Propaganda and the Deed: Anarchism, Violence and the Representational Impulse

Anarchism literally exploded onto the American political scene on May 4, 1886, with the now famous Haymarket riot. A relatively commonplace labor rally in Chicago began to break up as rain clouds rolled in. As the crowd was dispersing and the day's final speaker—an anarchist—was concluding, police moved to end the meeting prematurely. A skirmish ensued, a bomb was thrown into a group of police officers, and they opened fire: soon, numerous civilians and officers were dead. Suddenly everyone was talking about anarchism. The Haymarket affair has dominated critical attention to pre–World War II American anarchism, a focus that signals the convergence of popular caricature—the bomb-wielding anarchist depicted in countless newspapers from the 1880s to the present—with scholarship. The highly visible moment of anarchist violence produced an historical conflation, an elision of anarchism's internal conflicts, the near synonymy of "anarchism" with "violence." This essay seeks not to sever anarchism from violence, but to explore a far more complex relationship between the two by detailing the ambivalent, fractured, contradictory relationship between late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American anarchism and anarchist violence—between propaganda and the deed.

Most examinations of anarchist violence rely on the appellation "propaganda by deed," a construction that itself suggests a tension between words (propaganda) and actions (deeds). This tension, however, is not simply rhetorical; it's also historical: anarchists inconsistently endorsed violence. In fact, the anarchist rhetoric surrounding violence evinces tension between their orientation to theoretical violence and their response to actual violence, a fracture often characterized by a strong logical defense of violence and an equally potent aversion to violent acts. At other times it appears merely as an inconsistent appeal to violence's validity as a political tactic. This essay explores the anarchist inconsistency—an historical ambivalence toward violence—to reevaluate anarchism's relationship to violence and thus to reconsider the link between propaganda and the (violent) deed.

Foregrounding two anarchists—Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman—and two moments of anarchist violence—Berkman's 1892 attempt to kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick and Leon Czolgosz's 1901 assassination of U.S. president William McKinley—I elucidate a fundamental anarchist ambivalence toward violence, then posit an explanation for this tension. First, I discuss efforts to theorize the relationship of American anarchism to representation, addressing the philosophical links between democracy and propaganda. Next, I explain the philosophy of "propaganda by deed," a theoretical stance toward the potential value of violence. Then, I outline Goldman's and Berkman's specific orientation to propaganda by deed and its violent rhetoric before turning to their responses to real instances of violence. I argue that these multiple forms of ambivalence all emerge from the complex interstices of registers of representation: on one hand, anarchists actively rejected representative democracy; on the other hand, they were surprisingly willing to represent their politics (to produce propaganda). The ambivalence appears because these two forms of representation are not fully distinct—there exists a consonance between representative democracy and other forms of representation that forced anarchist violence itself to become propaganda. Ultimately, then, anarchists' ambivalence was an at times strategic, at times unconscious, effort to represent their radical politics within the American political sphere.

Registers of Representation

The question of anarchists' relationship to representation has been asked since the origins of American anarchism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, global politics struggled with multiple autocratic and totalitarian nations, alongside monarchies and varyingly successful forms of democracy. These disparate governmental forms produced a wide range of anarchist reactions, many of which address local or national concerns—the concrete forms of government against which individual anarchists react.¹ As Voltairine de Cleyre—one of the period's most prominent anarchists—pointed out, "anarchism is concerned with present conditions," with specific "oppressions," so anarchists tend to critique the instantiation of government under which they live.² Therefore, any study of American anarchism will find that it "is associated primarily with a rejection of representative democracy."³ This rejection of political representation dates back at least to Mikhail Bakunin, who argued [End Page...