Preliminary Programme

The German exile socialist Johann Most travelled to the United States in December 1882 shortly after his release from a London prison. He had been invited by New York comrades to undertake a speaking tour of the American industrial belt. At the same time, he converted to Bakuninist anarchism and settled in New York where he continued publishing his revolutionary paper Freiheit. How did he view the American republic, American democracy and the American people? This paper seeks to analyze and contextualize the changing views of a restless, estranged immigrant New Yorker. Most distinguished between the American State and the people making up the nation. To Most and many other foreign radicals, greed, corruption, and exploitation (“a new kind of feudalism”) swiftly erased all moral distinctions between the Old and New Worlds. Gone was the beacon republic that once inspired European Forty-eighters. Now, repression and violence from Haymarket to Homestead, and countless other labour disputes engulfed the country while the American working classes seemed unwilling to revolt. During the 1890s, Most tempered the rhetoric of insurrection and embraced communist anarchism. There was more commentary on American politics and he even offered cultural analyses of Thanksgiving and Labor Day. Twenty years after his immigration, Most’s perspective deepened and his views on America changed in some surprising ways as if American pragmatism and reform-mindedness during the Progressive Era held some promise for the future. (Show less)

This paper compares and contrasts the role of national, regional and municipal patriotisms in Italian and Spanish Anarchism from the 1860s to the 1940s. It will focus on Catalonia and Barcelona on the one hand and a belt of ‘anarchist towns’ located in Central Italy on the other. The role of Federalist Republicanism, campanilismo, Diasporic experiences and linguistic markers will be compared and contrasted. The concept of opportunity structures will be invoked to explain cycle of linkages to national or regional forms of patriotism and national identity and non-anarchist parties in alliances of convenience and/or conviction. (Show less)

Before the Second World War most anarchists in the United States were immigrants, posing a dilemma for both the consolidating American state and the Westphalian world-system of nation-states. Anarchists were the antitheses of loyal subjects or patriotic citizens—they were the most impossible of “impossible subjects,” who were neither wanted by, nor wanted to be a part of, any nation-state. These feelings were reciprocated, and between 1903 and 1919 U.S. legislation rendering all immigrant anarchists de facto illegal aliens. This campaign culminated in the deportations of hundreds of anarchists during the postwar Red Scare. Yet thousands more remained at large, and others proved frustratingly unremovable as a result of changing national borders, breakdowns in international relations, and creative legal and extralegal strategies. Still others re-entered the United States clandestinely and resumed their radical activates under assumed names. Alien anarchists were inherently deportable, but in practice often difficult to deport. Even those who were expelled to their countries of origin caused consternation, as the national governments obligated to receive them under international law did not in fact want them in their midst, but could not legally expel them in turn. The logics and practices of a state-based international system, within which everyone is designated a citizen and subject of a specific nation-state, often broke down in the face of anarchists’ alternative subjectivity of statelessness and “internationalism.” (Show less)