Transcript format and synch by Andante
Louis Michel, Vauterin de Claire,
Emma Goldman, Pierre-Joseph Prudent,
Buenaventura de Ruti, Ricardo Flores Magón.
The big names of anarchism wrote,
spread and sowed libertarian thought.
The great migratory waves which had already
carried it to the United States of America
also took it to the most remote countries
of the earth.
Be it in Palestine or Egypt,
amongst Jewish exiles or Indian communities,
within the confines of the African continent
as in the east,
and as far as the empire of the rising sun,
anarchists were everywhere.
At the beginning of the 20th century,
all seemed to be for the best and the best
of all possible libertarian worlds.
Anarchism had become
a part of the social landscape,
to the point that libertarians
could be seen flying their black flag
on the brand new postcards.
And if they were arrested,
it was only disguised as nursemaids
for the comic purposes of a Pate Brothers
production.
The ultimate irony came in 1910,
when Armand Fallier,
the new president of the French Republic,
even went in person to Bessançon
to inaugurate, in a lavish ceremony
complete with the Marseillaise and
marching Swiss Guards,
a monumental statue dedicated
to the father of anarchism,
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.
But in the wings, conditions for workers
remained very difficult.
And faced with an imminent global crisis,
the need for great change
was making itself felt more than ever.
And this is how, from France to Mexico,
and from Spain to the Ukraine,
in a time full of sound and fury,
anarchists set about trying to destroy
the old world once and for all.
However, it wasn't with a revolution
that the libertarian 20th century began.
Neither was it in 1907, in Amsterdam,
during this international congress,
where the cream of world anarchism
managed to more or less come to agreement
on the necessity of organizing the movement
into national federations,
capable of setting off a general strike
and revolt should w*r be declared.
The libertarian 20th century began
spontaneously much earlier on.
At a particular time, in a forgotten place,
with this new kind of woman and man
creating one of the other great currents
of the anarchist movement,
individualism.
Descendants of the age of enlightenment
and heirs to romanticism, individualists
were the enfant terrible of their time.
They read Nietzsche and Stirner,
advocated mass conscientious objection,
and insisted on
immediately leading a full life,
at odds with the authoritarian principles
of society at the time.
I have examined the trajectories
of these people one by one.
And what they wanted was to be
able to work with their hands,
but also with their heads, to be whole men.
They wanted to lead what they
considered to be the good life,
which was far from being an easy life.
And they wanted to lead it here and now.
This global desire for change,
which led individualists to reject work,
family, country, the very
foundations of bourgeois morality,
brought them to propose
an alternative lifestyle
and new practices of their own invention,
which in turn made revolutionaries of them.
It was to include
absolutely all aspects of life,
sexuality, education, clothing.
They advocated nudity.
Women abandoned the concept of corsets,
hats and restrictive clothing.
In place of marriage, they advocated
open unions, or in some cases, free love.
Multiple relationships were possible.
There was no problem
in loving several people at once,
neither for women nor for men.
At least that was the doctrine,
but in reality, of course, there was much
grinding of teeth and suffering.
Being individualists did not prevent
these anarchists from grouping together.
And if they couldn't change the world,
then they decided to change the universe.
In towns, they created libertarian Athenians.
And in the country, agricultural colonies.
And wherever they went,
they developed coherence
in their ideas and actions,
like here in Palestine,
where Jewish anarchists founded Degania,
the first kibbutz.
But it was particularly in Latin America
that truly libertarian cities grew up.
There was New Australia and Paraguay,
where amongst others, Mary Gilmore settled.
And the colonial Cecilia,
founded in Brazil by Giovanni Rossi
and a group of Italian anarchists,
of which only one image remains.
For four years,
these libertarians abolished hierarchies,
religion and money, set up councils,
loved freely and sang songs.
But anarchism didn't triumph.
And these colonies,
truly alternative societies,
which were meant to be
the seeds of a new world,
closed one after another.
Certain individualists concluded
that in order to change society,
you had to change the individual.
And to change the individual,
evil had to be pulled up at the roots.
In their opinion,
middle-class schooling instilled
authoritarian values in children
from the outset and
consolidated all the mechanisms of power.
It needed to be attacked and revolutionized.
They became constructive educationists,
devising teaching methods which combined
ancient paideia with libertarian principles.
The task of the anarchist was to educate.
In a way, you could say,
they needed to create the new man
before they could create the new society.
Great emphasis was placed upon intellectual,
sensorial, and even physical elevation.
No aspect of life was ignored.
Experiments into new forms of education
sprung up all around the world,
such as Sebastian Forre's La Ruche
and Paul Robins' Sompuy Orphanage.
But one of the most comprehensive was
the modern school founded in Spain
and based on the anti-authoritarian
principles of Francisco Ferrer.
Francisco Ferrer was an important
anarchist pedagogue
who started something
called the modern school movement.
And the idea was to bring secular,
non-religious education to children,
but also to adults.
Tried to create an equal relationship
between the teachers and the students,
where the students could choose
what they wanted to learn.
It was integral education.
That is to say,
it had to be both manual and intellectual.
The child needed to know
how to do just about anything.
It was exclusively based
on the use of reason,
without imposing anything
upon the child from outside.
We are not afraid to say it.
We want to create men
whose intellectual independence
will be their supreme force,
who will submit before nothing,
capable of discerning what is good
and aspiring to live one thousand lives
in the space of just one.
Society fears such men,
and we must not expect it ever
to support education,
which is capable of producing them.
The fascinating thing when you read about
the anarchist view of education,
and in my opinion this is something rare
amongst educational theorists,
is that they are suspicious of themselves.
They are so wary about illegitimate authority
that their reflections
about education contain
a deep analysis of the dangers of
indoctrination
within their own projects.
So you can read things along the lines
Never forget that we're not looking
to produce good little anarchists.
Let us always be wary of the power
which we ourselves have over these children.
We are trying to make free men.
They may think differently from us later on.
That is how we will know that
we have indeed made free men.
These secular and libertarian schools,
where children can be seen wearing hoods,
naturally stirred up fantasies.
And their success was as worrying for the
clergy as it was for the bourgeoisie.
Francisco Ferrer, their founder,
despite always having been
opposed to any form of violence,
had to be arrested as quickly as possible.
During the tragic week in Barcelona,
an opportunity was found
to wrongfully charge him.
He quickly became a target of repression.
In 1909, he was accused of having instigated
the Barcelona general strike
and was condemned to death.
International solidarity quickly developed
on all the continents.
In the United States, in Australia,
in all the major cities of Europe.
There were demonstrations
for a stay of execution.
There were petitions.
There were even governments who intervened,
asking the Spanish government to spare him.
But Ferrer was ex*cuted.
And then a few hours after his execution,
crowds started to gather in big cities
everywhere,
but particularly in Paris.
The Parisian rampage
was to be the most spectacular of all.
On the 13th of October, 1909,
there was an uprising
of extraordinary intensity.
Road workers, who were at that time the
cornerstone of the proletariat,
arrived with pickaxes over their shoulders
and tore up the avenues, exposed gas pipes,
pierced them and set them alight.
Paris became an inferno.
The assassination of Ferrer
at the hands of Spanish justice,
which provoked the most violent
uprising in Paris since the commune,
had similar repercussions
throughout the world.
There were the demonstrations
in Kotoku in Japan a few months later.
And those of Sacco and Vanzetti in the USA,
which all sparked immense
international solidarity movements.
Faced with this state violence
against innocent humanists,
numerous libertarians took up arms and
attacked what society held most dearly.
Exponents of theft,
which they preferred to call expropriation,
individual reclamation or
revolutionary banditry,
attempted to set off in Europe a revolution
which seemed too long in the making.
Anarchists everywhere struck out at property,
and burglary suddenly became
a revolutionary strategy.
The problem is very simple.
If I'm a revolutionary
opposed to capitalism,
for what mysterious reason
would I not attack a bank?
Why would I not expropriate a bank
to finance the revolution?
Method is another question.
I'm not talking about k*lling the little old
lady waiting at the teller's window.
I'm talking about a radical as*ault
on capitalism in the form of a bank robbery.
In the eyes of a revolutionary,
there's nothing scandalous about it.
As a little aside, even Stalin did it.
Indeed, that's what all revolutionaries do.
But it was anarchists
who turned these tactics into a system
and associated their names
with the biggest robberies of the time.
There was Buenaventura Durruti,
Spain's leading t*rror1st
before becoming the leader of
the anarchist revolution in Catalonia,
who, along with the Solidarios,
plundered parts of Europe and Latin America.
There was Severino de Giovanni,
Argentina's public enemy number one,
who pulled off the biggest robbery
his country had seen to date.
In the Ukraine, Nestor Makhno,
at the heart of the union of poor workers,
expropriated and redistributed
the confiscated goods.
But in France, there was Marius Jacob,
striving at the heart of
the band of night workers,
who made the greatest impression.
He was very well organized
and very gifted in this domain.
Marius Jacob robbed businesses,
churches, of course,
rich individuals,
but as far as possible
without employing the least violence.
And even with a certain elegance,
he would sometimes leave little ironic notes
for the people he'd robbed.
Yes, I have stolen a pocket handkerchief
from you worth 250 francs.
Is a 250 franc handkerchief
not an insult to misery?
Marius Jacob, the anarchist thief,
who despite committing
more than 500 robberies
only kept for himself enough to live on,
served as Maurice Leblanc's model
in the creation of the character
Arcent Lupin.
But the state, wanting to send a message to
anarchists tempted by illegality,
arrested him, and despite his eloquence,
inflicted an exemplary punishment.
This man, who had never shed blood,
was condemned to the bloodless guillotine
of a lifetime's hard labor,
and deported to French Guiana.
For revolutionary bandits,
the message was clear,
since authority sends even
the innocence to their deaths
better to k*ll before being k*lled.
It was in London in 1911
that the first major confrontation between
revolutionary bandits and the
forces of law and order
would be played out.
Over several hours,
during what the history of anarchy
would remember as the Battle of Stepney,
a siege took place at 100 Sydney Street.
At dawn,
the neighborhood was completely closed off.
Two anarchists holed up in a small house,
offered fierce resistance to
more than 800 police officers
and members of the Scots Guards.
The operations were overseen
by the Home Secretary,
a certain Winston Churchill,
who could be seen on the left in a top hat.
Unable to dislodge them,
the a*tillery was sent for.
The house caught fire,
and the two revolutionaries
died in the flames.
Newsreel cameras were sent to the scene
where a considerable crowd had gathered
to watch the show.
But was this young mechanic,
who legend has it was
Conan Doyle's London chauffeur,
among the curious bystanders?
One thing is sure.
On his return to France the following year,
he decided to move into action
by forming a g*ng which would soon
send a shockwave across Europe.
The Bono g*ng.
I prefer to call them the tragic bandits.
Firstly, because this wasn't a g*ng
under the authority of a leader.
And if there was a leader,
I see no reason why it would have been Bono
rather than someone else.
They were militant anarchists,
devoutly militant individualists,
with their combative past.
The young Octave Garnier, for example,
had been imprisoned following
a construction worker's strike
during which he was
severely beaten by the police
and ended up finding what he had been
looking for in individualism.
Austere doctrineers leading exemplary lives,
these men were strangers to tobacco,
alcohol, gambling or brothels.
They frequented the anarchy newspaper
directed by Victor Serge.
But it was through their
knowledge of mechanics
that they first entered history by being
the first to use a car to commit robberies.
The meager takings were far from being
sufficient to finance a revolution,
but their attacks were characterized
by indiscriminate violence.
The number of dead they left behind soared.
A price was put on their heads
with the press offering a reward of 100,000
francs to whoever enabled their capture.
The brand new Tiger Brigades
were set on their trail.
But far from being afraid,
the bandits defied society,
with Octave Garnier going as far as
riding to the heads of the Third Brigade,
known as the Anarchist Brigade.
I know this will come to an end.
In the ongoing struggle between
society's impressive arsenal and myself,
I know that I will be beaten.
I will be the weaker.
But I hope to make you pay a high price
for your victory.
It ended up in a siege between
isolated men and a thousand-strong troop,
with 10,000 spectators who had come
to see the capture of these hunted men.
They fought like lions to the very end,
knowing full well that they had no chance
of escape.
I would say that's what actually turned them
into propagandists by the deed.
The tragic bandits' actions came to an end
on the 28th of April, 1912,
in the suburbs of Paris.
Here, too, the newsreel cameras
were invited to the show.
The police placed bombs, which were set off.
When the operation was over,
the bodies of the anarchists were
put on display like hunting trophies.
This affair left a lasting impression
and momentarily marked the end
of revolutionary banditry in France.
Bonneau, like many illegalists,
gradually became a controversial figure
rejected by or reintegrated
into anarchist thinking
in accordance with the needs of the time.
Rather than consider the actions of the
Bonneau g*ng as a genuine protest movement,
personally, I tend more towards the theory
that it was the manifestation of a failure.
That is to say,
these are events which sometimes attract
a sort of morbid curiosity.
But in reality, they remain
marginal occurrences.
And as far as the Bonneau g*ng
was concerned,
it was the marginality of a group
which was marginal.
The media circus, which had grown up
around the Bonneau g*ng,
was above all instrumental in disqualifying
the anarchist movement in its efforts
to avoid w*r.
Because in the face of mass
demonstrations by libertarians
alongside other socialists,
here, for example,
at the Présent Jervé near Paris,
or during the Red Week in Ancona in Italy,
where Malatesta managed to spread the
general strike to the Marches, to Romania,
and as far as Tuscany,
the imperialisms were above all worried
that the workers of the world
might come to an agreement.
They had re-instigated the villainous laws
and made-up lists,
like the infamous B file in France,
which contained the names of all suspected
revolutionary leaders to be arrested
should a conflict begin.
But thanks to the fear generated
by the tragic bandit affair,
and faced with the shock provoked by the
assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo,
the state had no need
to resort to these methods.
And with the death of Jean-Jouess,
even some anarchist mainstays like Kropotkin
ended up rallying behind the Sacred Union.
And while Europe was on
the point of engaging in a w*r
which would k*ll millions of workers,
although it's not always remembered,
anarchists in Mexico were behind
the first great libertarian revolution.
It's hard to understand
why the Mexican Revolution
doesn't have the same
importance attached to it
as the Russian Revolution
or the Chinese Revolution,
but it was the first major revolution
of the 20th century.
The Mexican Revolution begins
at the end of 1910.
And in its early stages, 1910, 1911, 1912,
one of the factions, the major factions
fighting within the Mexican Revolution
was the Partido Liberale Mexicano, the PLM,
which is led by the Magón brothers,
Enrique and Ricardo Flores Magón,
who are Mexican anarchists in exile
in the United States
when the revolution breaks out.
Flores Magón and his comrades
played a fundamental role.
As the precursors of this
revolutionary movement,
they created the conditions
necessary for the revolution.
You could say that they were a constant
inspiration for all the other
revolutionary factions.
Their propaganda continuously pushed
the other factions to be more radical.
Magón, in fact,
regarded the Mexican Revolution
as the first act in the great
worldwide conflagration
which was just around the corner.
For him, the global libertarian revolution
was just about to take off.
The Mexican Liberal Party,
which was at the origin of the revolution,
was liberal and a party in nothing but name.
But it was well and truly
an anarchist organization,
as can be seen from its manifesto,
written by Ricardo Flores Magón.
Its place in the purest libertarian tradition
was not only because it
advocated direct action,
but also, and above all, by virtue of
its call for vast agrarian reform.
For it has to be remembered
that since its beginnings,
the anarchist movement was the only form of
socialism to assign a central role in the
revolutionary process to farm workers.
Furthermore, this explains its success
in a Mexico which was still
highly agricultural.
And this concept spread.
It inspired the three other mass
revolutionary organizations.
Emiliano Zapata's insurrectionary army
in the south,
the House of the World Worker
in the capital in the center,
and the Mexican branch of the IWW,
which had opened in the north.
And the slogan which Flores Magón
and the anarchists of the PLM placed
at the bottom of their writings
was taken up by these movements
and became the rallying cry of
the entire revolution,
Land and Liberty.
They said to the peasants,
grab a Winchester in hand
and take the land
because it belongs to you.
You don't have to wait for the working class
to develop
the peasants could have their own revolution.
Magón had confidence
in the spontaneity of an armed populace.
That is to say that he considered
an armed uprising,
a fight to the death against the system
to be the way of establishing
a libertarian society.
This call to arms resounded as strongly here
as it did on the slopes of the Sierra Madre
and the high ground of the Chiapas,
where peasants had lived for 400 years
in a state of extreme misery.
Evangelization, the encomienda
and smallpox had done their work.
The native peoples had been almost
entirely wiped out.
The womb of the Pachamama
was desecrated daily
and the whole subcontinent was bled dry,
humiliated and corrupted.
Placed under the control
of a handful of Latifundists
who owned all the land,
the vast majority of workers survived
with no prospect of betterment.
The day-to-day life of these men and women
was illiteracy, famine and illness,
and backbreaking work beneath the blazing sun
which burnt celluloid and skin alike.
Shouts and blows were the only encouragement
and confiscation the only reward.
The slightest gesture of revolt
was punished with a whip
and any attempt to escape,
as in the times of sl*very, by death.
In 1911,
the Magoans organized an invasion
of northern Mexico, of Baja California.
There is a group of around
from the United States and Canada
who crossed the border
to join the PLM's forces.
There are dozens of members of the IWW.
There are African-American radicals who join.
There's at least one Chinese partisan.
They invade the city of Mexicali
in northern Mexico,
seize it from federal troops,
maintain control of it,
and then they also seize Tijuana.
And for a period of a few months,
they control this area of northern Mexico.
The small army of the MLP
surrounded by the IWW
and led by General Mosby,
seen here on horseback,
opened the prisons and flew the black flag
over the land and liberty commune.
The libertarians of the whole world
expressed their enthusiasm.
Emma Goldman took part in meetings.
Krupatkin wrote the first theory on
guerrilla warfare.
Jack London published a collection of
short stories.
In the United States, in Argentina,
in Cuba, in Portugal, in Italy,
the anarchist press everywhere enthused
about the Mexican uprising which would
perhaps overturn the old order.
In this time,
when songs still spoke of the lives of men,
Joe Hill, a Swedish expatriate
and rebellious troubadour,
who was a leading figure in the IWW,
went to participate in the uprising
in the same way as the
international brigades would do later.
Should I ever be a soldier?
The song which he wrote for the occasion
is a musical testimony to this involvement
and a call to other workers
to join the fight.
It's the crush of the tyrants of mine
Join the army of the toilers
Man and women fall in line
Wage plates of the murderous
do your duty for the cause
for land and liberty
It's the first time that anarchists see
a situation in which there is an army,
under anarchist leadership,
taking steps to implement
libertarian communism.
That's the express goal of the PLM,
is to create a new anarchist society
in Mexico, and then from there
to spread the revolution to North America
and to the rest of the world.
So anarchists,
not just in the United States,
but in Europe,
people like Peter Kropotkin as well
view the Mexican Revolution
in its early years as potentially
an anarchist revolution in the making.
And the very first one.
But caught in a vice between
Mexican counter-revolutionaries on one side
and the Yankee Army on the other,
the fight was too weighted against them.
The communes were retaken,
the Mexican revolutionaries shot,
and the captured foreigners were herded
together in camps at the border.
And although they had lost
a battle in the north,
the anarchists had not lost the w*r.
And Flores Magón's hopes
turned toward the south
and a rugged and rebellious
army led by a charismatic general.
Right from the start,
Ricardo Flores Magón considered that Zapata,
even if he didn't regard himself
as an anarchist,
in practice he behaved like one,
as did the Zapata's troops.
They commandeered land without waiting
for any sort of legislation
and distributed it amongst themselves.
Emiliano Zapata,
who represented the indigenous peoples,
had been influenced by the reasoning
of the Mexican Liberal Party.
And the Flores Magón brothers,
who knew him well,
had an enormous sympathy with
the Zapata's movement.
The Zapata's army,
which consisted of nearly 28,000 fighters
at the height of the revolution,
engaged in truly guerrilla warfare
in the southern states.
As they gradually advanced,
they redistributed land,
even minted their own money,
and managed to reach the gates
of Mexico City.
Was the libertarian revolution
on the point of triumph in Latin America?
In their weariness, the jubilant crowds
who watched the revolutionary troops
going by
were unaware that Mexico would become
the theater of a terrible misunderstanding.
A misunderstanding
between anarchists of the towns
and anarchists of the fields,
between workers and peasants,
which was to weigh heavily on the
history of the libertarian movements.
Because the Mexican capital was
under the control of the
House of the World Worker,
the mighty urban
anarcho-syndicalist organization
which was purportedly 50,000 men strong.
The workers of Mexico City and the towns
tended to consider the peasant masses
as reactionaries.
They were of the opinion that
the New World couldn't be a product of
the backward peasant masses
as they saw them,
but rather the avant-garde
enlightened workers.
The Zapatas turned up
with their rosary beads
near Virgin of Guadalupe medallions.
The reaction of the Mexico City anarchists
was to say they were under the influence
of Catholicism.
They said to themselves,
they've been manipulated instead of
genuinely questioning what they were doing.
What did these peasants do?
They didn't go to mass.
They went with their arms to take land.
In practice, they reacted like truly
militant anarchists.
While the militant anarchists of the cities,
who were more intellectual,
regarded them as the Marxist cliché of
capitalist lackeys,
or lackeys of the church,
it was really a wasted opportunity
between anarcho-syndicalism and Zapatism.
You had this terrible break in 1916
between where the leadership of the COM
decided to form red battalions
to attack the Zapatistas.
This was clearly a class betrayal.
Having completely lost their bearings,
the workers of the red battalions
turned into auxiliaries of the
bourgeois army.
And thanks to them,
the counter -revolutionaries brought down
blind repression on the population.
In Trans-Zedipan,
where the Zapatas had set up
their staff headquarters,
including 112 women and 42 children.
By way of a swan song,
Ricardo Flores Magón published a manifesto
for anarchists of the world
and workers in general.
But the only ones to hear him
were the North American authorities,
who arrested him and condemned him
to end his days in a high-security prison.
And Zapata himself
ended up being caught in an ambush.
This internal w*r
between different progressive factions
is really what helped throttle the
anarchist content of the revolution,
at what should have been its peak.
Unfortunately, in the end,
no real reflection went into analyzing
the causes of the anarchists' failure
during the Mexican Revolution.
Consequently, soon afterwards,
the Liberal Party and Flores Magón
were forgotten about.
As things turned out,
the Mexican anarchists had no time
to feel sorry for themselves
to learn any lessons from what had happened.
But if the Mexican Revolution was forgotten,
it was because European libertarians were
caught up in the worst days of
the First World w*r.
And their lack of interest
in the results of this far-off uprising
was deepened when, in 1917,
at the gates of Europe,
a revolutionary breeze was felt blowing
from Russia.
Suddenly, something new in the East.
In February 1917,
there was the first Russian revolution.
Fatsar made a run for it.
A certain democracy was set up
with the Soviets.
The Workers' Councils, taking over.
The anarchists found that wonderful.
An eight-hour day,
the abolition of the death penalty,
freedom of opinion and of conscience.
Initially, the Russian Revolution
attacked injustice
and gave all power to the Soviets.
In this immense Russia
where homage was paid to Tolstoy,
where a monument was built
to the glory of Bakunin,
and Kropotkin was given ministries,
that anarchists could be forgiven for thinking
anarchy was at last
in the process of triumphing.
The beginning of the Russian Revolution
helped reinvigorate the anarchist movement
because it was the kind of revolution,
it seemed, that they advocated
a spontaneous insurrection.
The vast majority saw it
as an extremely positive thing,
that somewhere in the world,
it so happened to be in Russia,
men and women had risen up to say that
the former system of power was over.
Initially, the anarchists believed that
there was a possibility that in Russia,
they would at least see the birth of a
truly communist country.
I nearly said state,
but they didn't want to state.
They wanted a country
which would turn itself
into a communist society.
Partisans of libertarian communism.
Forgotten was the battle
between Marx and Bakunin
at the heart of the first international.
They could now see in the Bolshevik
revolutionaries,
with whom despite disagreements
about methodology,
it would be possible to team up
and create the new world together.
Anarchists in Russia have been
active partners with the Bolsheviks
and with the socialist revolutionaries
and others in helping to overthrow the Tsar,
in organizing Soviets and factory committees.
The enthusiasm of libertarian Russians
can also be explained by the fact that
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin,
was not at the time considered to be a
dogmatic Marxist or an inspiring despot.
His party did not yet call itself communist.
The first political treaty written by him
was entitled, What is to be Done?
In reference to the novel by the
libertarian Russian, Chynashevsky,
he was opposed to the sacred union
and had demonstrated an anti-militarism
which had seduced the libertarian masses.
But above all, for Russian anarchists,
Lenin was still the little brother of
Alexander Ulyanov,
the propagandist by the deed,
hanged in 1887 for having prepared
an assassination attempt against the Tsar.
This glorious genealogy,
added to his libertarian pledges,
led them to believe that Lenin might be
sympathetic toward them,
and the publication in 1917 of his book,
The State and Revolution,
seemed to confirm this hypothesis.
You have to realize that at one point,
Lenin started expressing radical ideas
pretty far removed from orthodox Marxism.
He also vehemently criticized
the idea of the state, thereby
holding out a hand to anarchists.
We do not, after all,
differ with the anarchists on the question of
the abolition of the state as the aim.
We maintain that to achieve this aim,
we must temporarily make
use of the instruments,
resources and methods of state power
against the exploiters.
We set ourselves the ultimate aim
of abolishing the state.
And what's more,
Lenin stands his ground, saying
we're going to be accused of
being anarchists for saying that.
But all the same, I'd rather be accused of
being an anarchist now than being confused
with social democrats who form part of the
governments of the sacred union.
So that helped to bolster the illusion
on both sides that Bolsheviks and anarchists
actually had the same objective in mind,
had more or less the same methodology
in the field,
and were only separated in terms of
internal organization.
This illusion of a convergence of points of
view and a similarity in the objectives
was once more accentuated in October,
when Lenin put into action a strategy
directly inspired from anarchists,
the storming of the Winter Palace.
For the anarchists who took part,
their moment of glory had arrived.
Clearly that provoked
an incredible amount of hope.
Even Malatesta at the beginning looked
kindly upon the Russian Revolution,
at the beginning, and even Kropotnik
went back to Russia because he thought
that the revolution was going to veer
towards libertarianism.
And along with Emma Goldman,
from the four corners of the earth,
anarchists flocked to take part
in the revolution.
Libertarian organizations
quickly claimed the high ground,
like in Moscow,
where the Federation of Anarchist Groups
controlled part of the city.
But it was in the Ukraine that
the libertarian movement
showed its potential
thanks to a young peasant of
Zaporozian Cossack origins,
who, in taking the leadership of
the uprising in northern Crimea,
became one of the major figures of
Makhno was a peasant
of very humble extraction,
but with immense military talent.
And he managed to organize a peasant and
popular uprising in the Ukraine.
He created anarchist-type communities
pretty much everywhere,
and proved that a revolutionary avant-garde
did not necessarily need to take
the form of a party.
During the months after leaving Hulyaipole
in the fertile plains of the Ukraine,
the Makhnovshina, the insurrectionary army
which bore the name of its organizer,
sowed revolution as it passed.
An anarchist and peasant militia,
it flew a black flag
with a skull and crossbones,
under which was written, death to all those
who oppose workers' freedom.
And as it gradually advanced,
the Makhnovshina,
like the legions of Sparta-Kisovold,
took over the towns, and day after day
expanded its influence.
At its height,
the Makhnovshina controlled a territory
equal in size to that of an
average European country, in which
hundreds of thousands of people lived.
When they seized a city,
the first thing they did was open the jail
and release all the prisoners.
They distributed...
They redistributed food and whatnot
amongst themselves and the population.
They drew up plans for collective ownership
of farms and factories.
Makhnovshina's army functioned
on a voluntary basis.
Officers were elected.
The peasant communities,
which found it necessary
to defend their land
in liberty with weapons,
sent volunteers to join the army.
They freely supplied horses,
chariots and food.
They formed an army of up to 40,000 men,
with all that that entails.
Administration services, medical teams.
At one point, they even had an
armored train.
An armored train like Trotsky's,
except that theirs had anarchy
written on it.
It allowed Batko Makhno, Father Makhno,
as his supporters called him,
and these are the only filmed images of him,
to transport his cavalry from Huliapuli
in Alexandrovsk, Kharkov,
and even as far as Kiev, the whole length of
a front which stretched over 1,000 km.
In this way, his troops could carry out
a veritable w*r of harassment
on the planks of Petbiora's
counter-revolutionary forces,
and behind the terrible white armies of
General Denikin.
And in the month of October 1919,
the second anniversary of the uprising,
at a moment when everything
seemed lost for the Bolsheviks,
Makhno and the anarchists
saved the Russian Revolution.
The population in the Bolsheviks
had begun to take flight.
Here's a really good example of
the efficiency of the Maklovshina,
which didn't just sit around
in its own backyard.
Makhno was capable of
thinking of the common interests,
thereby saving the revolution.
That particular moment at the beginning of
when he organized an alliance
with the Red Army,
an alliance which was
voluntary on both sides,
in which was immortalized
in front of the cameras.
Here's the Bolshevik, Dibenko,
with his impressive stature,
and Makhno looking so small beside him.
It's a bit like looking at two conceptions
of the same revolution,
the hard-line Bolshevik one,
and then Makhno,
who has the air of a somewhat romantic
revolutionary leader about him.
But in Moscow, where Lenin had just
decreed w*r communism,
the anarchists' actions had started
to be frowned upon,
as had the criticisms which they were
already voicing at the very heart
of the new capital,
concerning dictatorship
over the proletariat.
For most other anarchists,
that is the signal
that the Bolsheviks are not
true revolutionaries,
that they are not interested in the
well-being of the working masses,
that they are not friends of the anarchists
or anyone else who is not a Bolshevik.
This was essentially a moment
when the Bolsheviks,
who were basically a revolutionary
group amongst others,
found themselves politically isolated
in attempting to stabilize their power,
notably by trying to eliminate those
who had the same sort of militarized groups
as themselves.
So it was a question of
who was going to win.
In the face of criticism, Trotsky,
who had just taken over
leadership of the Red Army,
decided to, as he put it, rid Russia
of anarchism with an iron broom.
But he first had to invent consent.
Aware of the potential of a new
weapon of mass propaganda,
the Bolsheviks went about producing,
for the fledgling cinema, films denouncing
the dangers of middle-class disorganization
and of anarcho-banditry.
The Bolsheviks did not attempt
any revolution
in their methods of communication.
They simply recycled
the same worn-out cliches
used by the bourgeois European press,
which had portrayed
libertarians as inebriated,
provocative arsonists to be crushed.
This brought about a genuine rupture
between anarchists and the Bolsheviks,
who were very quickly to become
the most dangerous adversaries that
the anarchist movement had ever had.
But when Kropotkin died in 1921,
the authorities suddenly decided to organize
a national funeral,
where the Bolsheviks feeling remorse.
All the country's cameras were mobilized
to capture this homage
paid by the revolution
to one of the fathers of anarchism.
Emma Goldman, who can be seen here,
even delivered a eulogy at the service.
When Kropotkin died in 1921,
many anarchists were already in prison.
The Bolshevik party allowed them
to be released
so that
they could attend the funeral.
There were thousands of them.
But immediately afterwards,
they were sent back to prison.
These measures were extremely cynical.
The Bolshevik regime manufactured
a disconcerting lie.
On the one side,
they were celebrating someone
who was by any standards a great Russian.
And on the other, they were taking measures
against his philosophy.
The ceremony was hardly over when,
under the direct orders of Lenin,
the libertarian poet Lev Chirny
and the militant Fanny Baron were shot dead
in the cellars of the Cheka prison
along with seven other anarchists.
And in the following weeks,
the Bolsheviks decided to purge
the last two strongholds of anarchism
in the Soviet Union.
The Ukraine would be later,
but first it was Kronstadt,
where the sailors, formerly known as
Glory in honor of the revolution,
had formed a commune.
For the Central Committee,
the threat was too close
and the symbol too dangerous.
Despite Emma Goldman's offer to mediate,
Trotsky sent in the Red Army,
which crushed the small island
under its bombs.
The end of the suppression of the
Kronstadt uprising
was on March 18, 1921,
which corresponded both with
the Bolshevik Party Congress
and the anniversary of the Paris Commune.
So from a symbolic point of view,
it was very impressive.
In the spring of 1921,
only the Makhnovshina were left
to oppose the Bolsheviks.
It was on the shores of the Black Sea
amid alcohol fumes and cossack dancing
that the anarchist army, apparently unaware
of the famous phrase inspired by the Aeneid,
Timiobolcebiko et Dona Ferrentes,
beware of Bolsheviks bearing gifts,
was decimated by the Red Army.
The cavalry and the Makhnovshina officers
were with the Red Army near to Sébastopol.
They threw a huge banquet to celebrate
a victory.
As you know, Leninism was
very well organized.
And during the night,
all the Makhnovist officers were shot dead.
The final pages of the Makhno saga
are tragic.
It's a desperate race,
a battle with no hope of victory,
the struggle of a wounded beast.
The Russian Revolution was catastrophic
for anarchism.
The anarchist movement totally ceased
to exist in Russia.
Its last representatives died in
Stalin's camps or in exile.
But the executions and the deportation
of anarchists to the Solovky Islands
had the principal objective of
reducing libertarians to silence.
Because at the very moment
when it was attempting
to make the workers' world believe that
socialism was being built
within its borders,
the Bolshevik authorities
could not take the risk
that testimony from frontline revolutionaries
might tear aside the veil of the
workers' illusions.
That's why the assassinations
were accompanied
by the total censure of anarchists' words.
And since that day, and even more so
after the rise to power of Stalin,
for whom as we know from his early writings
anarchism was a long-term preoccupation,
the Marxist history books have made
no mention of the role played
by libertarians in the Russian Revolution.
It has taken many years for the
new generations in the East,
as well as a large part of the West,
to be able to hear the total criticism
of the Soviet regime
which was first formulated by anarchists.
The anarchists were the first
to raise this critique of
the fact that this would in fact be
state capitalism.
That the state would become
the sole landlord.
The state would become the sole capitalist.
And this would not in fact change capitalist
relations with the working class at all,
other than the fact that the working class
really would then have nowhere to hide.
If they had no place to hide,
it was because during the
immediate aftermath of the w*r,
the capitalist bourgeoisie
also tried to repress
the anarchists' revolutionary attempts
wherever they could,
with no lesser barbarity
than the Bolsheviks had done.
Like in Germany,
where the libertarian leaders
of the Bavarian Soviet Republic,
Erich Musam, Ernst Töhler, Rett Marrud,
were imprisoned, hunted down, or
lynched by a mob like Gustav Landauer,
whose body was left by the authorities
to rot in the street for several days
by way of an example.
In Bulgaria, the uprising of
the 23rd of September 1923,
which was intended to establish
a government of workers and peasants,
ended up in a white terror,
during which the very
Orthodox King Boris III
purportedly had the head
of Georges Chetanov,
the young Bulgarian anarchism theorist,
delivered to him on a tray.
The tragic week which
brought to an end the hopes
raised by the great demonstrations
in La Fora in Argentina,
found an echo in Colombia
with a banana m*ssacre,
when the United Fruit Company assassinated
hundreds of anarcho-syndicalists.
These repressive waves
flowed as far as China,
where the movement of May 4th 1999,
inspired by Liu Shifu,
the first Chinese anarchist,
was broken up by the warlords.
A young teacher present in
Tiananmen Square in Peking,
a certain Mao Zedong,
witnessed the brutal repression of students
and was deeply marked by it.
This terror of anarchism sent a tremor
as far as the slopes of Mount Fuji,
where the Imperial Japanese authorities
arrested and beat to death
Sakai Osugi and Ito Nui, as well as
their six-year-old nephew,
whose unrecognizable bodies
were thrown to the bottom of a well.
Let's not forget Italy,
which came to the Brinca Revolution.
Capitalism also
reestablished his order here,
thus fulfilling the prophecy of Malatesta,
who can be seen here on the left
haranguing the crowd.
The bourgeoisie will
make the proletariat pay
for its attempts at revolution
with tears and blood.
Yes, wherever anarchism has
tried to make its ideas triumph,
its militants have it arrested,
persecuted, and assassinated.
Even in the United States of America,
another historic land of anarchism,
the revolutionary movement
was fought against.
And this fight would culminate
in the condemning to death
of two innocents.
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01x02 - Land and Liberty
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"Ni Dieu Ni Maître" reviews all the great events of the social history of the last two centuries and reveals the origin and destiny of this political current that has been fighting for over 150 years all masters and gods.
"Ni Dieu Ni Maître" reviews all the great events of the social history of the last two centuries and reveals the origin and destiny of this political current that has been fighting for over 150 years all masters and gods.