was an avowed anarchist. From the late 1970s many punk rock bands identified themselves with anarchy, and some—notably Crass and Chumbawumba in England and Fugazi in the United States—were actual anarchist collectives. Revolt and disrespect for authority were among their favourite themes. Anarchist critics and music historians also recognized a strong anti-authoritarian tradition in African American blues.

Painting, graphic art, and cartooning

Many major 20th-century painters, at one time or another, were active in the anarchist movement or acknowledged anarchism as a significant influence, including Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, and the Czech-born Marie Cermíínová, known as Toyen, in France; Robert Henri, George Wesley Bellows, the Russian-born Max Weber, and Man Ray in the United States; Max Ernst in Germany; and Enrico Baj in Italy. Anarchist ideas affected all the major movements in painting—from the Ashcan School in the 1910s to Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s.

In the 1960s a new anarchist agitprop art began to flourish, largely inspired by Expressionism, Surrealism, and the work of the Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada. The Italian painter Flavio Costantini's dramatic portrayals of anarchist history and the graphic art of Carlos Cortez, Eric Drooker, and Josh MacPhee in the United States and Clifford Harper in England were widely reproduced in anarchist magazines and as posters. Also striking are the imaginative collages of American artists Freddie Baer and James Koehnline.

Cartoons, always major weapons in the anarchist arsenal, were more prominent than ever in the movement's press at the end of the 20th century. Satirical sketches by Roberto Ambrosoli in Italy and Tuli Kupferberg in the United States appeared throughout the world. England's Freedom Press attracted many comic-strip artists, including Philip Sansom and German-born John Olday in the 1940s and later, from the 1960s through the 1990s, Arthur Moyse. Donald Rooum's inventive series Wildcat was collected in several volumes.


Franklin Rosemont Ed.


Contemporary anarchism

After World War II, anarchist groups and federations reemerged in almost all countries where they had formerly flourished—he notable exceptions being Spain and the Soviet Union—but these organizations wielded little influence compared to that of the broader movement inspired by earlier ideas. This development is not surprising, since anarchists never stressed the need for organizational continuity, and the cluster of social and moral ideas that are identifiable as anarchism always spread beyond any clearly definable movement.

Anarchist ideas emerged in a wider frame of reference beginning with the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, which aimed to resist injustice through the tactic of civil disobedience. In the 1960s and '70s a new radicalism took root among students and the left in general in the United States, Europe, and Japan, embracing a general criticism of "elitist" power structures and the materialist values of modern industrial societies—both capitalist and communist. For these radicals, who rejected the traditional parties of the left as strongly as they did the existing political structure, the appeal of anarchism was strong. The general anarchist outlook—with its emphasis on spontaneity, theoretical flexibility, simplicity of life, and the importance of love and anger as complementary and necessary components in both social and individual action—attracted those who opposed impersonal political institutions and the calculations of older parties. The anarchist rejection of the state, and the insistence on decentralism and local autonomy, found strong echoes among those who advocated participatory democracy. The anarchist insistence on direct action was reflected in calls for extra-parliamentary action and violent confrontation by some student groups in France, the United States, and Japan. And the recurrence of the theme of workers' control of industry in so many manifestos of the 1960s—especially during the student uprisings in Paris in May 1968—showed the enduring relevance of anarcho-syndicalist ideas.

Beginning in the 1970s, anarchism became a significant factor in the radical ecology movement in the United States and Europe. Anarchist ideas in works by the American novelist Edward Abbey, for example, inspired a generation of eco-anarchists in the United States, including the radical Earth First! organization, to protest urban sprawl and the destruction of old-growth forests. Much influential work in anarchist theory during this period and afterward, such as that of Murray Bookchin, was noteworthy for its argument that statism and capitalism were incompatible with environmental preservation.

Anarchists also took up issues related to feminism and developed a rich body of work, known as anarcha-feminism, that applied anarchist principles to the analysis of women's oppression, arguing that the state is inherently patriarchal and that women's experience as nurturers and care-givers reflects the anarchist ideals of mutuality and the rejection of hierarchy and authority.

The most prevalent current in anarchist thinking during the last two decades of the 20th century (at least in the United States) was an eclectic, countercultural mixture of theories reflecting a wide range of artistic, literary, political, and philosophical influences, including Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism; the writers of the Beat movement; the Frankfurt School of Marxist-oriented social and political philosophers—especially Herbert Marcuse—and post-structuralist and postmodern philosophy and literary theory, in particular the work of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Other influential figures were the American linguist and political writer Noam Chomsky, the Czech-born American writer and activist Fredy Perlman, and Hakim Bey and other writers associated with the anarchist publisher Autonomedia in New York City. African American anarchism, as represented in the writings of former Black Panther Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin in the late 1970s, was a major influence in the United States and in many other parts of the world.

Although some older varieties of anarchism, such as Proudhonian mutualism, had faded away by the end of the 20th century, others persisted, including the anarchist individualism of Warren, Spooner, and others in the United States and anarchist communism in Europe and Latin America. Anarcho-syndicalism remained a significant movement in Spain, France, Sweden, and parts of Africa and Latin America. As in the 1960s, anarchism continued to exert a strong appeal among students and young people, and a large percentage of those who considered themselves anarchists were in their teens and twenties. From the early 1970s the anarchist emblem consisting of a circled A was an established part of the iconography of global youth culture.

anti-WTO protest (123K)

In 1999 anarchist-led demonstrations against the WTO in Seattle provoked wide media attention, as did later related protests against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The unprecedented publicity given to the anarchists' explicitly revolutionary viewpoint inspired a proliferation of new anarchist groups, periodicals, and Internet sites. Anarchists were also a significant—and in some cases a predominating—influence in many other political movements, including campaigns against police brutality and capital punishment, the gay rights movement, and diverse movements promoting animal rights, vegetarianism, abortion rights, the abolition of prisons, the legalization of marijuana, and the abolition of automobiles.

(See also: Wikipedia: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

At the beginning of the 21st century, no anarchist movement posed a serious threat to state power, and anarchists were no closer to achieving their dream of a society without government than they were a century before. Nevertheless, the perceived failure of governments to solve enduring social problems such as racial and gender inequality, poverty, environmental destruction, political corruption, and war increased the appeal of anarchist ideas among many groups. Young people in particular were attracted to the anarchist priorities of creativity and spontaneity—the importance of living the "new society" here and now rather than postponing it indefinitely until "after the Revolution." For these people and many others around the world, anarchism remained an active and vibrant ferment of criticism, protest, and direct action.




George Woodcock
Martin A. Miller
Franklin Rosemont Ed.



Additional Reading

General

The best general accounts of anarchism are Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (1992); James Joll, The Anarchists, 2nd ed. (1980); Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (1988); George Woodcock, Anarchism, new ed. (1986); Harold Barclay, People Without Government, completely rev. ed. (1990); Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (1970; originally published in French, 1965); Paul Eltzbacher, Anarchism (1960, reprinted 1972; originally published in German, 1900); and Richard D. Sonn, Anarchism (1992).

Good anthologies of anarchist theory include Irving Louis Horowitz (ed.), The Anarchists (1964); Leonard I. Krimerman and Lewis Perry(eds.), Patterns of Anarchy (1966); and David E. Apter and James Joll (eds.), Anarchism Today (1971).

For a comprehensive bibliography of anarchist literature from different countries over the last two centuries, see Denise Fauvel-Rouif (ed.), Anarchism (1982); and Helene Strub (ed.), Anarchism, vol. 2 (1993). There are also useful selected bibliographies in all the books listed above.

Classic authors

The earliest formulations of modern anarchist thought can be found in William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 2 vol. (1792). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's key anarchist work is Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (1840; What Is Property?, trans. by Benjamin R. Tucker, 1876). Of Peter Kropotkin's many writings, his Memoirs of a Revolutionist (1899) is essential. See also his La conquête du pain (1892; The Conquest of Bread, 1906), Fields, Factories, and Workshops (1899), and Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). Leo Tolstoy's Christian anarchist concepts can be found in many of his later works, including T Sarstvo Bozhie vnutri nas (1894; The Kingdom of God Is Within You, trans. by Constance Garnett, 1894), and V chem moîa vera (1884; What I Believe, trans. by Constantine Popoff, 1885). Emma Goldman's voluminous writings include her autobiography, Living My Life, 2 vol. (1931, reissued 1988); see also the autobiography of Goldman's comrade Alexander Berkman, Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912, reprinted 1970).

For an analysis of Godwin's work, see Isaac Kramnick, The Politics of Political Philosophy, A Case Study: Godwin's Anarchism and Radical England (1970). For information on Proudhon's life and thought, see Stewart Edwards (ed.), Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1969); K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (1984); Alan Ritter, The Political Thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1969, reprinted 1980); and Robert L. Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.-J. Proudhon (1972). For an anthology of Kropotkin's writings, see Martin A. Miller (ed.), Peter Kropotkin: Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution (1970). On Kropotkin's life, consult Martin A. Miller, Kropotkin (1976); Caroline Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872-1886 (1989); and George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Anarchist Prince: A Biographical Study of Peter Kropotkin (1950, reissued 1970). Two convenient volumes that explore the anarchist ideas of Michael Bakunin are Arthur Lehning (ed.), Selected Writings [of] Michael Bakunin (1973); and Sam Dolgoff (ed.), Bakunin on Anarchism, 2nd rev. ed. (1980; originally published as Bakunin on Anarchy, 1972). For biographies of Bakunin, see Edward H. Carr, Michael Bakunin (1937, reissued 1975); Arthur P. Mendel, Michael Bakunin: Roots of Apocalypse (1981); and Eugene Pyziur, The Doctrine of Anarchism of Michael A. Bakunin (1955, reissued 1968).

Articles by Emma Goldman are collected in her Anarchism and Other Essays, 3rd rev. ed. (1917, reprinted 1967); and in Alix Kates Shulman (ed.), Red Emma Speaks, 3rd ed. (1996). For a sympathetic biography of Goldman, see Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise (1961, reissued 1982). The correspondence of Goldman and Berkman can be found in Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon (eds.), Nowhere at Home (1975). The life of Johann Most is studied in Frederic Trautmann, The Voice of Terror: A Biography of Johann Most (1980).

Russian anarchist thought

The best general account of the anarchist movement in Russia remains Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists (1967, reprinted 1980). For documents on the anarchist critique of Lenin and bolshevism, see Paul Avrich (ed.), Anarchists in the Russian Revolution (1973). Voline, The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921 (1955; originally published in French, 1947), is a good anarchist memoir of the Russian Revolution.

Anarchism in the United States

On the origins and history of American individualist anarchism, see Carlotta R. Anderson, All-American Anarchist: Joseph A. Labadie and the Labor Movement (1998); James J. Martin, Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908 (1953, reissued 1970); and Rudolf Rocker, Pioneers of American Freedom, trans. from German (1949). An excellent collection of historical source material can be found in Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (1995). There is a large literature on Haymarket. Especially useful are Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy (1984); and David Roediger and Franklin Rosemont (eds.), Haymarket Scrapbook (1986). Anarchist influences in the Industrial Workers of the World are discussed in Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November: Culture and Community in the Industrial Workers of the World (1989).

Anarchism in Europe

P. Holgate, Malatesta (1956), is a study of the leading Italian anarchist. See also Vernon Richards (ed.), Errico Malatesta: His Life & Ideas, 3rd ed. (1984). On France, see Marie Fleming, The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Elisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism (1979). On Germany, the best book is Andrew R. Carlson, Anarchism in Germany (1972). See also Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (1973). On Spain, see Temma Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia (1977); and Robert W. Kern, Red Years/Black Years: A Political History of Spanish Anarchism, 1911-1937 (1978). For developments in England, see Hermia Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (1983).

Anarchism in East Asia

Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution (1991), is a comprehensive analysis of anarchism in China during the first three decades of the 20th century. Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik, Schools into Fields and Factories: Anarchists, the Guomindang, and the National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927-1932 (1991), is a wide-ranging study of an educational experiment in which anarchists played a leading role. Edward S. Krebs, Shifu: Soul of Chinese Anarchism (1998), is a detailed if somewhat hagiographic biography of the most revered of Chinese anarchists. Olga Lang, Pa Chin and His Writings: Chinese Youth Between the Two Revolutions (1967), is a thorough treatment of the anarchist writer. Peter Zarrow, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (1990), which focuses on anarchist activity in the 1910s, is especially strong on anarchist contributions to feminist issues.

English-language studies of anarchism in Japan have concentrated largely on individuals. Major works are John Crump, Hatta Shuzo and Pure Anarchism in Interwar Japan (1993); F.G. Notehelfer, Kotoku Shusui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical (1971); and Thomas A. Stanley, Osugi Sakae, Anarchist in Taisho Japan: The Creativity of the Ego (1982). A translation of Osugi's autobiography is available in English as The Autobiography of Osugi Sakae, trans. with annotations by Byron K. Marshall (1992).

A good discussion of anarchism in Vietnam is Hue-tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (1992).

Anarchism in the arts

Anarchist influences in early 20th-century American art are discussed in Alan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (2001). Richard Porton, Film and the Anarchist Imagination (1999), examines anarchist films as well as anarchist elements in mainstream films. Ron Sakolsky and Fred Wei-han Ho (eds.), Sounding Off! Music as Subversion/Resistance/Revolution (1995), includes much anarchist material. Ron Sakolsky (ed.), Surrealist Subversions (2001), focuses on anarchist elements in Surrealism.

Contemporary anarchism

Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism (1968; originally published in French, 1968), by two participants in the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, effectively describes anarchist involvement in the protests; its critique of the contemporary French Communist Party is richly informed by a historical analysis of early anarchist resistance to bolshevism in Russia. David Apter and James Joll (eds.), Anarchism Today (1971), is a very good summation of the influence of anarchism around the world in the aftermath of the student uprisings of the 1960s. Noam Chomsky, Radical Priorities, 2nd rev. ed., edited by Carlos P. Otero (1984), includes a good sample of Chomsky's anarchism-related writings. Margaret S. Marsh, Anarchist Women, 1870-1920 (1981), treats the early development of feminist anarchism. Essays on contemporary anarcha-feminism by Elaine Leeder, Susan Brown, Peggy Kornegger, and Carol Erlich appear in Howard J. Ehrlich (ed.), Reinventing Anarchy, Again (1996). The most influential thinking in contemporary anarchism can be found in the work of Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, 2nd ed. (1986), and The Modern Crisis, 2nd rev. ed. (1987).


George Woodcock
Arif Dirlik
Franklin Rosemont
Martin A. Miller


Source: "Anarchism." Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, 2013.

Date of Origination: Friday, 04-Nov-2016... 07:37 AM
Date of Initial Posting: Friday, 04-Nov-2016... 12:46 AM
Updated Posting: Saturday, 5th-May-2018... 9:28 AM