In August 8, 1897, Michele Angiolillo, an Italian anarchist, shot Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the Prime Minister of Spain. Cánovas had dominated Spanish politics for decades, even during periods when he was nominally out of office, helping shore up Spain’s tottering monarchy and its possession of Cuba and the Philippines through torture and wide-scale military repression. Spanish imperialism in the Americas died with him: Cuba and the Philippines soon drifted out of Spain’s sphere of control and into that of the United States. A bullet from an anarchist’s pistol had changed global politics.
A century later, anarchists have largely given up on violence. Some break windows and get into fights with policemen at protests, but this is far from the plague of bombings and assassinations that transfixed Europe in the late 19th century. They have also lost much of their political salience, though the political philosophy of anarchism has seen something of a revival over the past twenty years. Thanks to Noam Chomsky, the Internet and the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s, multitudes of young activists now either see themselves as anarchists or are attracted to aspects of anarchist philosophy. Yet this hardly adds up to a coherent political movement.
While anarchism still inspires political action, anarchists do rather little to organize that action into a larger program for change. Like other activists, they have taken advantage of the Internet to organize protests, but the Internet is no substitute for a directed organization. It can create solidarities and facilitate simple forms of collective action, such as raising money or turning up in the same place for a protest. But it cannot easily sustain complex activities that require long-term commitments. Here, in particular, the Internet actually accentuates some of anarchism’s inherent weaknesses.
Unlike its great competitor, Marxism, anarchism was never associated with a coherent program of political change. While there were influential anarchist theorists, such as Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin, they tended to be non-systematic thinkers and to have highly romantic theories of politics. In some instances, this romanticism slipped into an indiscriminate enthusiasm for the emancipatory power of violence, a notion famously taken up by Georges Sorel. Most strains of modern anarchism do not emphasize violence, but they still do not provide a coherent strategy to provoke the radical changes that they would like to see. Noam Chomsky represents a broader pattern: While he is extremely specific in his criticisms of the “world system” that the Western industrialized powers have created, he has little to say about how best to replace it, let alone what to replace it with.1