The International Social Revolutionary Congress was an anarchist meeting in London between 14 and 20 July 1881, with the aim of founding a new International organization for anti-authoritiarian socialism (i.e., anarchists).
Planning for the London congress began following a small Brussels conference in 1880. The intent of the London meeting would be to explore founding an International organization dedicated to anti-authoritarian and decentralist socialism. The congress had 45 delegates, [1] including anarchist luminaries Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta, and Louise Michel. Planned in secret, delegates were known by code number. [2]
John Most, who contributed to the impetus for the meeting, ultimately did not attend from jail, having written in celebration of the assassination of Alexander II of Russia some weeks before the congress. [3] The new Social Revolutionary outgrowths of the American Socialistic Labor Party did not send delegates but were represented in spirit by other delegates. [2] Despite security measures, an attendee named Serreaux was later determined to have been an agent provocateur from the French police. [1]
The congress was ultimately unproductive, marred by bombastic speech and obsessive sensationalism related to Alexander II's assassination. [4] Though the delegates moved to form a new International organization based on autonomous federations, resuscitating the International Working Men's Association, the resulting Black International did not grow beyond a loose association of groups. The International had no central power, which would have conflicted with its federalist orientation, apart from a bureau of information, which itself did not last long. While governments would blame assassinations and terrorism on the Black International, the group truthfully held little organized power. A follow-up congress, planned for 1882, was abandoned. [5]
Anarchist communism is a far-left political ideology and anarchist school of thought that advocates communism. It calls for the abolition of private property but retention of personal property and collectively-owned items, goods, and services. It supports social ownership of property and the distribution of resources.
Anarchists have employed certain symbols for their cause since the 19th century, including most prominently the circle-A and the black flag. Anarchist cultural symbols have become more prevalent in popular culture since around the turn of the 21st century, concurrent with the anti-globalization movement and with the punk subculture.
According to different scholars, the history of anarchism either goes back to ancient and prehistoric ideologies and social structures, or begins in the 19th century as a formal movement. As scholars and anarchist philosophers have held a range of views on what anarchism means, it is difficult to outline its history unambiguously. Some feel anarchism is a distinct, well-defined movement stemming from 19th-century class conflict, while others identify anarchist traits long before the earliest civilisations existed.
Luigi Galleani was an Italian insurrectionary anarchist best known for his advocacy of "propaganda of the deed", a strategy of political assassinations and violent attacks.
Fanya Anisimovna Baron was a Russian Jewish anarchist revolutionary. She spent her early life participating in the Chicago workers' movement, but following the Russian Revolution in 1917, she moved to Ukraine and participated in the Makhnovist movement. For her anarchist activities, she was arrested and executed by the Cheka.
Anarchism in Russia developed out of the populist and nihilist movements' dissatisfaction with the government reforms of the time.
Dyer Daniel Lum was an American labor activist, economist and political journalist. He was a leading figure in the American anarchist movement of the 1880s and early 1890s, working within the organized labor movement and together with individualist theorists.
Alexander Movsesi Atabekian was an Armenian physician, publisher and anarchist communist.
The Manifesto of the Sixteen, or Proclamation of the Sixteen, was a document drafted in 1916 by eminent anarchists Peter Kropotkin and Jean Grave which advocated an Allied victory over Germany and the Central Powers during the First World War. At the outbreak of the war, Kropotkin and other anarchist supporters of the Allied cause advocated their position in the pages of the Freedom newspaper, provoking sharply critical responses. As the war continued, anarchists across Europe campaigned in anti-war movements and wrote denunciations of the war in pamphlets and statements, including one February 1916 statement signed by prominent anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Rudolf Rocker.
Alexander "Sanya" Moiseyevich Schapiro or Shapiro was a Russian anarcho-syndicalist activist. Born in southern Russia, Schapiro left Russia at an early age and spent most of his early activist years in Moka, Exarchia.
The Haymarket affair, also known as the Haymarket massacre, the Haymarket riot, the Haymarket Square riot, or the Haymarket Incident, was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The rally began peacefully in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day; it was held the day after a May 3 rally at a McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant on the West Side of Chicago, during which two demonstrators had been killed and many demonstrators and police injured. At the Haymarket Square rally on May 4, an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police as they acted to disperse the meeting, and the bomb blast and ensuing retaliatory gunfire by the police caused the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; dozens of others were wounded.
Marie Le Compte was an American journal editor and anarchist who was active during the early 1880s.
Freie Arbeiter Stimme was a Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper published from New York City's Lower East Side between 1890 and 1977. It was among the world's longest running anarchist journals, and the primary organ of the Jewish anarchist movement in the United States; at the time that it ceased publication it was the world's oldest Yiddish newspaper. Historian of anarchism Paul Avrich described the paper as playing a vital role in Jewish–American labor history and upholding a high literary standard, having published the most lauded writers and poets in Yiddish radicalism. The paper's editors were major figures in the Jewish–American anarchist movement: David Edelstadt, Saul Yanovsky, Joseph Cohen, Hillel Solotaroff, Roman Lewis, and Moshe Katz.
Jacob Abraham Maryson (1866–1941) was a Jewish–American anarchist, doctor, essayist and Yiddish translator. Maryson was among the few Pioneers of Liberty who could write in English. He was among the Pioneers who launched the Varhayt in 1889, the first American anarchist periodical in Yiddish.
Justus H. Schwab (1847–1900) was the keeper of a radical saloon in New York City's Lower East Side. An emigre from Germany, Schwab was involved in early American anarchism in the early 1880s, including the anti-authoritarian New York Social Revolutionary Club's split from the Socialistic Labor Party and Johann Most's entry to the United States.
To the Workingmen of America, known as the Pittsburgh Manifesto or Pittsburgh Proclamation, is an anarchist manifesto issued at the October 1883 Pittsburgh Congress of the International Working People's Association. After the organization faded, the manifesto remained generally accepted by American anarchists as a clear articulation of their beliefs.
"Anarchism or Communism?", better known as the Most–Grottkau debate, was a nationally advertised, public debate between America's foremost revolutionary anarchist Johann Most and Paul Grottkau in Chicago on May 24, 1884. The session consisted of two statements and two rebuttals and was published by the Chicago International Working People's Association as a 48-page pamphlet.
The Congress of Socialists of the United States, better known as the 1881 Chicago Social Revolutionary Congress, was a meeting of anarchists and socialists in Chicago in October 1881 to organize the new social revolutionary groups splintered from the American Socialistic Labor Party.
Sofia Grigorievna Kropotkina, commonly known by her anglicised name Sophie Kropotkin, was a Ukrainian teacher, writer, lecturer and museum director. Born into a Ukrainian Jewish family, she grew up in Tomsk, where her father ran a gold mine. After coming of age, she moved to Switzerland, where she pursued a degree in biology at the University of Bern and met Peter Kropotkin, whom she married. When her husband was arrested and imprisoned by the French government, she actively campaigned for his release, drawing sympathy from much of the Western press. She then moved to the United Kingdom, where she took up a career in teaching and went on lecture tours of the country, discussing the political issues of the Russian Empire and its revolutionary movement. After the Russian Revolution, she and her family moved to Moscow, where her husband died in 1921. She worked as the director of a museum about his life and work, which she managed up until her death.