From Ancient Rome to the French Revolution

The word proletariat derives from the Latin ‘proletarii’ and ‘proletarius’, which literally means producers of offspring. The Oxford Latin dictionary defines proletarius as “belonging to the lowest class of citizens” in Roman society (Glare 2012, 1631). References to this class appear in several early histories of Rome, which were written in the first century BC. These allege that in the 6th century BC the king of Rome Servius Tullius carried out a series of reforms that laid the political and military foundations of the later Roman republic. These accounts are flawed in so far as they project certain features of the Roman republic onto an earlier time period and depict complex social changes, which must have occurred gradually over an extended period of time, as happening all at once due to the actions of a great man. One of the main reforms ascribed to Servius is the division of Roman citizens into six classes based on how much property they owned according to a census. The class a citizen belonged to determined their voting rights within an assembly called the comitia centuriata and what military duties they had. The wealthiest citizens had to equip themselves with the most expensive military equipment but also had the most votes and so political power (Cornell 1996, 173-197, 288-89; Lintott 1999, 55-61). Cicero defines the lowest sixth class as “those who brought to the census no more than eleven hundred asses or altogether nothing except their own persons”. Servius named them “child-givers” [proletarius], as from them, so to speak, a child [proles], that is, an offspring of the city, seemed to be expected” (Cicero 2014, 76 [Cic. Rep. 2. 40). Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus both claim that the lowest class were exempt from military service (Livy 1919, 151 [Livy 1. 43]; Dionysius 1937, 327 [Dion. Hal. AR 4. 18]). Unlike Cicero, they do not refer to this group as the proletarius.

A similar account to Cicero is given in Aulus Gellius’ The Attic Nights, which was written in the second century AD. During the dialogue Julius Paulus is asked what proletarius meant. Paulus, who is described as being very knowledgable, replies,

Those of the Roman commons who were humblest and of smallest means, and who reported no more than fifteen hundred asses at the census, were called proletarii, but those who were rated as having no property at all, or next to none, were termed capite censi, or ‘counted by head.’ And the lowest rating of the capite censi was three hundred and seventy-five asses. But since property and money were regarded as a hostage and pledge of loyalty to the State, and since there was in them a kind of guarantee and assurance of patriotism, neither the proletarii nor the capite censi were enrolled as soldiers except in some time of extraordinary disorder, because they had little or no property and money. However, the class of proletarii was somewhat more honourable in fact and in name than that of the capite censi; for in times of danger to the State, when there was a scarcity of men of military age, they were enrolled for hasty service, and arms were furnished them at public expense. And they were called, not capite censi, but by a more auspicious name derived from their duty and function of producing offspring, for although they could not greatly aid the State with what small property they had, yet they added to the population of their country by their power of begetting children (Gellius 1927, 169, 171 [Gellius. 16. 10. 10-13).

Other sources use the terms proletarii and capite censi as synonyms. Gellius’ belief that the two groups were distinct appears to be an error (Gargola 1989). Although this account is less reliable than earlier ones, it does repeat the point that the proletarii are citizens who were so poor that their primary contribution to the Roman state was having children. The fact that they are having a discussion about what the word meant is evidence that the word had fallen out of use some time after the end of the Roman republic.

In the centuries that followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire the Latin words proletarii and proletarius continued to be known by students of ancient history. It appears to be the case that these words were not used to refer to class divisions within contemporary society until the 18th century. In 1762 the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau published The Social Contract. In the book he discusses Servius’s division of Roman society into six classes as part of an extended overview of how he believed decisions were made in the Roman republic. During this he refers to the proletarii with a French version of the word: “prolétaires” (Rousseau 1994, 145. For original French see Rousseau 1766, 221. Also see Montesquieu 1989, 527). Rousseau was widely read by participants in the French revolution, which included people who lacked a classical education. Some people chose to borrow the language of the ancient Roman Republic and apply the word prolétaire to poor people living under the new French republic. For example, in March 1793 the paper Paris Revolutions published an article which claimed that the nation was divided into two distinct classes, proprietors and prolétaires. This language was not mainstream at the time and other words were more commonly used when referring to the lower classes, such as the common people or the sans-culotte. The word ‘sans-culotte’ meant those who did not wear breeches. It referred to citizens who wore the trousers of the poor, rather than the breeches of the aristocracy (Rose 1981, 285-88).

One of the main ties between 18th century revolutionary republicanism and 19th century revolutionary socialism and communism was Gracchus Babeuf. In 1796 Babeuf and his associates unsuccessfully plotted to overthrow the Directory and replace it with a new revolutionary government that would, in theory, establish the collective ownership of property and create an egalitarian society they called common happiness (Birchall 2016). During his trial the prosecution referred to “this frightening mass of prolétaires, multiplied by debauchery, by idleness, by all the passions and by all the vices that pullulate among a corrupt nation, hurling itself suddenly upon the class of property-owners and sober, industrious and respectable citizens” (Quoted in Rose 1976, 367). Babeuf had himself occasionally distinguished between proprietors and prolétaires, but it was not his usual terminology. He generally used alternative words, such as workers, plebeians, or the poor (Rose 1976, 373-74, 377; Birchall 2016, 168-71, 195-96).

The Working Classes of the 19th Century

The word prolétaire largely fell out of favour in the immediate aftermath of the French revolution. During the early 19th century socialist and communist ideas began to emerge but the first wave of authors either did not use the word prolétaire or only used it on a few occasions (Rose 1981, 288-93). For example, Philippe Buonarroti’s 1828 book History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality was extremely influential but only refers to “the Proletarians” in Paris once. The fact that the English 1836 edition includes a footnote by the editor explaining what this word meant in Ancient Rome suggests that, at the time of writing, the term was not commonly used in Britain (Buonarroti 1836, 139). Early British socialists like Robert Owen and John Gray instead used phrases like “the working classes” (Owen 2016, 33; Gray 1825, 29). This wording is itself significant. People in the 17th and 18th centuries generally broke society down into various ranks, orders, degrees, and estates. Towards the end of the 18th century some authors started using the term ‘class’ to refer to categories of people within the economy. During the 19th century this language became the standard terminology in discussions of economic stratification and political ideologies began to be distinguished from one another by their views on what they called class (Briggs 1967).

In order to understand what authors in the 19th century meant by class it is necessarily to establish the economic context that they wrote in. Between 1500 and 1800 England transformed from being overwhelmingly rural and agricultural to having increasingly large towns and cities, alongside a significant rural manufacturing sector. In 1500 an estimated 74% of the population worked in agriculture, 18% in rural non-agriculture, and 7% in urban sectors of the economy. In 1800 only 35% worked in agriculture, 36% in rural non-agriculture, and 29% in urban. By the early 19th century Britain had the most successful economy in Europe (Allen 2004b, 15-18). This economic growth was enabled by multiple interlocking factors, including the rise of the British Empire. One of the most important factors was the adoption of new agricultural techniques in the 17th and 18th centuries that resulted in much bigger crop yields. More food could be grown without requiring a proportional increase in people doing agricultural labour. The result was massive population growth and the possibility for an increasingly large percentage of the population to do other kinds of work. This occurred in parallel to the enclosure of the common land and the spread of large farms run by tenant farmers. These tenant farmers were capitalists who rented the land from a small number of land owners, who owned the majority of farmland in the country, and hired propertyless wage labourers, who did not own any land, to do the farming (Allen 2004a, 96-116; Allen 2004b, 22-34).

Rural manufacturing was typically performed by workers at home and involved the entire family, including women and children. It is from this that we get the phrase ‘cottage industries’. Self-employed workers would grow or buy their own raw materials, produce items using tools that they owned, and then sell the finished products to a merchant. Other workers were wage labourers who were employed in what is called ‘the putting out system’. A merchant would hire workers to produce specific items, provide them with the raw materials that the merchant retained ownership of during production, and then sell the finished product to other merchants. These wage labourers generally owned their own tools, but there are examples of some workers renting tools from the merchant that hired them. These two kinds of worker were not mutually exclusive. A person could be self-employed and a wage labourer at the same time, or shift back and forth between these different kinds of work (Clarkson 1985, 15-26).

In the 18th century one of the main rural industries was cotton textiles. This took the form of the spinning of cotton into yarn and the weaving of yarn into cloth using hand tools like the spinning wheel and the hand loom. The workers employed in this industry via the putting out system were wage labourers but they were wage labourers who worked at home using means of production that they personally owned. The textile industry was changed during the mid to late 18th century by a series of technological innovations that made it possible to mass produce thread and cloth using machines powered by waterwheels and later the steam engine. Capitalists centralised this new machinery inside factories known as cotton mills. The majority of the cotton used in these factories was imported from the Americas and had been picked by black slaves. Cotton mill workers were propertyless wage labourers in the sense that they did not own any property that was used in the production process. They owned personal possessions like clothes but did not own the factory. They produced commodities for a capitalist in a building they did not own with machinery they did not own. They worked 12-14 hours per day, including breaks for meals, in exchange for a wage. The start and end of the working day was signalled by the ringing of a bell. Whilst at work they were subject to supervision and control by overseers, who directed their movements and fined them for such misdemeanours as looking out a window. The only day off was Sunday and it was normal to work seventy hours a week. The majority of early factory workers were adult women and children, who could be as young as seven. As industrialisation continued factories which employed men became increasingly common, such as iron works (Freeman 2018, 1-42. For details about the Arkwright and Strutt mills specifically see Fitton and Wadsworth 1958, 224-53).

Over time an increasingly large number of goods came to be manufactured in factories and the towns and cities that grew up around them. In 1800 28% of the population lived in settlements with 5,000 or more inhabitants. By 1850 that number had increased to 45% and England became the most urbanised country in Western Europe (Wrigley 2004, 88-90). As early as 1835 there were 1,330 woollen mills, 1245 cotton mills, 345 flax mills and 238 silk mills in the UK. In 1851 the average number of workers in woollen mills was fifty-nine, in worsted mills 170 and in cotton mills 167. Only a minority of mills employed several hundred workers. Although the amount and kinds of factory increased during industrialisation, they did not become the default system in manufacturing. Many industries continued to rely on domestic labour and small workshops throughout the 19th century, such as tailoring, stationery, and guns. It is furthermore the case that the relations of production within a factory did not always take the form of a single capitalist directly hiring a group of wage labourers. This is because factories often relied on various forms of sub-contracting. For example, a factory owner could hire a head spinner and pay him per item produced. This head spinner, in turn, employed his own assistants and paid them per hour worked. It was also common for self employed craftsmen or small firms to rent out a room and power in a factory for their own purposes (Hudson 2004, 36-44).

The industrialisation of France did not follow the same pathway as England. In 1500 an estimated 73% of the population worked in agriculture, 18% in rural non-agriculture, and 9% in urban sectors of the economy. By 1800 these numbers had shifted but nowhere near as much as in England. Now 59% worked in agriculture, 28% in rural non agriculture, and 13% in urban (Allen 2004b, 16). In 1806 around 2.6 million people lived in settlements with more than 10,000 inhabitants. By 1851 that number had increased to 5 million and only accounted for 14% of the entire population. Of this 5 million roughly 1 million lived in Paris, which was much larger than every other French city. This picture remains the same even if smaller towns are included in the data. If an urban area is defined as any settlement with 5,000 or more inhabitants, then the percentage of the population living in urban areas is only 19%. The majority of the national population lived in the countryside and around half of France still earned their living from agriculture (Sewell 1980, 148-151; Wrigley 2004, 88).

During the early 19th century the majority of land was farmed in small units. This farming was done by peasants who owned their own land or were tenants who paid rent to a small number of large landowners with a portion of their crop or directly with money. As industrialisation expanded the number of small farmers who owned their own land increased, but large farms occupied a greater percentage of the land. In 1892 76% of farms were smaller than 10 hectares. These small farms, which were mostly owned by those who worked them, covered only 23% of the total agricultural land. Large agricultural holdings of over 40 hectares were 4% of the total number of farms but included almost half of the total land that was farmed. Medium to large scale farms employed wage labourers. These wage labourers included both those who were landless and those who owned a small amount of land but needed to supplement their income. A very significant number of peasant proprietors did not own enough land to survive off it and were compelled to engage in other kinds of labour, such as renting additional land, working in rural industry or as an agricultural wage labourer, and migrating to urban areas for work on a seasonal basis (Price 1987, 11-19, 143-160).

A huge sector of the urban economy was the manufacturing of goods. In the early to mid 19th century the vast majority of this was done by male artisans who engaged in small scale handicraft production. By 1848 there were only a few large factories and these were mostly in the textile industry. Artisans began their career when they were 13 or 14 and went to live with a master artisan who trained them in the craft. After four to six years of training as an apprentice they became a journeyman and could either continue working with their master or seek employment elsewhere. The master artisan owned the workshop, expensive instruments of production, and the necessary raw materials. The journeyman owned their own tools, which typically cost two to four weeks worth of wages. With these tools they would produce an item that was then sold by their master for a profit. The master then paid them a wage that was, depending upon the business and time period, per number of tasks completed, per number of hours worked, or a set amount per day. According to the 1848 Paris Chamber of Commerce survey half of all workshops were composed of a master artisan who worked alone or one master and a single worker who assisted them. Only one in ten workshops employed more than ten workers and in the majority of cases master artisans worked alongside their employees. Journeymen could become a master if they saved up enough money to create their own business. Their opportunities to do so were massively reduced by an economic crisis that hit the French economy during the late 1840s and resulted in a large number of small workshops going bankrupt (Traugott 1985, 5-12; Aminzade 1981, 2-5).

Artisans were therefore an extremely broad category. It included (a) independent craftsmen who used their own tools and workshop to produce products for the market by themselves, (b) small capitalists who employed other craftsmen in a workshop they owned whilst also doing some labour themselves, (c) craftsmen who used their tools to work for the small capitalists in exchange for a wage. The majority of artisans were wage labourers. Typical professions included printers, carpenters, jewellers, and tailors (Moss 1980, 8-13, 17-18). These artisan wage labourers were often described as propertyless at the time (Sewell 1980, 215, 233-34, 264). This meant that they did not own property that was sufficient to become either an independent craftsmen or a master artisan, such as a workshop and more expensive means of production. These artisans owned the tools of their trade and, to that extent, were distinct from what I have called propertyless wage labourers. Despite this difference, both kinds of wage labourer could only survive by selling their labour to a capitalist in exchange for a wage.

The artisans of the 19th century were fundamentally different from the artisans that came before them. In old regime France artisans belonged to guilds for their specific profession. These were complex social networks led by master artisans who regulated their specific trade and thereby maintained their privileged position. These regulations typically determined things like the quality and price of goods, how many apprentices a master could have, how skilled an apprentice had to be before he became a journeyman, and the steps a journeyman had to go through in order to become a master. They not only had to have the necessary money to buy a workshop but also needed to pass an examination, pay a substantial fee to the guild, and swear an oath. Guilds were able to monopolise and regulate a particular trade due to legal privileges that were granted by the monarch. This legal recognition transformed a collection of real people into a single fictitious legal person that possessed certain rights, privileges, and duties. One of the main privileges that guilds were granted was the exclusive right to engage in a specific trade within a certain region (Sewell 1980, 19-39).

In parallel to this, journeymen formed their own clandestine guilds called brotherhoods. These brotherhoods, which often included journeymen from multiple professions, engaged in many of the same activities as the guilds led by their masters. This included maintaining standards of behaviour and quality of work and collecting dues and fines to pay for financial support when a member was ill, unemployed, or retired. They also engaged in activities that served their specific interests, such as compiling a blacklist of masters who did not pay journeymen enough, organising strikes, and ensuring that journeymen who refused to become members of the brotherhood could not find work. This is not to say that journeymen were attempting to unite as a class. They were divided into mutually exclusive and hostile organisations. These brotherhoods could not rely on the law to settle disputes and, when arguments and insults were not enough, violently fought one another in skirmishes and sometimes battles. Nor did brotherhoods aim to overthrow their masters. They viewed journeymen and masters as belonging to the same moral community. In trades where brotherhoods were influential, many of the masters were former members of a brotherhood and were still linked to this organisation by an oath that they had sworn (ibid 40-61).

The laws that enshrined the legal privileges of master guilds were erased during the French revolution of 1789 and replaced with a new constitution that granted every citizen the right to engage in whatever trade they wanted and to use their property how they wished. In 1791 guilds were formally abolished and citizens were banned from forming new ones. This included journeymen brotherhoods such that trade unions and strikes were made illegal (ibid, 84-91). After the abolition of the guilds, masters, journeymen, and apprentices confronted one another as legally free individuals connected by the market. In the old regime masters and journeymen were united by their shared profession and membership of a guild. This guild membership, in turn, separated them from unskilled workers, other kinds of artisan, and guilds that they were in competition with. They were at the same time divided based on their amount of wealth and the degrees of privilege, rank, and status within the guild itself. Masters had authority over journeymen not just because they owned a workshop, but also because they were legally recognised as a master within a guild. Now masters and journeymen were only separated by the amount and kind of property that they owned. It was within this economic context that a large segment of journeymen wage labourers, regardless of what profession they engaged in, began to acquire a sense that they belonged to a distinct class which included both skilled and unskilled workers (ibid, 138-142).

France became increasingly industrialised during the course of the 19th century and more of the economy centred on factories, steam power, railways, and coal. This did not lead to artisan wage labourers disappearing overnight and becoming propertyless factory workers. The number of artisans actually increased because basically the only factories that directly competed with artisans were textile factories. These textile factories caused the decline of the rural domestic weaving industry but did not effect urban artisans employed in different trades. These new factories mass produced cheap raw materials like cotton and iron that lowed the cost of production for artisans and, at the same time, employed unskilled workers who used their wages to pay for artisan produced goods, such as furniture, clothing, and cutlery. As late as 1864 only 5% of workers in Paris were classified as factory workers. It is estimated that, in 1876, the number of urban workers employed in handicraft production within France as a whole was double the number employed in factories. This is not to say that artisans were unaffected by industrialisation. They suffered from deskilling, lower wages, and unemployment. This included large capitalists buying up small workshops or hiring them as subcontractors. It is furthermore the case that early factories routinely hired artisans as wage labourers in order to perform skilled labour that had yet to be mechanised. One of the main threats to artisans was the rise of an urban putting out and sweatshop system which employed unskilled and semi-skilled workers, especially women and children, to mass produce standardised goods like clothes and shoes in set styles and sizes. Master artisans responded by making their workshops more like factories in order to remain economically competitive. This included hiring more apprentices and journeymen, establishing a rigid division of labour, and making everyone work harder and longer (Moss 1980, 13-19; Aminzade 1981, 6-14; Sewell 1980, 154-61).

The Proletariat in Early Socialism  

It is sometimes incorrectly assumed that Marx was the first social scientist to discover the existence of classes and class struggle in history. Marx himself rejected this view. He wrote in an 1852 letter, “I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy” (MECW 39, 62). One of the main influences on how socialists thought about class was British political economy and in particular Adam Smith’s 1776 book The Wealth of Nations. Smith thought that there were three main orders in what he called commercial societies. These were (i) workers, who gain income from wages; (ii) merchants and master manufacturers, who gain income from profits of stock; and (iii), land owners, who gain their income from rent (Smith 1904, 248-50). Workers, which Smith typically called workmen, included labourers, journeymen and servants. His category of worker therefore included both those who owned means of production, such as journeymen, and those who did not, such as servants (ibid, 70, 80). Smith also viewed self-employed artisans as workers. He wrote,

It sometimes happens, indeed, that a single independent workman has stock sufficient both to purchase the materials of his work, and to maintain himself till it be completed. He is both master and workman, and enjoys the whole produce of his own labour, or the whole value which it adds to the materials upon which it is bestowed. It includes what are usually two distinct revenues, belonging to two distinct persons, the profits of stock, and the wages of labour (ibid, 67-68).

Master manufacturers, who owned workshops, and merchants, who used the putting out system, paid workers a wage to produce a particular item and then sold this item for profit on the market. Smith used the word stock to refer to anything that a person owned. Master manufacturers and merchants therefore earn profit from stock both by selling items that they own and by providing workers with the necessary raw materials, instruments of production, etc to produce the items in question. He called this kind of stock capital (ibid, 49-50, 261-65). Smith’s merchants and master manufacturers were later called capitalists or the bourgeoisie.

In the 19th century the word proletariat first rose to prominence among working class social movements in France. Their conception of class was shaped by the legacy of the French revolution. In 1789 the clergyman Abbé Sieyès published a pamphlet called What is the Third Estate? In old regime France the first estate were the clergy, the second estate the nobility, and the third estate everyone else. In the pamphlet Sieyès argued that the third estate engages in, or at least could engage in, all the classes of labour (by which he meant categories) that are necessary for society to function and flourish, such as farming, manufacturing, shopkeeping, trading, and education. The consequence of this is that the third estate includes every person necessary for a complete country. The first and second estate should therefore be abolished because they are an unnecessary privileged class who are idle, do not engage in useful labour, and are a burden on the nation (Sieyès 1789).

This had a profound effect on how later French authors framed discussions of class. One of the main influences on French socialism was the aristocrat and canal enthusiast Henri Saint-Simon, who was not himself a socialist (Cole 1967, 37-50). Between 1814 and his death in 1825 Saint-Simon wrote a series of texts which divided society into two main groups: the industrials and the idlers. This distinction was not original to Saint-Simon and built on very similar ideas that had been proposed by the French political economist Jean Baptiste Say (James 1977, 456-75). The industrials were any person who engaged in what he regarded as productive labour. It included farmers, business owners, merchants, bankers, managers, and employees. The idlers were those who did not engage in productive activity and instead lived off the labour of others, such as aristocrats and the clergy. Saint-Simon sometimes referred to all industrials as workers, even capitalists and bankers (Saint-Simon 1975, 47-49, 158-160, 194-95, 214, 282). In 1823 he proposed that there was a third class between the industrials and the idlers. These were the bourgeoisie, who were non-aristocratic land owners, lawyers and soldiers (ibid 250-51). Two years later he published a fragment in which he referred to one section of the industrials as prolétaires. This group was “the most numerous class” and included both peasants and urban wage labourers. Saint-Simon thought that all members of the industrial class should unite together against the idlers and take control of society (ibid, 262-66). For this reason his fragment on the prolétaires critiques the English proletariat for wanting to “commence the war of the poor against the rich”, whilst praising “the French proletariat” for having “goodwill” towards “the wealthy industrials” (ibid, 265).

In 1827 the Swiss economist Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi published a second edition of his book New Principles of Political Economy. In the preface he claimed that he had revised his views based on an examination of England. During this research he discovered that,

the people of England are destitute of comfort now, and of security for the future. There are no longer yeoman, they have been obliged to become day-labourers. In the towns there are scarcely any longer artisans or independent heads of a small business, but only manufacturers. The operative, to employ a word which the system has created, does not know what it is to have a station; he gains only wages, and as wages cannot suffice for all seasons, he is almost every year reduced to ask alms from the poor-rates . . . The English nation has found it most economical to give up those modes of cultivation which require much hand-labour, and she has dismissed half the cultivators who lived in her fields; she has found it more economical to supersede workmen by steam-engines; she has dismissed, then employed, then dismissed again, the operatives in towns, and weavers giving place to power-looms, are now sinking under famine; she has found it more economical to reduce all working people to the lowest possible wages on which they can subsist; and these working people being no longer anything but proletarians, have not feared plunging into still deeper misery by the addition of an increasing family (Sismondi 1847, 116-117. In the English translation it says ‘rabble’. Have altered based on the original French quoted in Rose 1981, 290).

Shortly after the publication of this book Prosper Enfantin, who was an influential follower of Saint-Simon, gave a series of lectures between December 1828 and 1829. These were revised and published in book form as The Doctrine of Saint-Simon: An Exposition in 1830. In the fourth and fifth lectures, which were given in January and February 1829, Enfantin conceptualised history as a series of economic stages characterised by “the exploitation of man by man” and so the division of society “into two classes, the exploiters and the exploited” (Iggers 1972, 72-73). Each successive stage marked a decline in exploitation and so was a form of progress. Humans were initially “savages” who killed and often eat one another during wars. Then they started capturing people they defeated in combat and turning them into property who were instruments of work or pleasure. This system of slavery evolved over time and gave rise to new class distinctions, such as patricians and plebeians in ancient Rome. Eventually slavery was replaced by feudalism and the division of society into lords and serfs. Serfs were later separated from the land and turned into workers who could choose their master (ibid, 65-67).

During the sixth lecture, which was held in late February 1829, Enfantin outlined an analysis of class divisions within contemporary society. He said that,

the exploitation of man by man, which we have shown in its most direct and uncouth form in the past, namely slavery, continues to a very large extent in the relations between owners and workers, masters and wage earners. Of course, the respective conditions of the classes today are far from those of masters and slaves, patricians and plebeians, or lords and serfs in the past. At first sight it seems as if no comparison could be made. However, it must be realized that the more recent situation is only a prolongation of the earlier. The relation of master and wage earner is the last transformation which slavery has undergone. If the exploitation of man by man no longer has the brutal character of antiquity and assumes more gentle forms today, it is, nevertheless, no less real. The worker is not like the slave, the direct property of his master. His condition, which is never permanent, is fixed by a transaction with a master. But is this transaction free on the part of the worker? It is not, since he is obliged to accept it under penalty of death, for he is reduced to expecting his nourishment each day only from his work of the previous day (ibid, 82).

He then explained that,

the advantages and disadvantages proper to every social position are transmitted through inheritance. The economists have taken care to establish one aspect of this fact, namely hereditary misery, when they recognized within society the existence of a class of proletarians. Today the entire mass of workers is exploited by the men whose property they utilize. The managers of industry themselves undergo such exploitation in their relation with the owners, but to an incomparably smaller extent. And in turn they participate in the privileges of exploitation, which bears down with all its weight upon the laboring classes, which is to say, on the majority of the workers. In such a state of affairs, the worker appears as the direct descendent of the slave and the serf. His person is free; he is no longer bound to the soil; but that is all he has gained. And in this state of legal emancipation he can exit only under the conditions imposed upon him by a class small in numbers, namely the class of those men who have been invested through legislation, the daughter of conquest, with the monopoly of riches, which is to say, with the capacity to dispose at their will, even in idleness, of the instruments of work (ibid, 82-83).

Saint-Simon defined class in terms of a person’s occupation and whether or not they engaged in productive labour or were idle. The consequence of this was that capitalists and wage earners could, with a broad enough notion of productivity, be viewed as different kinds of worker belonging to the same class: the industrials. Enfantin, in contrast, defined class in terms of a groups source of income, ownership of property, and role in the production process. The consequence of this was that he viewed capitalists and wage earners as distinct classes. He, in addition to this, distinguished between wage earners who were managers and those who were proletarians or labourers. He claimed that proletarians survive by selling their labour to capitalists in exchange for a wage. They are free to choose who they work for but lack the freedom to not do so. This is because capitalists have monopolised ownership of riches and with this the capacity to determine how the instruments of work are used. Under these circumstances, wage earners have no choice but to use property owned by capitalists in order to produce goods and services for them. Although Enfantin mentioned that some capitalists are idle he did not frame this as their distinguishing characteristic which separates them from other classes. They are instead defined in terms of their ownership of private property and their hiring of wage labourers.

Both Sismondi and Enfantin noted that proletarians do not own land and survive by selling their labour to capitalists in exchange for a wage. They disagreed on whether or not the proletariat consisted of (a) only propertyless wage labourers who do not own any means of production or (b) both propertyless wage labourers and artisan wage labourers, who own the tools of their trade. Sismondi framed the proletariat and artisans as distinct classes. In 1827 he claimed that in England “there are scarcely any longer artisans or independent heads of a small business, but only manufacturers (Sismondi 1847, 116). Sismondi expanded upon this in an 1834 article. He wrote that “there exist in society an already numerous class, and which has a tendency to become more so every day” that creates “wealth by the labour of their hands”, have “no property”, and live off “wages”. This “class of working men to whom has been give in our time the name used by the Romans, proletarii, comprises the most numerous and energetic class of the population of large towns. It comprehends all those who work in manufactories, in the country as well as in towns; it continually encroaches on those kinds of business formerly known as master trades, whenever a manufactory can be established, when all together, in one place, under one head, but by many hundred hands, those common utensils and tools can be made” (ibid, 198-199).

Sismondi explicitly contrasted the manufactories, where proletarians were employed, with small workshops where artisans worked, including journeymen who were paid a wage. He wrote that in France “four-fifths then of the nation belong to the country and to agriculture, and the fifth to towns and other occupations. There would be danger to the state, the balance of production would be overthrown if this fifth became a quarter or a third, but it does not follow that this fifth should go to increase the ranks of the proletarri”. This is because “one part of the products of industry is prepared by trades, another part by manufacturers.  Now the life of men who exercise trades is in general happy, and affords all those securities which we have demanded for the poor who work. A trade always requires an apprenticeship” and includes “carpenters, masons, locksmiths, farriers, cartwrights, shoemakers, tailors, bakers, or butchers” (ibid, 203). He then described the career progression of an artisan. They start as an “apprentice” who “enters his master’s family according to a contract which often binds him for many years”, then live as “a journeyman” who “engages with a master for a salary”, and finally becomes “a master” who “employs the little capital which he has been accumulating in purchasing tools and furnishing a workshop; engages a journeymen and an apprentice” (ibid, 204). It is “in the midst of these trades, exercised by the freemen of towns, which formerly did all the industrial work in all nations, that manufactories have arisen” (ibid, 205). Sismondi’s distinction between artisans and proletarians is made even clearer several pages later. He claimed that in some towns in Germany and Switzerland master artisans are only allowed “to hire for wages more than one or two compagnons or journeymen, to keep more than one or two apprentices”. In such towns “no proletaries are to be seen there” (ibid, 219). He therefore viewed wage labourers and proletarians as overlapping but distinct categories. All proletarians are wage labourers but not all wage labourers are proletarians, such as journeymen artisans.

Enfantin, in contrast, talked as if the proletariat included all wage labourers, including artisans. This is supported by two pieces of evidence. First, Enfantin claimed that “the entire mass of workers” and “the majority of the workers” were “proletarians” (Iggers 1972, 83). Elsewhere he referred to “the poor class, the most numerous class, the proletarians” (Quoted in Lovell 1988, 66). As has already been mentioned, at the time of writing the majority of the French population lived in the countryside and it was common for agricultural wage labourers to own a small amount of land. Most male urban workers employed in manufacturing were artisan wage labourers. Propertyless wage labourers did exist and so form a subset of the group he is referring to, but they cannot form the majority. Second, Enfantin’s description of the proletariat applies to artisan wage labourers. They are a “wage earner” who, unlike a slave, are not owned by anyone and, unlike a serf, “is no longer bound to the soil”. They have the freedom to choose their “master” but lack the freedom to not sell their labour in exchange for a wage. This is because they are “reduced to expecting his nourishment each day only from his work of the previous day”. They are “exploited by the men whose property they utilize” and who has “the capacity to dispose at their will, even in idleness, of the instruments of work” (ibid, 82-83). That is to say, the master artisan who owns the workshop they work in and the raw materials that they work on, determines what artisan wage labourers produce, and owns the product of their employees labour.

The word prolétaire rose to popularity in France during the aftermath of the 1830 July revolution. The revolution, which lasted only three days of insurrection, overthrew the Bourbon monarch Charles the 10th and replaced him with the Orleanist monarch Louis Philippe. Workers, especially artisans, formed the majority of people who fought at the barricades and were injured or killed during the revolution. The new monarchy passed a series of reforms, such as freedom of the press and lower property requirements for having the right to vote, but refused to implement reforms that workers proposed. The new state chastised workers for foolishly asking for restrictions on what they called the liberty of industry, such as a minimum wage and a maximum length of the working day. Then as now the liberty of capitalists was built on the oppression of workers. In response artisans created their own newspapers in which they adopted the language of the French revolution to frame capitalists as idle aristocrats and workers as the productive third estate or ‘the people’. Capitalists were the new feudal lords and workers were the serfs of industry (Sewell 1980, 195-201). What Saint-Simonians had called “the most numerous and the poorest class” re-described itself as: “the most numerous and the most useful class . . . the class of workers. Without it capital has no value; without it no machines, no industry, no commerce” (Quoted in ibid, 198. See also ibid 214).

The first working class social movements in France were created by artisan wage labourers. These artisans called themselves proletarians (Moss 1980, 8; Traugott 1985, 198n7). The predominance of artisans in the labour movement was not unique to France. Among labour historians there is, to quote William Sewell,

almost universal agreement on one point: that skilled artisans, not workers in the new factory industries, dominated labour movements during the first decades of industrialization. Whether in France, England, Germany, or the United States; whether in strikes, political movements, or incidents of collective violence, one finds over and over again the same familiar trades: carpenters, tailors, bakers, cabinetmakers, shoemakers, stonemasons, printers, locksmiths, joiners, and the like. The nineteenth-century labor movement was born in the craft workshop, not in the dark, satanic mill (Sewell 1980, 1).

Although trade unions were made illegal during the French revolution, journeymen had been clandestinely organising strikes and unions throughout the early 19th century. These typically took the form of a modern continuation of the journeymen brotherhoods of old, complete with bizarre rituals and initiation ceremonies. These secret groups were often hidden within public legal mutual aid societies that provided members with various benefits, such as sick pay and a pension upon retirement. Initially these secret groups maintained the kinds of divisions and hostilities between rival sects and professions that had been common among the original brotherhoods (ibid, 162-190). Over time a segment of journeymen from different organisations started to co-operate with one another in their shared struggle against a common foe: capitalists and the current state. They began to advocate and organise the formation of workers’ associations that united all the workers in a specific trade and then all workers from every trade (ibid, 201-18) In 1833 at least seventy-two strikes were organised by workers. This was over four times larger than the total number of strikes in 1831 and 1832 combined (ibid, 208). As part of this strike wave the stonecutters of Lyon sent an address to silk workers that asked for assistance in a dispute with their masters. They declared, “we are no longer in a time where our industries engage in mutual insults and violence; we have at last recognized that our interests are the same, that, far from hating one another, we must aid one another” (Quoted in ibid, 212). The silk workers replied by claiming that their newspaper had been founded “to bring into being the bonds of the confraternity of proletarians” and “the holy alliance of laborers” (ibid). The self-described French proletariat was therefore made by both workers themselves acquiring an awareness of their shared class interests and the economic and political context that they acted within and in reaction to.

Throughout the 1830s and 1840s the words prolétaire and (from 1834 onwards) prolétariat were often used by French authors to refer to workers in general. The exact kind of worker they had in mind varied greatly. In socialist discourse there was not one proletariat, but many (Rose 1981, 282-83, 293-99; Lovell 1988, 65-79).  For some it included everyone who worked with their hands and produced the nation’s wealth. This conception was broad enough to include almost the entire population of France, including propertyless wage labourers, artisan wage labourers, self-employed artisans, and peasants who owned or rented a small amount of land. In January 1832 the revolutionary Blanqui was on trial and asked what his profession was by the court. Blanqui replied “proletarian . . . one of the thirty million Frenchman who live by their labor” (Quoted in Spitzer 1957, 96). The total population of France at the time was around 32 million. It was, as it were, the 19th century equivalent of saying ‘we are the 99%’. In 1834 Blanqui founded a secret society called the Society of Families (ibid, 6). Its programme defined “the people” or “the proletariat” as “the mass of citizens who work” (Quoted in ibid, 90).

Others adopted a more narrow definition. The printer Pierre Joseph Proudhon referred to himself as a “proletarian” multiple times in his 1840 book What is Property? (Proudhon 1994, 36, 72, 80. For Proudhon’s life see Vincent 1984). In 1852 Proudhon distinguished between the proletariat and the middle classes. He wrote,

The middle class. It consists of entrepreneurs, bosses, shopkeepers, manufactures, farmers, scholars, artists, etc. living, like the proletarians, and unlike the bourgeois, much more from their personal product than from their capital, privileges, and properties, but distinguished from the proletariat in that they work, in vulgar terms, for themselves, they are responsible for their estate’s losses and the exclusive enjoyment of their profits, whereas the proletarian works for hire and is paid a wage (Quoted in Ansart 2023, 75-76n9).

Proudhon, in contrast to several authors from the 1830s, clearly viewed the proletariat as distinct from the self-employed, such as independent artisans and peasants who worked alone. The wage earners that Proudhon called the proletariat included both propertyless wage labourers and artisan wage labourers who owned the tools of their trade.

Lastly, there was those who used the proletariat to refer exclusively to the new class of propertyless wage labourers that emerged during the industrial revolution. One of the earliest socialists to do so was Victor Considerant in his 1837 book Social Destiny (Rose 1981, 298-99). A decade later he published Principles of Socialism: Manifesto of 19th century Democracy, which repeated this point in a more condensed form. He distinguished between “the wealthy class that possesses capital and the instruments of production and the proletarian class that is stripped of everything” (Considerant 2006, 53). These proletarians, who work for capitalists in exchange for a wage, emerged due to the industrial revolution. He noted that, “in every branch of the economy, the big capitals and large enterprises make the law for the small. Steam engines, machinery, and large factories have always easily predominated wherever they have confronted small and middle-size workshops. At their approach, the old trades and artisans disappeared, leaving only factories and proletarians” (ibid, 54).

The Proletariat in Marx and Engels

The word proletariat was originally used in a variety of competing and contradictory ways. The various authors of the 1830s and 1840s that I have cited were extremely historically important but have largely been forgotten. When modern people in the 21st century think about the proletariat they generally think about the proletariat as it appears in the writings of Marx and Engels or, at least, the popular misrepresentations of Marx and Engels. Despite the central importance of class in their social analysis, it is surprisingly difficult to establish exactly what they thought about it. A key reason for this is that Marx died before writing his planned chapter on classes for volume three of Capital. The draft he begun contains only a few paragraphs (Marx 1991, 1025-26). Both Marx and Engels wrote about class a lot but often without defining key terms or providing the kind of systematic breakdown of classes that would make their ideas easy to understand. Matters are only made worse by the fact that they use the same word ‘class’ to refer to different things. The result is that even specialists disagree about how Marx and Engels understood class (Draper 1978; Heinrich 2004, 91-92; Ollman 1968; McLellan 1980, 177-82). Given this complexity, what follows is a brief attempt to establish how Marx and Engels defined the proletariat. It is not possible in such a brief account to cover every single source and nuance, but it should at least make their core positions clear.

Marx and Engels generally defined class in terms of a person’s source of income and relationship to the means of production. When discussing class they focused on the social relations that labour was performed within. In February 1844 Marx published a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Introduction in a journal he edited. This journal was called the Franco-German Yearbooks and only one issue was ever published (McLellan 1973, 98-99). His essay, which was written between late 1843 and early 1844, is the first text where Marx refers to the proletariat as the agent of revolutionary change. Although he does not define the proletariat explicitly, he does pick out three key features of this class. Firstly, “the proletariat is only beginning to appear in Germany as a result of the emergent industrial movement. For the proletariat is not formed by natural poverty but by artificially produced poverty” (Marx 1992b, 256) Secondly, “when the proletariat demands the negation of private property, it is only elevating to a principle for society what society has already made a principle for the proletariat, what is embodied in the proletariat, without its consent, as the negative result of society” (ibid). Thirdly, “the proletariat is already beginning to struggle against the bourgeoisie” (ibid, 255). In other words, the proletariat is a new class that does not own private property, emerges as part of the process of industrialisation, and is in an antagonistic relationship with capitalists, who are the class above it. Marx does not clarify how this new class is distinct from other kinds of worker that existed at the time. It is nonetheless clear that Marx is using the term in a narrower sense than many French socialists. This is for the obvious reason that artisans and peasants were not a new class that emerged during industrialisation.

Marx was not initially consistent with this terminology. On other occasions he followed common usage and referred to any worker as a proletarian, including artisans who owned their own means of production. In August 1844 he used the books of Wilhelm Weitling as evidence that “the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat” (Marx 1992b, 415). Weitling was a tailor and artisan (Wittke 1950, 6-9, 20-21). A few months later in his 1845 book The Holy Family Marx referred to the artisan and printer Proudhon as a proletarian. He wrote, “not only does Proudhon write in the interest of the proletarians, he is himself a proletarian, an ouvrier [worker]. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat” (MECW 4, 41). In his 1847 book the Poverty of Philosophy Marx mentioned “the proletariat of Feudal times” and so appeared to contradict his position that the proletariat is a new class that emerged with the industrial revolution. Marx later made a series of corrections to the book and one of them was replacing this phrase with “the class of workers of Feudal times” (MECW 6, 175, 672-3n71).

Around the same time Engels, who had met Marx but had yet to become his friend (MECW 50, 503), adopted the same narrow definition of the proletariat. Between October and November 1843 he wrote An Outline of a Critique of Political Economy. This essay was sent to Marx some time between late December and early January and was then published in the Franco-German Yearbooks (Carver 2020, 132). In this essay Engels referred to “the original separation of capital from labour and from the culmination of this separation — the division of mankind into capitalists and workers — a division which daily becomes ever more acute, and which, as we shall see, is bound to deepen” (MECW 3, 430). Engels mentioned the new factory system of industrial production several times but did not go into greater detail and instead promised to cover it at a later date (MECW 3, 420, 424, 442-43). Engels kept this promise and, in February 1844, wrote an essay that described the industrialisation of England during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The essay was published between August and September by the German paper Forwards, which was based in Paris and had Marx on its editorial staff. The publication of this essay coincided with Engels ten day visit to Paris, during which he cemented his friendship with Marx and they agreed to work together on future projects (Carver 2020, 145; Jones 2016, 161). In the essay Engels claimed that the industrial revolution led to “the division of society into owners of property and non-owners” (MECW 3, 478). He thought that,

the most important effect of the eighteenth century for England was the creation of the proletariat by the industrial revolution. The new industry demanded a constantly available mass of workers for the countless new branches of production, and moreover workers such as had previously not existed. Up to 1780 England had few proletarians, a fact which emerges inevitably from the social condition of the nation as described above. Industry concentrated work in factories and towns; it became impossible to combine manufacturing and agricultural activity, and the new working class was reduced to complete dependence on its labour. What had hitherto been the exception became the rule and spread gradually outside the towns too. Small-scale farming was ousted by the large tenant farmers and thus a new class of agricultural labourers was created. The population of the towns trebled and quadrupled and almost the whole of this increase consisted solely of workers. The expansion of mining likewise required a large number of new workers, and these too lived solely from their daily wage (MECW 3, 487).

Engels, like Marx, specified that the proletariat are a new class that does not own private property and emerged during the industrial revolution. He, in addition to this, clarified that the proletariat so understood survive entirely by selling their labour to a capitalist in exchange for a wage. He noted the existence of craftsmen who owned their own means of production but clearly viewed them as distinct from the proletariat (MECW 3, 477-78, 482-83). The central points of this essay were repeated by Engels in the opening chapter of his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels 1993, 15-30).

In 1847 Engels wrote a very clear and succinct account of what the proletariat is. He claimed that two main class positions were developing under capitalism. These were the “bourgeoisie” who “almost exclusively own all the means of subsistence and the raw materials and instruments (machinery, factories, etc.), needed for the production of these means of subsistence”, and “the class of the completely propertyless, who are compelled therefore to sell their labour to the bourgeois in order to obtain the necessary means of subsistence in exchange. This class is called the class of the proletarians or the proletariat” (MECW 6, 342-43). He defined the proletariat as “that class of society which procures its means of livelihood entirely and solely from the sale of its labour and not from the profit derived from any capital” (ibid, 341). Elsewhere he noted that “the proletarian”, in addition to this, “works with instruments of production which belong to someone else” (ibid, 100). This class is framed as being distinct from other kinds of worker that  had previously existed, such as journeyman artisans and rural domestic workers, who produced cloth with a spinning wheel and hand loom that they owned themselves. Engels wrote, “the manufactory worker of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries almost everywhere still owned an instrument of production, his loom, the family spinning-wheels, and a little plot of land which he cultivated in his leisure hours. The proletarian has none of these things. . . The manufactory worker is torn up from his patriarchal relations by large-scale industry, loses the property he still has and thereby only then himself becomes a proletarian” (ibid, 344-45).

Marx and Engels repeated this definition of the proletariat in a more condensed form in the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx and Engels 1996, 7). Why did Marx and Engels adopt their narrow definition of the proletariat? With Engels a key factor appears to be his life experiences. In November 1842 he moved to Manchester in order to work as a clerk in the offices of his father’s business, which owned cotton mills where propertyless wage labourers were employed. Whilst living in England, Engels witnessed the effects of industrialisation on society, the plight of factory workers, and the Chartist movements struggle for universal male suffrage. At the same time he met socialists and began reading political economy and economic histories of Britain (Carver 2020, 123-32, 140-41). Historians have proposed various sources of inspiration for Marx, but there is not enough evidence to give any definitive answer. It is likely that Marx heard the word during the meetings of communist artisans that he attended in the summer of 1844 whilst living in Paris (MECW 3, 355). One of the most common suggestions is that Marx read the 1842 book Socialism and Communism in Contemporary France by Lorenz von Stein. It is not known when Marx first read this book. He most likely knew of its existence soon after its publication because it was reviewed by someone else in a paper he wrote for called the Rheinische Zeitung. He first mentions the book by name in The Holy Family, which was written between September and November 1844 (Rubel and Manale 1975, 24; MECW 4, 134). Another likely source of inspiration for Marx is Sismondi. Marx explicitly refers to him in his 1844 Paris notebooks (Marx 1992b, 306, 339) and The Holy Family (MECW 4 , 33). Marx quotes Sismondi saying that, “my objections are not to machines, not to inventions, not to civilisation, but only to the modern organisation of society, which deprives the working man of any property other than his hands, and gives him no guarantee against competition, of which he will inevitably become a victim” (MECW 4, 272).

Over time Marx’s definition of the proletariat became increasingly precise. This went alongside arguing that the proletariat first began to emerge in England during the 16th century and so prior to the industrial revolution of the 18th (Marx 1990, 877-88, 905-907). In Capital Volume 1 he described the proletariat as the class which,

(i) sell their labour power as a commodity on the labour market. A person’s labour power is the mental and physical capabilities they exercise when producing anything. In other words, their ability to labour.

(ii) are a legally free person who can sell their labour power to whoever they want. They are not a slave or a serf and so own or are the proprietor of their own labour power, rather than being the property of someone else. They must, in addition to this, not be bound by guild regulations that seriously restrict if they can work and who they can work for.

(iii) sell their labour power for a limited and definite period of time. If a person sells their labour power once and for all then they are selling themselves and thereby become a slave who is a commodity owned by someone else, rather than a person who is selling a commodity that they own.

(iv) own no means of production (raw materials, instruments of production, etc) such that they cannot survive by producing their own commodities and selling these on the market. They have nothing to sell but their labour power and this is what compels them to seek a buyer of labour power on the market.

(v) sell their labour power to a capitalist, who owns means of production, in exchange for a wage. A worker then uses this wage to buy the necessities of life, such as food, rent, clothes etc, and thereby reproduce themselves and their labour power (Marx 1990, 270-80, 874-76, 1025-31).[1]

Marx and Engels’ narrow definition of the proletariat is widely misunderstood. Three points of clarification must be made. First, they did not think that proletarians and capitalists were the only classes that existed under really existing capitalism. This misconception stems from a sentence in the Communist Manifesto. They wrote that, “society as a whole is tending to split into two great hostile encampments, into two great classes directly and mutually opposed – bourgeoisie and proletariat” (Marx and Engels 1996, 2). In this sentence Marx and Engels were careful to use the phrase “great classes”, rather than ‘only classes’. A society can have two ‘great classes’, whilst also having several other lesser classes that are not as significant. The fact that Marx thought this is made clear in Capital Volume 3. He explained,

the owners of mere labour-power, the owners of capital and the landowners, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent – in other words wage-labourers, capitalists and landowners – form the three great classes of modern society based on the capitalist mode of production.

It is undeniably in England that this modern society and its economic articulation is most widely and most classically developed. Even here, though, this class articulation does not emerge in pure form. Here, too, middle and transitional levels always conceal the boundaries (although incomparably less so in the countryside than in the towns). We have seen how it is the constant tendency and law of development of the capitalist mode of production to divorce the means of production ever more from labour and to concentrate the fragmented means of production more and more into large groups, i.e. to transform labour into wage-labour and the means of production into capital (Marx 1991, 1025).

Marx distinguished between capitalism in its “pure form”, which has three great classes, and really existing capitalist societies like England, which contain far more classes. This was not a one off occurrence. In the early 1860s he wrote in his economic manuscripts that,

here we need only consider the forms which capital passes through in the various stages of its development. The real conditions within which the actual process of production takes place are therefore not analysed . . . We do not examine the competition of capitals, nor the credit system, nor the actual composition of society, which by no means consists only of two classes, workers and industrial capitalists (MECW 32, 124).

Marx, in other words, distinguished between the model that is constructed to analyse reality and reality itself. This model is a simplification that zooms in on certain key features of reality, whilst at the same time ignoring other aspects. This is a necessary aspect of doing social science because reality is an overwhelmingly complex process that is constantly changing. It is not possible to write about everything at once and no single person can learn everything about the real world. A model is good or useful to the extent that it corresponds to the reality that it is describing and can be used to explain it. Marx called this method of research abstraction (Marx 1990, 90, 102). He altered the categories that he used to understand reality depending upon the level of abstraction that his model was operating at. In Capital Volume 3 he claimed that he is concerned with explaining “the internal organization of the capitalist mode of production, its ideal average, as it were” and so will not discuss the specifics of “the actual movement of competition” in “the world market” (Marx 1991, 969-70. For more information on Marx’s method see Raekstad’s video series on dialectical materialism).

On numerous occasions Marx acknowledged that reality is far more complex than the simple two or three great class model he constructed to analyse capitalist society in its pure or average form. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels mentioned “the lower middle classes, small workshop proprietors, merchants and rentiers, tradesmen and yeoman farmers of the present” (Marx and Engels 1996, 8). They later referred to “the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant” in the present tense (ibid, 10). Marx and Engels predicted that, over time, an increasingly large percentage of these classes would be compelled by economic forces to become proletarians. This prediction is not the same thing as claiming that these classes do not exist within actual capitalist societies. They, in addition to this, claimed that,

in countries where modern civilization has developed, a new petty-bourgeoisie has formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and always renewing itself as a complement to bourgeois society, but whose members are continually being dumped into the proletariat as a result of competition, who themselves – as modern industry develops – see the time approaching when they will disappear as an independent part of modern society and will be replaced (ibid, 22).

Even decades later Marx and Engels did not think that the complete proletarianisation of the labour force had occurred. In Capital Volume One Marx described capitalist society as it existed in England during the 1860s. As part of this he noted the on-going existence of domestic wage labourers who own their own means of production, such as a sewing machine, and are employed by a capitalist who provides them with the necessary raw materials (Marx 1990, 599-604). He also claimed that, according to the 1861 census, there were more servants in England and Wales than those employed in textile factories and mines put together. These servants, who were largely women, were technically paid a wage but this was paid directly to them by those who hired their services. They were therefore distinct from wage labourers who were hired by a capitalist as part of a profit generating business (ibid, 574-75). In 1870 Engels wrote that the urban proletariat “is still far from being the majority of the German people” and exists alongside “the petty bourgeois, the lumpenproletariat of the cities, the small peasants and the agricultural labourers” who belong to “the agricultural proletariat” (MECW 21, 98, 100).

Marx and Engels never provide a systematic definition of the petty-bourgeoisie. The petty-bourgeoisie are sometimes referred to as “the small trading class” (MECW 14, 145). It appears to consist of small merchants, shopkeepers, master artisans, and self-employed artisans. These self-employed artisans own their own means of production and use them to produce commodities or services that they sell on the market. They do not employ anyone else as a wage labourer (MECW 6, 79-80, 343; MECW 26, 500; MECW 34, 470-71). In Capital Volume 3 Marx defined “small peasant and petty-bourgeois production” as “all forms in which the producer still appears as the owner of his means of production. In the developed capitalist mode of production, the worker is not the owner of his conditions of production, the farm that he cultivates, the raw material he works up, etc” (Marx 1991, 731). In his economic manuscripts from the 1860s Marx described such independent peasant farmers and handicraftsmen as engaging in a pre-capitalist form of production that is mediated through capitalist social relations and thereby altered by them. The result is that self-employed producers are metaphorically cut or split into two: they live as a capitalist who employs themselves as a wage labourer (MECW 34, 141-42). This analysis is clearly borrowed from Adam Smith.

Marx thought that this kind of mediation between different relations of production occured when “a determinate mode of production predominates, although all relations of production have not yet been subjected to it” (ibid, 141. See also ibid, 428). He appears to have had the same view of chattel slavery occurring under really existing capitalist societies, such as the United States. In the Grundrisse Marx wrote that “slavery is possible at individual points within the bourgeois system of production . . . because it does not exist at other points; and appears as an anomaly opposite the bourgeois system itself” (Marx 1993, 464). This point is repeated later in the manuscripts. He noted that, “the fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour” (ibid, 513. See also Marx 1990, 345).

The second clarification is that Marx and Engels did not think that only industrial propertyless wage labourers are proletarians. Engels is very clear that the proletariat also includes propertyless agricultural wage labourers. In February 1845 Engels claimed that in Germany,

Our proletariat is numerous and must be so, as we must realise from the most superficial examination of our social situation. It is in the nature of things that there should be a numerous proletariat in the industrial districts. Industry cannot exist without a large number of workers who are wholly at its disposal, work exclusively for it and renounce every other way of making a living. Under conditions of competition, industrial employment makes any other employment impossible. For this reason we find in all industrial districts a proletariat too numerous and too obvious for its existence to be denied.— But in the agricultural districts, on the other hand, many people assert, no proletariat exists. But how is this possible? In areas where big landownership prevails such a proletariat is necessary; the big farms need farm-hands and servant girls and cannot exist without proletarians. In areas where the land has been parcelled out the rise of a propertyless class cannot be avoided either; the estates are divided up to a certain point, then the division comes to an end; and as then only one member of the family can take over the farm the others must, of course, become proletarians, propertyless workers. This dividing up usually proceeds until the farm becomes too small to feed a family and so a class of people comes into existence which, like the small middle class in the towns, is in transition from the possessing to the non-possessing class, and which is prevented by its property from taking up any other occupation, and yet cannot live on it. In this class, too, great poverty prevails (MECW 4, 256-57).

Engels made the same point in The Condition of the Working Class in England, which featured an entire chapter on what he called “the agricultural proletariat” (Engels 1993, 267-69). He explained that,

The first proletarians were connected with manufacture, were engendered by it, and accordingly, those employed in manufacture, in the working up of raw materials, will first claim our attention. The production of raw materials and of fuel for manufacture attained importance only in consequence of the industrial change, and engendered a new proletariat, the coal and metal miners. Then, in the third place, manufacture influenced agriculture, and in the fourth, the condition of Ireland; and the fractions of the proletariat belonging to each, will find their place accordingly (Engels 1993, 32).

Marx agreed with Engels on this matter. Sometime between April 1874 and January 1875 he referred to the situation where a peasant proprietor becomes a proletarian. He wrote, “the capitalist tenant farmer has ousted the peasants, so that the actual farmer is as much a proletarian, a wage-labourer, as the urban worker” (MECW 24, 518). Marx and Engels were committed to the view that the industrial proletariat had the greatest revolutionary potential but this did not mean that they were the only members of the proletariat (MECW 5, 73-74; MECW 46, 153-54).

The third clarification is that Marx and Engels did not think that only workers who directly gather or produce a physical thing, like miners and assembly line workers, are proletarians. They were aware that other kinds of propertyless wage labourers exist. Marx emphasised the fact that the combination of large-scale production and the capitalist division of labour results in lots of propertyless wage labourers who play a key role in the production of a specific thing but are not direct producers of it. He wrote,

With the development of the specifically capitalist mode of production, in which many workers cooperate in the production of the same commodity, the direct relations between their labour and the object under production must of course be very diverse. E.g. the assistants in the factory, mentioned earlier, have no direct involvement in the treatment of the raw material. The workers who constitute the overseers of those who are directly concerned with this treatment stand a step further away; the engineer in turn has a different relation and works mainly with his brain alone, etc. But the whole group of these workers, who possess labour capacities of different values, although the total number employed reaches roughly the same level, produce a result which is expressed, from the point of view of the result of the pure labour process, in commodities or in a material product, and all of them together, as a workshop, are the living production machine for these products (MECW 34, 144).

Marx, in addition to this, referred to proletarians who are not involved in the production of physical things. In Capital Volume 2 he wrote that, “there are however particular branches of industry in which the product of the production process is not a new objective product, a commodity. The only one of these that is economically important is the communication industry, both the transport industry proper, for moving commodities and people, and the transmission of mere information – letters, telegrams, etc” (Marx 1992a, 134). He then acknowledged the existence of “workers occupied in the transport industry” (ibid, 135. Also see MECW 34, 145-46). Elsewhere he mentioned numerous kinds of worker who generate profits for capitalists by performing services or creating experiences for paying customers. This included waiters, singers, actors, teachers at private schools, and even clowns (MECW 31, 13, 15, 21-22; MECW 34, 139-40, 143-44, 448).

In these passages Marx emphasised the fact that two people can engage in the same kinds of labour but belong to separate classes due to the different social relations that they perform this labour within. He wrote, “these definitions are therefore not derived from the material characteristics of labour (neither from the nature of its product nor from the particular character of the labour as concrete labour), but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised” (MECW 31, 13). A propertyless tailor who makes suits for a capitalist in a clothes factory is a proletarian. An independent tailor who is directly hired by a customer to make a suit is a self-employed worker. This is true even if the customer who pays for the suit happens to be a capitalist. A person can teach a group of children to read in any society with writing. This teacher only becomes a proletarian when they work “for wages in an institution along with others, using his own knowledge to increase the money of the entrepreneur who owns the knowledge-mongering institution” (Marx 1990, 1044). Such a teacher “works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation” (ibid, 644).

The Spread of Marx and Engels’ Narrow Definition

Marx and Engels’ narrow definition of the proletariat did not immediately become popular. The standard broader conception continued to be widely used. For example, in 1852 Blanqui wrote in a letter that in France there were “thirty-two million proletarians without property, or with very little property, and living only by the product of their hands” (Quoted in Spitzer 1957, 101). One reason why the narrow conception of the proletariat did not become dominant is that Marx and Engels were not influential or widely read until decades later. Marx’s 1847 polemical critique of Proudhon, The Poverty of Philosophy, had a print run of only 800 copies and received very little attention (McLellan 1973, 165-66). Even their 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party had a small readership when it was first released and was largely forgotten until it was republished in 1872 with a new preface. The original 1848 edition was published anonymously and only people familiar with the inner workings of the Communist League knew who had written it (Carver 2015, 67-74; Steenson 1991a, 49, 112-13). Marx and Engels’ narrow definition of the proletariat did not suddenly rise to prominence after the publication of Marx’s magnum opus Capital: A Critique of Political Economy in 1867. This is because Capital was hardly a best seller. The first German edition had a print run of 1,000 copies and did not sell out until 1871. The second 1872 edition had a print run of 3,000 copies and this lasted until 1883 (Steenson 1991a, 52). It is sometimes claimed that Marx became famous in 1871 with the publication of his analysis of the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France, which sold at least several thousand copies in a few months (Heinrich 2019, 333; McLellan 1973, 400; MECW 22, 666). Although it is true that the pamphlet had a much larger readership than Marx’s previous output, it appeared as an official publication of the International Workingmen’s Association and was signed by every member of the General Council, rather than only Marx. The consequence was that people read Marx without knowing that they were reading him (Steenson 1991a, 113; MECW 22, 309, 355).

Marx and Engels became increasingly influential due to key members of emerging socialist movements and parties disseminating their ideas through the press and printing new editions of their old work, including the Communist Manifesto. This first occurred in Germany and Austria during the 1860s. From the 1880s onwards they were well known throughout European socialist movements (Steenson 1991a, 49-52, 115-21, 161, 165-66, 169-70, 220, 224). A key reason for this growth in influence was Engels’ various attempts to popularise his and Marx’s ideas, such as the 1877-1878 Anti-Dühring and 1880 Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. This was followed by other influential summaries, such as Kaul Kautsky’s 1887 Economic Doctrines of Karl Marx (Steenson 1991b, 33-35, 66). This influence culminated in a number of socialist parties adopting Marxist programs, or at least programs influenced by Marxism, during the late 19th century. In 1891 the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) adopted the Erfurt programme, which was primarily written by Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, and August Bebel. All three were associates of Marx and Engels. Kautsky even received feedback on the draft from Engels himself (ibid, 98-99). The programme opened with Marx and Engels’ narrow definition of the proletariat:

The economic development of bourgeois society leads by natural necessity to the downfall of small industry, whose foundation is formed by the worker’s private ownership of his means of production. It separates the worker from his means of production and converts him into a propertyless proletarian, while the means of production become the monopoly of a relatively small number of capitalists and large landowners (SPD 1891, 297).

Prior to the Russian revolution the SPD was the largest socialist political party in the world. In 1890 it had a membership of around 290,000 and had won 1.4 million votes and thirty five mandates in that year’s elections (Steenson 1991a, 72). The growth of social democracy spread Marx and Engels’ conception of the proletariat but it did not result in it being universally adopted by all socialists. On several occasions anarchist socialists continued to use the broad definition of the proletariat as a catch all term for any worker or wage labourer. This went alongside an awareness that the working classes are not a monolith and can be broken down into various subcategories, such as artisan wage labourers, propertyless wage labourers, peasants, skilled, unskilled and so forth. To give a few examples, in 1873 the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin wrote that, “Italy has a huge proletariat, endowed with an extraordinary degree of native intelligence but largely illiterate and wholly destitute. It consists of 2 or 3 million urban factory workers and small artisans, and some 20 million landless peasants” (Bakunin 1990, 7). In 1926 the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad claimed that capitalist society is split into “two very distinct camps . . . the proletariat (in the broadest sense of the word) and the bourgeoisie”. The proletariat so understood included “the urban working class” and “the peasant masses” (Dielo Truda 1926, 195, 199). Other anarchists used the words ‘proletariat’ or ‘working class’ in a narrow sense. In 1938 Rudolf Rocker claimed that during the industrial revolution “a new social class was born, which had no forerunners in history: the modern industrial proletariat”. This class, in contrast to journeymen and master artisans, did not own the “tools of his trade” and “had nothing to dispose of except the labour of their hands” (Rocker 2004, 24-25). Rocker’s narrative is the same as Marx and Engels, which is unsurprising given that he explicitly references both Capital by Marx and The Condition of the Working Class in England by Engels (ibid, 21).

The Proletariat in the 21st Century

This essay has been concerned with explaining the categories that socialists historically developed to understand the economic classes that exist under capitalism. During the nineteenth century three competing conceptions of the proletariat arose. The word was used to refer to either (a) all workers, including the self-employed (b) all wage labourers, or (c) all wage labourers who own no means of production. The last and most narrow conception was advocated by Marx and Engels and was not initially popular or widely used. Today it has become the dominant conception of the proletariat in socialist discourse. The proletariat so understood is only increasing in size. According to  Immanuel Ness “while industrial production contracted in the Global North from 1980 to 2007, production in the South has expanded, and global production as a whole has grown from 1.9 billion to 3.1 billion workers – far more working people than at any time in the history of capitalism” (Ness 2016, 9, 14). It is furthermore the case that Marx and Engels never claimed that the proletariat only consisted of industrial workers. Propertyless wage labourers employed in starbucks or video game development are just as much proletarians as those who work in mines and factories. What makes a person a proletarian is not the kind of labour they engage in, such as digging a ditch or doing a powerpoint presentation, but the social relations that they work within (Raekstad 2022, 216).

An understanding of the proletariat as a really existing class should not be gained purely through an examination of what dead men with large beards wrote about it. It is necessary to not only read old theorists but also test their theories against reality. If a model does not correspond to reality or cannot be used to explain it, then we should create new and better models. Reality is always more complicated than the neat models we construct to understand it. The mistake is to ignore reality because it does not align with our model. Although classes can be clearly distinguished from one another at a societal level, the boundaries between classes become fuzzier the more we zoom in. In the 19th century a person could be self-employed and a wage labourer at the same time. A farmer could be a peasant proprietor for one season and an urban propertyless wage labourer another. A person could spend their youth working in the city for a wage and then retreat to the countryside when their father dies and they inherit a small plot of land. People could, in other words, belong to multiple classes at the same time and move between classes on a regular or permanent basis. Despite this generalisations can of course be made, but they should be made with care and caution.

A reader might suppose that there is a rigid clear distinction between chattel slaves who pick cotton and legally free wage labourers who work in a cotton mill. Doing so would ignore that it was common for slaves to engage in wage labour (Linden 2008, 23). The labour historian Marcel van der Linden provides one extremely interesting example of this. Simon Gray was a slave in the southern United States. He worked as the chief boatman of the Natchez lumber company from 1845 until 1862. His crew was composed of between ten to twenty men. It included both black slaves and white legally free wage labourers. Some of the slaves were owned by the company. Other slaves were hired as wage labourers via their owner. This included Gray himself. He, in addition to this, employed the white workers, lent them money, sometimes paid their wages, and engaged in a wide variety of managerial tasks. Linden describes this as “a slave who functioned as a manager, free wage laborers who were employed by a slave, and other slaves who had to obey an employer who was himself a slave!” (Linden 2008, 26).

It is furthermore the case that early factories in England relied on a form of labour that could be described as state enforced child servitude. The government involuntarily made poor and orphan children the apprentices of factory owners. The factory owner had full legal authority over the child and it was illegal for the child to run away. These children were not owned as property but they were not strictly speaking legally free wage labourers. Due to state violence they did not choose who they worked for or, indeed, if they worked at all. Whilst at work these children would, at least in some workplaces, be beaten by overseers in order to keep them awake and on task during long shifts (Freeman 2018, 24-25). Marx was aware of this and wrote in Capital Volume One that the rise of “factory production” was built on “child-stealing and child-slavery” (Marx 1990, 922).

The distinction between wage labourers who own means of production and propertyless wage labourers was important in the 19th century. Drawing attention to it was necessary when explaining the decline of the hand loom and the rise of the factory in England. But reality was always more complicated than this distinction made it appear. Factory workers could own means of production as well. The German economist August Sartorius von Waltershausen visited the United States in the 1880s. He observed that,

Unlike their European counterparts, American factory workers commonly own their own tools. The system used on the other side of the Atlantic is certainly preferable, for, as Studnitz has noted, it means that American workers choose their tools according to their own needs, while European workers are forced to adapt to the tools they are provided with. Tools often constitute a sizable proportion of a worker’s wealth (Waltershausen 1998, 216. Cited by Linden 2008, 25).

In the modern world it is still common in certain professions for wage labourers to own their own tools, such as mechanics and chefs. Some companies use a bring your own device policy whereby people use their own personal computer and smartphone for work. When Marx was writing self-employed farmers and artisans were being turned into proletarians. Now corporations are attempting to avoid labour laws by transforming proletarians into self employed independent contractors who own their own means of production but have no job security and are not entitled to minimum wage. The sociologist Bartosz Mika has referred to the modern gig economy as the digital putting out system. During industrialisation merchant capitalists provided domestic craftspeople with raw materials. Now platform apps like uber, deliveroo, and taskrabbit provide service workers with access to consumers. Both forms of work are characterised by a decentralised labour force who are paid per task completed, do their work in isolation from other employees, and are dependent upon a central node for work (Mika 2020).

Capitalism has, in addition to this, created numerous other platforms that make it easier to be self-employed, such as social media, ebay, etsy, patreon, and onlyfans. But low wages and rising costs of living result in numerous proletarians turning to these sites not as their main source of income, but as a supplement to the inadequate wages paid to them by the ruling classes. It is furthermore the case that these self-employed workers are a source of revenue for the websites that they use to earn a living, whether this is directly through fees and advertising or indirectly through content production that ensures the website remains alive. On most websites users, whether they be content creators or viewers, are themselves a product whose personal data is sold to advertisers. In Asia some content creators are even being concentrated inside influencer factories, where they livestream in small cubicles for long hours in order to persuade their viewers to make donations and shop in real time. A large portion of the influencer’s income is then split between the streaming platform they use and the company that owns the influencer factory and micromanages their brand and behavior.

When Marx was writing it was generally correct to say that the proletariat sold their labour to the capitalist class who privately owned the means of production. Today a significant segment of propertyless wage labourers work for the state. Some of these professions can be accurately described as a person working for a state capitalist, such as a for profit energy or transportation company that the state owns the majority of shares in. In 1878 Engels correctly argued that,

state-ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces . . . The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers—proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with (MECW 25, 266).

This analysis does not apply to sectors that do not produce a profit and are maintained by a government allocated budget, in particular state run education, welfare, and healthcare systems.

The division of labour has also become more complex under capitalism. In Capital Volume 1 Marx pointed out that many capitalists hand “over the work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workers and groups of workers to a special kind of wage-labourer. An industrial army of workers under the command of a capitalist requires, like a real army, officers (managers) and N.C.O.s (foremen, overseers), who command during the labour process in the name of capital. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function” (Marx 1990, 450). The number of managers, planners, and supervisors, who are wage labourers that have the power to direct and control the labour process, has significantly increased since the 1860s. This has led several modern socialists, such as Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, to view this kind of wage labourer as belonging to a distinct category called the co-coordinator class (Albert and Hahnel 1981, 84, 140-41). They are not capitalists but exercise authority over the proletariat. Tom Wetzel calls this the bureaucratic control class (Wetzel 2022, 11-12). On this model class is determined not only by whether or not a person owns the means of production. It is also determined by their role in the labour process and their powers of decision-making.

Conclusion

An analysis of class in the 21st century cannot simply repeat the analysis from the 19th as if the world is exactly the same. We have to develop our own ideas in response to the economic realities that confront us. Although much has changed since the 19th century, the fundamental structure of capitalist society has not. Capitalism is still a class society based on a division between capitalists and wage labourers, rulers and ruled, exploiters and the exploited. In the late 19th century anarchist socialist workers argued that the proletariat should abolish itself by overthrowing the ruling classes, expropriating their private property, and smashing the state. On the ruins of the old world the proletariat, alongside all other kinds of worker, would build a stateless, classless, and moneyless society in which the means of production and land are owned in common and society is self-managed via voluntary workplace and community associations. In such a society people would no longer be capitalists or proletarians. They would be human beings who engaged in acts of production and consumption. Workers called this society the free association of free producers (Baker 2023, 28, 79-91). The same language was used by Marx and Engels. They wrote in 1844 that “the proletariat . . . is victorious only by abolishing itself” (MECW 4, 36). Although they disagreed with anarchists on revolutionary strategy, they shared a vision of a future society in which, to quote Engels in 1884, production is organised via the “free and equal association of the producers” (MECW 26, 272). Over a century later it remains the case that universal human emancipation requires the self-abolition of the proletariat.

In order to achieve this goal the proletariat needs to unite as a class, form their own organisations, and engage in direct action. One of the most effective kinds of direct action that workers can engage in is strikes. This is because capitalism requires the labour of workers. If nobody works, then business comes to a halt and capitalists cannot earn a profit. This imposes external pressure onto capitalists and gives them a powerful incentive to give into the demands of workers. The essential role of workers in production is both a source of oppression and their collective power to change the world. This is not to say that workplace strikes are the only form of direct action that workers should engage in or that workers should only organise at the point of production. Other forms of direct action and organising are necessary, such as rent strikes, civil disobedience, demonstrations, reading groups, university occupations, and so forth. Social change and the development of an effective mass movement requires both workplace and community organising. To give one example, the emancipation of women can be furthered by the formation of women only consciousness raising groups, cis-men doing their share of house work, reclaim the night marches, networks that help people get illegal abortions, and workplace organising against sexual harassment. The point is only that the ability to engage in class struggle via the collective withdrawal of labour is an important power that the proletariat has due to their location within the structure of capitalist society. This power was used by workers in the past to win better wages, safer working conditions, and shorter working hours. We can do the same and engage in collective direct action in order to improve our lives in the short term and build towards a truly free society in the long term.

Capitalism and the state are of course not the only oppressive structures. We live in a society which is patriarchal, racist, queerphobic and ableist. As a result of this, the working class is not an amorphous blob. It is divided along lines of gender, race, sexuality, and disability. These divisions are not merely the product of the ruling class dividing the working class. They are actively perpetuated by the working class themselves through the process of different working class people oppressing one another, such as working class men abusing working class women or white workers viewing black workers as inferior. Workers cannot unite within an organisation, let alone as a class, if one group of workers is being oppressed by another group of workers. Such behavior leads to workers being hurt and excluded within the very organisations that claim to fight for their emancipation. If we want to create a society in which everyone is free, then we must build organisations that struggle against all forms of oppression simultaneously. We must not tolerate any kind of oppressive behaviour and, at the same time, help other workers unlearn their socialisation into oppressive structures such that they become people who are capable of, and driven to, horizontally associate with others in all aspects of their life. The proletariat must unite as a class, but they must form a unity that is enriched by all the differences within it. We must engage in intersectional class struggle.

One serious barrier to the formation of a mass working class movement is that a large number of wage labourers do not regard themselves as belonging to the same class. Some wage labourers, for example, believe that capitalism is a meritocracy and worship CEOs as heroes and innovators. They have internalised the idea that if they have the right grind set and go monk mode then they too can become a successful entrepreneur. They are not a proletarian, but a capitalist in waiting who happens to be temporarily working for someone else. Workers must counteract these patterns of thinking by deliberately choosing to spread class-consciousness through words and actions. The making of the first self-described modern proletariat in 1830s France was not driven purely by impersonal economic transformations to society. A crucial factor was workers themselves, who had previously been divided into mutually hostile professions and organisations, coming to think of themselves as belonging to a distinct class with shared class interests. The 19th century proletariat was made by both the structure of capitalist society and workers themselves. In 1847 Marx wrote that,

Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have pointed out only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests (MECW 6, 211).

The proletariat of the 21st century must do the same. We have to transform from being just a class in itself and become a class for itself.

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Waltershausen, August Sartorius von. 1998. The Workers’ Movement in the United States, 1879-1885. Edited by David Montgomery and Marcel van der Linden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Albert, Michael, and Robin Hahnel. 1981. Marxism and Socialist Theory. South End Press.

Allen, Robert C. 2004a. “Agriculture During the Industrial Revolution 1700-1850.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain Volume 1: Industrialisation 1700-1860, edited by Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, 96–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2004b. “Britain’s Economic Ascendancy in a European Context.” In Exceptionalism and Industrialisation: Britain and Its European Rivals, 1688-1815, edited by Leandro Prados de la Escosura, 15–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Aminzade, Ronald. 1981. Class, Politics, and Early Industrial Capitalism: A Study of Mid-Nineteenth-Century Toulouse, France. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Ansart, Pierre. 2023. Proudhon’s Sociology. Chico, CA: AK Press.

Baker, Zoe. 2023. Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States. Chico, CA: AK Press.

Birchall, Ian. 2016. The Spectre of Babeuf. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Briggs, Asa. 1967. “The Language of ‘Class’ in Early Nineteenth-Century England.” In Essays in Labour History, edited by Asa Briggs and John Saville, 43–73. London: Macmillan & Co Ltd.

Carver, Terrell. 2015. “The Manifesto in Marx’s and Engels’s Lifetimes.” In The Cambridge Companion to The Communist Manifesto, edited by Terrell Carver and James Farr, 67–83. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2020. The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels. Palgrave Macmillan.

Clarkson, L. A. 1985. Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of Industrialization? Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press Ltd.

Cole, G.D.H. 1967. A History of Socialist Thought Volume 1: The Forerunners 1789-1850. London: Macmillan Press Ltd.

Cornell, Tim J. 1995. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (C1000-264bc). London: Routledge.

Draper, Hal. 1978. Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume 2: The Politics of Social Classes. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Fitton, R. S., and A. P. Wadsworth. 1958. The Strutts and the Arkwrights 1758-1830: A Study of the Early Factory System. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Freeman, Joshua B. 2018. Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World. W. W. Norton & Company.

Gargola, Daniel J. 1989. “Aulus Gellius and the Property Qualifications of the Proletarii and the Capite Censi.” Classical Philology 84 (3): 231–34.

Glare, P. G. W, ed. 2012. Oxford Latin Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Heinrich, Michael. 2004. An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press.

———. 2019. Karl Marx and the Birth of Modern Society – The Life of Marx and the Development of His Work Volume 1: 1818–1841. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Hudson, Pat. 2004. “Industrial Organisation and Structure.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain Volume 1: Industrialisation 1700-1860, edited by Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, 28–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

James, Michael. 1977. “Pierre-Louis Roederer, Jean-Baptiste Say, and the Concept of Industrie.” History of Political Economy 9 (4): 455–75.

Jones, Gareth Stedman. 2016. Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Lovell, David. 1988. Marx’s Proletariat: The Making of a Myth. London: Routledge.

McLellan, David. 1973. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd.

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Mika, Bartosz. 2020. “Digital ‘Putting-out System’ – an Old New Method of Work in Platform Economy.” Polish Sociological Review 211 (3): 265–80.

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Wetzel, Tom. 2022. Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st Century. Chico, CA: AK Press.

Wittke, Carl. 1950. The Utopian Communist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling Nineteenth-Century Reformer. Louisiana State University Press.

Wrigley, E. A. 2004. “British Population During the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century, 1680-1840.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain Volume 1: Industrialisation 1700-1860, edited by Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, 57–95. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[1] According to Draper, Marx thinks that only propertyless wage labourers who produce surplus value and thereby generate profits for a capitalist are proletarians (Draper 1978, 34). Propertyless wage labourers that do not produce surplus value are therefore not proletarians, such as teachers employed in state funded schools or road construction workers hired directly by the state. The best evidence I have found to support this view is a single sentence in the Communist Manifesto which claims “the proletariat” are “the class of modern workers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital” (Marx and Engels 1996, 7). For Marx only productive labour, in the sense of labour that produces surplus value, increases capital (Marx 1990, 644). This sentence in the Communist Manifesto could be interpreted as a generalisation, rather than an attempt to establish the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for being a proletarian. The pamphlet is after all full of generalisations. Unfortunately Marx’s other statements on the subject are vague and could be interpreted as either saying that the proletariat only includes productive workers or that all propertyless wage labourers who sell their labour power to an employer (rather than selling a labour service directly to a customer) are proletarians irrespective of whether or not they produce surplus value (MECW 34, 444-45). In Capital Volume 3 Marx claims that “commercial wage-labourers employed by the merchant capitalist . . . do not directly produce surplus-value ” but do ultimately enable their employer to generate a profit. In a footnote Engels refers to such workers as “the commercial proletariat” (Marx 1991, 406-407, 414-15). In the absence of definitive evidence I am agnostic on the matter, but I could have missed an important source or not seen an important detail when reading.

It might be inferred from examples like this that although one should not trust what an academic says about a topic outside of their field, they should be deferred to when discussing their area of expertise. This rule is motivated by a true claim: someone who has read hundreds of books about a topic, such as the history of socialism, will know more about it than someone who has never read anything on the subject. Yet this general rule does not mean that academics should be automatically believed. One of the main features of any academic discipline is academics constantly disagreeing and arguing with one another. What one academic regards as obviously correct, another believes is outdated and wrong. This especially happens over time as new books and journal articles appear that overturn the previous academic consensus or dominant position. It is furthermore the case that the truth does not care about academic credentials. The beliefs that a person with a PhD expresses are only as good as their arguments, evidence, interpretation of said evidence, citations, sources, and so on.

I am a historian of political thought. When reading about history I often discover that extremely well educated people who teach at prestigious universities have made basic factual errors in their books. In this discipline it is normal for specialists to reasonably disagree with one another about a wide variety of topics, such as what a source is really saying, if an eye witness is reliable or not, or which causal factor is most important. The errors I find are not matters of interpretation and debate. They are simply mistakes. In this essay I will go through a number of examples from famous authors.

Orlando Figes earned his PhD from the University of Cambridge and was Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His book A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 is described as a masterpiece or magnum opus by the glowing reviews from journalists that appear in its first two pages. In the book Figes asserts that Marx learned Russian in order to read the novel What Is To Be Done? by Nikolay Chernyshevsky (Figes 1997, 130). Of the five sources that Figes cites for this section of the book, I was only able to find four of them (Figes 1997, 831n12). These four sources do not say anything about why Marx learned Russian in the referenced page numbers. One of the cited books claims elsewhere that Marx learned Russian and admired Chernyshevsky but does not connect the two facts together (Szamuely 1974, 371).

I have been unable to find a single primary or secondary source which supports Figes’ assertion. The Marx biographer David McLellan claims that, “a study of the evolution of agriculture in Russia was intended to illuminate Marx’s ideas on ground-rent in Volume Three of Capital in the same way as English industrial development provided the practical examples to the ideas expounded in Volume One. Marx had learnt Russian specifically to be able to study the original sources” (McLellan 1973, 422). McLellan’s narrative is supported by the primary sources. Marx wrote in an 1877 letter that, “in order to reach an informed judgment of the economic development of contemporary Russia, I learned Russian and then spent several long years studying official publications and others with a bearing on this subject” (MECW 24, 199). He appears to have started learning Russian in 1869. On 30 October of that year Jenny, who was Marx’s daughter, wrote a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann in which she reported that Marx, “sends you his kind regards, and hopes you will excuse his [not] writing to you, as at the present moment he is very busy reading a book (which has just appeared in the Russian language, and the reading of which gives him no small amount of trouble) on the condition of the Russian peasantry” (MECW 43, 545. See also ibid 551).

The book that Marx was reading was not a novel. It was N. Flerovsky’s The Condition of the Working Class in Russia (MECW 43, 360, 630n443). Marx informed Engels in a 23 October letter that, “I have been sent from St Petersburg a thick 500-page Flerovsky volume on the condition of the Russian peasants and workers. Unfortunately in Russian” (MECW 43, 362). A month later, on November 29, Marx told Kugelmann that in order to read the book he was having “to grind at Russian” (MECW 43, 389-90). Marx’s progress at reading this book was surprisingly fast given that he had only just started learning the language. In early February 1870 he told Engels that “I have read the first 150 pages of Flerovsky’s book” (MECW 43, 423). After roughly a year of reading Russian Marx was much more confident in his powers. On 21 January 1871 he told Sigfrid Meyer in a letter that,

I don’t know whether I told you that since the beginning of 1870 I have been having to teach myself Russian, which I now read fairly fluently. This came about after I had been sent Flerovsky’s very important work on The Condition of the Working Class (Especially the Peasants) in Russia from St Petersburg; I also wanted to familiarise myself with the (excellent) economic works of Chernyshevsky (who was rewarded by being sentenced to the Siberian mines for the past seven years). The result was worth the effort that a man of my age must make to master a language differing so greatly from the classical, Germanic, and Romance languages (MECW 44, 105).

In this passage Marx is very explicit that he read the “economic works of Chernyshevsky”, rather than his novel. A few years later Marx recommended Chernyshevsky’s Outlines of Political Economy According to Mill in the 1873 afterword to the 2nd German edition of Capital Volume 1 (Marx 1990, 98).

There is some indirect evidence that Marx read Chernyshevsky’s novel but this does not appear until several years after he first learned Russian. In December 1872 he considered writing an overview of Chernyshevsky’s life and thought but ended up abandoning this project (MECW 44, 457). A month later he wrote to Nikolai Danielson, who was his main provider of Russian books, “as to Chernyshevsky, it entirely depends on you whether I confine myself wholly to his scientific work, or touch on his other activities as well. In the second volume of my book he will, of course, only appear as an economist. I am familiar with a major part of his writings” (MECW 44, 469). Marx does not specify if this included fiction. I searched through every volume of the Marx and Engels collected works from 1869 onwards and was only able to find one occasion where Marx made a reference to Chernyshevsky’s novel. In July 1878 Marx wrote in a letter, “what is to be done?, as the Russians say” (MECW 45, 312). This is of course not definitive proof that Marx actually read the novel since it is possible that he heard or read this phrase being used by Russians and decided to copy it. For example, in 1875 Engels responded to a Russian revolutionary who used the phrase (MECW 24, 35). Even if it is assumed that this shows that Marx read the novel, it does not support Figes’ assertion since at this point in time Marx’s Russian was very proficient. All other usages of the phrase that appear are clearly not references to the book, such as when Engels told Marx “you or your wife can of course decide what is to be done with the money” (MECW 46, 104).

Given the above evidence, it is clear that Marx learned Russian in order to study the country’s economics. Figes made an assertion about why Marx chose to learn Russian but did not bother to look through the indexes of the Marx and Engels collected works in order to verify this information. If he had done so, he would have avoided making a mistake. This kind of error does not appear to be a rare occurrence for Figes. In 2012 the academics Peter Reddaway and Stephen F. Cohen wrote an article for The Nation in which they claim that Figes’ book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia had its translation into Russian cancelled by the publishers. This occurred after researchers at the Memorial Society, which is a human rights organisation dedicated to the victims of Stalin, were hired to help with the translation but ended up discovering a huge number of minor and major factual errors in Figes’ work. The chief researcher at Memorial is reported to have said “I wept as I read it and tried to make corrections…. I gave only a few examples, but the entire text is like this…. It’s even difficult to choose examples; they appear throughout”.

Jonathan Sperber is professor emeritus at the University of Missouri. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago and has written 10 books, most of which are about the social and political history of 19th century Europe. In 2013 he published Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life. The book received rave reviews from the mainstream press and was even a finalist for the Pulitzer prize for biography. The journalist Jonathan Freedland described it as “meticulously researched” in a review for The New York Times. The book also contains a number of basic factual errors that could have been easily avoided if Sperber had looked things up. In chapter two Sperber asserts that Hegel and Kant “were both lifelong bachelors, married as it were to the ethereal world of philosophy” (Sperber 2013, 49). He provides no source for this claim. The book’s bibliography contains a single book with Kant’s name in the title and this is a book about the history of antisemitism (Sperber 2013, 619). I checked the book just in case and could not find anything about Kant’s personal life (Rose 1990). Sperber’s endnotes for chapter two references two books on Hegel and his followers (Sperber 2013, 570n21, n35). Neither of these books appear to make any claim about whether Hegel was married or not (Toews 1980; Breckman 1999).

It is common for academics to not provide page references for a fact which is widely known about, such as the fact that WW2 happened or that horses exist. But it is important to provide page references for biographical claims about famous philosophers. This is because, like with any famous person, there are a lot of claims that are repeated about them which are only myth and legend. It is true that Kant was a lifelong bachelor who never married or, as far as we know, had sex (Kuehn 2001, 116-18), but the same is not true of Hegel. Hegel, unlike Kant, got laid. Sperber is aware of this since he refers to the claim that Hegel fathered an illegitimate child with a barmaid (Sperber 2013, 49). There are, however, two major problems with Sperber’s description of Hegel’s sex life. First, the woman Hegel had an illegitimate child with in 1807 was not to my knowledge a barmaid. She was Christiana Charlotte Johanna Burkhardt, his landlady and housekeeper (Pinkard 2000, 192). Second, Hegel married Marie von Tucher in September 1811 (Pinkard 2000, 301). The fact Hegel married is also mentioned in the standard introductions to Hegel, such as those by Tom Rockmore, Frederick Beiser, and Stephen Houlgate (Rockmore 1993, 43; Beiser 2005, 15; Houlgate 2005, xiv).

Sperber, to his credit, fixed this error in later printings of the book. But it is not the only factual error that he made. He claims that Marx and Engels “met in person for the first time” in August 1844 whilst Marx was living in Paris (Sperber 2013, 136). This is false. Marx and Engels met in person for the first time in November 1842 whilst Marx was editor of the Rhineland News and lived in Cologne. In 1895 Engels recalled that, “when I dropped in again towards the end of November on my way to England, I ran into Marx there and that was the occasion of our first, distinctly chilly meeting” (MECW 50, 503). Sperber should know about this because he references David McLellan and Francis Wheen’s biographies of Marx several times. Both McLellan and Wheen very clearly mention this fact just before discussing Marx and Engels’ second meeting in Paris (McLellan 1973, 130-31; Wheen 2001, 75).

Although I have cited McLellan’s biography of Marx twice in this essay, that does not mean that it is perfect and free from factual errors. McLellan completed his PhD at Oxford and went onto become the professor of political theory at the University of Kent and then Goldsmith’s college, University of London. He has written several good books about the theory and history of Marx specifically and Marxism in general. He also makes mistakes. McLellan claims that Marx’s school grades were as follows: “Latin and Greek verse were good, his Religion satisfactory, his French and Mathematics weak, and his History (strangely) weakest of all” (McLellan 1973, 10). When I first read this I believed it and assumed it was true because there was no way McLellan would get something so simple wrong. I was amazed that Marx, who would go onto develop one of the most influential theories of history, had done badly in history at school. I thought it said something about how school grades are not destiny and people can grow and improve as they age. I even posted this fact on twitter with a supporting page reference, only to be told by strangers on the internet that I was wrong. I could not believe this and looked up Marx’s school grades for myself only to discover that the strangers on the internet were right.

The certificate that Marx received at the age of 17 upon passing his exams and leaving school claimed that, “he has good aptitudes, and in ancient languages, German, and history showed a very satisfactory diligence, in mathematics satisfactory, and in French only slight diligence” (MECW 1, 643). It reported that his knowledge and performance was best in German, Latin and Ancient Greek. His knowledge in other subjects is described as follows: “in French, his knowledge of grammar is fairly good; with some assistance he reads also more difficult passages and has some facility in oral expression”; “his knowledge of the Christian faith and morals is fairly clear and well grounded; he knows also to some extent the history of the Christian Church”; “he has a good knowledge of mathematics”; “in History and Geography he is in general fairly proficient;” “in physics his knowledge is moderate” (MECW 1, 643-44). From this it is clear that history was not teenage Marx’s worst subject. His performance in history was
comparable to other subjects, such as French, religious studies, and geography. McLellan is also wrong to claim that Marx’s performance in mathematics was worse than his performance in religious studies. He appears to have made this mistake because he repeated what another secondary source said. At the time of writing, the Marx and Engels collected works in English and MEGA2, which is the second version of the Marx and Engels complete works, had yet to be published.

A reader might respond to this essay be describing me as a pedant, to which I would reply that this is true. I would, in addition to this, point out that I am much more pedantic with myself than with anyone else. I have a PhD in the history of anarchism and care about citations so much that even my instagram posts include page references. I drove myself crazy double checking all 1260 endnotes in my book Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States over the course of an entire month. In addition to this, I double checked every single date in the book was correct and that every single quote was typed out correctly. I cannot begin to describe how boring it was to do this. This was the second time I had done this and yet I still found errors that had to be fixed. There is a part of me that wanted to do it a third time just in case. Although I am a perfectionist, this does not mean that my book is perfect. As anyone who has listened to me on a podcast misremember something I read several years ago knows, I also make mistakes. In chapter one of my book I write that “Bakunin first publicly called himself an “anarchist” in August 1867 in ‘The Slavic Question’” (Baker 2023, 30). This is false. The article was published in two parts. The first part appeared on 31 August and the second part on 8 September. The passage in which Bakunin calls himself an anarchist is from the second part published in September. I should have given September as the month because I am referring to when a statement was publicly made, rather than when Bakunin privately wrote it prior to its publication (Eckhardt 2016, 453, n47). I made this mistake because I did not read an endnote carefully enough.

The writing of history is, to a significant extent, built on trust. No historian has the time or energy to thoroughly fact check every single book they read. Nor is total fact checking always possible since often the source for a claim is in an archive in a different country or in a language that one cannot read. As a result, historians generally have to trust that another historian did the work properly and is accurately reporting the information that they found. But I find it hard to trust the work of other historians because I have been hurt too many times. On several occasions I have investigated a claim only to find out that what I thought was a rational conclusion drawn from a serious and thorough evaluating of the evidence, was actually an arbitrary opinion, a pure fabrication, or a misreading of a source. Whenever I discover that another historian has made an error, it plants a seed of doubt in my mind. If Sperber was so wrong about Hegel’s sex life and did such little research into the topic, then how can I trust anything he says about any topic? This is why I love it when historians quote primary sources at length. I no longer need to take their word for it and can instead see and assess the evidence for myself.

Academia is full of what could be called the aesthetics of scholarship. A person writes confidently and cites a large number of sources and so must know what they are talking about. Another person is given a professorship with a ridiculously long title and so is clearly one of the best in their field.  It is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between someone who is an expert and someone who has learned to write like an expert. It can be easy for academics to believe in and internalise these aesthetics to the point that they mistake their opinions for knowledge. They must be right about a topic because they are a big brained person who did well at school, went to an elite university, got a PhD in the field, published articles in top peer-reviewed journals and so on. At this point academic qualifications shift from evidence that a person has seriously studied a topic to what is, for all intents and purposes, an appeal to authority. Such mental narratives ignore that intelligence does not guarantee correctness and often just enables a person to be wrong in a very elaborate manner.

Academics should of course be read if you want to learn about a topic. Researching even a small question can take years of dedicated work and so it is worthwhile to read what the people who have done this work have to say. The acquisition of knowledge is a collective effort and the research of one person is always built on the efforts of a huge number of other people. Life is short. Every decision to devote time towards learning about one topic, takes away time that could have been spent on another topic. It is not possible to become an expert on everything and so we have no choice but to rely on the expertise of others. But academics should also be read critically and skeptically. When reading history I try to apply two general rules. First, if a historian does not have a supporting source, do not automatically believe them or take their word for it. As wikipedia puts it, “citation needed”. Second, even if a historian has a source keep in mind that the source could not be saying any of the points they make or could include information that contradicts them. In other words, just because a sentence ends with a citation does not mean it is true or grounded in any evidence.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Penguin Books.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. 1975. Collected Works, Volume 1. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

———. Collected Works, Volume 24. 1989. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

———. Collected Works, Volume 43. 1988. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

———. Collected Works, Volume 44. 1989. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

———. Collected Works, Volume 45. 1991. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

———. Collected Works, Volume 46. 1992. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

———. Collected Works, Volume 50. 2004. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Secondary Sources

Baker, Zoe. 2023. Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States. Chico, CA: AK Press.

Beiser, Frederick. 2005. Hegel. New York: Routledge.

Breckman, Warren. 1999. Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Houlgate, Stephen. 2005. An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History 2nd Edition. Blackwell Publishing.

Eckhardt, Wolfgang. 2016. The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin VS. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Figes, Orlando. 1997. A People’s Tragedy:  The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924. London: Pimlico.

Kuehn, Manfred. 2001. Kant, A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McLellan, David. 1973.  Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.

Pinkard, Terry. 2000. Hegel, A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rockmore, Tom. 1993.  Before and After Hegel: A Historical Introduction to Hegel’s Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Rose, Paul Lawrence. 1990. German Question/Jewish Question: Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Sperber, Jonathan. 2013. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Szamuely, Tibor. 1974. The Russian Tradition. London: Martin Secker & Warburg.

Toews, John Edward. 1980. Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wheen, Francis. 2001. Karl Marx: A Life. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

2. On page 34 I quote Guillaume as saying “no ‘anarchist program’ has ever been formulated, as far as we know”. This is a translation error made by Marianne Enckell (Enckell 2018, 363n26). In the original French Guillaume writes “aucun programme anarchique, n’a jamais été formulé, à notre connaissance” (Jura Federation 1876, 1) The correct translation is therefore “no ‘anarchic program’ . . .” (Eckhardt 2016, 376).   

3. On page 192 I write “on December 8, the soldier Agesilao Milano stabbed and wounded King Ferdinand II of Naples with a bayonet”. It should read: on December 8, 1856 (Pernicone and Ottanelli 2018, 13).

Bibliography

Baker, Zoe. 2023. Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States. Chico, CA: AK Press.

Eckhardt, Wolfgang. 2016. The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Enckell, Marianne. 2018. “Bakunin and the Jura Federation.” In Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth: The First International in Global Perspective, edited by Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz, and Jeanne Moisand, 355–65. Leiden, NL: Brill.

Jura Federation. 1876. Bulletin de la Féderation Jurassienne, N° 19 – 7 Mai.

Pernicone, Nunzio, and Fraser M. Ottanelli. 2018. Assassins against the Old Order: Italian Anarchist Violence in Fin de Siècle Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

When reading history books it is easy to assume that any sentence with an endnote must be true. The thoughts that an author just happened to come up with can take on the appearance of objective neutral fact when they are printed on a page. The process of becoming a historian is, to a significant extent, about confronting the extent to which our knowledge of the past is built on shaky foundations: primary sources which contradict one another, are open to numerous interpretations, can be easily misunderstood, contain ambiguities, reflect a biased viewpoint and so on. Things only get harder when one lacks access to the relevant primary sources and is instead forced to rely on the conflicting opinions of other historians.

To illustrate this point I am going to examine a single topic. In 1927 a specific anarchist organization called the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) was founded. I briefly discuss this organization in my forthcoming book Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States. A discerning reader might wonder why I do not provide a membership figure for the FAI. The reason is that every source I have read gives a different number and at the time of writing I was yet to figure out the correct answer. In this essay I am going to go through all the evidence I am familiar with and thereby establish why the topic is so complicated. In so doing I aim to demonstrate that writing history books is a total nightmare.

Let us begin! George Woodcock claims that the FAI had 30,000 members in 1936 and 150,000 in 1938 (Woodcock 1986, 327). Woodcock is generally unreliable and often wrong. Peter Marshall, who is generally better than Woodcock but still makes errors, asserts that the FAI never had more than 30,000 members (Marshall 2008, 458). David Miller claims that in the early 1930s the FAI had “some 10,000” members (Miller 1984, 137). I have only cited three authors and already there are three different positions. It is, in addition to this, difficult to compare the numbers because the size of any organization varies over time.

Other authors note that it is difficult to establish how many people were in the FAI because it was a secret organization. Such claims typically go alongside very different estimates of how large the FAI was. Gerald Brenan writes that “as the F.A.I. was a secret organization, no figures of its strength have been published. One may assume however that from 1934 to 1936 its membership lay round about 10,000” (Brenan 2014, 298n22). Murray Bookchin provides a much larger membership figure. He notes that, “owing to the FAI’s passion for secrecy, we know very little about its membership figures. Judging by data published by Diego Abad de Santillián, a leading faista, the figure on the eve of the Civil War may have been close to 39,000” (Bookchin 1998, 198). Hugh Thomas, in comparison, writes that in 1930 the FAI’s “organization and numbers were unknown” and provides no membership figure for this period (Thomas 1977, 68-69). Later in the book Thomas asserts that by 1937 “the socialist party now numbered only 160,000, the FAI much the same number” (Thomas 1977, 523). Chris Ealham, a specialist in the history of anarchism in Spain, claims that the FAI only had around 2,000 members in 1931 (Ealham 2010, 100).

Different numbers are provided by Stuart Christie. He claims that between 1927 and 1930, which was during the CNT’s period of illegality under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, “it is unlikely” that FAI “national membership exceeded 1,000” (Christie 2008, 46). After the inauguration of the Republic and the legalization of the CNT, the size of the FAI increased to a pre-1937 height of an estimated 5,500 members in late 1933 (Christie 2008, 147-48). The size of the FAI subsequently decreased to an estimated 3,500 in 1936 (Christie 2008, 173). Juan Gomez Casas provides higher figures. He claims that the FAI had around 10,000 members in 1933 (Casas 1986, 133). By February 1936 “the F.A.I. had 496 groups in all of Spain . . . If one estimates ten members per group, which was high in many instances, the F.A.I. had fewer than 5,000 members” (Casas 1986, 178). Later in his book Casas writes that “a general count of organized groups at the February 1937 plenum tallied 5000 F.A.I . members; the figure could be 7000 if we add groups not counted at the plenum for various reasons” (Casas 1986, 217-18).

It is difficult to evaluate which membership figures are true. This is because in most instances the secondary sources do not explain how they arrived at the number they give. Authors usually just assert a number and do not back it up with a source I can easily track down. Brenan tells us that “one may assume” that the FAI had 10,000 members between 1934 and 1936, but I have no idea why we should make this assumption. Bookchin refers to data published by the FAI member Santillián but I have been unable to find this myself. On other occasions the secondary source does provide a clear citation but I cannot find a copy of the book. For example, Ealham’s position that the FAI had only 2,000 members in 1931 cites Josep Maria Huertas Claveria’s Workers in Catalonia but there is no pdf of it online. Even I am not going to buy a book in a language I cannot read in order to find one citation.

Ealham’s figure might be derived from an article by the famous Spanish anarchist Durruti, who was not a member of the FAI but knew people who were and often spoke in the name of the FAI during debates within the CNT (Christie 2008, vii; Garner 2016, 344-45n3). In the 1931 article Durruti wrote that, “we of the FAI have only 2000 members enrolled in the Confederation” (Quoted in Christie 2008, 113). This could be where Ealham gets his figure from but it could also not be. I do not actually know and am just making an educated guess.  

Woodcock and Marshall both give the number of 30,000 members but neither provide a citation for this. This number probably comes from José Peirats, who was an important member of the CNT and briefly secretary of the Barcelona Federation of the FAI. In Volume 2 of The CNT in the Spanish Revolution he wrote that, “although the so-called ‘specific organization’ held great sway over the CNT and its committees, for nearly every one of the FAI’s members belonged to the Confederation, its numbers were quite limited by comparison with the magnitude of the CNT. The size of the FAI prior to the army revolt [of 1936] may be reckoned at around 30,000” (Peirats 2005, 203). Although Peirats was a participant in the CNT and the FAI, I should not assume that the number he provides is correct. This is because Peirats is writing a history book in the early 1950s decades after the events he is describing. He may be misremembering how large the FAI was or repeating information he was told by other people that is, without Peirats realizing, inaccurate. Peirats does not explain where this figure comes from. It appears to be an educated guess given his use of the expression “may be reckoned at around.”

In order to properly evaluate the number provided by Peirats I need to compare his account with the numbers provided by other members of the FAI. Unfortunately the vast majority of primary sources written by anarchists in Spain have not been translated into English. As a result I am forced to rely on tiny fragments of information quoted in secondary sources. This is often frustrating because secondary sources do not always provide the information I need in order to interpret the claims made by the primary source. For example, Ealham cites a letter where Peirats claims that at its high point the FAI had no more than 30,000 members in Spain, with an estimated 3,750 in Barcelona (Ealham 2015, 74-5). In an endnote Ealham adds the detail that Fidel Miró, another member of the FAI, claimed that there were only around 300 members in Barcelona (Ealham 2015, 241n21). Ealham does not specify which period Miró is talking about and thereby prevents me from being able to compare the figures. In order to solve this puzzle I had to look for Miró name in the indexes of various books until I discovered that Christie discusses the same passage by Miró. Christie writes, “Miró claims that although no one knows for certain the total number of FAI affiliates in Barcelona, generally considered to be the heart of the specific organization, ‘at no time, prior to July 1936, was it in excess of 300’” (Christie 2008, 46).

The best primary source for the membership of the FAI prior to the civil war is the organization’s October 1933 National Plenum. I lack access to the complete minutes of this plenum and have to instead rely on two secondary sources. These secondary sources interpret the same numbers in fundamentally different ways. According to Christie, the 1933 plenum was attended by 21 delegates representing 569 groups and 4,839 members. Groups from Levante and Asturias were unable to send delegates to the plenum and instead forwarded letters of support. If these groups are included in the total membership of the FAI then the federation was composed of 632 groups and 5,334 members (Christie 2008, 147-48, 148n2). Casas gives a different account of the same event. He claims that “twenty-two delegates attended the Peninsular plenum in Madrid in late October 1933, representing 569 groups, with 4,839 members, and they received letters of affiliation from 632 groups, with 5,334 members: a total of 10,173 members – almost the same count as in 1931 and 1932” (Casas 1986, 133). 

There is, in short, a disagreement about whether the figure of 632 groups and 5,334 members refers to the total membership of the FAI or just the FAI groups who sent letters of support to the plenum. Casas quotes the minutes of the plenum at length but does not quote the part about the letters of support that were sent in. Given this, I have to make a number of educated inferences from the evidence that is available. First, when Casas claimed that the plenum was attended by 22 delegates this was a typo.  His own source refers to 21 delegates (Casas 1986, 138). Second, it is very unlikely that over half of the organization did not send a delegate to the plenum. The minutes list the number of groups per region. The largest was in Catalonia where there were 206 groups. This should be the largest number of FAI groups in a region since it is where the CNT was largest in Spain and basically every member of the FAI was also a member of the CNT. The second largest region for FAI groups was Andalusia with 119 groups. Almost every other region had less than 50 groups, with some as low as just 10 (Casas 1986, 138). On the basis of this I have concluded that Christie’s account is probably correct.

The majority of authors I have read claim that the FAI grew in size during the Spanish revolution and civil war. It is nonetheless not clear how large the FAI became. The secretary of the FAI Peninsular Committee announced in 1937 that the FAI had 160,000 members (Christie 2008, 218). Alejandro Gilabert, who was secretary of the Barcelona Federation of the FAI, claimed in an August 1937 article for Solidaridad Obrera that the FAI had “30,000 members in Barcelona alone” (Quoted in Christie 2008, 219). These numbers should not be automatically trusted. They could be inflating membership figures in order to make the FAI appear more important than they actually were and persuade new people to join. This seems to be the case given that, as was previously mentioned, Casas refers to a February 1937 plenum of the FAI that did “a general count of organized groups” and listed only 5000 members (Casas 1986, 217-218). Even if membership figures dramatically increased between February and August it is unlikely that they increased that much. But I could be wrong about this. I am just making an educated guess.

Having gone through the evidence I can establish a number of conclusions. First, the size of the FAI is difficult to establish due to it being a secret organization. Second, the FAI had at least a few thousand members during the early to mid 1930s. Third, the size of the FAI increased during the Spanish civil war. Establishing these minor conclusions took a huge amount of work and lots of time looking through the indexes of history books. I cite eleven books in this essay but read far more that mentioned the FAI several times but never specified how large the organization was. Despite all this work, my knowledge of the past is extremely limited. I am largely relying on secondary sources citing the minutes of plenums that I did not attend and which I have not read in an archive. I am trusting that Christie and Casas accurately repeat what the original primary sources claim and that the people who wrote the primary sources were providing correct information.

It should also be kept in mind that I could have missed crucial information in the books that I do cite. I carefully looked through the indexes and relevant chapters but did not re-read multiple books from start to finish in order to answer my question. Some days when working on this essay I had bad sleep or was feeling stressed out and this affected my ability to process the information I was reading. I try to counter-act this issue by double checking all my page references and claims before I release anything. The problem I have is that when I do this I am not always operating at peak performance. If I had the time and energy I would triple check my double checking. This is of course an infinite regress. I can always keep fact checking my fact checking. At some point I have to accept that what I have written is as good as I can realistically make it.

When reading history books it can be easy to forget that they are written by flawed imperfect people trying their best to understand and write about very complex topics. I could have read Brenan’s figure of 10,000 members first and then repeated it as fact without realizing how controversial this number is. During the course of writing my book, I routinely thought I understood a topic given what I had read. I then researched more or read new research on the topic and realized that I had been wrong or that the topic was far more complex than I had initially thought. The consequence of these experiences is that I am now permanently paranoid that I might be wrong about something because I stopped digging for information.

This paranoia goes alongside a constant frustration at my inability to work as much as I would like. I read very slowly due to dyslexia and can only read 1 to 2 hours a day without destroying myself. I have a vast number of topics I need to research and have to be very careful about how I use my time. I can only do so much work per day before my brain loses the capacity to read. The consequence of this is that I often have to stop myself from falling too deep down a research rabbit hole. I want to obsessively read about how many members the FAI had, but if I do that I will not be researching other topics, including ones that are much more important and complicated. At some point I have to tell myself that I tried my best to establish the answer and need to move on to other work. If I did not do this I would never finish writing anything. Ultimately everything I release to the public is work-in-progress that I decided was good enough and, as far as I could tell at the time, factually correct.

Bibliography

Brenan, Gerald. 2014. The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Spanish Civil War. 2^nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Bookchin, Murray. 1998. The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868-1936. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Casas, Juan Gómez. 1986. Anarchist Organisation: The History of the F.A.I. Montréal: Black Rose Books.

Christie, Stuart. 2008. We, The Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927-1937. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Ealham, Chris. 2010. Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898-1937. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Ealham, Chris. 2015. Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Garner, Jason. 2016. Goals and Means: Anarchism, Syndicalism, and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Marshall, Peter. 2008. Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. Harper Perennial.

Miller, David. 1984. Anarchism. London: J.M Dent and Sons.

Peirats, José. 2005. The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, Volume II. Christie Books.

Thomas, Hugh. 1977. The Spanish Civil War. 3^rd ed. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books. 

Woodcock, George. 1986. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideals and Movements. 2nd ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

People are often drawn to the study of labour history because they want to understand how to change the world. It is thought that the history of class struggle contains within itself not only a series of events and dates laid out in chronological order but also lessons. Through studying the history of class struggle we can establish with evidence what strategies and tactics work or do not work, why movements grow and why they collapse, what challenges social movements will have to overcome and so on. The necessity of studying history emerges from the fact that socialists cannot run scientific experiments in a laboratory and thereby establish the definitive formula for revolution. We can instead only look at contemporary and previous attempts to achieve socialism in order to try and learn from a vast assortment of victories and defeats. The study of history cannot create a recipe for revolution since no such recipe exists. It can at best establish generalisations which inform our action in the present.

When learning about the past it is easy to focus on major exciting events in which large groups of workers took direct action and in so doing simultaneously transformed the world and themselves. During my research I find myself drawn to narratives about strikes, riots, insurrections, massive civil disobedience campaigns, armed uprisings, and revolutions. Learning about these events is an important part of labour history but to focus exclusively on them leads to a distorted view of the past and how social change happens. Members of historical socialist movements did not spend the majority of their time participating in huge actions which rapidly transformed society and the future course of history. The bulk of their lives as revolutionaries were spent doing much more mundane activities. They produced, distributed and read radical literature, organised and attended picnics, performed in a theatre club, watched a public debate, discussed politics with friends, family and colleagues, attended an endless series of meetings for their affinity group or trade union, wrote and received a vast amount of letters and so on. These small mundane activities can appear to be of little importance when viewed in isolation. Yet when these small activities were repeated day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year by groups of people they took on greater significance.

These small activities produced and reproduced the social relations, capacities, psychological drives and consciousness which were the foundation of social movements. Without these seemingly insignificant acts repeated over and over again, the large exciting moments of rebellion and revolution never would have occurred in most instances or would have occurred on a much smaller scale. Even events which can appear to have come out of nowhere were significantly shaped by the struggles which preceded them. For example, the Paris Commune of 1871 arose unexpectedly in response to a chance event: army soldiers were sent to seize cannons from the national guard in the district of Montmartre and a crowd of protesters went to stop them. Although the founding of the Commune took only a few days, it was the culmination of years, and arguably decades, of class struggle from below. Within Paris this class struggle took various forms, such as massive public meetings, talks and debates attended by thousands of workers, the production and distribution of books, pamphlets and papers, the founding of co-operatives, the organisation of sections of the International Workingmen’s Association, and a wave of strikes, demonstrations and riots (Merriman 2014, 39-45. For a brief summary of preceding struggles see ibid 11-2, 16-7, 25-36).

Anarchists in the 19^th and early 20^th century understood the significance of small acts being repeated over and over again. They viewed social change as a single process which could be divided into periods of evolution and periods of revolution. During periods of evolution change is slow, gradual and partial. Over time this evolutionary change builds up and culminates in a revolutionary period during which change is rapid, large scale, and fundamentally alters society. Evolutionary change and revolutionary change were not viewed as separate distinct entities. They were instead seen as two aspects of a single process which fed off and flowed into one another (Reclus 2013, 138-40). This idea was usually expressed through water-based metaphors. To give one example, in 1875 Michael Bakunin wrote in a letter to Élisée Reclus that, “[w]e are falling back into a time of evolution – that is to say revolutions that are invisible, subterranean and often imperceptible . . . drops of water, though they may be invisible may go on to form an ocean” (Bakunin 2016, 251-2). Anarchists thought that evolutionary change included a wide spectrum of behaviour. It referred not only to direct action which modifies the dominant structures of class society, such as a strike which wins higher wages in a workplace. It also included transformations driven forward by culture, such as a worker’s understanding of the world being altered through their exposure to a book, poem or song.

The latest research on the history of anarchism has drawn attention to the construction of counter-culture by anarchist movements around the world. This includes, but is not limited to, anarchist movements in Cuba (Shaffer 2019), Argentina (Suriano 2010), Japan (Konishi 2013), England (Di Paola 2017) and the United States (Goyens 2007; Zimmer 2015). For the purposes of this essay I shall focus on the manner in which anarchists in Spain engaged in evolutionary change through the formation of a radical working class counter-culture. It should be kept in mind that identical or similar practices were implemented by anarchists in other countries. Discussions of anarchism in Spain often focus on the National Confederation of Labour (CNT). The CNT is a trade union that was founded in 1910 and adopted an anarcho-syndicalist programme in 1919 at the La Comedia national congress in Madrid, which was attended by 450 delegates representing over 700,000 workers. Despite suffering multiple waves of state repression and being illegal for several years of its existence, the CNT was able to survive and maintain itself over time. By May 1936 the CNT was composed of 982 union sections with a total membership of 550,595 workers. The CNT proceeded to play a key role in the Spanish revolution and civil war of 1936-1939, during which workers created numerous experiments in economic self-management that demonstrated the feasibility of anarchist socialism working at scale (Peirats 2011, 7-10, 93. For details on self-management during the revolution see Leval 2012). The CNT is the largest anarcho-syndicalist trade union in history. To understand how anarchists in Spain were able to construct a mass movement it is necessary to go beyond the examination of strike waves, armed uprisings, the highs and lows of formal organisations, important national congresses, the various debates about strategy and tactics within the movement as a whole and so on. These factors were of course extremely important but they are not the full picture. Another key factor is the manner in which the creation and transmission of culture sustained, reproduced and expanded the anarchist movement in Spain.

The central importance of culture for the development of anarchism in Spain is especially apparent when examining print media. Between 1890 and 1915, 298 periodicals and journals were launched in Spain. Of these 107 were based in Catalonia and 191 were in other regions of Spain, such as Andalusia and Valencia. These papers collectively released 7328 issues, of which 4930 have survived. These papers largely appeared on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis. Most periodicals were one sheet of paper which was folded to create four pages. These papers typically featured articles on anarchist theory, commentaries on current events, critiques of the bourgeois and state socialist press, letters and correspondence from members of the movement, and news of the class struggle both within Spain and the wider world. These short periodicals co-existed with a smaller number of journals, which were eight, sixteen or thirty-two pages long. During this period over 700 anarchist books and pamphlets were also published. These covered topics as diverse as geography, history, biology, sociology, political theory, birth control, law, art and literature. Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid sold 20,000 copies in three years and The Conquest of Bread went through eleven editions and had sold 28,000 copies by 1909. Most groups could not afford to publish books due to the printing costs involved and instead focused on the publication of periodicals and pamphlets. Errico Malatesta’s pamphlet Between Peasants was particularly popular and was published in fifteen different editions between 1889 and 1915. The distribution of pamphlets was itself assisted by periodicals. Extracts of a pamphlet would be printed on the third and fourth page of a paper. Over several weeks or months a reader would accumulate the entire pamphlet and then tear out each page, assemble them together, and bind them with string. Anarchists did not limit themselves to non-fiction and also published poems, plays, songs and short stories as sections of periodicals or self-contained pamphlets (Yeoman 2020, 9-11, 41-3).

The majority of anarchist print media was written and edited by workers for free in their spare time after a full day of work. There were a few papers which were run by full time paid staff, such as Solidaridad Obrera from 1916 onwards, but these were in the minority. The manner in which anarchist periodicals were typically produced after work can be seen in the fact that the masthead of El Corsario declared that its office hours were from 7pm to 9pm in the evening. Most famous theorists, such as Anselmo Lorenzo and Ricardo Mella, were not professional writers and worked full time at other occupations. During the early 1930s the anarchist militant José Peirats split his time between working as a manual labourer during the day and writing articles for several important anarchist periodicals in the evening. Peirats was not unique in this respect. Throughout the late 19^th and early 20^th century one of the main sources of content for anarchist papers was the vast number of letters which workers sent to editors and publishing groups. These letters usually contained anarchist theory, stories, poetry, calls for solidarity, news of organising and meetings, and reports of oppressive or scandalous behaviour by capitalists and the police (Yeoman 2020, 43-4, 56, note 33, 248; Esenwein 1989, 127; Ealham 2015, 72-4).

The workers who sent in letters were known as correspondents and played a key role in the day-to-day functioning of anarchist print media. Through writing letters they transmitted information and reflections about a local area to the editors of the paper. The editors of the paper would, if they deemed it worthy, print the letter in the paper and then send copies of the paper to every correspondent they had across the country. These correspondents would then distribute the paper to local workers and collect money for both the publishing costs of the paper and solidarity funds that the paper had set up. These solidarity funds, which were collected at workplaces, meetings, plays, marriages and funerals, provided financial assistance to striking workers, anarchist prisoners, and widows of dead comrades. The anarchist press was therefore constituted by a social network in which, to quote the historian James Yeoman, local correspondents were “the ‘nodes’ through which the anarchist press was channelled into localities, and the thoughts, experiences and money from localities were channelled out to publishers” (Yeoman 2020, 47). The various publishing groups were, in turn, interconnected with one another and would support each other in various ways, such as larger and well established papers announcing the appearance of a new anarchist periodical. These kinds of positive relationships did not of course always occur and on other occasions anarchist periodicals engaged in polemical arguments with one another. During periods when there were no genuinely national formal anarchist organisations, the informal social networks that connected readers, correspondents, editors and publishers functioned as the national organisational structure of the anarchist movement. These social networks also operated at an international level. Larger anarchist papers in Spain would receive correspondence and articles from anarchists around the world and would, in turn, send out copies of their paper to workers in other countries. This was especially the case with countries that had a significant Spanish immigrant population, such as Argentina and Cuba (Yeoman 2020, 43-50, 17-8).

The health of anarchist print culture was a proxy for the health of the movement. During periods of organisational growth the number of periodicals generally expanded, whilst during periods of state repression in which anarchist formal organisations and affinity groups were forced underground the number of periodicals dramatically shrunk. This is not to say that the highs of anarchist print culture always coincided with the expansion of anarchist formal organisations. Between 1898-1906 the number of anarchist periodicals significantly increased but during this same period the anarchist led trade union, the Federation of Resistance Societies of the Spanish Region (FSORE), was seriously weakened by an unsuccessful general strike in 1902. The FSORE continued to decline over the following years until it was dissolved in 1907 (Yeoman 2020, 9-15, 162-3). Nor is the number of periodicals in circulation always an indicator of the health of anarchist print culture. In 1916 the official organ of the CNT, Solidaridad Obrera, became the anarchist movements first successful daily paper. In response to this other anarchist papers decided to close down and encouraged their readers to support Solidaridad Obrera instead. Despite the number of periodicals in circulation decreasing, anarchist print culture was the strongest it had ever been. Solidaridad Obrera published as much content in a month as most anarchist periodicals published in a year. Between 1916 and 1919 Solidaridad Obrera issued around 800 daily editions. A typical anarchist paper between 1890-1915 had, in comparison, a print run of only 20 to 30 issues before it ceased publication due to financial difficulties and/or state repression. The strength of Solidaridad Obrera coincided with the strength of the CNT, which funded the publication of the paper and had almost 800,000 members in 1919. That year the CNT organised a massive general strike in Barcelona which successfully forced the Spanish ruling class to pass legislation granting the eight hour day. The direct action of workers at the point of production was assisted by the pens of Solidaridad Obrera’s writers, who published articles throughout the strike informing readers of the latest news. In response to this strike wave the Spanish state repressed the CNT and banned Solidaridad Obrera (Yeoman 2020, 15, 51, 53, 248-9. For information on the strike see Smith 2007, 292-9).

The amount of time and energy anarchists in Spain devoted to the creation and distribution of print media is understandable given the importance that anarchist theory placed on education. The black American anarchist Lucy Parsons claimed that “Anarchists know that a long period of education” which develops “self-thinking individuals” is a necessary condition for “any great fundamental change in society” (Parsons 2003, 31). Similar remarks can be found in the Spanish anarchist press. In 1902 Mella wrote in La Protesta that “[w]e the anarchists” should “work for the coming revolution with words, with writings and with deeds . . . the press, the book, the private and public meeting are today, as ever, abundant terrain for all initiatives” (Quoted in Yeoman 2020, 40). Anarchist attempts to educate workers through print media faced a significant barrier: during this time period the majority of adults, especially poor people, could not read or write. In 1877 72 percent of the population in Spain were illiterate. This gradually decreased to between 63 and 67 percent in 1900 and 59 percent in 1910 (Bray and Haworth 2019, 7). Anarchists overcame this obstacle through the spoken word. Anarchist periodicals, journals, pamphlets and books were read aloud to groups of workers by the few people who were literate. This would usually be followed by a group discussion about the contents of the paper, pamphlet or book. This practice of collective education occurred at public meetings, smaller private gatherings and even at work. The development of revolutionary consciousness on company time was achieved by groups of workers dividing up tasks such that one worker would recite anarchist literature whilst the others laboured and listened (Esenwein 1989, 129, 132; Yeoman 2020, 46).

This feature of the anarchist movement was commented on by people at the time. The reformist Ramiro de Maeztu claimed in 1901 that,

These books, pamphlets and periodicals are not read in the manner of others . . . the reader of anarchist works—generally a worker—does not have a library, nor buys books for himself. [I have] witnessed the reading of [Kropotkin’s] The Conquest of Bread in a workers’ centre. In a room dimly lit by a candle, up to fourteen workers met every night of the winter. One of them reads laboriously, the others listen . . . (Quoted in Yeoman 2020, 46)

Juan Díaz del Moral made a similar observation during the period of excitement which followed the 1917 Russian revolution. He wrote,

In their work breaks during the day (los cigarros) and at night after the evening meal, the most educated would read aloud pamphlets and newspapers, to which the others would listen attentively. What had been read was followed by corroborating perorations and endless praise. Not everything was understood: there were unknown words; some interpretations were childish, others were malicious, according to the character of the person who expressed them; but ultimately everyone agreed. It could not be any other way! It was the truth that they had felt all their lives, although they had never been able to express it. They read continually; their curiosity and their desire to learn were insatiable. Even on the road, mounted on horseback, with the reins or halters loose, campesinos could be seen reading; there were always some pamphlet in the saddlebag with their food. The number of copies of newspapers that were distributed is incalculable; each person wanted to have his own. It is true that 70-80 percent of them could not read; but this was not an insurmountable obstacle. The dedicated illiterate bought his own newspaper, gave it to a compañero to read to him, and then marked the articles that pleased him most. Later he would ask another comrade to read the article marked, and after a few readings he had committed it to memory and would recite it to those who did not know it (Quoted in Mintz 1994, 120, note 3).

The fact that anarchist articles were routinely spread through the spoken word had a profound effect on how they were written. An article ending with the declaration ‘VIVA ANARCHY! VIVA THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION!’ can appear over the top to a solitary reader. Such sentences make a lot more sense when one imagines a reader shouting these words at a group of workers and those workers shouting the same words back (Yeoman 2020, 46).

To a modern reader the manner in which workers historically absorbed anarchist ideas can appear similar to how contemporary workers educate themselves through listening to podcasts or youtube videos. There are, however, a number of important differences. A modern person generally listens to content alone over the internet. Workers in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries listened to anarchist print media as a group in a face-to-face gathering. This medium of transmission by itself created a social network of anarchist workers in a specific location. This group of workers could then decide to not only absorb and discuss anarchist theory, but also put theory into practice and take direct action, such as by unionising their workplace or organising a strike. The collective nature of anarchist print media is apparent not only in how it was consumed but also in how it was produced. Periodicals published the thoughts and experiences of correspondents within Spain and the wider world. Through the medium of the printed word the thoughts and experiences from multiple individuals and groups were saved in the pages of the paper. They thereby gained a permanence which existed long after the memories of people were altered, decayed and forgotten due to the passage of time or lost forever with death. Workers who retained complete sets of papers, even after they had ceased publication, had access to the memory of the movement and the class struggles for emancipation which had previously occurred. The hunger for such information can be seen in the fact that editors of papers regularly received letters asking for previous issues so that an anarchist library could offer visitors a complete collection (Yeoman 2020, 53-4).

Anarchists also spread their ideas through lectures, public debates and speaking tours. Some speaking tours were big events in which the most famous anarchist orators and writers gave talks across all of Spain. This included talks given by well known anarchists from abroad, such as Malatesta and Pedro Esteve’s November 1891 to January 1892 speaking tour which was promoted by the anarchist paper El Productor. Other speaking tours were much smaller affairs. In 1892 the Catalan metalworker Ignacio Martín visited the city of Gijón and single handedly spread anarchist ideas across factories, taverns and workers’ centres. Through these speaking tours anarchist orators attempted to simultaneously influence the consciousness of other workers and encourage them to form or join anarchist groups, organise, and take direct action. This can be seen in Malatesta and Esteve’s speaking tour. They travelled across the country giving talks which explained basic anarchist ideas and emphasised the need for organisation and armed insurrection to achieve emancipation. Following their visit new anarchist groups or workers’ associations were formed. In addition to encouraging the formation of new anarchist groups, Malatesta and Esteve also visited prominent anarchist militants wherever they travelled in order to establish or strengthen social networks between anarchist groups throughout Spain. In so doing they aimed to create the organisational basis for future acts of revolt. The dual goal of consciousness raising and organising was typically facilitated through the distribution of posters, pamphlets, and periodicals at talks. This had the effect that speaking tours established a local archive of anarchist literature wherever they travelled. The new collection of print media could then be used by workers to educate themselves further and become more committed to anarchism once the speaking tour had left the area. Since periodicals included an address to send letters to, the distribution of print media also ensured that new local anarchists had a means to communicate with other anarchists and become part of the social networks that constituted the movement. This is not to say that speaking tours were always enormous successes. Their effectiveness was routinely hindered by state repression. For example, one speaking tour, which aimed to persuade proletarians and peasants in Andalusia to join the CNT, was abruptly ended when all the speakers were arrested at the first event (Yeoman 2020, 147-8, 219, 234-5, 246; Turcato 2012, 91-9).

The creation and transmission of anarchist culture was not confined to print media and speaking tours. Anarchists in Spain devoted a significant amount of time and energy to organising a wide range of different social events. This included, but was not limited to, plays, poetry scenes, concerts, dinners, dances, picnics, discussion groups, and reading groups. These various forms of association generally occurred within public meeting places, such as cafes and bars, and were self-organised by working class groups known as circles, affinity groups or workers’ centres. During the late 19^th century one of the best known workers’ centres in Barcelona was La Luz, which organised daily discussions at a cafe that attracted workers and middle class professionals from various political persuasions. Although the majority of people who attended the meetings were republicans, anarchists were able to effectively intervene in the discussions, spread their ideas to other workers, and persuade some of them to become anarchists. Such daily or weekly activities were interspersed with public celebrations of key dates in the revolutionary calendar, such as the anniversary of the Paris Commune and May Day. For example, on the fifteenth anniversary of the Paris Commune anarchist groups from Barcelona and the surrounding area organised a festival which featured choirs, an orchestra, poetry recitals and theatre performances (Esenwein 1989, 128-32; Smith 2012, 156-7, 260). The spread of anarchist culture through social events was facilitated by the creation of anarchist-run physical spaces. In the early 1930s anarchist members of the CNT established a co-operative store and bakery in Sant Adrià. The co-operative was built from scratch by a group of volunteer carpenters, bricklayers and plasterers using building materials which were paid for by crowd-funding within the local community. The co-operative not only sold various products and food at cost price but also featured a library, a bar with a billiard table, and a cafe. This enabled the co-operative to host a wide range of anarchist social events, including evening classes, lectures, plays and musical recitals (Ealham 2010, 52-3).

One of the main physical spaces where workers came into contact with anarchist ideas were cultural and social centres known as ateneos or athenaeums, which were interconnected with the anarchist trade union movement. An ateneo typically featured a cafe, library, reading rooms, meeting rooms for anarchist and neighbourhood groups, and an auditorium for formal debates, public talks and artistic performances. The walls of the building were decorated with signifiers of anarchism, such as portraits of famous revolutionaries and red and black banners. During periods of state repression when trade unions were forced underground, ateneos were generally able to remain open and thereby ensure the on-going existence of an anarchist presence within working class communities. The ateneos were funded and run by workers in their spare time, such as the La Torrassa Rationalist Athenaeum in Barcelona which was set up and paid for by a group of anarchist brick-makers in the early 1930s. The building’s furniture was provided by anarchist carpenters. The workers who participated in ateneos organised a wide range of educational and leisure activities in their spare time. This included day schools for working-class children, evening classes for adult workers, theatre clubs which would perform radical plays, singing and musical groups, family picnics, and hiking clubs which allowed poor urban workers to experience the beauty of nature in the countryside and along the coast. The wide range of activities which ateneos organised led to workers who participated within them to change themselves in multiple directions, such as gaining the confidence to speak before a crowd, learning to read and write, and acquiring an in-depth understanding of why capitalism and the state should be abolished. In so doing they experienced first hand one of the main goals of anarchism: the many-sided development of human beings as an end in and of itself.

Through participating in ateneos workers not only developed themselves but also formed social bonds with one another and became members of the anarchist movement. A significant number of anarchist militants, especially women, first encountered anarchist ideas and entered into anarchist social networks through their participation in the ateneos when they were children and teenagers. This process was facilitated by print media. Anarchist periodicals informed readers of the existence of ateneos. Ateneos, in turn, taught workers to read and write and contained libraries of anarchist books, pamphlets and periodicals. This can be seen in the experiences of Soledad Estorach, who arrived in Barcelona at the age of fifteen and soon learned about anarchism through the journal La Revista Blanca. She read articles by Soledad Gustavo and decided to travel to Gustavo’s address, which was printed in the paper. Gustavo told Estorach to go to an ateneo. Upon arrival she met an old man who showed her the library. She recalled being “entranced by all those books” and feeling “that all the world’s knowledge was now within my reach” (Quoted in Ackelsberg 2005, 86). In the years that followed Estorach became a key participate within the CNT and Mujeres Libres, which was an anarchist organisation that focused on women’s emancipation. Young people not only received an anarchist education in ateneos but also gained experiences of anarchist organising. In 1932 youth groups which had emerged from ateneos in Granada, Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia formed the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL). The FIJL, which was an independent organisation linked with the CNT, came to be viewed as one of the main pillars of the anarchist movement. On several occasions ateneos were the avenue through which workers mobilised to participate in demonstrations and strikes. Money raised by the ateneo in the La Torrassa neighbourhood funded not only its activities but also the wider social movement, including the CNT’s prisoner support committee which helped imprisoned anarchists and their families. Ateneos were, in other words, social spaces which facilitated working class self-education, recreation, and class struggle (Ackelsberg 2005, 84-8; Ealham 2010, 45-7; Ealham 2015, 50-5; Evans 2020, 23. For a Spanish anarchist advocating human development see Mella 2020, 6-9).

One of the main services which ateneos provided to workers, be they adults or children, were educational classes. This occurred as part of a wider emphasis on pedagogy and schools within the anarchist movement. Anarchists advocated the formation of secular schools which were independent of the church and the state, taught boys and girls together in the same classes, and emphasised the development of both physical and mental capacities. In the early years of the movement anarchist teachers worked at secular schools run by republicans. Over time anarchists began to establish their own schools. This most notably included the Modern School established by Fransisco Ferrer in Barcelona. The school was founded in September 1901 with a class of thirty pupils. The number of students gradually increased over the following years and by 1905 126 pupils attended the school. The school did not last long and was permanently closed by the Spanish state in 1906 following an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate the King of Spain. Three years later in 1909 Ferrer was arrested and executed by the Spanish state after he was falsely charged with having orchestrated a week long working class insurrection against army reservists being called up to fight in Morocco. This had the effect that Ferrer was transformed from a relatively obscure figure into an internationally famous martyr who inspired anarchists around the world to create modern schools of their own. The majority of anarchist schools in Spain were not as well funded as Ferrer’s Modern School. Outside of Catalonia they were typically rooms which lacked equipment and trained teachers. These rooms were often used for multiple purposes, such as the anarchist ran school in Cádiz which was located in the meeting room of the city’s metalworkers society (Avrich 2006, 3-31; Bray and Haworth 2019, 1-43; Smith 2012, 158-60; Yeoman 2020, 151-6). Despite these limitations anarchist schools could still have a significant impact on workers who attended them. One worker claimed, “I’m Andalusian and I moved to l’Hospitalet when I was nearly 10 years old. I learnt everything I know from the anarchists. I was 14 or 15 and I didn’t know how to read or write. I learnt at the night school organised by the libertarians” (Quoted in Ealham 2010, 47).

The manner in which different aspects of anarchist counter-culture intermixed with and supported one another can be seen in the Centre for Social Studies, which was founded in 1898 in the large town of La Línea. Anarchist workers from a variety of occupations were affiliated with the centre. According to a 1901 report, this included 347 carpenters, 450 construction workers, 200 painters, 210 iron and metal workers, 80 quarrymen and stonemasons, 80 cork-makers, 120 boot-makers, 120 tobacco-workers and 423 from varied industries. This last category of worker mostly consisted of casual and farm labourers. Later reports from 1902 establish that between 4,000 and 8,000 workers were affiliated with the centre. In 1901 the centre launched a new school which was located on the premises. This occasion was heralded with a large public event that featured poetry recitals, the unveiling of portraits of the anarchist Fermín Salvochea and the novelist Émile Zola, and lectures on such topics as god, the state, capitalism and the history of anarchism in Spain. The school’s main teacher was Ernesto Álvarez, who edited the anarchist paper La Protesta. Álvarez was able to become a teacher at the school due to the fact that his salary was paid for the various workers’ societies who were affiliated with the centre. By the end of 1901 the new school was teaching 180 children reading and writing and had begun to expand into adult education. This included French night classes where the teaching methods and classroom rules were decided upon by the students themselves. Gabriela Alcalde, who was another teacher at the school, ran night classes for women which taught them embroidery and needlework. These were organised in order to provide women with skills that could enable them to gain economic independence and no longer have to work as domestic servants. The school, which in 1902 claimed to be educating 400 children and 22 adults, was shut down by the Spanish state following a series of protests and riots in the town (Yeoman 2020, 157-9, 183, note 309).

The various aspects of anarchist counter-culture were generally underpinned by the expectation that those most committed to anarchism would transform themselves and become what was called a ‘conscious worker’. To be a conscious worker was, at the very least, to be an active participant within the trade union and collective struggles in the workplace and community. It was also believed to require various lifestyle changes in which a worker led by example and abandoned alcoholism, tobacco, gambling, visiting brothels, and watching bull fights in favour of reading, studying, and discussing anarchist ideas. It was for this reason that anarchist social centres typically prohibited the consumption of alcohol on the premises and served non-alcoholic drinks, such as unfermented grape juice (Mintz 2004, 85-7; Smith 2007, 160-1; Yeoman 2020, 131). Despite the best efforts of the most committed anarchists, the majority of other workers appear to have preferred having a fun night out. For example, the anarchist militant Manuel de los Reyes responded to a sociology lecture in Cádiz being badly attended by writing an angry article in the periodical  El Proletario. During the article he labelled those who had not shown up as “cowards” and “traitors”. He complained, “why do you not frequent the society where they are able and want to educate you, and not the taverns that are nothing more than centres of corruption? . . . why do you not school yourselves?” (Quoted in Yeoman 2020, 161). Some anarchist workers went further and embraced a cluster of alternative lifestyles known as naturalism, which included vegetarianism, nudism and only eating uncooked foods (Mintz 2004, 87-8). These anarchists made a surprise appearance in the CNT’s 1936 Zaragoza congress resolutions on libertarian communism. The CNT’s resolutions, which mostly covered such topics as the armed defence of the revolution and the construction of a large-scale bottom-up planned economy, also featured the caveat that “naturist/nudist communes” would be free to autonomously self-manage themselves. It was stipulated that since no commune can be entirely self-sufficient, even if it is populated by nudists who only eat uncooked fruits and vegetables, naturalist communes would be able to form voluntary agreements with the federations of workplace and community councils that the majority of the anarchist movement would construct (Peirats 2011, 104-5).

One of the main ways in which anarchists attempted to implement their ideals in daily life was free love. Free love referred to voluntary sexual relationship between equals which occurred outside of marriage. These relationships were free in the sense that if one partner wanted they could voluntarily disassociate, end the relationship, and date new people. These relationships were overwhelmingly monogamous and articles advocating free love often clarified that they were not endorsing polyamory or promiscuity. Although there were some anarchists at the time who today would be regarded as queer, such as the lesbian Lucía Sánchez Saornil, anarchist discussions of free love focused on heterosexual relationships between a man and a woman. In practice a significant number of anarchists did not fully implement the ideas of free love and decided to instead form voluntary secular marriages which occurred independently of the Catholic church (Ackelsberg 2005, 47-52, 172; Mintz 2004, 91-9; Yeoman 2020, 138-41). In a country where Catholicism was a dominant social force, those anarchists who decided to have secular marriages known as ‘free unions’ faced hostility and prejudice from other members of their community. For example in Casas Viejas, Antonia wanted to enter into a secular marriage with Pepe. Her father, who was a member of the local anarchist led trade union, was against the idea and violently hit her after she refused to leave Pepe. Antonia recalled,

since I didn’t answer him, he started to beat me. There were some shoes hanging there, and he seized them and started to beat me black and blue. My sister grabbed my father by the legs, but he kept beating me. He hit me such a hard blow on the head that he could have killed me. I ran out and went up to the vegetable patch on the slope. I had to run around a tree, and when I turned around—my father was behind me, running. I reached the house of a neighbor. When my father got to the neighbor’s small patio, he had to stop. He couldn’t enter. (Quoted in Mintz 2004, 97)

Despite these traumatic events Antonia and Pepe married a few days later at a secular wedding attended by local anarchists. Antonia wore the clothes she had run away in since she was unable to safely return home. After the wedding Pepe would see Antonia’s father in the street and greet him but he would never reply. Antonia similarly recalls that one day she greeted her father and he responded by shouting at her to leave and get out of his sight. Although Antonia’s father came to accept the situation and regret his behaviour, these events provide an illustrative example of the obstacles practitioners of free love and secular marriages had to overcome in a deeply religious and patriarchal society (Mintz 2004, 98-9). This is not to say that anarchist men were perfect. The evidence which is available indicates that anarchist men were generally sexist towards women in the movement and expected their partners to do the majority of childcare and housework. In 1935 Lola Iturbe complained that anarchist men “however radical they may be in cafés, unions and even affinity groups, seem to drop their costumes as lovers of female liberation at the doors of their homes. Inside, they behave with their compañeras just like common ‘husbands’” (Quoted in  Ackelsberg 2005, 115).

Anarchist parents rejected the religious baptism ceremonies of the Catholic church in favour of simply registering the name of the child. These registrations often included a communal event where revolutionary songs were sung and local children would read anarchist texts aloud. It was common for anarchist parents to give their children distinctly anarchist names. Some children were named after abstract concepts, such as Anarchy, Germinal, and Fraternity. One couple went so far as to name one of their children Free Proletarian, who sadly died shortly after birth. Other anarchist parents named their children after famous rebellious figures, such as Spartacus and Kropotkin, or famous scientists, such as Archimedes, Galileo, and Darwin (Yeoman 2020, 139-41). The birth and secular  registration of children was reported upon and celebrated in the anarchist press as examples of workers living in accordance with anarchist ideals. In April 1910 Tierra y Libertad reported that,

A beautiful boy with the delightful name of Palmiro has been brought to the civil register of Medina Sidonia as the son of the compañeros Maria de los Santos Bollullo and José Olmo, the first offspring of their free union. Our sincere congratulations to these compañeros for the strength of their convictions in removing themselves from the bureaucratic procedures used by the black-clothed priests (Quoted in Mintz 2004, 95).

Given the above historical overview, an understanding of how social movements are able to grow and significantly alter society requires an examination of both huge moments of protest and rebellion and the smaller day-to-day activities which sustained and  expanded social movements over time. Between the late 19^th and early 20^th century anarchists in Spain successfully organised the largest mass anarchist movement in history. This mass movement was centred on trade unionism within the CNT and the organisation of strikes. Anarchists in Spain did not limit themselves to a narrow conception of trade unionism and also engaged in a wide variety of other activities. One of the main activities they engaged in was the construction of a vibrant working class counter-culture centred on print media, education and art. The creation and transmission of this culture was facilitated by the establishment of anarchist social spaces, including co-operatives, schools and social centres known as ateneos. Through this counter-culture anarchists were able to spread their ideas, establish contact with the wider working class community, and sustain their commitment to anarchism over time, especially during periods of state repression. Their cultural activities, in short, promoted and supported class struggle from below and were interconnected with a revolutionary social movement. It was therefore distinct from much of what passes for counter-culture today, which often consists of the formation of an identity through the purchasing and consumption of commodities.

It is of course the case that anarchists alive today cannot simply copy what worked in the past onto the present and expect similar results. What was once extremely radical, such as having secular weddings and funerals, are now for large parts of the world a common thing to do. It is very difficult to create hundreds of ateneos in a context where buildings and land are extremely expensive and the rent is too damn high. Nor is it the case that every aspect of historical anarchist counter-culture was a good idea. No child should have to suffer the negative consequences of their anarchist parents naming them Anarchy or Free Proletarian. It is also important to not romanticise historical anarchists and ignore their failings. The brickmaker José Peirats played a key role in the history of the CNT and the construction of anarchist counter-culture. He was also a sexist homophobe (Ealham 2015, 206-8). Despite these limitations the study of historical anarchist counter-culture in Spain can serve as a source of inspiration in the present. It should merely be kept in mind that, even if counter-culture is a necessary condition for the development and reproduction of mass revolutionary movements, it is not a sufficient condition. As historical anarchists in Spain were well aware, social change requires that workers organise and take direct action against the ruling classes. Counter-culture is important but it is no substitute for what Kropotkin once referred to as the formation of “workers’ organisations” which engage in “the direct struggle of Labour against Capital and its protector,—the State” (Kropotkin 2014, 189).

Bibliography

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Anarchism is a social movement which advocates the abolition of all forms of domination and exploitation in favour of a society based on freedom, equality and co-operation. It holds that this goal can only be achieved if the hierarchical social structures of capitalism and the state are abolished and replaced by a socialist society organised via horizontal free association. Doing so requires a fundamental transformation in how organisations are structured and decisions are made. Capitalism and the state are hierarchical pyramids in which decision-making flows from the top to the bottom. They are based on a division between a minority who monopolise decision-making power and issue commands, and a majority who lack real decision-making power and must ultimately obey the orders of their superiors. A horizontal social structure, in comparison, is one where people collectively self-manage and co-determine the organisation as equals. In an anarchist society there would be no masters or subjects.

Modern anarchists often describe anarchism as democracy without the state. Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin argued in 1993 that “there is no democracy or freedom under government — whether in the United States, China or Russia. Anarchists believe in direct democracy by the people as the only kind of freedom and self-rule” (Ervin 1993. Also see Milstein 2010, 97-107). Perhaps the most famous advocate of this position was David Graeber. In 2013 Graeber argued that “Anarchism does not mean the negation of democracy”. It instead takes “core democratic principles to their logical conclusion” by proposing that collective decisions should be made via “nonhierarchical forms of direct democracy”. By “democracy” Graeber meant any system of “collective deliberation” based on “full and equal participation” (Graeber 2013, 154, 27, 186).

This endorsement of direct democracy is not a universal position among modern anarchists. A significant number of anarchists have argued that anarchism is fundamentally incompatible with, or at least distinct from, democracy. Their basic argument is that democracy means rule by the people or the majority, whilst anarchism advocates the abolition of all systems of rulership. The word anarchism itself derives from the ancient Greek work anarchos, which means without rulers. Within a democracy decisions are enforced on everyone within a given territory via institutionalised mechanisms of coercion, such as the law, army, police and prisons. Defenders of democracy take this coercive enforcement to be legitimate because the decisions were made democratically, such as every citizen having the right to participate in the decision-making process. Since such coercive enforcement is taken to be incompatible with anarchism’s commitment to free association, it follows that anarchism does not advocate democracy (Gordon 2008, 67-70; Crimethinc 2016).

Anarchists who advocate democracy without the state are themselves in favour of free association. Graeber, for example, advocates a society “where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence”. As a result, he opposed any system of decision-making in which someone has “the ability . . . to call on armed men to show up and say ‘I don’t care what you have to say about this; shut up and do what you’re told’” (Graeber 2013, 187-8. Also see Milstein 2010, 60-2). Given this, the pro-democracy and anti-democracy anarchists I have examined are advocating the same position in different language. Both advocate collective methods of decision-making in which everyone involved has an equal say. Both argue that this should be achieved via voluntary association and reject the idea that decisions should be imposed on those who reject them via mechanisms of institutionalised coercion, such as the law or police. They just disagree about whether these systems should be called democracy because they use different definitions of that word.

During these debates it is common for anarchists to appeal to the fact that historical anarchists were against what they called democracy. Unfortunately these appeals to anarchist history are often a bit muddled due to people focusing on the words historical anarchists used, rather than their ideas. In this essay I shall explain not only what historical anarchists wrote about democracy but also how they made decisions. I do not think that the history of anarchism can be straight forwardly used to settle the debate on anarchism and democracy. My hope is only that an in-depth knowledge of anarchist history will help modern anarchists think about the topic in more fruitful ways.

The Historical Anarchist Critique of Democracy

The majority of historical anarchists only used the term ‘democracy’ to refer to a system of government which was, at least on paper, based on the rule of the people or the majority. Errico Malatesta wrote that, “anarchists do not accept majority government (democracy), any more than they accept government by the few (aristocracy, oligarchy, or dictatorship by one class or party) nor that of one individual (autocracy, monarchy or personal dictatorship)” (Malatesta 2014, 488). Malatesta did not invent these definitions. He is merely repeating the standard definitions of different forms of government in so called ‘western’ political theory. The same distinction between the government of the many, of the few, and of one individual can be found in earlier theorists such as Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau (Hobbes 1998, 123; Locke 2016, 65-6; Rousseau 1999, 99-100). These standard definitions of different forms of government derived from ancient Greek sources, including Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle (Hansen 1991, 65-9).

The most famous example of a democracy in ancient Greece is Athens during the 5^th century BC. In democratic Athens all major decisions were made by majority vote in an assembly attended by adult male citizens. Key government officials were selected at random by lot. The majority of the population – women, slaves, children and foreigners – were excluded and lacked decision-making power in the assembly (Hansen 1991, 304-20).  There is a tendency for modern radicals to argue that the example of 5^th century Athens demonstrates that from a historical point of view true democracy is direct democracy. Doing so would be a mistake. As Raekstad has argued, in ancient Greece the word ‘democracy’ did not refer to a specific decision-making system. Ancient Greeks did not have our modern distinction between direct democracy and representative democracy. They instead viewed a city as a democracy if and only if it was ruled by its citizens or at least the majority of its citizens. As a result, cities with fundamentally different systems of decision-making could all be regarded as democracies providing that they were cities based on the collective self-rule of the citizenry (Raekstad 2020).

Aristotle, to give one example, does not only refer to cities where citizens debate and directly vote on decisions in an assembly as a ‘democracy’. He also used the term ‘democracy’ to refer to cities where citizens merely elected government officials who wielded decision-making power, and then held these government officials to account (Hansen 1991, 3; Aristotle 1998, 235-6). Aristotle did so even though he regarded selecting officials via lot as a democratic method and selecting officials via voting as an aristocratic or oligarchical method (ibid, 80-1, 153-5). The reason why is that for Aristotle the key question when determining what to label a city’s constitution is which group of people rule. If a city is ruled by the majority of its citizens, and these citizens are poor in the sense that they do not own a lot of property, then for Aristotle, it is a democracy independently of the decision-making mechanisms through which this rule is achieved (ibid, 100-2, 139-41). A modern person could of course disagree with Aristotle about whether or not citizens who elect representatives truly rule their city. Such a disagreement does not change the fact that in ancient Greece the word ‘democracy’ did not just mean what we call direct democracy.

Between the late 18^th and mid 19^th centuries the term ‘democracy’ gradually came to refer to governments ruled by parliaments composed of elected representatives who belonged to political parties. These governments claimed to be expressions of the will of the people. It should be kept in mind that these democratic governments were not initially based on universal suffrage. Representatives were at first elected by adult male property owners, who were a minority of the population. Over several decades of struggle from below suffrage was gradually expanded to include most or all adult men and then, largely after WW1, all adult men and women. The gradual expansion of suffrage went alongside various attempts by rulers to prevent genuine universal suffrage, such as wealthy property owners having multiple votes rather than only one, or black people being prevented from registering to vote in the United States (Markoff 2015, 41-76, 83-5, 136-40). This historical context is why when anarchists in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries wrote critiques of ‘democracy’ they focused on the representative democracy of bourgeois parliaments, rather than the direct democracy of ancient Athens.

The historical anarchist critique of democracy so understood is as follows. Anarchists began by arguing that the government of the people was impossible. What defenders of democracy referred to as ‘the people’ was an abstraction which did not really exist. The actual population of a country is constituted by distinct individuals with different and contradictory ideas, needs and  aspirations. If people will never agree on everything, then there will never be a unanimous ‘will of the people’. There will only ever be multiple and incompatible wills of different segments of the people. The decisions of governments are imposed on everyone within a country via the law and the violent enforcers of the law, such as the police or judges. A democracy is therefore at best a system of government in which the will of the majority is violently imposed on the minority in the name of an abstraction called ‘the people’ (Malatesta 1995, 77-8).

Such a system of government was rejected by anarchists on the grounds that it is incompatible with freedom. Anarchists were committed to the view that everyone should be free and that, as a result, no one should be dominated.  As Alexander Berkman wrote, in an anarchist society, “[y]ou are to be entirely free, and everybody else is to enjoy equal liberty, which means that no one has a right to compel or force another, for coercion of any kind is interference with your liberty” (Berkman 2003, 156). In advocating this position anarchists were not arguing that violence is always wrong. They viewed violence as legitimate when it was necessary to establish or protect the equal freedom of all, such as in self-defence or to overthrow the ruling classes. (Malatesta 2014, 187-91) The violence of government, however, goes far beyond this since they are institutions which have the power, and claim the exclusive right to, impose their will on everyone within a given territory via force (ibid, 113, 136).

This was a form of domination which anarchists opposed irrespective of whether or not the government was ruled by a minority or a majority.  In Luigi Galleani’s words, even if “the rule of the majority over the minority” were “a mitigated form of tyranny, it would still represent a denial of freedom” (Galleani 2012, 42). Anarchists reject “the domination of a majority over the minority, we aspire to realise the autonomy of the individual within the freedom of association, the independence of his thought, of his life, of his development, of his destiny, freedom from violence, from caprice and from the domination of the majority, as well as of various minorities” (ibid 61. Also see ibid, 50). This opposition to the domination of the majority went alongside the awareness that majorities are often wrong and can have harmful views (Malatesta 2015, 63-4). In a homophobic and transphobic society, for example, the government of the majority would result in laws oppressing queer people.

Anarchists did not, however, think that modern states have ever been based on majority rule. They consistently described them as institutions based on minority rule by a political ruling class in their interests and the interests of the economic ruling class. This included self-described democratic governments. In 1873 Michael Bakunin wrote that,

modern capitalist production and bank speculation . . . get along very nicely, though, with so-called representative democracy. This latest form of the state, based on the pseudo-sovereignty of a sham popular will, supposedly expressed by pseudo-representatives of the people in sham popular assemblies, combines the two main conditions necessary for their success: state centralization, and the actual subordination of the sovereign people to the intellectual minority that governs them, supposedly representing them but invariably exploiting them (Bakunin 1990, 13).

Given this Bakunin thought that,

Between a monarchy and the most democratic republic there is only one essential difference: in the former, the world of officialdom oppresses and robs the people for the greater profit of the privileged and propertied classes, as well as to line its own pockets, in the name of the monarch; in the latter, it oppresses and robs the people in exactly the same way, for the benefit of the same classes and the same pockets, but in the name of the people’s will. In a republic a fictitious people, the ‘legal nation’ supposedly represented by the state, smothers the real, live people. But it will scarcely be any easier on the people if the cudgel with which they are beaten is called the people’s cudgel (Bakunin 1990, 23).

The same position was advocated by Malatesta. He wrote in 1924 that, “even in the most democratic of democracies it is always a small minority that rules and imposes its will and interests by force”. As a result “Democracy is a lie, it is oppression and is in reality, oligarchy; that is, government by the few to the advantage of a privileged class” (Malatesta 1995, 78, 77. Also see Berkman 2003, 71-3). The anarchist critique of democratic governments should not be interpreted as the claim that all forms of government are equally bad. Both Bakunin and Malatesta also claimed that the worst democracy was preferable to the best monarchy or dictatorship (Bakunin 1980, 144; Malatesta 1995, 77).

Given their analysis of the state as an institution which serves the interests of the capitalist class, anarchists concluded that a truly democratic government, where the majority rule, could only possibly be established in a socialist society based on the common ownership of the means of production (Malatesta 1995, 73). They did not, however, think that this could actually happen. Since the modern state is a centralised and hierarchical institution which rules over an extended area of territory, it follows that state power can only in practice be wielded by a minority of elected representatives. These representatives would not be mere delegates mandated to complete a specific tasks. They would be governors who had the power to issue commands and impose their will on others via force or the threat of it. As a result they would constitute a distinct political ruling class. Over time these representatives would be transformed by the activity of exercising state power and become primarily concerned with reproducing and expanding their power over the working classes (Baker 2019).

In rejecting what they called democracy, historical anarchists were not rejecting the idea that collective decisions should be made in general assemblies. Historical anarchists consistently argued that in an anarchist society collective decisions would be made in workplace and community assemblies. Anarchists referred to these assemblies using various terms, such as labour councils,  communes, and associations of production and consumption (Rocker 2004, 47-8; Malatesta 2014, 60; Goldman 1996, 68). The National Confederation of Labour (CNT), which was a Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union, proposed in its 1936 Zaragoza congress resolutions that decisions in a libertarian communist society would be made in “general assemblies”, “communal assemblies” and “popular assemblies” (Peirats 2011, 103, 105, 107).

A few historical anarchists did refer to anarchism as democracy without the state but they were in the minority. During the 1930s the Russian anarcho-syndicalist Gregori Maximoff rejected both “Bourgeois democracy” and the “democracy” of “the Soviet republic” on the grounds that, contrary to what they claimed, they were not based on the genuine rule of the people. They were instead states in which a minority ruling class exercised power in order to reproduce the domination and exploitation of the working class. Given this, Maximoff advocated the abolition of the state in favour of the self-management of society via federations of  workplace and community councils. He regarded such a system of self-management as genuine democracy. He wrote, “true democracy, developed to its logical extreme, can become a reality only under the conditions of a communal confederation. This democracy is Anarchy” (Maximoff 2015, 37-8). On another occasion Maximoff declared that “Anarchism is, in the final analysis, nothing but democracy in its purest and most extreme form” (Maximoff n.d., 19). In arguing that anarchism was “true democracy” Maximoff was not advocating different forms of association or decision-making to other anarchists. He was only using different language to describe the same anarchist ideas.

The majority of anarchists did not refer to an anarchist society as ‘true democracy’ because for them ‘democracy’ necessarily referred to a system of government. A key reason why historical anarchists associated ‘democracy’ with government was that anarchism as a social movement emerged in parallel with, and in opposition to, another social movement called Social Democracy. Although the term ‘social democracy’ has come to mean any advocate of a capitalist welfare state, it originally referred to a kind of revolutionary socialist who aimed at the abolition of all forms of class rule. In order to achieve this goal Social Democrats argued that the working class should organise into trade unions and form socialist political parties which engaged in electoral politics. This was viewed as the means through which the working class would both win immediate improvements, such as the eight hour day or legislation against child labour, and overthrow class society through the conquest of state power and the establishment of a workers’ state. Social Democrats argued that in so doing socialist political parties would overthrow bourgeois democracy and establish social or proletarian democracy (Taber 2021). Anarchists responded by making various arguments against Social Democracy, such as critiques of trying to achieve socialism via the conquest of state power. The consequence of this is that one of the main occasions when historical anarchists used the words ‘democracy’ and ‘democrat’ was when they were referring to Social Democracy (Kropotkin 2014, 371-82; Berkman 2003, 89-102).

One of the great ironies of history is that the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin initially used the language of ‘democracy’. In 1868 he co-founded an organisation called The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and wrote a programme for it which committed the group to the goal of abolishing capitalism and the state (Eckhardt 2016, 3; Bakunin 1973, 173-5). The language of ‘democracy’ was echoed by the anarchist led Spanish section of the 1^st International even though it was formally opposed to the strategy of electoral politics. The September 1871 resolutions of the Valencia Conference declared that “the real Federal Democratic Republic is common property, anarchy and economic federation, or in other words the free worldwide federation of free agricultural and industrial worker’s associations” (Eckhardt 2016, 166. For resolutions against electoral politics see ibid, 160). This language did not catch on among anarchists and by 1872 Bakunin had definitely abandoned it. This can be seen in the fact that when he founded a new organisation, which he viewed as the successor to the original Alliance, he decided to name it the Alliance of Social Revolutionaries (Bakunin 1990, 235-6, note 134; Eckhardt 2016, 355).

Historical Anarchist Methods of Decision-Making

Having established what historical anarchists thought about democracy, I shall now turn to their views on collective systems of decision-making. Historical anarchists proposed a variety of different mechanisms through which decisions in general assemblies could be made. It can be difficult to establish how exactly historical anarchists made decisions because it is a topic which does not appear frequently in surviving articles, pamphlets or books. Those sources which are available do nonetheless establish a number of clear positions. Some anarchists advocated majority vote, whilst other anarchists advocated unanimous decisions in which everyone involved had to agree on a proposal. Other anarchists advocated both depending upon the context, such as the size of an organisation or the kind of decision being made. It should be kept in mind that what historical anarchists referred to as systems of ‘unanimous agreement’ was not modern consensus decision-making in different language. I have found no evidence of historical anarchists using the key features of consensus as a process, such as the specific steps a facilitator moves the meeting through or the distinction between standing aside and blocking a proposal.

Malatesta advocated a combination of unanimous agreement and majority voting. He wrote that in an anarchist society “everything is done to reach unanimity, and when this is impossible, one would vote and do what the majority wanted, or else put the decision in the hands of a third party who would act as arbitrator” (Malatesta n.d., 30). This position was articulated in response to other anarchists who thought that all decisions should be made exclusively by unanimous agreement and rejected the use of voting. He recalled that,

in 1893 . . . there were many Anarchists, and even at present there are a few, who, mistaking the form for the essence, and laying more stress on words than on things, made for themselves a sort of ritual of ‘true’ anarchism, which held them in bondage, which paralyzed their power of action, and even led them to make absurd and grotesque assertions. Thus going from the principle: The Majority has no right to impose its will on the minority; they came to the conclusion that nothing should ever be done without the unanimous consent of all concerned. But as they had condemned political elections, which serve only to choose a master, they could not use the ballot as a mere expression of opinion, and considered every form of voting as anti-anarchistic (Malatesta 2016, 17. Also see Turcato 2012, 141).

This opposition to all forms of voting allegedly led to farcical situations. This included endless meetings where nothing was agreed and groups forming to publish a paper and then dissolving without having published anything due to minor disagreements (Malatesta 2016, 17-8). From these experiences Malatesta concluded that “social life” would be impossible if “united action” was only allowed to occur when there was “unanimous agreement”. In situations where it was not possible to implement multiple solutions simultaneously or effective solidarity required a uniform action, “it is reasonable, fair and necessary for the minority to defer to the majority” (Malatesta 2016, 19). To illustrate this point Malatesta gave the example of constructing a railway. He wrote,

If a railroad, for instance, were under consideration, there would be a thousand questions as to the line of the road, the grade, the material, the type of the engines, the location of the stations, etc., etc., and opinions on all these subjects would change from day to day, but if we wish to finish the railroad we certainly cannot go on changing everything from day to day, and if it is impossible to exactly suit everybody, it is certainly better to suit the greatest possible number; always, of course, with the understanding that the minority has all possible opportunity to advocate its ideas, to afford them all possible facilities and materials to experiment, to demonstrate, and to try to become a majority (Malatesta 2016, 18-9).

This is not to say that Malatesta viewed an anarchist society as one where people voted on every decision. He thought that farmers, for example, would not need to vote on what season to plant crops since this is something they already know the answer to. Given this, Malatesta predicted that over time people would need to vote on fewer decisions due to them learning the best solution to various problems from experience (Malatesta n.d., 30).

Malatesta was not alone in disagreeing with anarchists who opposed all systems of voting. During the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, the Belgian anarchist Georges Thonar argued that the participants should not engage in voting and declared himself “opposed to any vote”. The minutes of the congress claim that this caused “a minor incident. Some participants applaud noisily, while lively protest is also to be heard” (Antonioli 2009, 90). The French anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist Pierre Monatte then gave the following speech,

I cannot understand how yesterday’s vote can be considered anti-anarchist, in other words authoritarian. It is absolutely impossible to compare the vote with which an assembly decides a procedural question to universal suffrage or to parliamentary polls. We use votes at all times in our trade unions and, I repeat, I do not see anything that goes against our anarchist principles.

There are comrades who feel the need to raise questions of principle on everything, even the smallest things. Unable as they are to understand the spirit of our anti-parliamentarianism, they place importance on the mere act of placing a slip of paper in an urn or raising one’s hand to show one’s opinion (Antonioli 2009, 90-1).

Malatesta’s advocacy of majority voting was also shared by other anarchists. The Ukrainian anarchist Peter Arshinov wrote in 1928 that “[a]lways and everywhere, practical problems among us have been resolved by majority vote. Which is perfectly understandable, for there is no other way of resolving these things in an organization that is determined to act” (Arshinov 1928, 241).

The same commitment to majority voting was implemented in the CNT, which had a membership of 850,000 by February 1936. (Ackelsberg 2005, 62) The anarchist José Peirats explained the CNT’s system of decision-making as follows. The CNT was a confederation of trade unions which were “autonomous units” linked together “only by the accords of a general nature adopted at national congresses, whether regular or extraordinary”. As a result of this, individual unions were “free to reach any decision which is not detrimental to the organisation as a whole”. The “guidelines of the Confederation” were decided and directly regulated by the autonomous trade unions themselves. This was achieved through a system in which “the basis for any local, regional, or national decision” was “the general assembly of the union, where every member has the right to attend, raise and discuss issues, and vote on proposals”. The “resolutions” of these assemblies were “adopted by majority vote attenuated by proportional representation”. The agenda of regional or national congresses were “devised by the assemblies” themselves. These general assemblies in turn “debated” each topic on the agenda and after reaching an agreement amongst themselves elected mandated delegates to attend the congress as “the executors of their collective will” (Peirats 2011, 5).

Anarchists who advocated majority voting disagreed about whether or not decisions passed by majority vote should be binding on everyone involved in the decision-making process, or only those who had voted in favour of them. Malatesta argued that the congress resolutions of a federation should only be binding on the sections who had voted for them. He wrote in 1900 that since a federation is a free association which does not have the right “to impose upon the individual federated members” it followed that “any group just like any individual must not accept any collective resolution unless it is worthwhile and agreeable to them”. As a result, decisions made at the federation’s congresses, which were attended by mandated delegates representing each group that composed the federation, were “binding only to those who accept them, and only for as long as they accept them” (Malatesta 2019, 210, 206).

Malatesta repeated this view in 1927. He claimed that congresses of specific anarchist organisations, which are organisations composed exclusively of anarchist militants, “do not lay down the law” or “impose their own resolutions on others”. Their resolutions are only “suggestions, recommendations, proposals to be submitted to all involved, and do not become binding and enforceable except on those who accept them, and for as long as they accept them”. (Malatesta 2014, 489-90) The function of congresses was to,

maintain and increase personal relationships among the most active comrades, to coordinate and encourage programmatic studies on the ways and means of taking action, to acquaint all on the situation in the various regions and the action most urgently needed in each; to formulate the various opinions current among the anarchists and draw up some kind of statistics from them. (ibid, 489. See also ibid, 439-40)

Malatesta’s position on congress resolutions should not be interpreted as the claim that a person could do whatever they wanted within an organisation without consideration for the organisation’s common programme or how their actions effected others. In 1929 he clarified that within an organisation each member should “feel the need to coordinate his actions with those of his fellow members”, “do nothing that harms the work of others and, thus, the common cause” and “respect the agreements that have been made – except when wishing sincerely to leave the association”. He thought that people “who do not feel and do not practice that duty should be thrown out of the association” (Malatesta 1995, 107-8).

A more concrete understanding of what this position on congress resolutions looked like can be established by examining actual anarchist congresses. In 1907 anarchist delegates representing groups in Europe, the United States and Argentina attended the previously mentioned International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam. Proposals or resolutions at the congress were adopted by majority vote and each delegate had a single vote. How this was implemented varied depending upon the kind of decision being made. On the first day of the congress there was a disagreement about the agenda. One faction proposed that the topic of anti-militarism should be removed from the agenda and that this topic should instead be discussed at the separate congress of the International Antimilitarist Association. The other faction argued that the anarchists would have to formulate a position on anti-militarism at their anarchist congress before they attended a distinct congress attended by people who were not anarchists. The first proposal won 33 votes and the second 38 votes. Since only one proposal could be implemented the majority position won and the congress included anti-militarism on its agenda (Antonioli 2009, 36-7. For the later discussion on anti-militarism see ibid, 137-8).

Over several days the congress passed a variety of resolutions via majority vote. These resolutions were not binding on the minority. As the Dutch delegate Christiaan Cornelissen explained, “[v]oting is to be condemned only if it binds the minority. This is not the case here, and we are using the vote as an easy means of determining the size of the various opinions that are being confronted” (ibid, 91). The proposed resolution against alcohol consumption was not even put to a formal vote due to almost every delegate being opposed to it (ibid, 150-52). In situations where there was no need to have a single resolution, multiple resolutions were passed providing that each received a majority vote. This occurred when four slightly different resolutions on syndicalism and the general strike were adopted (ibid, 132-5). The congress minutes respond to this situation by claiming,

The reader may be rather surprised that these four motions could have all been passed, given the evident contradictions between them. It defies the parliamentary norm, but it is a conscious transgression. In order that the opinion of the majority not suffocate, or seem to suffocate, that of the minority, the majority presented the single motions one by one for vote. All four had a majority of votes for. In consequence, all four were approved (ibid, 135).

Other anarchists argued that decisions passed by majority vote should be binding on every member of the organisation. In June 1926 a group of anarchists, who had participated in the Russian revolution and been forced to flee to Paris to escape Bolshevik repression, issued the Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft). The text made a series of proposals about how specific anarchist organisations should be structured. This included the position that the collectively made decisions of congresses should be binding on every section and member of a specific anarchist organisation such that everyone involved is expected to carry out the majority decision. The platform states that,

such an agreement and the federal union based on it, will only become reality, rather than fiction or illusion, on the conditions sine qua non that all the participants in the agreement and the Union fulfil most completely the duties undertaken, and conform to communal decisions. In a social project, however vast the federalist basis on which it is built, there can be no decisions without their execution. It is even less admissible in an anarchist organisation, which exclusively takes on obligations with regard to the workers and their social revolution. Consequently, the federalist type of anarchist organisation, while recognising each member’s rights to independence, free opinion, individual liberty and initiative, requires each member to undertake fixed organisation duties, and demands execution of communal decisions (The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad 1926a. Also see Arshinov 1928, 240-1).

Within a specific anarchist organisation differences of opinion about its programme, tactics and strategy would of course emerge. In such situations the authors of The Platform later clarified that there were three main potential outcomes. In the case of “insignificant differences” the minority would defer to the majority position in order to maintain “the unity” of the organisation. If “the minority were to consider sacrificing its view point an impossibility” then further “discussion” would occur. This would either culminate in an agreement being formed such that “two divergent opinions and tactics” co-existed with one another or there would be “a split with the minority breaking away from the majority to found a separate organisation” (Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad 1926b, 218).

The position that decisions passed by majority vote should be binding on every member of the organisation was not a uniquely platformist one. The CNT’s constitution, which was printed on each membership card, declared that “Anarcho-syndicalism and anarchism recognise the validity of majority decisions”. Although the CNT recognised “the sovereignty of the individual” and a militant’s right to have their own point of view and defend it, members of the CNT were “obliged to comply with majority decisions” and “accept and agree to carry out the collective mandate taken by majority decision” even when they are against a militant’s “own feelings”. This position was justified on the grounds that, “[w]ithout this there is no organisation” (Quoted in Peirats 1974, 19-20).

Members of the CNT did nonetheless disagree about whether or not this system of majority voting, in which decisions were binding on all members, should be applied to much smaller specific anarchist organisations. The Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) was a specific anarchist organisation composed of affinity groups. These affinity groups had between 4 and 20 members. The FAI initially made most of their decisions via unanimous agreement and rarely used voting. In 1934 the Z and Nervio affinity groups pushed for the FAI to adopt binding agreements established through majority vote. The Afinidad affinity group agreed with the necessity of such a system within the CNT but opposed it being implemented within small specific anarchist organisations or affinity groups. After a confrontational FAI meeting Afinidad left the organisation in protest (Ealham 2015, 77; Guillamón 2014, 28-9).

Conclusion

Having systematically gone through the evidence, it is clear that modern and historical anarchists advocate the same core positions. What many modern anarchists label as democracy without the state, historical anarchists just called free association or anarchy. At least one historical anarchist, Maximoff, referred to anarchism as democracy without the state several decades before it became a popular expression. Historical anarchists made decisions via majority vote, unanimous agreement or a combination of the two. Modern anarchists use the same basic systems of decision-making. The main difference is that modern anarchists often use consensus decision-making processes, which historical anarchists did not use.

This, in turn, raises the question of whether or not anarchists should use the language of democracy. In a society where people have been socialised to view democracy as a good thing, it can be beneficial to describe anarchism as a kind of direct democracy. Yet doing so also comes with potential downsides, such as people confusing anarchism for the idea that society should be run by an extremely democratic state that makes decisions within general assemblies and then imposes these decisions on everyone via the institutionalised violence of the law, police and prisons. Independently of what language modern anarchists choose to use, our task remains the same as historical anarchists: during the course of the class struggle we must develop, through a process of experimentation in the present, the forms of association, deliberation and decision-making which simultaneously enable effective action and prefigure a society with neither master nor subject.

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Taber, Mike, ed. 2021. Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International 1889-1912. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad. 1926a. The Organisational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists.

The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad. 1926b. “Supplement to the Organisational Platform”. In Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organisation from Proudhon to May 1968, edited by Alexandre Skirda, 214–23. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002.

Turcato, Davide. 2012. Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments With Revolution, 1889-1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Raekstad, Paul. 2020. “Democracy Against Representation: A Radical Realist View”. Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics.

Rocker, Rudolf. 2004. Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1999. Discourse on Political Economy and The Social Contract. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

In the popular imagination anarchists are assumed to be naive optimists. It is thought that anyone who thinks humans can live a good life without capitalism and the state must do so because they think humans are angels who are naturally caring and benevolent. Anarchists in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries in fact had a very nuanced understanding of human nature.

Anarchists thought that all human beings across all societies have some characteristics in common. Michael Bakunin wrote that the key elements of “human existence” will “always remain the same: to be born, to develop and grow; to work in order to eat and drink, in order to have shelter and defend oneself, in order to maintain one’s individual existence in the social equilibrium of his own species, to love, reproduce and then to die” (Bakunin 1964, 85-6). The exact same point is made by Rudolf Rocker. He claimed that,

We are born, absorb nourishment, discard the waste material, move, procreate and approach dissolution without being able to change any part of the process. Necessities eventuate here which transcend our will . . . We are not compelled to consume our food in the shape nature offers it to us or to lie down to rest in the first convenient place, but we cannot keep from eating or sleeping, lest our physical existence should come to a sudden end (Rocker 1937, 24).

Since these common characteristics are constant across all human beings they must stem from certain basic facts about human biology. Anarchists did not, however, regard human nature as a static unchanging entity. Humans are, just like all species of animal, subject to evolutionary change via various processes including natural selection. As a result of this, Peter Kropotkin thought that there were “fundamental features of human character” which could “only be mediated by a very slow evolution” (Kropotkin 1895). Nor did anarchists view human nature as an abstract essence which exists outside of history. Anarchists distinguished between the innate characteristics which constitute all human beings and the manner in which these innate characteristics are developed during a person’s life within a historically specific society. Bakunin thought that although humans possessed innate “faculties and dispositions” which are “natural” it was “the organisation of society” which “develops them, or on the other hand halts, or falsifies their development”. Given this, “all individuals, with no exception, are at every moment of their lives what Nature and society have made them” (Bakunin 1964, 155). Kropotkin similarly wrote that “man is a result of both his inherited instincts and his education” (Kropotkin 2006, 228).

Anarchists thought that one of the main processes which modifies and develops the innate characteristics of human nature is human activity itself. Anarchists conceptualised human activity in terms of practice. Humans engage in practice when they deploy their capacities to satisfy a psychological drive and through doing so change the world and themselves simultaneously. For example, when a person makes a sandwich they deploy their relevant capacities, such as being able to spread jam on bread, in order to satisfy their drive for a jam sandwich. In so doing they change the world – a jam sandwich now exists where before there was none – and they change themselves – they acquire the drive to have sandwiches with other kinds of jam or reproduce their capacity to make a sandwich. This idea can be seen in Kropotkin’s advocacy of “teaching which, by the practice of the hand on wood, stone, metal, will speak to the brain and help to develop it” and thereby produce a child whose brain is “developed at once by the work of hand and mind” (Kropotkin 2014, 645).

If the capacities and drives a person has are continually determined by practice, and the practice people engage in varies across different social and historical contexts, then what capacities and drives people have, in turn, varies both socially and historically. This idea can be clearly seen in anarchist discussions of psychological drives, which were historically called needs. Luigi Galleani thought that when a human being develops themselves they acquire “a series of ever-more, growing and varied needs claiming satisfaction” which “vary, not only according to time and place, but also according to the temperament, disposition and development of each individual” (Galleani 2012, 43, 45).

The consequence of the theory of practice was that even capacities and drives which are universal among human beings are always mediated through and developed by historically specific forms of practice. All human being, for example, have the drive to consume water but how they do so and what specific kinds of liquid they have a drive to consume varies between and within societies. One person may satisfy their drive for liquid through drinking tea from a mug, whilst another person drinks milk from a glass through a straw. The universal capacities and drives which all human beings possess (except in cases of pathology) are, in turn, what enable people within specific contexts to develop historically specific capacities and drives. The universal capacity to acquire language, for example, enables human beings to invent, learn and alter a vast array of different specific languages such as French, Mandarin and Welsh. The characteristics which all humans have in common are, in other words, the foundation from which the great diversity of human life emerges. The extent to which anarchists thought this was the case can be seen in the fact that several anarchists claim that there is an infinite number of different kinds of person. Errico Malatesta, for example, wrote that in an anarchist society “the full potential of human nature could develop in its infinite variations” (Malatesta 2014, 402).

This was not to say that humans could transform themselves into anything they wanted. The nature of the innate characteristics which constitute all human beings places definite limits on what they can be shaped into. Humans cannot morph their arms into wings, their feet into claws or their hair into feathers. Although a human can develop themselves in many different directions, the scope of what they can possibly become is limited by the kind of animal that they are. As Rocker wrote, “man is unconditionally subject only to the laws of his physical being. He cannot change his constitution. He cannot suspend the fundamental conditions of his physical being nor alter them according to his wish” (Rocker 1937, 27).

Anarchists thought that human beings were social animals who had a tendency to engage in two main kinds of behaviour: struggle and co-operation. Malatesta wrote that humans possessed the “harsh instinct of wanting to predominate and to profit at the expense of others” and “the thirst for domination, rivalry, envy and all the unhealthy passions which set man against man”. These negative passions co-existed with “another feeling which draws him closer to his neighbour, the feeling of sympathy, tolerance, of love”. As a result human history contained “violence, wars, carnage (besides the ruthless exploitation of the labour of others) and innumerable tyrannies and slavery” alongside “mutual aid, unceasing and voluntary exchange of services, affection, love, friendship and all that which draws people closer together in brotherhood”. From these facts Malatesta drew the conclusion that human beings were “a social animal whose existence depends on the continued physical and spiritual relations between human beings” which are “based either on affinity, solidarity and love, or on hostility and struggle” (Malatesta 2015, 65-6, 68).

The same position was advocated by Kropotkin. It is sometimes falsely claimed that Kropotkin only focused on the second tendency of human beings to co-operate with one another and ignored the darker side of human nature. This stems from a lack of familiarity with Kropotkin’s book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. As the book’s subtitle and introduction makes clear, Kropotkin thought that mutual aid was one among several factors of evolution, rather than the sole factor (Kropotkin 2006, xvii-xviii). Kropotkin expanded upon this point in chapter 1. He argued that a naturalist would be wrong to view “the life of animals” as only “a field of slaughter” or “nothing but harmony and peace” (Kropotkin 2006, 4). The animal world instead featured both conflict and co-operation. He wrote,

as we study animals . . . we at once perceive that though there is an immense amount of warfare and extermination going on amidst various species, and especially amidst various classes of animals, there is, at the same time, as much, or perhaps even more, of mutual support, mutual aid, and mutual defence amidst animals belonging to the same species or, at least, to the same society. Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle (Kropotkin 2006, 4-5).

Kropotkin thought that human beings were not different from other animals in this respect. He wrote in his book Ethics: Origin and Development that there are “two sets of diametrically opposed feelings which exist in man”. These “are the feelings which induce man to subdue other men in order to utilise them for his individual ends” and the feelings which “induce human beings to unite for attaining common ends by common effort”. The first corresponds “to that fundamental need of human nature – struggle” and the second to the “equally fundamental tendency – the desire of unity and mutual sympathy” (Kropotkin 1924, 22). Charlotte Wilson similarly wrote that “the history of men living in a social state is one long record of a never-ending contest between certain opposing natural impulses developed by the life in common.” This “struggle” which humans observe “within our own nature and in the world of men around us” occurred between “the anti-social desire to monopolise and dominate, and the social desires which find their highest expression in fraternity” (Wilson 2000, 38-9).

Anarchists did not think that there was a strict dichotomy between domination and co-operation such that a social structure only ever contained one or the other. Anarchists understood that people can co-operate with one another to engage in domination, such as the police working together in order to effectively beat up protesters. It is furthermore the case that institutions which are based on domination are generally reproduced through co-operative social relations. Under capitalism, for example, workers are subject to domination and exploitation by the capitalist who employs them. Yet these same capitalist businesses would quickly go bankrupt if workers did not co-operate with one another in order to collectively produce various goods or services (Malatesta 2014, 121-6).

Anarchists repeatedly emphasized both the good and the bad aspects of human beings in their overviews of history. Within Mutual Aid Kropotkin noted multiple examples of the San people in South Africa co-operating and being sympathetic towards one another, such as hunting in common, engaging in affectionate behaviour, and rescuing someone if they were drowning in water (Kropotkin 2006, 72-3). This went alongside Kropotkin noting examples of domination. He wrote,

when Europeans settled in their territory and destroyed deer, the Bushmen began stealing the settlers’ cattle, whereupon a war of extermination, too horrible to be related here, was waged against them. Five hundred Bushmen were slaughtered in 1775, three thousand in 1808 and 1809 . . . They were poisoned like rats, killed by hunters lying in ambush before the carcass of some animal, killed whenever met with. So that our knowledge of the Bushmen, being chiefly borrowed from those same people who exterminated them, is necessarily limited (Kropotkin 2006, 72).

Far from being naive about human nature, anarchists were extremely aware of the fact that humans are capable of committing atrocities against one another. Anarchists, in addition to this, thought that the extent to which human beings engaged in domination or co-operation varied significantly between different contexts. Kropotkin wrote,

the relative amounts of individualist and mutual aid spirit are among the most changeable features of man. Both being equally products of an anterior development, their relative amounts are seen to change in individuals and even societies with a rapidity which would strike the sociologist if he only paid attention to the subject, and analysed the corresponding facts (Kropotkin 1895).

Given their conception of human nature, anarchists thought that the main reason for this variation in human behaviour was differences in people’s environment and the forms of practice they engaged in and were subject to. This led anarchists to argue that the oppression and exploitation which occurred within existing society was not the product of human nature considered in isolation. They instead stemmed from the manner in which the raw materials of human nature were developed through participation within social structures. To quote Malatesta, “social wrongs do not depend on the wickedness of one master or the other, one governor or the other, but rather on masters and governments as institutions; therefore, the remedy does not lie in changing the individual rulers, instead it is necessary to demolish the principle itself by which men dominate over men” (Malatesta 2014, 415).

Anarchists viewed capitalism and the state as hierarchical social structures based on a division between a minority who command and a majority who obey. They are pyramids in which decision making flows from the top to the bottom. The majority of the population are workers who lack real decision making power over the nature of their life, workplace, community or society as a whole. They are instead subject to the rule of an economic ruling class – capitalists, bankers, heads of state owned companies etc – and a political ruling class – politicians, heads of the police, generals etc. The decisions of the ruling classes are, in turn, implemented by a vast array of individuals raised up above the rest of the population and granted special powers of command, such as corporate managers, police officers and prison guards.

Those at the top of hierarchies not only wield power over others but are also transformed and corrupted through doing so due to the forms of practice they are engaging in. Bakunin argued that,

Nothing is as dangerous for man’s personal morality as the habit of commanding. The best of men, the most intelligent, unselfish, generous, and pure, will always and inevitably be corrupted in this pursuit. Two feelings inherent in the exercise of power never fail to produce this demoralization: contempt for the masses, and, for the man in power, an exaggerated sense of his own worth (Bakunin 1980, 145).

The same point was made by Elisée Reclus. He wrote,

Anarchists contend that the state and all that it implies are not any kind of pure essence, much less a philosophical abstraction, but rather a collection of individuals placed in a specific milieu and subjected to its influence. Those individuals are raised up above their fellow citizens in dignity, power, and preferential treatment, and are consequently compelled to think themselves superior to the common people. Yet in reality the multitude of temptations besetting them almost inevitably leads them to fall below the general level (Reclus 2013, 122).

It is common for defenders of hierarchy to claim that capitalism and the state are necessary due to the negative characteristics of human nature. If workers are incapable of governing themselves then they must be led by enlightened CEOs. If people murder, steal and rape then society must be protected by the police, prisons and the law. Yet it is these hierarchical systems which bring out the worst in people and make the greatest atrocities possible. As Kropotkin wrote,

when we hear men saying that the Anarchists imagine men much better than they really are, we merely wonder how intelligent people can repeat that nonsense. . . We maintain that both rulers and ruled are spoiled by authority; both exploiters and exploited are spoiled by exploitation; while our opponents seem to admit that there is a kind of salt of the earth — the rulers, the employers, the leaders — who, happily enough, prevent those bad men — the ruled, the exploited, the led — from becoming still worse than they are. There is the difference, and a very important one. We admit the imperfections of human nature, but we make no exception for the rulers (Kropotkin 2014, 609).

Anarchists argued that if human beings are imperfect animals capable of committing the most appalling acts against one another, then this imperfection is the strongest reason for why no person should be raised up above the rest of society and granted the institutionalised power to command and impose their decisions on others through force or the threat of it (Malatesta 2015, 40). An individual serial killer can do a great deal of harm armed only with a knife. Their capacity for violence is, however, nothing compared to what rulers wielding the knife of state power are capable of. This can be seen in the fact that millions of people have been killed by states during the history of imperialism and colonialism. An individual thief may break into my home and steal my television but their theft is nothing compared to the vast plunder of resources, destruction of the natural environment and oppression of workers carried out by the corporations which manufactured my television and extracted the raw materials it is made out of. The greatest crimes are carried out not by isolated sadistic individuals but by vast social structures which enable a ruling minority to violently impose their will on the working classes.

As a result of this anarchists concluded that hierarchical and centralised institutions should be abolished in favour of horizontal free association between equals. Within an anarchist society people with the desire or predisposition to oppress and exploit other people would still exist. They would not, however, find themselves in a situation where there are positions of power they can take over and use to engage in oppression and exploitation on a large scale. In Bakunin’s words,

Do you want to prevent men from ever oppressing other men? Arrange matters such that they never have the opportunity. Do you want them to respect the liberty, rights and human character of their fellow men? Arrange matters such that they are compelled to respect them — compelled not by the will or oppression of other men, nor by the repression of the State and legislation, which are necessarily represented and implemented by men and would make them slaves in their turn, but by the actual organization of the social environment, so constituted that while leaving each man to enjoy the utmost possible liberty it gives no one the power to set himself above others or to dominate them. . . (Bakunin 1973, 152-3).

Given the above, anarchists would argue that it is not they who are naive about human nature but the defenders of hierarchy. Authoritarians imagine that emancipation can be achieved if good people with the correct ideas take control of the reigns of power. Anarchists realise that this has never happened and will never happen. Irrespective of people’s good intentions or the stories they tell themselves, they will be corrupted by their position at a top of a hierarchy and become primarily concerned with exercising and expanding their power over others in order to serve their own interests. If human beings are not inherently good, then no person is good enough to be a ruler

Bibliography

Bakunin, Michael. 1964. The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism. Edited by G.P. Maximoff. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe.

Bakunin, Michael. 1980. Bakunin on Anarchism, ed. Sam Dolgoff. Montréal: Black Rose Books.

Bakunin, Michael. 1973. Selected Writings. Edited by Arthur Lehning. London: Jonathan Cape.

Galleani, Luigi. 2012. The End of Anarchism? London: Elephant Editions.

Kropotkin, Peter. 1895. Proposed Communist Settlement: A New Colony for Tyneside or Wearside. The Newcastle Daily Chronicle. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-proposed-communist-settlement-a-new-colony-for-tyneside-or-wearside.

Kropotkin, Peter. 1924. Ethics: Origins and Development. London: George G. Harrap & Co.

Kropotkin, Peter. 2006. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

Kropotkin, Peter. 2014. Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology. Edited by Iain McKay. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Malatesta, Errico. 2014. The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader. Edited by Davide Turcato. Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Malatesta, Errico. 2015. Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta. Edited by Vernon Richards. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Rocker, Rudolf. 1937. Nationalism and Culture. Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee.

Wilson, Charlotte. 2000. Anarchist Essays. Edited by Nicolas Walter. London: Freedom Press.

In the modern world anarchist hot takes can be easily found on twitter or facebook. Such hot takes are of course not a new phenomenon and can also be found in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. In this video I shall draw attention to a few of my personal favourites.

The French geographer Élisée Reclus was strongly opposed to children being taught geography with two-dimensional maps because they failed to accurately represent the real 3D earth. In a letter to the Spanish anarchist educator Francisco Ferrer he argued that “maps with unequal scales and projections would do as much damage to my students as they did to me and undoubtedly to the reader as well, because no one manages to completely erase the contradictory impressions that one receives from these diverse maps.” This was because they gave “geographic forms a floating and indefinite appearance”, misrepresented “the proportions between the different regions” and featured “multiple deformations, inflated or narrowed, stretched, elongated, or truncated in various ways” (Quoted in Ferrer 2019, 102). It was therefore “truly impossible to use traditional maps without betraying the very same cause of education with which they were entrusted”. Reclus’ alternative to 2D maps was the use of 3D globes. He thought that, “the early geographical education of the child must proceed from a direct examination of the globe, an exact and proportional reproduction of the earth itself.” (Ibid, 103) This hostility to 2D maps is not a one off event. In 1903 Reclus argued that 2D maps ”ought to be entirely tabooed. They must be tabooed, because maps are made on different scales, and that being so, it is quite impossible to compare them; and if you cannot compare them, it is only a waste of time and trouble. In all well-conducted schools, globes should be used, and children ought to be entirely forbidden the use of maps’” (Quoted in Ferretti 2019, 32). Reclus was, in short, a true globe head.

Historical anarchists had strong opinions not only about globes but also about drugs. In 1922 the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta argued against the criminalisation of cocaine. Although his arguments against drug prohibition are still relevant today, he did seriously underestimate how much people enjoy taking cocaine. He wrote,

There are in France stringent laws against the traffic in drugs and against those who take them. And as always happens, the scourge grows and spreads in spite, and perhaps because of, the laws. The same is happening in the rest of Europe and in America. Doctor Courtois-Suffit, of the French Academy of Medicine, who, already last year [1921], had sounded the alarm against the dangers of cocaine, noting the failure of penal legislation, now demands … new and more stringent laws.

It is the old mistake of legislators, in spite of experience invariably showing that laws, however barbarous they may be, have never served to suppress vice or to discourage delinquency. The more severe the penalties imposed on the consumers and traffickers of cocaine, the greater will be the attraction of forbidden fruits and the fascination of the risks incurred by the consumer, and the greater will be the profits made by the speculators, avid for money.

It is useless, therefore to hope for anything from the law. We must suggest another solution. Make the use and sale of cocaine free [from restrictions], and open kiosks where it would be sold at cost price or even under cost. And then launch a great propaganda campaign to explain to the public, and let them see for themselves, the evils of cocaine; no one would engage in counter-propaganda because nobody could exploit the misfortunes of cocaine addicts.

Certainly the harmful use of cocaine would not disappear completely, because the social causes which create and drive those poor devils to the use of drugs would still exist. But in any case the evil would decrease, because nobody could make profits out of its sale, and nobody could speculate on the hunt for speculators (Malatesta 2015, 105-6).

Malatesta’s hot take about cocaine is one example of how historical anarchists articulated anarchist theory in response to a specific historical context. Another example is the Spanish anarchist Ricardo Mella’s amusing intervention into discussions about exercise. In 1913 he argued that gym culture emerged due to the wealthy not having to engage in manual labour. Whilst the poor worked their bodies to exhaustion in order to earn a wage, the rich went to gyms where they would “ridiculously move their arms and legs and trunks aimlessly and uselessly” (Mella 2020, 42). Mella thought that gym culture was not only a product of the capitalist division of labour. It was also inferior to what he viewed as more natural and superior forms of exercise. He wrote,

Some days ago, a French illustrated magazine published a beautiful picture of a group of German ladies in the most ridiculous gymnastic positions. All of them were simultaneously performing the strangest movements. Blunders, pirouettes, jumps, everything was done rhythmically and to the voice of a leader.

We immediately think that those ladies would become healthier and more vigorous and would also be happier running free across the prairie into the forest’s heavy leafiness, bounding over rocks and crags or bathing in the sun on the beach’s warm sand. We immediately think that tidy tough guys who waste their time in fencing halls, in ball games, in horse racing, or in water sports would be much better off running around beaches, forests, and meadows after cute girls, inviting kisses, in pink colors. They would be better off climbing trees in order to reach bountiful nature’s rich fruits for their loved ones. They would be much better off in complete freedom of action and passion. The automated doll is in no way better to natural man (Mella 2020, 41).

Prior to the invention of crossfit, Mella suggested what could have become a bold new exercise programme: men in pink outfits chasing hot women across the wilderness. Other anarchists do not appear to have endorsed Mella’s attempt to combine cross country running with heterosexual gender relations. When writing about dating they largely focused on the idea of free love. Although this sometimes included the idea of polyamory, it usually referred to a monogamous consensual relationship which occurred outside of marriage. Such love was supposed to be free in the sense that it was voluntary and did not contain any oppressive social relations. One proponent of free love in this sense of the term was the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker. Although Rocker appears to have treated his partner Milly Witkop with respect, other anarchist men were less caring and used women as sex objects. To give one example, Rocker knew a married man who lived with and impregnated a young woman who was not his wife. This man subsequently threw her out of his house when his wife arrived from Russia. In response to this kind of behaviour Rocker endorsed drastic action. He proposed that men who had sex with and then abandoned women should be expelled from an organisation he was involved in. Such men were viewed by Rocker as people who had wrongly mistaken anarchist ideas on free love as license to satisfy their own sexual desires without consideration for the welfare of others (Frost 2009, 88). Rocker in other words engaged in anti-fuckboi aktion.

Given the above, historical anarchist theory is not only interesting or thought provoking. It is also sometimes very amusing and bizarre. These hot takes highlight the fact that anarchists did not only write about such topics as the oppression of capitalism and the state or what strategies anarchists should use to achieve their objectives. They reflected upon and wrote about a large number of different topics. In 1886 the English anarchist Charlotte Wilson claimed that, “Anarchists believe that the solution of the social problem can only be wrought out from the equal consideration of the whole of the experience at our command, individual as well as social, internal as well as external” (Wilson 2000, 50). For some anarchists the topics worthy of consideration included drugs, sex, exercise and, most importantly of all, globes.

Bibliography

Ferrer, Francisco. 2019. Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader. Edited by Mark Bray and Robert H. Haworth. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Ferretti, Federico. 2019. Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK. London: Routledge.

Frost, Ginger. 2009. “Love is Always Free: Anarchism, Free Unions and Utopianism in Edwardian England”. Anarchist Studies 17, no. 1, 73-94.

Malatesta, Errico. 2015. Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta. Edited by Vernon Richards. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

Mella, Ricardo. 2020. Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology. Edited by Stephen Luis Vilaseca. Palgrave Macmillan.

Wilson, Charlotte. 2000. Anarchist Essays. Edited by Nicolas Walter. London: Freedom Press.

The French anarchist Louise Michel was born in 1830 and died in 1905. She led a very eventful life, which included fighting in the Paris Commune of 1871. In this video I’m going to be drawing attention to an aspect of her life which doesn’t get the attention it deserves. She was extremely chaotic good.

As a child she gave away her possessions to poor people. This even included her shoes on one occasion. Not content with giving away items she personally owned, Michel also stole money, fruits and vegetables from her grandparents and then distributed them to local peasants in her relatives’ name. This led to unexpected consequences when the peasants arrived at the house to thank her grandparents for their generosity. Michel claims to have “laughed” in response to the “great scenes” which occurred during these moments (Thomas 1983, 21; Michel 1981, 6).

During her childhood Michel attended church regularly (Thomas 1983, 20). This did not stop her from also attempting “alchemy, astrology, the summoning of spirits” at the top of a tower which she decorated with the skeletons of dogs, cats and horses. At one point she took her practice of witchcraft to the next level and tried to summon the devil. She wrote in her autobiography, “among haunted ruins I drew magical circles, and I declared my love to Satan. Satan didn’t come, which led me to think he didn’t exist” (Michel 1981, 20, 19).

This chaotic good energy continued into adulthood. During the 1860s she earned a living as a teacher in Paris (Thomas 1983, 42-3). In her autobiography she claimed that one night when walking home she deliberately scared a member of the bourgeoisie. She wrote,

Another time I was returning home on foot fairly late, and I had on a long cloak which enveloped me completely. I was wearing a sort of wide hat made out of shaggy cloth which cast a lot of shadows on my face, and brand-new ankle boots from the pawnshop, For some reason the heels made a lot of noise. The newspapers recently had been writing a lot about nocturnal attacks. Some good bourgeois heard my boots ringing, and being unable to make out my exact form because of my cloak and hat, he began to run with such fear that it gave me the idea of following him for a bit to scare him properly.

He went along, looking around to see if anyone would come to help him. With the black night and the deserted streets, the bourgeois was scared witless, and I was having a really good time. He lengthened his stride as much as he could. I kept to the shadows and made my heels strike even louder, because that noise was what kept up his fright. I don’t know what district we had come to when I let the bourgeois go, yelling at him: ‘Must you be so stupid?’ (Michel 1981, 48-9).

During her eventful life Michel was arrested and imprisoned a number of times. In January 1882 she was arrested and sentenced to two weeks in prison for insulting a police officer. During the trial Michel denied that she had called the police “hoods and deadbeats” and offered an alternative chain of events. A newspaper account of the trial reads as follows.

‘You are charged with insulting policemen,’ said M. Puget, the judge.

‘On the contrary, it is we who should bring charges concerning brutality and insults,’ Louise Michel said, ‘because we were very peaceful. What happened, and doubtless the reason I am here, is this: I went to the headquarters of the police commissioner and when I got there, I looked out a window and saw several policemen beating a man. I did not want to say anything to those policemen because they were very overexcited, so I went up to the next floor and found two other policemen who were calmer. I said to them, ‘Go down quickly. Someone is being murdered’ (Michel 1981, 134).

Michel’s true crime was, in other words, trolling a police officer. She had amusing interactions not only with the police but also with men in general. When she was twelve or thirteen two adult suitors attempted to marry her. She remembered that “they both had the idea of choosing a very young fiancée and having her moulded like soft wax for a few years before offering her up to themselves as a sacrifice.” After the first adult suitor did not notice her literary reference to Moliere she “looked straight in his face, and with the ingenuousness of Agnes, I said to him boldly, knowing he had one glass eye, ‘Monsieur, is your other eye glass, too?’ That seemed to embarrass my relatives a little, and as for my suitor, he gave me a venomous look from the eye that wasn’t glass, and made it clear he no longer wanted to make me his fiancée” (Michel 1981, 21). Michel scared away the second adult suitor with similar tactics. She remembered saying,

‘You see plainly what’s hanging on the wall over there.’ It was a pair of stag antlers. ‘Well, I don’t love you. I will never love you, and if I marry you I won’t restrain myself any more than Mme Dandin did. If I marry you, you will wear horns on your head a hundred thousand feet higher than those antlers.’ I suppose I convinced him I was telling him the truth, for he never came back. My relatives advised me, however, to be a little more reserved in quoting old authors in the future. There have been unfortunate children who were forced to marry old crocodiles like those. If it had been done to me, either he or I would have had to jump out the window (Michel 1981, 21).

As an adult Michel acted in a similar manner towards unwanted men. She wrote that one day,

a simple-minded man, absolutely dressed to the teeth, a stupid man as stiff as a wooden doll, appeared at the door of 45, boulevard Ornano, where my mother and I were living. ‘MIle Michel?’ he asked, forgetting to take off his stove-pipe hat and beating his right hand with a small stick. ‘I am she,’ I said. ‘No, you aren’t her.’ ‘I’m not me?’ ‘Well! I know Louise Michel. I saw her portrait in the Salon.’ ‘So?’ ‘So! Try not to make fun of me. A woman who has horses and carriages doesn’t open her own door. Go and get her for me. I repeat: It isn’t her who is opening this door.’ ‘It’s she who is closing it,’ I said. Whereupon, as this stupid man wasn’t all the way inside, I pushed him completely outside and slammed the door in his face. He blustered a little from the other side of the door, and then I heard him going down the steps, still shouting insults (Michel 1981, 153).

Michel regularly went on speaking tours to spread anarchist ideas and raise money for social movements. On one occasion she combined this with a cunning plan to manipulate her haters. She wrote,

In October 1882 I went to Lille to speak in connection with the strike of the women spinners there. . . All the strikers had to do was hold out for one week more and the exploiters would have given in, but to last a week longer the strikers needed two thousand francs. That was why I went to Lille to make a speech. Thanks to the reactionaries who paid for their seats so that they could come to insult me, we made the two thousand francs in one lecture alone. I asked the organizers of the speech to put that money away safely, and then I was able to announce to the gentlemen who had bought tickets that we had what we needed. Thus, they were free either to listen to me or to spend their time howling, either of which was perfectly all right with me because we already had the two thousand francs that we needed (Michel 1981, 153-4).

From these stories it is apparent that Louise Michel had powerful chaotic good energy. Yet these stories are not only amusing. They also serve as a reminder that famous revolutionaries in the past were not fundamentally different to people alive today. They were human beings who, despite living in a different time and place, engaged in what one might call relatable content.

Bibliography

Michel, Louise. 1981. The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel. Edited and Translated by Bullit Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter. The University of Alabama Press.

Thomas, Edith. 1983. Louise Michel. Black Rose Books.

Michael Bakunin was one of the early influential theorists of the anarchist movement and played a key role in developing and spreading its ideas. He is one of my favourite authors and I have gained a huge amount from reading him. But this does not mean that I am uncritical of Bakunin. I am against putting any anarchist, dead or alive, on a pedestal and think it is important to examine both the good and the bad aspects of what Bakunin thought. His theory contained a profound inconsistency. He advocated a society in which all systems of domination and exploitation were abolished and everybody was free. He was also an antisemite. Most of the thousands of pages Bakunin wrote contain no antisemitism. On the few occasions where he is antisemitic it is abhorrent and should be rejected by everybody. In this essay I shall explain how he was antisemitic and why it was wrong. Once I have done this, I will discuss whether or not Bakunin’s critique of capitalism and the state was fundamentally racist and then explore how historical anarchists responded to his antisemitism.

Bakunin’s Racism

Bakunin’s antisemitism took five main forms. Firstly, on a number of occasions Bakunin unnecessarily pointed out that somebody he did not like was a Jew. One of Bakunin’s main political opponents in the 1^st International was a Russian Jew named Nicholas Utin, who was an ally of Marx and Engels. In August 1871 Bakunin wrote a text which was later referred to as his Report on the Alliance. Within the text he labelled Utin a “little Jew” who manipulated other people, especially women, on four occasions (Bakunin 1913, 197, 213, 265-6, 273. For English translations see Carr 1975, 346; Bakunin 2016, 153, 158). A year later in October 1872 Bakunin again referred to Utin as “a little Russian Jew” in his unsent letter to the editors of La Liberté (Bakunin 1973, 247. Also see Bakunin 1872b, 1). Bakunin made similar remarks about other individuals. Within Statism and Anarchy, which was published in 1873, Bakunin complained that German workers were “confused by their leaders – politicians, literati, and Jews” who “hate and fear revolution” and have as a result “directed the entire worker population” into parliamentary politics (Bakunin 1990, 193).

On other occasions Bakunin went further. He explictly connected a person’s Jewishness with what he thought were their negative personality traits or incorrect political positions. In Statism and Anarchy Bakunin wrote that,

By origin Marx is a Jew. One might say that he combines all of the positive qualities and all of the short comings of that capable race. A nervous man, some say to the point of cowardice, he is extremely ambitious and vain, quarrelsome, intolerant, and absolute, like Jehovah, the Lord God of his ancestors, and, like him, vengeful to the point of madness. There is no lie or calumny that he would not invent and disseminate against anyone who had the misfortune to arouse his jealousy – or his hatred, which amounts to the same thing. And there is no intrigue so sordid that he would hesitate to engage in it if in his opinion (which is for the most part mistaken) it might serve to strengthen his position and his influence or extend his power (Bakunin 1990, 141)

Bakunin later claimed that Marx was a “hopeless statist” and advocate of “state communism” because of “his threefold capacity as an Hegelian, a Jew, and a German” (Bakunin 1990, 142-3). This point was repeated elsewhere. Bakunin remarked in his 1872 letter To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain that Marx “as a German and a Jew” is “an authoritarian from head to foot”. Within the same letter Bakunin wrote that Marx’s “vanity, in fact, has no limits, a truly Jewish vanity” (Bakunin 1872a. For the German version see Bakunin 1924, 117, 115).

Bakunin made similar remarks about the German state socialist Ferdinand Lassalle. He wrote in Statism and Anarchy that “Lassalle . . . was vain, very vain, as befits a Jew” (Bakunin 1990, 177). A few pages later he declared that “Lassalle . . . was too spoilt by wealth and its attendant habits of elegance and refinement to find satisfaction in the popular milieu; he was too much of a Jew to feel comfortable among the people” (Bakunin 1990, 180). Bakunin not only connected Lassalle’s vanity and elitism with being Jewish but also argued, just as he had done with Marx, that Lassalle’s Jewishness could be used to explain his political positions. Bakunin wrote that Lassalle advocated parliamentary politics as the means to seize state power because he was “a German, a Jew, a scholar, and a rich man” (Bakunin 1990, 175).

Bakunin’s antisemitism was not limited to making negative remarks about a few Jewish individuals. Between February and March 1872 Bakunin wrote a letter titled To the Comrades of the International Sections of the Jura Federation. It is perhaps the most antisemitic texts he ever wrote. Within the letter he asserted that Jewish people are,

bourgeois and exploitative from head to foot, and instinctively opposed to any real popular emancipation . . . Every Jew, however enlightened, retains the traditional cult of authority: it is the heritage of his race, the manifest sign of his Eastern origin . . . The Jew is therefore authoritarian by position, by tradition and by nature. This is a general law and one which admits of very few exceptions, and these very exceptions, when examined closely confirm the rule (Bakunin 1872b, 4).

He continues a few paragraphs later by saying that Jewish people are “driven by need on the one hand, and on the other by that ever restless activity, by that passion for transactions and instinct for speculation, as well as by that petty and vain ambition, which form the distinguishing traits of the race” (ibid).

The second main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was the belief that Jewish people were united as a singular entity, rather than being a broad and diverse ethnic, cultural or religious group composed of distinct individual people acting independently of one another. Bakunin claimed in his March 1872 letter to the Jura Federation that “the Jews of every country are really friends only with the Jews of all countries, independently of all differences existing in social positions, degree of education, political opinions, and religious worship”. He continued at length,

Above all, they are Jews, and that establishes among all the individuals of this singular race, across all religions, political and social differences that separates them, a union of solidarity that is mutually indissoluble. It is a powerful chain, broadly cosmopolitan and narrowly national at the same time, in the racial sense, interconnecting the kings of finance, the Rothschilds, or the most scientifically exalted intelligences, with the ignorant and superstitious Jews of Lithuania, Hungary, Roumania, Africa and Asia. I do not think there exists a single Jew in the world today who does not tremble with hope and pride when he hears the sacred name of Rothschild (Quoted in Draper 1990, 297. For the original French see Bakunin 1872b, 3).

Sometime between October 1871 and February 1872 Bakunin wrote a note which he titled Supporting Documents: Personal Relations with Marx. He initially intended to include the text in a letter he was writing to Italians he knew, but the note was never sent. It contained some of the most antisemitic remarks Bakunin ever wrote. (Bakunin 1924, 204. Bakunin did send a letter to Bologna in December 1871 but it has been lost and we do not know if it contained similar racist content) Within the unsent note Bakunin wrote,

Himself a Jew, Marx has around him, in London and France, but especially in Germany, a multitude of more or less clever, intriguing, mobile, speculating Jews, such as Jews are everywhere: commercial or banking agents, writers, politicians, correspondents for newspapers of all shades, with one foot in the bank, the other in the socialist movement, and with their behinds sitting on the German daily press — they have taken possession of all the newspapers — and you can imagine what kind of sickening literature they produce. Now, this entire Jewish world, which forms a single profiteering sect, a people of bloodsuckers, a single gluttonous parasite, closely and intimately united not only across national borders but across all differences of political opinion — this Jewish world today stands for the most part at the disposal of Marx and at the same time at the disposal of Rothschild. I am certain that Rothschild for his part greatly values the merits of Marx, and that Marx for his part feels instinctive attraction and great respect for Rothschild (Bakunin 1924, 208-9).

The third main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was the belief in an international Jewish conspiracy which played a key role in running the world via control of commerce, banking and the media. In 1869 Bakunin was critiqued by a German Jewish state socialist called Moses Hess in an article which was published in the radical paper Le Réveil. Bakunin responded in October by writing a long unpublished letter titled To the Citizen Editors of Le Réveil. Bakunin’s other title for the letter was Study of the German Jews (Carr 1975, 369-70; Eckhardt 2016, 27; Bakunin 1911, 239). Within the letter he wrote that,

I know that in speaking out my intimate thoughts on the Jews with such frankness I expose myself to immense dangers. Many people share these thoughts, but very few dare to express them publicly, for the Jewish sect, which is much more formidable than that of the Catholic and Protestant Jesuits, today constitutes a veritable power in Europe. It reigns despotically in commerce and banking, and it has invaded three-quarters of German journalism and a very considerable part of the journalism of other countries. Then woe to him who makes the mistake of displeasing it! (Quoted in Draper 1990, 293. For the original French see Bakunin 1911, 243-4. This view is repeated in Bakunin 1872b, 1).

Bakunin’s friend Alexander Herzen reacted to this racist letter by complaining to Nicholas Ogarev, “why all this talk of race and of Jews?” (Quoted in Carr 1975, 370).

The fourth main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was intimately connected to the previous one. Bakunin not only believed that an international Jewish conspiracy played a key role in running the world. He also believed in a specifically Jewish conspiracy against him within the 1^st International. The history of the 1^st International is very complicated and for the purposes of this essay all you need to know is the following. In September 1872 Bakunin was expelled from the 1^st International at its Hague Congress for being a member of a secret organisation called the Alliance. Marx and Engels were mistakenly convinced that Bakunin was attempting to use the Alliance to take over the 1^st International and become its dictator. Due to this false belief Marx and Engels went to great lengths to guarantee Bakunin’s expulsion from the organisation, which included them creating fake delegates. Bakunin, in contrast, correctly thought that Marx, Engels and their supporters were attempting to take over the 1^st International and convert the General Council, which was supposed to perform only an administrative role, into a governing body which imposed state socialist decisions and policies on the organisation’s previously autonomous sections. One of the ironies of history is that, a key reason for why Marx and Engels did this is that they thought it was necessary in order to counter Bakunin’s non-existent attempt to become dictator of the International and impose his anarchist programme on the organisation (Eckhardt 2016. For a less in-depth history see Berthier 2015; Graham 2015).

Bakunin expressed his belief in a Jewish conspiracy against him in both public and private. In May 1872 the General Council issued a pamphlet called Fictious Splits in the International which had been written by Marx and Engels (Marx and Engels 1988, 83-123). The pamphlet repeated a number of inaccurate claims that had been made about Bakunin during his time in the International. This included Hess’ October 1869 accusation that Bakunin attempted to transfer the location of the General Council from London, where Marx and Engels lived, to Geneva, near where Bakunin lived, and Utin’s baseless September 1871 accusation that Bakunin was responsible for the harmful actions of the Russian revolutionary Sergei Nechaev (Eckhardt 2016, 29-31, 91-3). Hess had been friends with Marx and Engels in the early 1840s, but their friendship seems to have ended by 1848. Utin, in contrast, was in close contact with Marx and Engels during the early 1870s and suggested various corrections and additions to the pamphlet (McLellan 1969, 145-7, 158, 160; Eckhardt 2016, 47, 202-3).

In June 1872 the Bulletin of the Jura Federation published Bakunin’s response. He wrote that Marx’s pamphlet was “a collection, hodgepodge as much as systematic, of all the absurd and filthy tales that the malice (more perverse than spiritual) of the German and Russian Jews, his friends, his agents, his followers and at the same time, his henchmen, has peddled and propagated against us all, but especially against me, for almost three years” (Quoted Eckhardt 2016, 212). Bakunin was correct to think that Marx was repeating claims made by Hess and Utin but their Jewishness was irrelevant. Bakunin framed these events as a Jewish conspiracy against him because he was an antisemite. Engels reacted to Bakunin’s article by writing in a letter to Theodor Cuno, “Bakunin has issued a furious, but very weak, abusive letter” in which “he declares that he is the victim of a conspiracy of all the European—Jews!” (Marx and Engels 1989, 408).

Bakunin repeated his belief in a Jewish conspiracy against him in his October 1872 unsent letter to the editors of La Liberté. He wrote that,

Marx . . . has a remarkable genius for intrigue, and unrelenting determination; he also has a sizeable number of agents at his disposal, hierarchically organized and acting in secret under his direct orders; a kind of socialist and literary freemasonry in which his compatriots, the German and other Jews, hold an important position and display zeal worthy of a better cause (Bakunin 1973, 246. Also see Bakunin 1872b, 1).

Bakunin was correct that Marx, Engels and their supporters conspired against him. Where Bakunin went wrong was to frame the actions of Marx as a specifically Jewish conspiracy. It happened to be the case that some of Bakunin’s main political opponents within the International were Jews – Marx, Utin, Hess and Sigismund Borkheim – but a larger number of his opponents belonged to other ethnicities, such as the German’s Johann Philipp Becker and Georg Eccarius. Bakunin appeared to have been aware of this but thought they were operating under the commands of Marx and so a Jew. Bakunin could have viewed this situation as one political faction acting against another political faction. Due to his antisemitism, he instead framed it as people who were specifically Jewish conspiring against him. This was wrong and unjustifiable.

The fifth main form of Bakunin’s antisemitism was his stereotyping of Jews as wealthy bankers (Bakunin 1872b, 1-2). In Statism and Anarchy he asserted that the creation of the German nation state in 1871 was,

nothing other than the ultimate realisation of the anti-popular idea of the modern state, the sole objective of which is to organise the most intensive exploitation of the people’s labour for the benefit of capital concentrated in a very small number of hands. It signifies the triumphant reign of the Yids, of a bankocracy under the powerful protection of a fiscal, bureaucratic, and police regime which relies mainly on military force and is therefore in essence despotic, but cloaks itself in the parliamentary game of pseudo-constitutionalism (Bakunin 1990, 12).

Over a hundred pages later Bakunin noted that “the rich commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and the Jewish financial world of Germany” both “required extensive state centralisation in order to flourish” (Bakunin 1990, 138). Bakunin could have made his point about the relationship between finance capital and the state with a reference to bankers in general. He was an antisemite and so instead referred specifically to Jewish bankers and equated the rule of Jewish bankers with the rule of Jews in general. This was a common form of antisemitism during the 19^th century because several of the largest banks in the world were owned by Jewish families, such as Rothschild and Sons. Such racist claims ignored that other large banks at the time were not owned by Jewish families, such as Barings (Ferguson 2000, xxv, 20, 260-71, 284-8). It is furthermore the case that both today and in the 19^th century the majority of Jews are not bankers or members of the ruling classes. Jewish workers do not benefit from the fact that some bankers happen to be Jewish. This is no different to the fact that workers who are Christians or atheists do not benefit from the fact that some bankers happen to be Christians or atheists.

This kind of antisemitism was not a one-off occurrence. Bakunin’s most widely read work is a pamphlet called God and the State, which was first published in 1882 and is a long extract from his unfinished 1870-2 text The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution. Within God and the State Bakunin wrote that,

the Jews, in spite of that exclusive national spirit which distinguishes them even to-day, had become in fact, long before the birth of Christ, the most international people of the world. Some of them carried away as captives, but many more even urged on by that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principal traits of their character, they had spread through all countries, carrying everywhere the worship of their Jehovah, to whom they remained all the more faithful the more he abandoned them (Bakunin 1970, 74. This view is repeated in Bakunin 1872b, 4).

In other texts Bakunin linked his antisemitic beliefs about Jewish bankers with his critique of state socialism. Bakunin’s main critique of state socialism was that social movements should not use the means of seizing state power to achieve the ends of socialism because it would not result in the abolition of all forms of class rule. The minority of people who actually wielded state power in the name of the workers, such as politicians or bureaucrats, would instead constitute a new ruling class who dominated and exploited the working classes and focused on reproducing and expanding their power, rather than abolishing it (Bakunin 1873, 169, 237-8, 254-5, 265-70). This argument was not antisemitic and has been made by anarchists from Jewish backgrounds, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (Goldman 1996, 390-404; Berkman 2003, 89-136. For their family history see Avrich and Avrich 2012, 7, 15).

Bakunin was, however, a racist and so argued that one of the groups which would benefit from the seizure of state power by socialists were Jewish bankers specifically. He thought that just as Jewish bankers benefited from state centralisation under Bismarck so too would they benefit from state centralisation under the rule of a socialist political party. Bakunin wrote in his unsent note Personal Relations with Marx that,

What can there be in common between Communism and the large banks? Oh! The Communism of Marx seeks enormous centralisation in the state, and where such exists, there must inevitably be a central state bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, which. speculates on the work of the people, will always find a way to prevail . . .  (Bakunin 1924, 209).

This position was repeated in Bakunin’s unsent 1872 letter to La Liberté. He wrote that Marx argued that the state should seize the means of production and land, organise the economy and establish “a single bank on the ruins of all existing banks”. This would result in “a barracks regime for the proletariat, in which a standardised mass of men and women workers would wake, sleep, work and live by rote; a regime of privilege for the able and the clever; and for the Jews, lured by the large-scale speculations of the national banks, a wide field for lucrative transactions” (Bakunin 1973, 258-9). Bakunin could have made the argument that state socialist strategies would benefit a minority of people who ran the national state bank. He was an antisemite and so felt the need to refer specifically to Jewish bankers and to stereotype Jewish people in general as a parasite which exploits people. Bakunin’s racism was not the main reason why he opposed state socialist strategies, but antisemitism was a component of one of the arguments he made. I have been unable to find a single example of later anarchists repeating Bakunin’s antisemitic argument.

Bakunin’s antisemitism was not remarkable for the 19^th century. Antisemitism existed both within wider society and the socialist movement specifically. Bakunin lived in an antisemitic society and so expressed antisemitic views. Yet Bakunin was also raised in a patriarchal society but unlearnt this to a significant extent and advocated for woman’s emancipation (Bakunin 1973, 83, 174, 176). Bakunin was not responsible for internalising the prejudices of his time, but he was responsible for not noticing and unlearning them. The fact that this was possible is indicated by how many socialists were not antisemitic and explictly opposed antisemitism. They did so despite the fact that they too had been raised and lived within a racist social environment. Anarchists in the Russian empire, for example, defended Jews against pogroms on several occasions by organising mobile defence units armed with pistols and bombs. A number of Russian anarchists were killed whilst doing so. The armed defence of Jews was explictly justified by Russian anarchists in 1907 on the grounds that they were “against all racial conflicts” (Antonioli 2009, 164).

Bakunin’s antisemitism raises two important questions:

1. Was Bakunin’s critique of capitalism and the state fundamentally racist? By ‘fundamentally’ I mean the primary reason or the foundational core. Something can be significant without it being fundamental.
2. Were historical anarchists aware of Bakunin’s antisemitism and what did they think about it?

Bakunin’s Critique of Capitalism and the State

The answer to the first question is no. Bakunin advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state because he was committed to the view that everybody should be free, equal and bonded together through relations of solidarity (Bakunin 1985, 46-8). This led Bakunin to argue that capitalism and the state should be abolished because they are social structures based on the economic ruling class – capitalists, landowners, bankers etc – and the political ruling class – monarchs, politicians, generals, high ranking bureaucrats etc – dominating and exploiting the working classes. For example, in an 1869 article for L’Égalité Bakunin critiqued capitalism for being based on “the servitude of labour – the proletariat – under the yoke of capital, that is to say, of the bourgeoisie”. He argued at length that,

The prosperity of the bourgeois class is incompatible with workers’ freedom and well-being, because the particular wealth of the bourgeoisie exists and can be based only on the exploitation and servitude of labour . . . for this reason, the prosperity and the human dignity of the working masses demands the abolition of the bourgeoisie as a distinct class (Bakunin 2016, 43).

Bakunin then claimed that since the “power of the bourgeoisie” is “represented and sustained by the organisation of the state”, which “is only there to preserve every class privilege”, it follows that “all bourgeois politics . . . can have but one single purpose: to perpetuate the domination of the bourgeoisie” and the “slavery” of “the proletariat” (Bakunin 2016, 43, 49, 45). This, in turn, led Bakunin to advocate the abolition of the state. He argued in 1870 that “one should completely abolish, both in reality and in principle, everything that calls itself political power; because so long as political power exists, there will be persons who dominate and persons dominated, masters and slaves, exploiters and the exploited” (ibid, 63). This is not an antisemitic argument. The exact same position was advocated by anarchists from Jewish backgrounds, such as Goldman and Berkman, and by anarchists who were not Jewish but opposed antisemitism and participated in the Jewish anarchist movement, such as Rudolf Rocker (Berkman 2003, 7-28, 70-3; Goldman 1996, 49-51, 64-77; Rocker 2005, 1-3, 9-18).

Bakunin was, however, a racist and so thought that a key group who engaged in domination and exploitation were Jews, especially Jewish bankers. It is important to make three points about this. Firstly, Bakunin at no point claims that Jews are the only or main group who form the ruling classes. Secondly, the two propositions Bakunin believed in are logically independent of one another. The proposition that capitalism and the state are based on the domination and exploitation of the working classes does not entail the racist proposition that Jews as a group engage in exploitation via banking. Thirdly, Bakunin’s antisemitic remarks do not demonstrate that the main reason why Bakunin advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state was his antisemitism. If this was the case then one would expect Bakunin to have referred specifically to Jews or Jewish bankers most of the time when he critiqued capitalism and the state. Yet in the vast majority of cases Bakunin does not mention Jewish people at all when critiquing these institutions. He instead refers to the ruling classes in general.

It might be argued in response that this was a tactical calculation by Bakunin. When writing public articles for papers such as L’Égalité he chose to hide his antisemitism and refer to the ruling classes in general but when writing in private he chose to refer specifically to Jewish people. The problem with this argument is that the majority of Bakunin’s unpublished or private critiques of capitalism and the state available in English do not mention Jewish people at all (Bakunin 1973, 64-93, 166-74). Nor did Bakunin try to hide his antisemitism through the use of dog whistles. One of the main texts where Bakunin makes antisemitic claims about Jewish bankers is in his book Statism and Anarchy which was published by Bakunin himself. Within Statism and Anarchy Bakunin connected his critique of capitalism and the state with antisemitic claims about Jewish bankers on two occasions (Bakunin 1990, 12, 138). In the majority of cases when critiquing capitalism and the state he does not mention Jewish people at all and instead refers to “the ruling classes” in general with such phrases as “the bourgeoisie”, “the privileged and propertied classes”, “the exploiting class” and “the governing minority” (Bakunin 1990, 21, 23-4, 114, 136-7, 219). Bakunin does refer to banks and bankers in general on four occasions when critiquing capitalism and the state but in every instance this went alongside referring to other members of the ruling classes, such as landowners, industrialists and merchants (Bakunin 1990, 12-3, 24, 29, 31, 138).

Given this, antisemitism was not the main reason why Bakunin advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state. Although Bakunin critiqued banks in an antisemitic manner, his opposition to capitalism and the state cannot be reduced to this antisemitism. His antisemitic remarks about banks co-existed alongside the broader argument that capitalism and the state should be abolished because they are systems of class rule which oppress and exploit the working classes.

Bakunin Was Self-contradictory

It is furthermore the case that Bakunin’s racism towards Jewish people was fundamentally inconsistent with other things that he himself wrote. Bakunin advocated universal human emancipation on several occasions. To give one example, in 1868 Bakunin insisted that the goal of a revolution should be “the liberty, morality, fellowship and welfare of all men through the solidarity of all – the brotherhood of mankind” (Bakunin 1973, 167. Also see ibid, 86; Bakunin 1985, 52, 124, 189, 200). Bakunin not only advocated universal human emancipation but thought it could only be achieved through all of humanity forming bonds of solidarity and co-operation with one another. The abolition of capitalism and the state required “the simultaneous revolutionary alliance and action of all the peoples of the civilised world”. In order for this to be achieved “every popular uprising . . . must have a world programme, broad, deep, true, in other words human enough to embrace the interests of the world and to electrify the passions of the entire popular masses of Europe, regardless of nationality” (Bakunin 1973, 86. Also see ibid, 173).

Bakunin made a similar point in 1873. He wrote,

since we are convinced that the existence of any sort of State is incompatible with the freedom of the proletariat, for it would not permit of an international, fraternal union of peoples, we wish to abolish all states . . . The Slav section, while aiming at the liberation of the Slav peoples, in no way contemplates the organisation of a special Slav world, hostile to other races through national feeling. On the contrary, it will strive to bring the Slav peoples into the common family of mankind, which the International Working Men’s Association has pledged itself to form on the basis of liberty, equality and universal fraternity (Bakunin 1973, 175-6).

Bakunin thought that the achievement of liberty, equality and universal human fraternity required opposition to racism. He advocated the “recognition of humanity, of human right and of human dignity in every man of whatever race” or “colour” (Bakunin 1964, 147). This commitment to universal human emancipation in turn entailed the advocacy of the self-determination of ethnic minorities. Bakunin thought that, “every people and the smallest folk-unit has its own character, its own specific mode of existence, its own way of speaking, feeling, thinking, and acting . . . Every people, like every person, is involuntarily that which it is and therefore has a right to be itself” (Bakunin 1964, 325). This included groups being free to practice their religion (Bakunin 1873, 66, 176; Eckhardt 2016, 27).

Bakunin, in addition to this, opposed imperialism and colonialism. He critiqued what he termed the gradual extermination of Native Americans, the exploitation of India by the British Empire and the conquest of Algeria by the French empire (Bakunin 2016, 175-6) He advocated,

the necessity of destroying every European despotism, recognising that each people, large or small, powerful or weak, civilised or not civilised, has the right to decide for itself and to organise spontaneously, from bottom to top, using complete freedom . . . independently of every type of State, imposed from top to bottom by any authority at all, be it collective, or individual, be it foreign or indigenous . . . (Bakunin 2016, 178).

Bakunin wrote the above remarks within his March 1872 letter to the Jura Federation. The same text where he is extremely racist towards Jewish people. The fact that Bakunin did not view the two parts of the letter as inconsistent with one another makes me very depressed. He was so prejudiced that he did not realise that a commitment to universal human emancipation and the establishment of what he called “the brotherhood of mankind” entailed an opposition to his own racism against Jewish people.

Were historical anarchists aware of Bakunin’s antisemitism and what did they think about it?

The extent to which historical anarchists were aware of and critiqued Bakunin’s antisemitism is a complex topic. Several historical texts which were written about Bakunin do not mention his racism, such as Max Baginski and Peter Kropotkin’s articles published in 1914 as part of the celebration of the 100-year anniversary of Bakunin’s birth (Glassgold 2000, 69-71; Kropotkin 2014, 205-7). These two texts focus on only the positive aspects of Bakunin – his eventful life and important role as an anarchist revolutionary – but do not touch on his negative side – antisemitism. I am not sure why this is the case. One obvious explanation is that they wanted to present Bakunin to the public in the best light possible when celebrating the 100-year anniversary of his birth. Yet if this was the case why not talk about Bakunin’s antisemitism on other occasions? I have been unable to find any mention of Bakunin’s antisemitism in the writings of anarchists from Jewish backgrounds which are available in English, such as Berkman, Goldman and Gustav Landauer. When they do briefly mention Bakunin it is usually only to say something positive about him, explain an idea of his, or recount the split between anarchists and state socialists within the 1^st International (Berkman 2003, 184; Goldman 1996, 69, 74, 103, 138; Landauer 2010, 81, 160, 175, 208). I have asked Kenyon Zimmer, who is a historian of the Jewish anarchist movement in America, and he does not recall Bakunin’s antisemitism being discussed in their paper the Fraye Arbeter Shtime. A Jewish anarchist could have complained about the topic during a conversation but since this conversation was never written down modern people cannot learn about it.

I suspect that a significant reason for why there are so few historical sources discussing Bakunin’s racism is that he largely expressed these thoughts in obscure texts. Every single antisemitic remark I have quoted in this video comes from nine sources. These are in chronological order,

• The October 1869 unpublished letter To the Citizen Editors of Le Réveil. Sent to Bakunin’s friends Aristide Rey and Alexander Herzen but not published by the editor of Le Reveil. First published in 1911 in Volume 5 of Bakunin’s collected works in French (Bakunin 1911, 239-94).
• The August 1871 Report on the Alliance. An extract was published in 1873 within the Mémoire Presented by the Jura Federation of the International Working Men’s Association to all Federations of the International. This version included two of the antisemitic remarks made towards Utin (Appendix of Guillaume 1873, 45-58. For the antisemitism see 51-2, 57). The full text, which included all of the antisemitism, was published in 1913 in Volume 6 of Bakunin’s collected works in French (Bakunin 1913, 171-280).
• The October 1871 to February 1872 unsent note Supporting Documents: Personal Relations with Marx. First published in 1924 in volume 3 of Bakunin’s collected works in German (Bakunin 1924, 204-16).
• The March 1872 letter To the Comrades of the International Sections of the Jura Federation. Nettlau claimed in 1924 that it was yet to be published (Bakunin 1924, 204). As far as I can tell it was first published in 1965 in Archives Bakounine Volume 2.
• The June 1872 article Response of Citizen Bakunin published in the Bulletin of the Jura Federation. Copies of the Bulletin of the Jura Federation were most likely not widely circulated after it ceased publication in 1878, let alone the specific 15^th June 1872 issue which included Bakunin’s text (Miller 1976, 150). It was republished in 1924 in volume 3 of Bakunin’s collected works in German (Bakunin 1924, 217-220).
• The June 1872 letter To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain. First published in 1924 in Volume 3 of Bakunin’s collected works in German (Bakunin 1924, 108-18).
• The October 1872 unsent letter to the editors of La Liberté. First published in 1910 in Volume 4 of Bakunin’s collected works in French (Bakunin 1910, 339-90).
• Statism and Anarchy, which was first published in 1873 in Russian. Only 1,200 copies were printed. It was reprinted in Russian in 1906, 1919 and 1922 (Shatz in introduction to Bakunin 1990, xxxv). In 1878 extracts of the book were translated into French and published in L’Avant-garde under the title Le gouvernementalisme et l’Anarchie. This did not include the antisemitic passages. In 1929 the first Spanish edition of Statism and Anarchy was published. (Bakunin 1986, 1). Rocker claimed in 1937 that the Spanish version of Statism and Anarchy was the first time the book was translated from Russian “into any other European language” (Rocker 1937, 557).
• God and the State, which was first published in 1882 and originally written in 1871. It is a long extract from his unfinished 1870-2 text The Knouto-Germanic Empire and the Social Revolution. It was translated into multiple languages and was Bakunin’s most widely read work (Bakunin 1970, viii-ix; Bakunin 1973, 111).

Of the nine antisemitic texts I have found five were letters and two of them were never sent to anybody. Only three antisemitic texts were publicly available prior to Bakunin’s death in 1876: two articles in French and one book in Russian. An additional antisemitic text, God and the State, was published in 1882 but the majority of Bakunin’s antisemitic texts were only made available in the early 20^th century as part of the publication of Bakunin’s collected works in French, German and Spanish. I do not know how widely read these books were and I expect that they were largely read by a relatively small number of massive nerds interested in Bakunin’s ideas. Even those who owned the books may only have read parts of them and so happened to not come into contact with the racist passages which take up a small fraction of the thousands of pages Bakunin wrote. Any modern person who has bought a book while late night internet shopping knows how easy it is to own books without reading them. Perhaps the most antisemitic texts Bakunin ever wrote – the March 1872 letter to the Jura Federation – was not, to my knowledge, publicly available until the 1960s.

Given the above, the only antisemitic text which was definitely widely read and available in multiple languages in the 19^th and early 20^th century was God and the State. The racism within God and the State consisted of one significantly antisemitic paragraph which claimed that Jewish people migrated all over the world because of their “mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principal traits of their character” (Bakunin 1970, 74). In other parts of the text Bakunin does make more general critiques of Judaism as a religion, such as describing Jehovah as a jealous God. Even though these passages were written by an antisemite I have not noticed any obvious antisemitic content within them. (Ibid, 69-71, 85). Nor is it antisemitic in and of itself to critique Judaism as a religion. Anarchists from Jewish backgrounds were often themselves very critical of Judaism as a religion and instead identified as Yiddish speakers who shared a culture (Zimmer 2015, 15-6, 24-8). This can be seen in the fact that the Jewish anarchist Saul Yanovsky translated God and the State into Yiddish in 1901 and altered the text such that Bakunin’s criticism of “Catholic and Protestant theologians” also referred to “Jewish Theologians” (Torres 2016, 2-4).

This is not to say that historical anarchists were unaware of Bakunin’s antisemitism. James Guillaume was Bakunin’s friend and the main editor of Bakunin’s collected works in French. He was definitely familiar with Bakunin’s views on Jews but does not mention them in the biographical sketch of Bakunin he wrote for Volume 2 of Bakunin’s collected works in French (Guillaume in Bakunin 2001, 22-52). Guillaume appears to have deliberately altered a Bakunin quote such that it no longer contained any antisemitism. He quotes Bakunin’s remark that Marx was authoritarian from head to foot but does not include Bakunin’s explanation for this: Marx was a German Jew. This topic is made confusing by the fact that Guillaume claims he is quoting an 1870 manuscript, but the passage cited is word for word identical with Bakunin’s 1872 letter. As a result, Guillaume could be referring to a different version of the text Bakunin wrote which contains no racism, but this seems unlikely (ibid, 26. For the original French see Bakunin 1907, xiv. Compare to Bakunin 1872a; Bakunin 1924, 117). I have been unable to find a place where Guillaume acknowledges Bakunin’s racism, but it should be kept in mind that the vast majority of his work has never been translated into English.

Other anarchists explicitly opposed Bakunin’s antisemitism. In May 1872 Bakunin sent a letter to the Spanish anarchist Anselmo Lorenzo which included antisemitism. Within his 1901 memoirs Lorenzo correctly argued that Bakunin’s racism towards Jews “was contradicting our principles, principles that impose fraternity without distinction along race or religion and it had a distastefulness effect on me.” Max Nettlau, who edited Bakunin’s collected works in German, similarly opposed Bakunin’s “anti-Jewish remarks” (Quoted Eckhardt 2016, 509, notes 112 and 113. For a description of the letter see ibid, 196). There are, in addition to these critiques of Bakunin, several examples of anarchists rejecting antisemitism in general. This includes Kropotkin opposing the 1905 pogroms against Jews in Russia, the Jewish anarchist Landauer campaigning in 1913 against antisemitic conspiracy theories, and Rocker critiquing the oppression of Jews by the Nazi’s (Kropotkin 2014, 472-3, 481; Landauer 2010, 295-9; Rocker 1937, 249-50, 327-8). In 1938 Goldman wrote that she considered it “highly inconsistent for socialists and anarchists to discriminate in any shape or form against the Jews” (Goldman 1938).

Conclusion

Bakunin was one of the early influential theorists of the anarchist movement, but anarchism does not consist in repeating what Bakunin wrote. Anarchism was not created by one individual. It was collectively constructed by the Spanish, Italian, French, Belgian and Jurassian sections of the International. Its programme incorporated the insights of a wide variety of individuals. Some well-known, such as Errico Malatesta, and others whose names have largely been forgotten, such as Jean-Louis Pindy who was the delegate of the Paris Construction Workers’ Trade Union at the 1^st International’s 1869 Basel Congress and a survivor of the Paris Commune of 1871. From the 1870s onwards the anarchist movement spread around the world and its theory and practice was pushed in new directions by anarchists in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Oceania and Africa. This included a large number of anarchists from a Jewish background. Between the beginning of the 20^th century and the start of WW1 in 1914 the Yiddish-speaking anarchist movement was the largest in the United States. Yiddish-speaking anarchists also played a key role in England’s anarchist movement (Zimmer 2015, 4-6, 15, 20; Rocker 2005).

A significant amount of Bakunin’s anarchist beliefs were not original to him but common positions within the social networks he was a part of. This included his advocacy of the collective ownership of the means of production and land, the view that trade unions should prefigure the future society, and the rejection of parliamentary politics as a means to achieve emancipation (Eckhardt 2016, 12-6, 54, 106-8, 159-60; Graham 2015, 109-21). Anarchism was above all else the creation of workers engaged in class struggle against capitalism and the state. As the group of Russian anarchists abroad explained in 1926,

The class struggle created by the enslavement of workers and their aspirations to liberty gave birth, in the oppression, to the idea of anarchism: the idea of the total negation of a social system based on the principles of classes and the State, and its replacement by a free non-statist society of workers under self-management. So anarchism does not derive from the abstract reflections of an intellectual or a philosopher, but from the direct struggle of workers against capitalism, from the needs and necessities of the workers, from their aspirations to liberty and equality . . . The outstanding anarchist thinkers, Bakunin, Kropotkin and others, did not invent the idea of anarchism, but, having discovered it in the masses, simply helped by the strength of their thought and knowledge to specify and spread it.

Anarchists are not Bakuninists. We believe in the programme of anarchism which evolves and is updated over time, rather than treating what an individual man with a large beard happened to write in the late 19^th century as scripture. Anarchists in the past shared this attitude. Malatesta claimed in 1876 that anarchists were not “Bakuninists” because “we do not share all the practical and theoretical ideas of Bakunin” and “follow ideas, not men . . . we reject the habit of incarnating a principle in a man” (Quoted in Haupt 1986, 4). Kropotkin similarly recalled in his autobiography that during his 1872 visit to the Jura Federation,

in conversations about anarchism, or about the attitude of the federation, I never heard it said, ‘Bakunin had said so,’ or ‘Bakunin thinks so,’, as if it clenched the discussion. His writings and his sayings were not a text that one had to obey . . . In all such matters, in which intellect is the supreme judge, everyone in discussion used his own arguments” (Kropotkin 2014, 104).

This is a position Bakunin himself agreed with. In his 1873 letter of resignation from the Jura Federation he wrote that “the ‘Bakuninist label’ . . . was thrown in your face” but “you always knew perfectly well, that your tendencies, opinions and actions arose entirely consciously, in spontaneous independence” (Bakunin 2016, 247-8).

In conclusion, Bakunin should still be read today and there is a great deal of insight within the thousands of pages he wrote. He should, however, be read critically and his antisemitism was wrong, unjustifiable and fundamentally at odds with the principles of anarchism which seeks the abolition of all forms of domination and exploitation, including all forms of racism. The preamble to the 1866 Statutes of the 1^st International declared: “this Association, and every individual or society joining it, will acknowledge morality, justice and truth as the basis of their conduct toward all men, without distinction of nationality, creed, or colour” (Berthier 2012, 165). Socialist movements have on too many occasions not lived up to these words and it is essential that socialists today, be they anarchist or not, ensure that they do and oppose all systems of domination in both words and deeds.

One of the main lessons of Bakunin’s life is that somebody who thinks they are a genuine advocate of universal human emancipation can still have oppressive beliefs without being aware that they do. None of us are responsible for being socialised to be prejudiced towards others but, just like Bakunin before us, we are all responsible for noticing and unlearning it. As the Jewish anarchist Landauer wrote in 1913 in response to antisemitism, “socialism means action among human beings; action that must become reality within these human beings as much as in the outside world. When independent peoples propose to create a united humanity, these propositions are worthless when even a single people remains excluded and experiences injustice” (Landaur 2010, 295).

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