“Anarchism Means That You Should Be Free.” On the Literature of Liberation

Outfitted in a gray suit and white tie purchased at Kaufmann Brothers department store and with a calling card featuring the pseudonym “Simon Bachman,” ostensibly a New York employment agent, the twenty-five-year-old Russian anarchist Alexander Berkman stood outside of Pittsburgh’s Chronicle-Telegraph Building on a warm summer day in 1892. He was waiting for industrialist Henry Clay Frick, chairman of the recently consolidated Carnegie Steel Corporation, to return from his daily card game at the Duquesne Club.

In Berkman’s pocket was a 38-caliber, short-barreled revolver. In the other a twelve-inch dagger. “The history of the world is on my side,” muttered Fyodor Dostoevsky’s anarchist Kirilov in Demons, and no doubt Berkman shared similar sentiments.

Except Kirilov wanted to die for the brotherhood of man, while Berkman believed that he had to kill for the same. Yet so nervous was the bookish and bespectacled Berkman that he clumsily bumped into Frick as the former got off the elevator, nearly dropping his revolver.

Murder didn’t come naturally to the studious Berkman, who would reason in his 1912 Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist that “Man’s inhumanity to man is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery… that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.” The anarchist wanted to make an example of Frick because of that economic slavery. And so, he would, in a manner.

Anarchism has a dizzying array of sects. Anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-collectivism; mutualism, individualism, illegalism. They’re certainly committed to praxis—as Berkman’s example should show—and anarchists have had their share of short-lived political success from the few heady months of the Paris Commune in 1871 to the Makhnovshchina in southern Ukraine following World War I, the contemporary Chiapas of the Zapatistas and the Kurdish revolutionaries in Rojava.

Yet compared to their sometimes-comrades and often-times adversaries the Marxist-Leninists, who at the height of their power governed over a third of the globe, anarchism—at least in the modern world—has been rarely attempted. And so, a certain imaginative impulse is necessitated, a lyric sensibility, a literary perspective.

While the communist finds salvation in the state and the capitalist in the corporation, the anarchist understands redemption as imparted by friends and neighbors, family and comrades. Whether violent or pacificist, “Anarchism means that you should be free,” writes Berkman in his charmingly titled ABC of Anarchism, “that no one should enslave you, boss you, rob you, or impose upon you.”

Add to that the bearded Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon with his invocation that “Private property is theft,” Peter Kropotkin who appears as much as a Russian Old Believer as a revolutionary prophesizing that this “very instant the tyrants of the earth shall bite the dust,” Mikhail Bakunin thundering with demonic energy that the “passion for destruction is a creative passion,” the Lithuanian-American speaker Emma Goldman—Berkman’s lover and a far more consequential theorist—quipping that “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

Marxism is an ideology for economists, but anarchism is for poets—a rhetoric that’s thundering and denunciatory, excoriating and profane. Even Berkman could turn a phrase, albeit not with perfect elegance—”If your object is to secure liberty, you must learn to do without authority” (a sentiment that hasn’t endeared anarchists to either communists or capitalists).

As Berkman’s hatred of authority indicates, Marxists may despise the capitalists, and capitalists the state, but anarchism has the wisdom to detest both. True to the doctrine of “propaganda by the deed,” however, Berkman wanted to move beyond theory, to write his poems with a gun.

Because Berkman was worried that he might lose his nerve, he didn’t wait for the receptionist to deliver the bogus inquiry about “Simon Bachman.” Instead, Berkman stormed the office where Frick was seated in a red maple captain’s chair, aimed the revolver and fired. The bullet lodged in Frick’s shoulder.

Berkman fired again, this time hitting the target’s neck. Aiming for a kill shot, Berkman was tackled by an assistant; the two tussled over the heavy oak desk, the gun discharged, nearly shattering the glass in the brass light fixture.

From the hallway, clerks would see the silhouettes of the melee through the frosted windows. Several arrived just in time to see Berkman stab Frick twice in the leg. A sheriff’s deputy pulled Berkman from the scrum, who years later recalled Frick’s “ashen gray” face, how his “black beard…[was] streaked with red.”

Three shots were a miniscule act of violence that summer. Less than two weeks before, Pinkertons opened fire on striking steel workers in Homestead under Frick’s order. Seven men died. If anyone deserved an anarchist’s bullet, it was Frick, but Berkman had hoped to incite a revolution. In this regard he obviously failed.

A jeering crowd gathered on Fifth Avenue as Berkman was led out by police, surprising in a town where Frick was widely loathed. Perhaps they were just angry that Berkman missed. Had Frick bled out on his thin oriental rug, maybe Alexander Berkman would have been a nineteenth-century Luigi Mangione.

Before the status quo’s villain du jour was antifa, or Islamists, or communists, or Marxist-Leninists, it was the mustache-twirling, bomb-throwing, foreign anarchist. According to the yellow American press, anarchists were denizens of German rathskellers building bombs or Italian immigrants stockpiling guns, Siberian émigrés spiking railroad tracks and Chicago unionists setting factories on fire.

Not that political violence was fiction, as Berkman’s example demonstrates. Add to that the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley, the 1919 bombing of Georgia Senator Thomas W. Hardwick, and the 1920 Wall Street bombing that took forty lives.

In response, or maybe rather using the violence as an excuse, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer initiated the scattershot raids that would bear his name, which saw thousands of Americans arrested and deported, mostly Jews and Italians. Berkman and Goldman were among those exiled, destined for the newly-formed Soviet Union where the Bolsheviks weren’t more amenable to anti-hierarchical politics than were the capitalists.

On a cold December morning in 1919, Goldman and Berkman huddled together on the deck of the S.S. Buford as the Statue of Liberty appeared smaller and smaller, the ship making its way towards Russia.

This was America’s first Red Scare, when suspected anarchists, socialists, Marxists, and unionists were often prosecuted and persecuted with little justification. That’s the sad fate of Lazarus Averbuch, a nineteen-year-old Russian-Jewish émigré shot to death by the Chicago Chief of Police in 1908 for daring to knock on the latter’s door (it seems the young man only thought that he was expected to retrieve a “letter of good character” from the authorities, as the Czar had expected Jews to do).

To launder the reality of Averbuch’s murder, the antisemitic police and press transformed this young pogrom survivor into a terrorist. Averbuch was later memorialized in the Bosnian-American writer Aleksandr Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, both a metafiction and a eulogy, where he describes how “America was obsessed with anarchism… patriotic preachers raved against the sinful perils of unbridled immigration, against the attacks on American freedom and Christianity.”

Another miscarriage of justice twelve years later, when the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed for a murder in Massachusetts that they were later exonerated of. Sacco and Vanzetti became martyrs of anarchism and pro-immigration sentiment (my own Italian grandfather helped raise money in their defense), with John Dos Passos writing how following the electric chair, “their voices blow back… singing one song / to burst the eardrums… Make a poem of that if you dare!”

One man’s nihilistic terrorist is another man’s romantic freedom fighter, and so it has been in the literature of those who’ve been ground down by the system lashing out in righteous violence. William Godwin, the eighteenth-century English novelist never used the word “anarchism,” yet has been claimed as a forerunner because of his anti-aristocratic novel Caleb Williams, or the treatise where he declared that “No man must encroach upon my province nor I upon his.”

Leo Tolstoy, who despite being a count, forged a synthesis of Christianity and anarchism, though a cursory reading of the gospels demonstrates that that seems to have already been done by Christ. Tolstoy preached that we are “not the sons of some fatherland… but we are sons of God,” for the “Anarchists are right in everything.”

George Orwell was a very English sometimes-anarchist and sometimes-socialist who fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, only to learn that the Stalinist bullets intended for the fascists more often than not ended up in his comrades, an important political education, writing in Homage to Catalonia that regardless of partisanship, “when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

Theory and journalism might be helpful, but the vanguard genre for imagining a different, contrary, alternative world is science fiction. Speculative fiction is both the most radical and the most reactionary genre, a laboratory for experimenting with alternative social arrangements. For every fascist fellow-traveler like Robert Heinlein or the reactionary Orson Scott Card, there is a Samuel Delany, an Octavia Butler, an Ursula K. Le Guin—the font of both revolution and its opposite.

Scottish novelist Iain M. Bank’s “The Culture Series” with its account of a post-scarcity galactic civilization; Canadian philosopher Corey Doctorow’s Walkaway where post-apocalyptic survivors build a society based on human flourishing; Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia where an interstellar society is anarcho-syndicalist. Rather than yet another cyberpunk hellscape or post-nuclear blasted heath, zombie apocalypse or digital capitalist nightmare, anarchist science fiction provides the vocabulary for a more hopeful future.

Butler, who didn’t describe herself as an anarchist, nonetheless explores similar themes in the Parable of the Sower. Written in 1993, Parable of the Sower and its sequel envisions a distant, dystopian 2024. Teenager Lauren Oya Olamina lives in a California ravaged by crime and wild-fires; the United States is on the verge of electing a fascist whose motto is “Make America Great Again.”

In this Hobbesian state, Lauren’s hyper-empathy nurtures a new ideology called Earthseed dedicated to solidarity. Because the traditional means of structuring a community have failed, she and her neighbors must forge their own. “I realize I don’t know very much,” she writes. “None of us knows very much. But we can all learn more. Then we can teach one another.”

The essence of the whole thing—none of us know much; we can teach one another. No solitary gun-slinger galloping across the scorched landscape or corporate mercenary stalking an enemy, Lauren rather organizes her community as they set out. Not the Pinkerton’s rifle—or Berkman’s revolver—but the hand of your neighbor.

Radical anthropologist David Graeber, who with the pithiness of a Madison Avenue poet coined #Occupy’s motto “We are the 99 percent,” wrote in “Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!” that even while “Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction,” they are mostly “simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to.”

When it comes to help from the outside Butler’s California is indistinguishable from the real one, where your home can burn but hotels will put you up (at a discount), or where federal funds help to rebuild (at least until January 20th). At its core, what the literature of anarchism has always presupposed is that we can’t rely on the state, and that we can’t rely on the oligarchs—but we’re not alone. We have each other, which is more than enough.