The New York Social Revolutionary Club was an anarchist group founded in 1880. Following a schism in the Socialistic Labor Party, the breakaway club reflected its members more revolutionary, anarchistic views. Its key figures included Wilhelm Hasselmann, Moritz Bachmann, and Justus Schwab.
The American Socialistic Labor Party (SLP) suffered a schism in late 1880, as dissidents were driven from or left the party in opposition to its "compromise" of supporting the Greenback Party in the 1880 presidential election. [1] From November to December, radical groups splintered out in urban immigrant communities driven towards what would be known as anarchism. These revolutionary clubs were primarily uncompromising German emigres cast out by Germany's Anti-Socialist Laws. They had lost faith in electoral change and authoritarian committees and instead believed in armed struggle and direct action to transform society. Splinter factions sprouted across the country—Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, but most notably, New York—and were the seeds of the American revolutionary anarchist movement. [2]
On November 15, 1880, [3] a group of New York socialists left the SLP to found a Social Revolutionary Club that reflected their more anarchistic views. [1] Among the group's key figures were Wilhelm Hasselmann, Moritz Bachmann, and Justus Schwab. [4]
Hasselmann was the club's central figure. A follower of Blanqui and Bakunin and previously a chemist and a socialist politician in Germany, Hasselmann emigrated to the United States earlier in 1880, having been cast out by Germany's Anti-Socialist Laws. He was driven further to anarchism by his August expulsion from the German Social Democratic Party, along with John Most. [4] Bachmann later translated Bakunin's God and the State and wrote about anarchism. Schwab ran a Lower East Side saloon for radicals and was one of those expelled from the SLP after the Greenback compromise. [5] Peter Knauer was another club founder. [3]
The New York club was the impetus for the October 1881 Chicago Social Revolutionary Congress, the first national meeting of revolutionary socialists. Schwab represented the club at the congress. [6] The New York club also organized a welcome reception for John Most the day of his arrival in the United States, in December 1882, with speeches from Schwab and Victor S. Drury. [7]
Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a Russian revolutionary anarchist. He is among the most influential figures of anarchism and a major figure in the revolutionary socialist, social anarchist, and collectivist anarchist traditions. Bakunin's prestige as a revolutionary also made him one of the most famous ideologues in Europe, gaining substantial influence among radicals throughout Russia and Europe.
August Vincent Theodore Spies was an American upholsterer, radical labor activist, and newspaper editor. An anarchist, Spies was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder following a bomb attack on police in an event remembered as the Haymarket affair. Spies was one of four who were executed in the aftermath of this event.
Grigorii Petrovich Maksimov was a Russian anarcho-syndicalist. From the first days of the Russian Revolution, he played a leading role in the country's syndicalist movement – editing the newspaper Golos Truda and organising the formation of factory committees. Following the October Revolution, he came into conflict with the Bolsheviks, who he fiercely criticised for their authoritarian and centralist tendencies. For his anti-Bolshevik activities, he was eventually arrested and imprisoned, before finally being deported from the country. In exile, he continued to lead the anarcho-syndicalist movement, spearheading the establishment of the International Workers' Association (IWA), of which he was a member until his death.
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.
Paul Avrich was an American historian specialising in the 19th and early 20th-century anarchist movement in Russia and the United States. He taught at Queens College, City University of New York, for his entire career, from 1961 to his retirement as distinguished professor of history in 1999. He wrote ten books, mostly about anarchism, including topics such as the 1886 Haymarket Riot, the 1921 Sacco and Vanzetti case, the 1921 Kronstadt naval base rebellion, and an oral history of the movement.
Anarchism in Ukraine has its roots in the democratic and egalitarian organization of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, who inhabited the region up until the 18th century. Philosophical anarchism first emerged from the radical movement during the Ukrainian national revival, finding a literary expression in the works of Mykhailo Drahomanov, who was himself inspired by the libertarian socialism of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. The spread of populist ideas by the Narodniks also lay the groundwork for the adoption of anarchism by Ukraine's working classes, gaining notable circulation in the Jewish communities of the Pale of Settlement.
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.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to anarchism:
Golos Truda was a Russian-language anarchist newspaper. Founded by working-class Russian expatriates in New York City in 1911, Golos Truda shifted to Petrograd during the Russian Revolution in 1917, when its editors took advantage of the general amnesty and right of return for political dissidents. There, the paper integrated itself into the anarchist labour movement, pronounced the necessity of a social revolution of and by the workers, and situated itself in opposition to the myriad of other left-wing movements.
Paul Grottkau (1846–1898) was a German-American socialist political activist and newspaper publisher. Grottkau is best remembered as an editor alongside Haymarket affair victim August Spies of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, one of the leading American radical newspapers of the decade of the 1880s. Later moving to Milwaukee, Grottkau became one of the leading luminaries of the socialist movement in Wisconsin.
The Socialist Labor Party (SLP) is a political party in the United States. It was established in 1876, and was the first socialist party formed in the country.
Marie Le Compte was an American journal editor and anarchist who was active during the early 1880s.
The International Working People's Association (IWPA), sometimes known as the "Black International," and originally named the "International Revolutionary Socialists", was an international anarchist political organization established in 1881 at a convention held in London, England.
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.
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.
Wilhelm Hasselmann was a German socialist politician, activist and editor of various social democratic newspapers.
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.
Mikhail Bakunin's Confession is an 1851 autobiographical work written by the imprisoned anarchist for clemency from Russian Emperor Nicholas I.