Theatre, 2.
22 Osvaldo Bayer, Los anarquistas expropiadores, Simón Radowitzky, y otros ensayos (Coyhaique, Argentina: Sombraysén Editores, 2008), 387n26.
23 This indifference could be said to derive from the very nature of the anarchist tradition qua tradition. For all the diversity of Marxist thinkers and parties, all claim a theoretical pedigree with Marx and Engels at its head. Anarchism, on the contrary, enjoys a plurality of origins—a source of scorn for its critics, for whom it appears as a “political illegitimate,” in the words of a popular turn-of-the-century tract on the Anarchist Peril: “there appear to be several ‘fathers’.… Some cast the blame on Proudhon; others on Max Stirner; a third section makes Josiah Warren responsible; while yet others lay the crime at the door of Bakounine … [or] Kropotkin” (W.C. Hart, Confessions of an Anarchist [London: E. Grant Richards, 1906], 171n). More vexing yet, since even Proudhon, in coining the word “anarchist” in its positive sense, was only appropriating an existing word (heretofore merely an epithet used to bastardize one’s political opponents), and since the content given to this word came from already-existing workers’ movements (such as the Mutuellistes of Lyon, after whom Proudhon spoke of “mutualism” as the economic system proper to anarchism) and social tendencies (Kropotkin traces anarchist practices of “mutual aid” back to human prehistory and prehuman natural history), even these “fathers” cannot be said to be the absolute originators of anything. We wear our bastardy with pride.
24 On the importance of the concepts of “affinity” and “analogy” to anarchist thought, see Colson, Petit lexique, 20–21 and 24–26.
25 Karen Rosenberg, “The Cult of Self-Sacrifice in Yiddish Anarchism and Saul Yanovsky’s The First Years of Jewish Libertarian Socialism,” in Yiddish and the Left, eds. Gennady Estraĭkh and Mikhail Krutikov (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 2001), 179, 181.
26 I borrow the term from Sharif Gemie, “Counter-Community: An Aspect of Anarchist Political Culture,” Journal of Contemporary History 29 (April 1994): 349–367.
27 For classic examples of the anarchism-as-quasi-religious-atavism argument, see Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (New York: W.W. Norton, 1965), 74–92, or Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 225. For classic anarchist denunciations of religion, see Bakunin’s God and the State (New York: Dover, 1970) or Peggy Kornegger’s “The Spirituality Ripoff,” in The Second Wave 4.3 (1975): 12–18. For an acknowledgment of affinities with religious antecedents on the part of atheist anarchists, see, for instance, Gustav Landauer’s paean to medieval Christianity in Die Revolution (Revolution and Other Writings [Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010], 127–137), or Peter Kropotkin’s nod to several centuries’ worth of heresies and millenialist movements in Ethics, trans. Louis S. Friedland and Joseph R. Piroshnikoff (New York, London: The Dial Press, 1924), 133–134. Paul-François Tremlett’s “On the Formation and Function of the Category ‘Religion’ In Anarchist Writing,” in Culture and Religion 5.3 (2004): 367–381, provides what may be the best analysis of these discrepancies in the treatment. Demetrio Castro Alfín (“Anarquismo y protestantismo: Reflexiones sobre un viejo argumento,” Studia historica: Historia contemporánea 16 [1998]: 197–220) reconsiders this old historiographic chestnut in the Spanish context.
28 Sam Dreen qtd. in W.J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914 (London: Duckworth, in association with the Acton Society Trust, 1975), 254; Jean Maitron, Le Mouvement Anarchiste En France (Paris: F. Maspero, 1975), 1.145.
29 Isaac Klein, A Guide to Jewish Religious Practice (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1979), 213. Bloch’s hypothesis is disputed, since the Kol Nidrei seems to predate Bloch’s history, but whatever its origins, the significance of the song in Jewish life was certainly cemented by experiences of persecution, all the more so after Bloch’s 1917 interpretation, in the wake of the Shoah. See also Margaret Olin, “Graven Images on Video?,” in Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art, eds. Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 47.
30 Blaine McKinley, “‘The Quagmires of Necessity’: American Anarchists and Dilemmas of Vocation,” American Quarterly 34.5 (Winter 1982): 507.
31 Luigi Galleani, The Principle of Organization, trans. Wolfi Landstreicher (Cascadia: Pirate Press Portland, 2006), 4. In a contemporary echo, Laura Portwood-Stacer observes that among anarchists today, “everyone can be called out at some point for not living up to anarchist principles,” since—no less than 1925—“to live in contemporary society is to be complicit with capitalism and other forms of exploitation” (130).
32 Albert Libertad, “The Joy of Life,” in Man! An Anthology of Anarchist Ideas, Essays, Poetry and Commentaries, ed. Marcus Graham (London: Cienfuegos Press, 1974), 355–356. Cf. Alexandra Myrial (a.k.a. Alexandra David-Néel, 1868–1969), in Pour la Vie (1901): “Obedience is death. Each instant man submits to an alien will is an instant cut off from his life” (13).
33 The notion that anarchists were anarchists because they believed in the existence of a good human nature, repressed by social institutions such as the State, that merely awaited expression, is really a durable misreading that survives in spite of many concerted attempts to puncture it, perpetuated by political scientists, philosophers, and historians alike. See, for instance, Dave Morland’s “Anarchism, Human Nature and History: Lessons for the Future” (in Twenty-First Century Anarchism, eds. Jon Purkis and James Bowen [UK: Cassell, 1997], 8–23), David Hartley’s “Communitarian Anarchism and Human Nature” (in Anarchist Studies 3.2 [1995]: 145–164), and my own Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006), 56–60.
34 See, for instance, the ridicule heaped by Proudhon on Rousseau’s notion that “Man is born good … but society … depraves him” (System of Economic Contradictions: or, the Philosophy of Misery, trans. Benjamin R. Tucker [Boston: Benjamin R. Tucker, 1888], 404), or Bakunin’s contempt for Rousseau’s conception of “primitive men enjoying absolute liberty only in isolation” (Bakunin on Anarchism, 128).
35 Kaneko Mitsuharu, “Opposition,” trans. Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite, in 99 Poems in Translation: An Anthology, ed. Harold Pinter et al. (New York: Grove Press, 1994), 54–55.
36 David Weir, Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts, 1997), 5.
37 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 75.
