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).

memorial day massacre in chicago:
"In several instances from two to four policemen are seen beating one man. One strikes him horizontally across the face, using his club as he would a baseball bat. Another crashes it down on top of his head and still another is whipping him across the back."

fbi and kent state:
In July of 1963, a memo from the Cincinnati office on the subject of "Communist Speakers on College Campuses" noted that "Governor James A. Rhodes has signed into law legislation authorizing the trustees of any state-operated college or university to bar from using campus facility any person that they wish to bar."
(...) By the mid-1960s, the CIA and the FBI were working together through the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on radical groups and harass peace organizations. The FBI's operation was known as COINTELPRO. The CIA's was Operation CHAOS.
(...) In 1967, declassified government documents reveal that CIA Director Richard Helms, Hoover and President Lyndon Johnson believed that the domestic protest movements against the Vietnam War were being orchestrated by the Communist governments in Moscow, Peking, Havana and Hanoi.
(...) On May 4, 1970, Sandra Scheuer, Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause and William Schroeder were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State. Numerous investigative accounts have alleged that the FBI was involved in the burning of the campus ROTC building, which led to the deaths of the students.
(...) The SAC in Cincinnati paid a "courtesy call" on Governor Rhodes 18 days after the shootings. Governor Rhodes informed the FBI agent that he intended to keep the Ohio State University campus open, despite what some historians regard as one of the largest student riots in U.S. history. ". . . He [Rhodes] intends to mobilize sufficient members of the Ohio National Guard (ONG) to accomplish this, 'even if he has to put a guard in every classroom,'" the memo reads. The Governor blamed the unrest on outside agitators and "commented that of the upwards of 100 persons arrested on May 21 and May 22, 1970, only a few were OSU students. . ." the memo notes. The FBI memo cites that of the 78 arrests, 35 were OSU students and two OSU employees, even though the majority of the arrests were made off-campus.
(...) Critics have long charged that the FBI deliberately covered up information about those responsible for ordering the Kent State shootings. A tape was recently released revealing what appears to be an order to shoot at Kent State. FBI declassified docouments strongly suggest that the FBI's extensive influence over Governor Rhodes, perhaps due to their knowledge of his ties to organized crime and the numbers rackets, may have played a key role in the Governor's violent and repressive tactics that led to death of four students at Kent State in 1970.

christian parenti on capitalism and prisons (2001):
...there is a debate going on, which is not always acknowledged as such, as to what is the enemy? Is the enemy nasty corporate practice or is the enemy a whole society that is a specific stage of historical economic development that has, as a system, a logic. And that's you know, what I think. And I think that, I'll give you the punch line first, I think that if we limit our critique to bad corporations we will end up in a cul-de-sac where we will eventually be patting Nike on the head for changing their nasty habits, which they will never do anyway.
(...) So, more specifically, why does America with 5% of the world's population have 25% of the world's prisoners.
(...) [why?] When this criminal justice crackdown that we're living in now began was really in the late sixties and what was going on in the late sixties? Basically the U.S. system faced a dual crisis, political and economic. the political crisis, you're all familiar with, I'm sure: the civil rights movement, the black power movement, then the anti-war movement adding into that. Also a little known wildcat labor movement that was making things difficult for the captains of industry, massive strikes also making things difficult for the corrupt leadership of the AFL-CIO forcing them to actually act like actual unionists, and of course rioting: massive rioting from 64 on. (...) There's also the war in Vietnam that is the background for all of this. You have to remember that the U.S. is bogged down in this hugely expensive, incredibly technically complicated war that by the late-sixties was threatening the power of the U.S. dollar and undermining the whole world financial system and also, after the Tet offensive of '68, it was a war that was falling apart from the U.S. side. (...) And in response to all of this on the domestic side, the police were not up to the task of basically crushing and containing the rebellion. We often forget that because ultimately they prevail, right? They crush the panthers, they put so many activists in prisons, they shut things down, they were tremendously brutal, broke the law, got away with it, et cetera.
(...) [the effect of all this:] And it didn't scare people away; it radicalized the movement. It made the U.S. look really really bad. It made it harder for the U.S. to get on the world stage and say "Capitalism and liberal democracy deliver the goods. Not any of these other options people are fighting for. This is The system."
(...) [the concrete result: the underpinnings of today's justice system] So in response to the police crisis, Lyndon Johnson, in 1967 proposes legislation, that in '68 passes the house of representatives as D.C. is literally burning for the second time. Martin Luther King has just been assassinated, there is massive riots, there is like smoke billowing over the congress and these guys are designing this piece of legislation which creates the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the LEAA, this huge federal bureaucracy, which over the next ten years redistributes about a billion dollars a year to local police to retool and retrain american law enforcement and the judicial system and prisons, to some extent, to deal with the crisis of an incipient revolution which is what they had on their hands at the time.
(...) [world-economic situation at the time] The second part of the crisis that was going on parallel to this was economic. The U.S. ended world war 2 as the industrial power on the planet. Europe and Japan, the two main capitalist rivals had been destroyed economically and so the U.S. was, by the end of the war, producing half, or some people say more than half of the world's output and it was in the position to make incredible profits. (...) So you had, like, fifteen years of deprivation and pent up economic demand coupled with generous aid from the U.S. and U.S. corporations there to provide the machines, tools, and the commodities at first. And you get this incredible boom throughout the nineteen fifties and the early sixties: the golden era of capitalism.
(...) [the crisis...] So finally you have the fundamental crisis that capitalism always returns to: you have a crisis of overproduction. This is one of the central irrationalities of this system. That when things work out the way they're supposed to, you run into trouble. When the economy is going well, you inevitably produce too much stuff and therefore you can't keep producing at the same rate of profitablity, which is the logic, which is the reason that investors invest, that's what keep capitalism going, is profitability.
(...) [the solution?] Well, the solution in the real, you know, true organic solution to this problem is war. That is one of the functions of war under capitalism. Not that it's thought of as such, but structurally this is how it works: one of the heuristic positive things about war for the capitalist class is that it destroys, not just people, but stuff. You clear away the commodities of capital and then restart a period of growth. It's like burning a field and we are their weeds, unfortunately. So they couldn't just write off capital, destroy Europe's economic base, destroy the U.S. economic base, so where are they going to make up the difference?
(...) [the other solution?] Well, from labor. That's the easiest place to go, is to take back the gains that the working class had made over the last thirty years since the depression. Both directly through higher wages and indirectly through what's called the social wage, funding for welfare, increased funding for education, increased funding for the environment. You have to remember that it's under Nixon in the early seventies that you have the creation of the EPA, the creation of OSHA, all of these huge agencies. (...) So capital tries to attack labor in the Seventies. They try to drive down wages, but it doesn't work, and the ruling class is trying to figure out "well, why is this?"
(...) [on this engineered crisis] At one point, congress asked Volcker, the crisis was getting very very bad, Mexico was threatening to bail out on its ninety billion dollar debt and Volcker goes before congress and they say you have to lower interest rates and stimulate the economy and he says "Well, I can't do that," because basically, this is his quote, "the standard of living of the average american worker has to decline, I don't think you can get around that," until economic health returns. His colleague in England, where the same policy was being pursued, because this is a world system, Alan Budd, later described the policy this way: "Rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes. What was engineered in Marxist terms," this guy is a Thatcherite conservative, "was a crisis in capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labor and has allowed the capitalist's to make high profits ever since."
(...) [and the 80s] In 1980, not a single union contract included a wage freeze or wage giveback and none of them really had since the early sixties. By 1982, forty-four percent of all union contracts included wage freezes or outright wage givebacks. So you have, in the eighties, you have the return of mass poverty.
(...) [on why capitalism needs poverty] If the poor, you want the poor to intimidate your workers, right? Say you own a hotel, you want the poor. You want homeless people to scare the shit out of your waitstaff, but you don't actually want those homeless people in front of your hotel, cause then they scare away the tourists. And, of course, poor people organize and rebel. So how do you manage this contradiction? You have to have poverty under capitalism, capitalism produces poverty through policy and organically through crisis, but it's always threatened by poverty. --> [and the repression/prison-complex] Well, one way was welfare, right? Absorb the poor, co-opt the poor, placate the poor, but that was seen to be aiding workers in general, so that's not an option. Well, what do you do? You switch back to the old-fashioned method of repression, increased demonization. So you get, in the early eighties, a re-engagement with that earlier part of the story of the criminal justice crackdown. and it's very much about containing and controlling the poor. You get the War on Drugs, ramps up in '82, first by changing the rules to favor the prosecution. In '84, there's the first really big federal crime bill that does a whole bunch of stuff. It creates a lot of grants for local law enforcement, local incarceration, but one of the key things it does is create the Asset Forfeiture laws which is a way of recruiting local police into the drug war, because this is really coming down from the top in certain levels.
(...) [and more militarization...] Eighty-six, you get another major crime bill that creates new, twenty nine new mandatory minimums, billions of dollars for grants to the locals. Eighty-eight through ninety-two, more of these crime bills. Ninety-two riots, Clinton comes in. More of the same policies culminating in the '94 crime bill where there's thirty billion dollars doled out to the states. Of course, always with strings attached that they must repress poor people more, essentially, right? So you can get the money to build your prison if you have a three-strikes law or truth-in-sentencing law. Which means that in many cases nonviolent offenders on a third or second offense are put away for twenty-five to life. Then you can get extra money from the Feds, etc etc. Ninety-six, effective terrorism anti-death penalty act. Numerous immigration restrictions to militarize the border. And on and on and on, and we're still in that moment of buildup though it is beginning to plateau to some extent and there is this response to it.