This wasn’t just talk. Dynamite played a central role in the Haymarket affair in Chicago as labour militancy peaked among immigrant groups in the United States. On 3 May 1886, Chicago policemen shot dead six strikers outside the McCormick Reaper Works, and beat others with their clubs. At a mass meeting the next day, amid fiery speeches denouncing the atrocities, a dynamite bomb was thrown in the direction of the police. Four policemen died in the ensuing riot. During the resulting ‘red scare’, and general clamour for revenge from big business and the media, anarchist speech-makers and journalists, including Most, were rounded up. Despite appeals for clemency from such eminent writers as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, four men were hanged.
The image of the bodies of four men hanging in turn radicalized many young men and women, including Emma Goldman, an immigrant from Russia who had experienced the brutality of working-class life. A young man of Polish origin assassinated President William McKinley in 1901. He had no connections to any anarchist groups, but he had been to a lecture by Goldman. He was executed and Goldman was arrested; the American Congress passed a law excluding from the country any one ‘who disbelieves in or is opposed to all organized governments’. Theodore Roosevelt launched an international crusade against terrorism, anticipating George W. Bush’s war on terror by more than a century.
But the fear of terrorism did not go away. Nor did the attraction of propaganda by the deed diminish. Transatlantic cable telegraph and mass-circulation newspapers provided the right technological circumstances for it. Anarchist spectacles were meat and drink to the newspapers, which reported them at length with many lurid illustrations, titillating their readers, but also confirming the militants’ own high sense of their value and potency. In the late nineteenth century, as in the early twenty-first century, blunderingly repressive governments together with a sensationalist media made anarchist militancy seem more widespread than it was.
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One of anarchism’s more extraordinary manifestations was the Ghadar Party, composed of members of the Indian diaspora, and led by peripatetic intellectuals and immigrant labourers in early twentieth-century California. Its intellectual mentor was an Oxford-educated Indian called Lala Hardayal, who taught Indian philosophy at Stanford University.
Hardayal kept his distance, physically and intellectually, from the kind of Hindu racial-religious rhetoric about the nation in which Savarkar and others were beginning to indulge. He emphasized his knowledge of French, Spanish and Italian over Sanskrit. While still a student at Oxford, Hardayal met Kropotkin, while one of his closest friends, a British radical, was a biographer of Bakunin and edited many of his writings. Hardayal later set up a Bakunin Institute in Oakland. The topic of discussion at a meeting he held in 1912 in the Bay Area was ‘Heroes who have killed rulers and dynamited buildings’. Thousands of Indians abroad joined his group, encouraging Hardayal to plan an anti-British insurrection in India.
Alexandria in Egypt with its large Italian immigrant population concealed a hard-core group of anarchists fleeing the crackdown on them by European governments. Their magazines extolling Bakunin and Kropotkin were read in faraway Buenos Aires and New Jersey. Such global networks crystallized as an immigrant workforce linked its immediate grievances of exploitation and racial discrimination to its position within a global political-economic structure.
In general, the worldwide expansion of industrial and commercial society made more people aware of its ineradicable inequalities and injustices. The rich, growing richer and more acquisitive, seemed to flaunt their remoteness from the working class. The idea of a total revolt against the social and political order grew even more attractive as attempts at assassination failed. As émile Henry wrote:
You have hanged us in Chicago, decapitated us in Germany, garroted us in Xerez, shot us in Barcelona, guillotined us in Montbrison and in Paris, but what you can never destroy is anarchy. Its roots are too deep, born in a poisonous society which is falling apart; [anarchism] is a violent reaction against the established order. It represents the egalitarian and libertarian aspirations which are opening a breach in contemporary authority. It is everywhere, which makes anarchy elusive. It will finish by killing you.
The Underground Man Emerges
Bakunin had been dead for five years when, in 1881, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated. Bakunin’s place in the anarchist pantheon was taken by Peter Kropotkin, another Russian exile in London (described by Oscar Wilde as ‘a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems to be coming out of Russia’). But Bakunin’s influence endured longer.
He had significant followers in Italy: one of them, the Italian feminist Anna Kuliscioff, campaigned vigorously against the exploitation of women workers in Italy’s nascent industry (and even attacked the Socialist Party for its failure to fight for women’s right to vote). Bakunin, however, achieved his greatest triumphs in Spain, where anarchism became a mass movement and revolutionary force for nearly seven decades. In countries where the political system still seemed capable of delivering justice, Bakunin’s creed of all or nothing was unlikely to take hold. But economic backwardness, weak government, uneven modernization, and a massive gap between the rich and the poor made Bakunin’s ideas potent.
The Russian has been depicted as a misguided romantic with a bent for destruction and secret societies. ‘He is not a serious thinker,’ Isaiah Berlin wrote. ‘There are no coherent ideas to be extracted from his writings of any period, only fire and imagination, violence and poetry.’ George Lichtheim was more to the point when he wrote that ‘Bakunin had translated into words what the Russian peasant – or the landless Italian and Spanish laborer – dimly felt about the civilization erected at his expense.’
Bakunin would have surely understood why tens of thousands of young men recoiling from dysfunctional nation states and crooked elites have rushed to join ISIS. He possessed in full an insight into the nature and function of the destructive instinct in a society whose political arrangements fail to accommodate the growing aspirations to justice and equality of its masses. As the political thinker Eric Voegelin pointed out:
In the lives of nations and civilizations, situations arise in which through delay of adjustment to changed circumstances the ruling groups become evil to the point that the accumulated hatreds of the victims break the impasse through violence … The new factor that becomes manifest in Bakunin is the contraction of existence into a spiritual will to destroy, without the guidance of a spiritual will to order.
Bakunin makes it possible to understand a puzzle about the contemporary partisans of violence: men who concern themselves with none of the problems that exercise both liberal reformers and radical revolutionaries. Their idea of political action assumes the irrelevance of nations and states as determining forces in history. They seem to follow the logic outlined by Souvarine in Zola’s Germinal: