42 Qtd. in Michelson “A Character Study of Emma Goldman,” Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Vol. 1, ed. Candace Falk (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 441.
43 Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), 259; and Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910), 56. Similarly, Ruth Kinna has argued that recent poststructuralist interpreters of the anarchist tradition misread Kropotkin’s conception of revolution: “It was not a matter of going to sleep in a statist system one night and waking up in utopia the next morning. Kropotkin believed that revolution was necessary, but it was work in progress as much as a cataclysmic event” (82).
44 Errico Malatesta, “Towards Anarchism,” in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Vol. 1, ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 506.
45 Francis Dupuis-Déri, “En deuil de révolution? Pensées et pratiques anarcho-fatalistes.” Réfractions 13 (Automne 2004): 139–150.
46 Proudhon, Oeuvres complètes 17 (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1868), 142; Landauer, Revolution, 116, 154.
47 Elisée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution, and the Anarchist Ideal,” in Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisée Reclus, eds. and trans. John Clark and Camille Martin (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 153.
48 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works Vol. 24: Marx and Engels, 1874–83 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1989), 518; Gustav Landauer, For Socialism, trans. David J. Parent (St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1978), 74.
49 Gustav Landauer, Der Werdende Mensch: Aufsätze über Leben und Schrifttum, ed. Martin Buber (Potsdam: G. Kiepenheuer, 1921), 228.
50 Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 128.
51 Landauer, Der Werdende Mensch, 228, trans. and emphasis mine.
52 Landauer, Revolution, 94–108.
53 Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus,” trans. Ed Emory, in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, eds. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 196; Andrea Colombo qtd. in Steve Wright, “Confronting the Crisis of ‘Fordism’: Italian Debates Around Social Transition,” http://www.arpnet.it/chaos/steve.htm.
54 Marco Revelli, “Worker Identity in the Factory Desert,” trans. Ed Emory, in Radical Thought in Italy, 118–119. This also recalls Walter Benjamin’s concluding remarks in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future.… This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn and ed. Hannah Arendt [New York: Schocken Books, 1969], 264).
55 Among those who have thought that Armand Gatti might be the anarchist Brecht, apparently, was Gilles Deleuze (“How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” trans. Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale, in The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Charles J. Stivale [New York: Guilford Press, 1998], 264). Erwin Piscator thought Gatti might be the anarchist Piscator (Knowles, “Armand Gatti’s Two Theatres,” 52). Martin Esslin thinks that the anarchist Brecht is none other than the early Bertolt Brecht (Brecht: A Choice of Evils [London: Eyre Methuen, 1980], 151).
56 See, for instance, Kirwin Shaffer’s Anarchism and Countercultural Politics in Early-Twentieth-Century Cuba (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005); Tom Goyens’s Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Caroline Granier’s Les briseurs de formules: les écrivains anarchistes en France à la fin du XIXe siècle (Coeuvres-et-Valsery: Ressouvenances, 2008); or George McKay’s anthology, DiY Culture: Party & Protest in Nineties Britain (New York: Verso, 1998).
57 See Milstein, “Something Did Start in Quebec City,” in Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches From a Global Movement, ed. Daniel Burton-Rose et al. (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2004), 126–133; Barbara Epstein, “Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement,” Monthly Review 53.4 (2001): 1–14; David Graeber, “For a New Anarchism,” New Left Review 13 (2002): 61–74 and “Occupy and Anarchism’s Gift of Democracy,” Guardian (November 15, 2011).
58 I’m borrowing the concept of “lines of flight” very loosely from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who use it to speak of attempts to flee from imprisoning spaces and systems, particularly by the creation of something new.
59 Daniel Colson, Trois Essais de Philosophie Anarchiste: Islam, Histoire, Monadologie (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2004), 9–29, trans. mine.
60 Silvana Nicola, “Los consumidores iluminan el camino,” El País Digital (June 23, 2006), http://200.40.120.165/Suple/Empresario/06/06/23/elempre_223059.asp.
1. The Reader In the Factory
In an influential survey, The Radical Novel in the United States 1900–1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society, Walter B. Rideout takes just two pages to consider the literary production of anarchists, pondering “why the movement should have produced no novels”: perhaps, he speculates, this was due to “absorption in labor struggles and the task of propagandizing, the lack of an amenable publisher … or the Anarchist ‘temperament,’ which expended itself more readily in personal reminiscence, critical analyses, short poems, and long arguments.” In any case, the question is only of interest in that “the nonexistence of such novels emphasizes by contrast the domination of radical fiction at that time by the Socialist writers.”61 Subsequent scholars have allowed this judgment to stand, even as they have sought to overturn almost every other aspect of the midcentury critical establishment. Alan M. Wald, in Writing From the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics agrees: “No one … has as yet been successful in making the argument for a substantial achievement in fiction, poetry, or literary criticism on the part of social democrats and anarchists, or other types of radicals in the 1930s or thereafter.”62 Rideout’s book was republished in 1992, and a more recent survey, Barbara Foley’s Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction 1929–1941, mentions—purely in passing—only a single anarchist novel.63
This failure to find any “substantial achievement” by anarchists in the field of literature doesn’t just mean that there are not enough anarchist books to talk about; this is not just a quantitative but a qualitative judgment, one we find repeated even in scholarship