lecture 8, "dynamite club: the anarchists"
john merriman

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life and death of one man, emile henry (guillotined in 1894, when he was 21)

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anarchists, unlike socialists, did not want to seize control of the state, but wanted to "destroy" it. they saw political life as irredeemably bourgeois and corrupt.

first anarchist, prof is saying, was prodhoun (from east of france, active in 1850s and 1860s). he wrote a pamphlet titled "property is theft" (he meant, prof argues, that "unearned" property is theft)--"to be governed is to be...checked, valued, estimated, commanded...that is government, that is justice, that is its morality"

followed by two russian anarchists, peter kropotkin and mikael bakunin. both were nobles(!). the former was once toasted by the king of england--he was among those that came up with the term, "propaganda of the deed", which was premised on the idea that the masses were like a tinder-box, and all that was needed was a spark.

depending on how one counts, anarchists assasinated about 6 or 7 heads of state.

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begin with a bomb in the cafe terminus. february 12, 1894, a pale, thin man named emile henry hid a bomb in his clothes, and headed for the elegant boulevards near the paris opera. he wanted to kill as many peopole as possible. he stopped before the opera itself, where there was a fancy ball going on, but he didn't think he could get past the guards. he was a flanuer, an intellectual who had been a bit of a dandy--but if he was, he was an impoverished flanuer, who hated and killed.

at 8pm he reached the cafe terminus--as it was filling up he ordered two beers and a cigar (paying for them, in an un-anarchist gesture). an hour later, he lit the fuse with his cigar, and he threw the bomb into the packed cafe (paris had become a staging ground for the belle epoque, prof is saying--the "cathedrals of modernity").

rebuilding of paris by hausman had chased thousands of workers to north-eastern paris, don't forget, to make way for these boulevards packed with dept stores. indeed, paris seemed no longer the capital of revolution--"boulevards lined up like soldiers"--but the capital of Capital, in a sense. a centralized state, with strong police and army presence. (on may day 1891, troops fired on protestors.)

it was in this context, in the 1890s, that the anarchists began to organize. above all in mont matre, and in industrial regions and worker suburbs.

this was a time of scandal--the memory of the paris commune loomed large for the anarchists. they "hated" paris, and admired bakunin and the others. the modern state had erected itself on the corpses of the communards.

a wave of anarchist bombings swept the capital from 1892-1894--assasination noted by the king of italy as a "professional risk".

prof is arguing that many of the anarchists, however, were people of peace--for propotkin and proudhoun the goal was to create communities, to survive away from the state.

at the same time, propotkin had accepted the phrase "propaganda by the deed" (and maybe even coined it). the belief that a single act of violence would be the spark. he did later have his doubts, but he refused to condemn those driven by despair (he had celebrated the permanent revolution of the word and pen)

dynamite was invented by alfred nobel in 1868--it seemed, in some sense, to level the playing field. a german anarchist had written that it was "within the power of dynamite to destroy capitalism", just as it was "within the power of gunpowder to destroy feudalism."

rabba scholl(sp.?) took this to heart--born into poverty, shamed in school as someone wearing beggar's clothes. he took to crime and anarchism. he was arrested, escaped the police wagon, and made it to paris. after the police firings and arrests in 1891--rabba scholl's two "deeds" followed these incidents, when he bombed the homes of two magistrates. he was subdued later by 10 policemen, and was guillotined the next year.

he so terrified contemporaries, that his name became a verb. after his death the anarchists of paris debated the wisdom of his attacks. some sympathizers thought of him as a martyr, a violent jesus christ (both were 33 when they were executed).

in his eulogy of scholl, an art critic warned that the murder of scholl was going to act as a trigger. someone else penned, "what do the victims matter if the gesture is beautiful"(!).

people of means were afraid to go to fancy restraunts, to rent to magistrates, etc. (a climate of fear). hundreds of scrawled threats arrived to property owners, people of means, etc. (signed by the avengers of rabba scholl, etc.--"finally the day when social justice will arrive"). "the dynamite polka."

on the 9th of december 1893, an unemployed worker who couldn't feed his family tossed a small bomb full of thumbtacks into the chamber of deputies--his goal was not to kill, but to call attention to the plight of the poor. he was guillotined almost immediately, after a brief trial. "long live anarchy," he shouted.

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emile henry's father had been a communard--he fled, under the sentence of death, to spain, where he worked in the mines (turning from republican socialism, to anarchism--in spain anarchists were terribly influential). he had two brothers--following his father's death in 1882 from mercury poisoning, his mother and the kids returned to paris. his mother had a bit of family land, and started up an inn (in the countryside, basically). he is very smart, becomes a scholarship student. the last report on his scholarship reads "he will become a student at one of the best schools in paris" (but he failed the oral exam, alas--though he could have taken it again).

he precipitously returned to paris. he lost his footing, a friend said, and became attracted to spiritism, trying to contact the dead soul of his father. worked here and there while living on the margins of urban life. his brother became an anarchist, and was a prominent orator in smoky cafes (he went to jail in 1894, for things that he had written). emile, now 20 years of age, was called "microbe." he was devoted to his mother, and would walk/take the train to go visit her. gave about a third of his monthly earnings to his mother.

began meeting with some anarchist groups, read some propotkin and other counterparts. his two targets were "private property" and "authority", two cancers he believed had to be destroyed. though he remained detached from the intellectual anarchist scene, he did fancy himself an intellectual. he was different from the man that through the tack bomb (malatoun(sp.?)), in that emile only loved the "idea"--didn't love the people, but the "deed", according to prof. (this was a common thread amongst elite anarchists, whose hate for bourgeois society could translate into a hate for the "people").

emile was a loner--he never spoke in public, allegedly. arrested with his brother after his brother was mistaken for having dynamite in his coat-pocket (it was actually a pen case). emile lost his job after his arrest/release--he bounced between bad jobs (once working as an apprentice to a watch-maker...). in 1892, he briefly served as a manager for an anarchist literary newspaper. but all this while he was preparing his bombs.

police informers, remember, were everwhere! (g.k. chesterton's book). he was overheard saying something about nitro-glycerin. a police spy reported that the old ways of the anarchists no longer seemed in play--the ones that you had to worry about were not the speech-makers, but the ones lurking in the shadows with evil "deeds" in mind.

they reflected, of course, a debate within anarchism--between the associanists and the believers in individual autonomy of the dynamiters.

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this lecture's title, "dynamite club", reflects the police's misinterpretation that all these bombings were co-ordinated.

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on the 11th of november, 1892, an employer of a mining company found a suspicious looking package outside the company door. they carried it downstairs quite stupidly, and policemen came along and decided that they had to take it to the police station (it was a bomb that would explode after chemical reaction). when they put it down on a table in the police station it exploded! the bomb was wrapped in a newspaper that related the arrest of emile henry!

emile fled to london--a friend of oscar wilde's remembered meeting him there. he was proud. he had exterminated 6 enemies. the policemen, however, didn't think of him as a serious suspect--a policemen didn't believe that his routine of the day was possible (i.e., that he had an alibi...)

anyway, emile is in london, now. what converts him to anarchism, of course, is the appaling gap between the poor and the rich in paris. never had people lived it up in such egregious ways, as in the "belle epoque." everywhere he lived had been on the edge of paris--and from where he lived, he could see the monuments/buildings he hated in paris (notre dame, for example).

he once wrote that "love" could lead you to "hate"--he loved humanity in the abstract, and hated society in very concrete ways.

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the explosive device that emile henry threw into the terminus injured 20 people and killed one. henry had been seen, and so he wouldn't be caught, he said, "where's the scoundrel that did this?" but then he ran, and then was finally caught--he fired with his pistol, hitting a policeman's wallet(!).

he's put in a prison--the prison guards were trying to get information out of him, even as he's trying to convert the guards to anarchism. his friends actually broke into the prison and stole dynamite, putting paris on high alert.

at his trial he says you have "shot us in spain, hung us in germany... but what you can never do is extinguish anarchy, because its roots are too deep."

he was executed on the 21st of may, 1894. (the last public execution, actually, was 1936 (people bought tickets to sit on neighboring roofs!)--the last execution in france was in 1972, with the guillotine, of course).

these guillotine scenes were important to anarchists, as well, as scenes of martyrdom, of course.

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was this a form of indirect suicide? (some have argued this, presumably?)

he had fallen in love with a woman, the wife of a fellow anarchist. he proclaimed his love, but was blown off. she, after his execution, gives interviews to journalists--"oh, he loved me so much..."

no, not indirect suicide.

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how did this represent the origins of modern terror, prof is asking? what was new about it? a couple of things.

(1) most of the anarchists in western europe had been ordinary workers, but emile henry was an intellectual--instead of targeting a head of state, he threw a bomb at the petty-bourgeois that sustain capitalism. that's really new about it, prof is saying.

(2) in modern terrorism you have an alliance between intellectuals/students and the down-and-out, which is reflected in emile henry's life.

(3) you have revolutionary immorality--martyrdom.

(4) they all set out to attack the state/capitalism, imperialism/state--an institution that stands for a whole system/ideology.

(5) again, seen as leveling the playing field--you proved you were strong, even when, in reality, you were weak.

(6) not a centrally organized, massive conspiracy--yet individuals and small groups were critical.

(7) when you think of the word "terrorism" -- this was originally applied to describe the violence of the state. it is often forgotten, professor is saying, that the vast majority of victims of terror are victims of state terror. and the anarchists, in this sense, had obvious grievances. you cannot understand it without this. anarchists killed perhaps up to 60 people in this era; the state, of course, many more (260:1, in someone's estimates).

terrorism has thus become part of the political process, in a sense. mutual need, in a sense--dissidence stoked and encouraged the overzealous response of the State (when States take tactics that swell hatred for them).

for a radical ethics of equality:
The critique of the atomisation of society and the empire of selfishness generated by liberal capitalism has found extremely powerful weapons in the arsenal of leftist thought. However, these weapons have not always been used to further an emancipatory project. They have also been used to justify the forcible homogenisation of society under a political banner. ... In all these cases, only those elements that are “convenient” are taken from leftist ideas, such as the culture of a strong State, the subordination of the individual to the needs of the collective, the critique of liberal democracy, etc. The more clearly emancipatory ideas - equality, self-determination, cooperation, solidarity, and liberty – are left by the wayside.
(...) Alongside this ideological use of leftist ideas, Marxism can sometimes be found being used as an “ideology of modernisation”. Lenin himself argued that Socialism is “soviet power plus electrification”. This use has fed the self-justifying discourse of several dictatorships, from the Chinese elites who headed the restoration of Capitalism, to theoreticians of “African Socialism” such as Julius Nyerere or tyrants of “scientific Socialism” such as the Somali Siyad Barre. Once again, from the wide range Marxist ideas, only those of strong State planning (supported by compulsory unanimity from below), the imperative of developing productive forces, and the critique of the bourgeoisie and of liberalism in the name of an equality (restricted to the purely economic sphere) are taken up.
(...) Finally, there are “inverted” uses of left wing ideas. Instead of using them to justify the homogeneity of society, the scientific dominion of a bureaucratic vanguard, or a strong State, they are used to mask the most radical individualism. Many people or small groups of “anarchists” and “autonomists” (or however you want to call them) take the leftist tradition of rejecting oppression, the State, and authority in general, but only to claim their own personal rights to act according to their own will, being accountable to nothing and nobody. In this case, leftism acts as an “aesthetic” varnish and a “lifestyle” to justify an attitude that is as selfish as that of bourgeoisie, and which is often much more elitist in its disdain for “ordinary” people.
(...) How is it that such sublime ideas coexist with such contradictory uses and effects? How is it that the ideas of the left so often become a path to the practices of the right?
(...) If the implicit humanism of the ideas of the left has so often been absent in its practices, it is because the left tradition, or at least its hegemonic currents, lacks an ethical dimension. Indeed, any concern for the ethical evaluation of actions has been actively eradicated from its politics. [this is a very massive thesis; and important to note that it forgoes a materialist's analysis of precisely why those movements became totalitarian]
(...) The visceral rejection of ethics by many people on the left never ceases to surprise me. I have seen countless companions become jumpy when, for one reason or another, they hear someone else use vocabulary referring to the universe of moral. If forced to discuss failings in someone’s behaviour they always clarify that “it is not a question of morals”, as if it was not proper for someone on the left to talk about things being “good” or “bad”. Although many people on the left are among the most altruistic, kind and charitable people to be found in this world, most would doubtless be uncomfortable with being considered “good” or “kind” (an adjective that, in the cultural universe of the left, evokes a sense of “weakness”).
(...) This strange contradiction in militant culture came about because the left has rejected the question of moral evaluation of behaviour, reducing ethics, to a mere “logic”. Thus conducts and actions are not guided by what could be considered “good” or “bad”, but by what is “correct” or “incorrect”. The measure of “correctness” is defined not by ethics, but by its correspondence to a given political truth: a correct action is one that follows the correct political line. A political line is established as being “correct”, not through an exercise of ethical evaluation, but based on the knowledge of a truth (for example, the direction in which “Historical Laws” point, the assumed dictates of “revolutionary conscience”, the postulates expressed in this or that canonical text by Marx, Bakunin, etc.) An action that pushes in the correct historical direction – for example, inciting a group of young people to join a direct action, deliberately keeping from them information about its possible consequences – can be considered “correct” independent of whether it is ethically reprehensible. The important thing is not that the action is correct because it is “good”, but because it could be “effective”. [a fair point, in part. at times also a question of being bound to certain political principles, which certainly fosters this sort of ethical stultification/stagnation. but is it not merely a symptom of poor internal democracy, rather than an overarching aversion to ethics?]
(...) Ethics and leftism are not mutually exclusive. In fact, traces of serious consideration of the ethical dimension can be found in the (misnamed) “Utopian Socialism” of the 19th century and in a number of minor currents within Socialist and Anarchist traditions. For Kropotkin’s anarchism, for example, an ethics of a new type, one that was different from religious and metaphysical precepts, was fundamental to “give men an ideal” and to “guide them in action”. Worried by the amorality of the time, derived from liberalism, Darwinism or the ideas of Nietzsche, Kropotkin worked intensively from 1904 until his death in 1921 to write a treatise on ethics. He argued for an ethics of solidarity and sought to demonstrate that it was universal, emanating from the naturally sociable nature of mankind (and animals) and the impulse to “mutual aid”.[iii] Similar concerns can be found in Tolstoy’s “Christian Socialism”, which had become a genuine mass movement by the beginning of the 20th century. From the teachings of a Christ stripped of his divine status, Tolstoy derived general ethical mandates (unconnected with any religiosity) that should not only guide political action, but should also prefigure the world we are aiming for: love thy neighbour, humility, forgiveness, etc.[iv]
(...) However, the Marxist tradition fiercely opposed any ethical discourse. Marx himself dismissed such concerns as irrelevant: in the Communist Manifesto he considers them a distraction that interferes with understanding of the material basis of poverty and social ills, and in The German Ideology he went so far as to argue that “communists do not preach any moral at all”. Students of Marx have recently suggested that his rejection of ethics was simply the result of a “tactical” necessity to mark a difference between his ideas and other debates current at the time, and that Marxism is, in fact, a form of humanism that contains a strong implicit ethics. Nevertheless, even these authors recognise that Marx’s attitude profoundly marked the Marxist tradition, which from that point on maintained hostility towards any ethical discourse (with the exception of a marginal variant of “ethical Marxism”, represented by authors such as Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Henri Lefebvre, or Mihailo Markovic).[v] Karl Kautsky, the principal Marxist theorist of the Second International, dedicated his book Ethics and the materialist concept of History (1906) to arguing that historical progress obeys laws that have very little to do with moral ideas. Therefore, he argued, Socialists should look to science for guidance in their actions, because “science is always above ethics”.[vi] In his article “Tactics and Ethics” (1919) Lukács agreed with Kautsky in that decisions about political tactics should answer only to the tribunal of history: if they are in accordance with “the sense of world history”, then they are “correct”, and therefore, by necessity “ethical”.[vii] Many other examples can be found.[viii] What is important for our purposes is that this type of reduction of the ethical dimension to a mere problem of “logic” or of understanding what is correct or incorrect in terms of some Laws of historical necessity, was translated in practice – not only among Marxists but also among people on the left in general – into an eradication of all sense of personal responsibility, and the typical principle according to which “the end sanctifies the means”.
(...) In Religion and Socialism, a noteworthy book written in 1907 and now all but forgotten, Anatoli Lunacharski – who would soon form part of the first Bolshevik government – proposed complementing Marxism’s “austere, modest and arid philosophy”, with aesthetics and ethics, a “science of values” of the sort that is lacking today. Essentially, Marx and Engels occupied themselves with “knowing” the world; but the “the complete relationship between man and the world is only attained when the processes are not only known, but also valued”; action “emerges only from knowledge and evaluation”. Science does not occupy itself with questions of the heart: it responds to “how?” and “why?”, but it is not concerned with questions of “good?” or “bad?”. Religion, on the other hand, responds to these questions and reaches a practical conclusion: “it proves the presence of evil in the world” and “attempt to defeat it”. It is taking this function of ethical and aesthetic evaluation into account that Lunacharski argues that Socialism should “imitate” religion (needless to say, forgetting its theological and dogmatic elements) and become a genuine cosmology. [can this complement materialism, which almost necessarily relegates this tussle of ideas?]
(...) It is clear that Socialism is the cause of the proletariat; but is it also good for all humanity from a moral point of view? Lunacharski complains that orthodox Marxists reject that question, because for them it is enough that it be correct for the proletariat alone (they say that Socialism is not a faith that looks to win converts outside the working class). Nevertheless – our author goes on to say–, this is a limited conception: the proletariat needs to achieve “ideological hegemony” if it wants to reach power (something they would not be able to do alone, against everyone else).
(...) Although rejected in theory, an implicit moral world nevertheless exists in the practices of the left, which clearly distinguishes between the “righteous” and “sinners
(...) By guiding its actions in accordance with the mandates of a transcendental Truth (extracted from science, knowledge of supposed historical Laws, or some canonical text), the left makes itself impenetrable to others in two ways. On the one hand, it shuts its ears to the simple “opinions” of the uninitiated (that is to say, those who have not demonstrated a grasp of the Truth), which leads to a conspicuous unwillingness to reach agreements with them; on the other hand, it implicitly rejects any responsibility towards its fellows. Protected by the Truth, the left remains untouchable to the judgements of others. By retiring themselves from the world of equals in this way, leftists often adopt that typical air of self-sufficiency and arrogant condescension towards others, and that vanguardist style that can be found even amongst those who declare themselves opposed to all vanguards (but who nevertheless feel themselves to be “illuminated” by their own Truth). In this way, we end up in the paradox indicated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau more than two hundred years ago, in one of those ironic phrases laden with truth that he liked to shoot against his fellow philosophers. He questioned those who would say they loved Humankind, but only to avoid the obligation of loving any human being in particular. Rousseau’s critique remains useful today to illustrate the tragedy of a left without ethics. [yes. this i fully agree with]
(...) Here let us return to the problem of the left and the ethical dimension that is indispensable if we are to protect it from ideological abuse, and to clearly separate it from right-wing practices. The beginning and end of any anticapitalist politics – and this is the central thesis of this essay – should be a radical ethics of equality.
(...) A radical ethics of equality is, above all, an immanent ethics. Unlike other ethics – for example, that of Kant, that of the Socratic philosophers, or that included in religious principles – that claim to come from some eternal order (rational, natural or divine), ours should be firmly anchored in this world. As with all of social life, the universe of moral criteria should be put within the grasp of real men and women. To say it in another way, the content of this ethics should be the fruit of social agreements that recognise the needs of life in common, from the most universal (that is to say, those that relate to human beings as a species) to the most historical and situational. That an ethical code be something more or less permanent and widely shared does not mean that it should be considered eternal or universal, nor that its authority should be deposited in gods or transcendental Truths. An immanent ethic is an ethic that comes from us.
(...) A radical ethic of equality is also an ethic of dialogue. It recognises that society is not made up of isolated individuals, but nor is it a collective that exists beyond the specific individuals who compose it (to postulate a collective over and above people, as certain leftists do, is to fall once again into the transcendental). Personal existence, as the young Bakhtin knew,[x] is only possible in interaction with the other: it is by the means of the image, the body, the gaze, and the word of my fellows that I exist as a whole person. Social life is nothing more than this ongoing dialogue with our fellows, those who are alive, those who have died, and those who are yet to come. An ethical existence is, therefore, that of people who know themselves to be obliged to be able to answer to the other for what they are, for what they do, and for what they fail to do. An ethics of dialogue therefore requires commitment to our fellows, a personal existence that assumes its responsibility for the other, and which does not look for excuses or alibis nor does it retreat into the monologue or to devotion to a transcendent (be it God, Science, the Nation, the People, Class, the Party or the Individual). An ethical existence without alibis, is one of fidelity to the specific situation and of accountability to others for every act. And it can only be considered a radical ethics of equality if the commitment is to the other just as they are.
(...) This radical commitment to others just as they are does not mean ignoring class differences and the antagonism that shape our society. For we are talking about an ethics of equality, whose raison d’être is precisely that of protecting life in common from those who, under any excuse, attempt to place themselves above others. That is why those who have refused to accept being equals, at all times and in all places have feared dialogic and immanent ethics. It is because the “unequals” cannot be accountable to others, that the justification of their privilege (“private law”) has always rested upon some authority or transcendent. Radical egalitarian ethics is, by definition, power’s fiercest enemy.
(...) What would the specific content of an ethics of equals be? What virtues would it promote? What conducts would it condemn? It would be, firstly and fundamentally, and ethics of caring for the Other, expressed in a codification of virtues and defects that values all that which aims at cooperation, solidarity, empathy, humility, respect for diversity, the capacity for consensus, etc., and which “represses” impulses to competition, selfishness, ambition to power, intellectual arrogance, stubbornness, obsequiousness, or narcissism.